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NATO absolved of war crimes in Kosovo |
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June 14, 2000
THE HAGUE (AP) - The Yugoslav war crimes tribunal said Tuesday it found no reason to investigate NATO for criminal activity during its 78-day bombing campaign in Kosovo last year that killed nearly 500 civilians. The committee, appointed 13 months ago by war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, reviewed complaints by the Yugoslav government and by international human rights bodies that the NATO bombing of civilian convoys and infrastructure amounted to crimes against humanity and genocide. The campaign by the Western military alliance in the spring of 1999 was intended to force Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to rein in Serbian forces trying to evict ethnic Albanians from the Serbian province of Kosovo. Del Ponte told the United Nations last week that she would not initiate any prosecution for the NATO campaign. Amnesty International has repeatedly charged that NATO "violated the laws of war leading to cases of unlawful killing of civilians." The report released Tuesday gave a case-by-case justification for declining to pursue the war crimes allegations. "We will not open a criminal investigation," the prosecutor said. There was "no political motivation, no political reasons, just fact and law" that led to the committee's conclusion, she said.
NATO pilots and commanders were accused of 21 specific incidents of crime, including the bombing of a convoy of 1,000 Albanian refugees returning to their homes and the destruction of the Yugoslav television station in Belgrade, the capital. The prosecutor took the unusual step of publishing the report's findings to avoid any impression it was whitewashing the allegations.
In its report, the committee admitted its findings were based on public statements from NATO and from the Yugoslav government, and that its members did not visit Kosovo for a firsthand investigation. When asked for further information, the report said, NATO was evasive and refused to answer specific questions. Nevertheless, the committee said it found no instances in which purely civilian targets were deliberately bombed. During the campaign, NATO warplanes flew 38,400 sorties and dropped 23,618 bombs. The committee confirmed that among those munitions were weapons using depleted uranium and cluster bombs, both denounced by human rights groups as potentially indiscriminate. But it said neither weapon was illegal under international law.
The ruling could be a factor in whether the United States will continue to oppose the creation of a permanent war crimes tribunal to succeed the specific U.N. tribunals prosecuting war crimes in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The issue was being discussed at U.N.headquarters in New York this week.
The United States was one of seven countries - including China, Iraq and Libya - to oppose the International Criminal Court when 120 other countries approved the statute for its creation by a treaty signed in Rome in July 1998.
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