To: Kosovo Talk
From: George Kenney
Subject: Comments on second round Howard Zinn's comments are extremely trenchant and thoughtful. I would add, with regard to Kosovo, that NATO is about to embark on a very costly ground war, supposedly to protect Kosovo's Albanians. Such a war will result in many killed, including many Kosovar Albanians. Who know how many, but it could be in the tens of thousands. So not only has NATO precipitated a refugee catastrophe, it is now making a moral claim that large-scale killing would correct this wrong. I suspect most religious people would reject that argument. It is no surprise that the Pope and American bishops have already spoken out against the war.
And I would also briefly note, if it were true that NATO went to war to protect Kosovo's Albanian population, then NATO would not constrain itself to limited assistance when faced with the Macedonian government's refusal to allow care for those refugees. We are bombing Serbia for the Kosovars, yet we tacitly accept the reality of their inhuman confinement in mud and excrement. Or we ourselves make pale offers of asylum for a few -- behind concertina wire at [the U.S. Naval Base in] Guantanamo Bay. How sad.
To: Kosovo Talk
From: George Kenney
Subject: Genocide I must add another comment here regarding the use of the word "genocide." So far as I am aware, I am the only person to write critically on the conventional wisdom that says 250,000 to 300,000 were killed in the Bosnian war.
I had an article on this in the New York Times Sunday Magazine in early 1995, asserting that at that time the total number killed on all sides, military and civilian, was most likely in the 25,000 to 60,000 range. After the war, I did some more (unpublished) research that suggests the total killed during the war was roughly 70,000 to 90,000, and that the percentage of each population base killed was roughly identical.
A cross check of my range could be done for purposes of rough confirmation: take the numbers provided by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute for military deaths during the war, published in its annual yearbook by Oxford University Press. Add known civilian deaths. Add those officially declared missing to the International Committee of the Red Cross (assume they are dead), subtract some for double-counting and people who fled the region, and it's hard to get a reasonable range higher than 70,000 to 90,000.
Do these numbers matter? You bet! It seems, looking at interventionist rhetoric regarding crises around the world, that 200,000 is a kind of magic number. Almost every strident Kosovo interventionist talks about genocide and glibly rattles off the high number for Bosnia, as if there were 20 or 30 as-yet-undiscovered Srebrenica massacres -- as if the Serbs had butchered everyone they could get their hands on. And what really, really bothers me is that no mainline news organization has ever seen fit to go back and systematically investigate the numbers or explain what they mean. News organizations, of course, got lots of mileage out of the genocide claim too, and it is a rare reporter who worked in Bosnia who judiciously refrained from inflated estimates.
My rant aside, the point is that it is difficult to trust people when they go on about genocide. It is a term tossed about altogether too casually.
