In an interim report to the Security Council last week, the chief prosecutor for the United Nations war-crimes tribunal, Carla Del Ponte, said forensic teams had dug up 195 sites where massacre victims were said to be buried and had found only 2,108 bodies. She said many of the sites were not mass graves at all but individual burial plots, and that only 11 of the locations examined to date contained more than 50 corpses each. “The figure [so far] does not necessarily reflect the total number of actual victims,” Del Ponte said, “because we have discovered evidence of tampering with graves. There were also a significant number of sites where the precise number of bodies cannot be counted.”
An additional 334 sites will be examined after the ground thaws next spring. In all, U.S. officials predict that 7,000 to 8,000 bodies will be found. That’s bad enough. Whatever the final tally, it will easily justify the war-crimes charges brought against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and four of his henchmen (who are also accused of ordering ethnic cleansing and other forms of persecution). But as long as Milosevic & Co. remain at large, Del Ponte’s grisly evidence may never get into a courtroom.
