Saturday, October 18, 2008

HLC: 13500 deaths in Kosovo in period 1998-2000

The Humanitarian Law Center has published a list of victims of the Kosovo conflict between januari 1998 and december 2000. According to B92 they have so far registered 13,472 victims — 9,260 Albanians and 2,488 Serbs. I have to refer to B92 for these data because the data on the HLC website are very concise. HLC will publish their complete data in januari 2009.

Excavations after the war brought about 3000 bodies and about 2000 more are reported missing by the Red Cross. Admiitedly that is for the war only while the HLC list spans a 3 year period and it is not yet clear how many of them were killed in the war. But it stills brings us thousands of names of people whose family for some reason didn't bother to report their death of disappearance. This raises important questions about the reliability of the Red Cross missing list. It raises also the question how complete the HLC list is: even in 2007 they added 3193 names. And what kind of methods do they use to find so many new names?


Postscript 2: I encountered an article on the Slobodan Milosevic website that claims that most victims were killed by NATO or the KLA.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

They have to find so many new names to support the pre-war estimates of 100,000 dead.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/
world/2000/aug/18/balkans3

click on my name for the London Guardian story.

Anonymous said...

At least the war is over, and the government of Serbia, which killed so many Kosovars for the crime of not being Serb, has retreated to its own borders.