Attack on Yugoslavia
Some critics have accused Clinton of leading the United States to war with Kosovo under the false pretense of genocide [5]. Others have accused him, and his administration, of inflating the number of Kosovar Albanians killed by Serbians[6]. Clinton's Secretary of Defense William Cohen, giving a speech, said, "The appalling accounts of mass killing in Kosovo and the pictures of refugees fleeing Serb oppression for their lives makes it clear that this is a fight for justice over genocide [7]." On CBS' Face the Nation Cohen claimed, "We've now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing...They may have been murdered[8]." Clinton, citing the same figure, spoke of "at least 100,000 (Kosovar Albanians) missing[9]". Later, talking about Serbian elections, Clinton said, "they're going to have to come to grips with what Mr. Milo?ević ordered in Kosovo...They're going to have to decide whether they support his leadership or not; whether they think it's OK that all those tens of thousands of people were killed...[10]". Clinton also claimed, in the same press conference, that "NATO stopped deliberate, systematic efforts at ethnic cleansing and genocide[11]." Clinton even compared the events of Kosovo to the Holocaust. CNN reported, "Accusing Serbia of 'ethnic cleansing' in Kosovo similar to the genocide of Jews in World War II, an impassioned President Clinton sought Tuesday to rally public support for his decision to send U.S. forces into combat against Yugoslavia, a prospect that seemed increasingly likely with the breakdown of a diplomatic peace effort[12]." Clinton's State Department also claimed Serbian troops had committed genocide. The New York Times reported, "the Administration said evidence of 'genocide' by Serbian forces was growing to include 'abhorrent and criminal action' on a vast scale. The language was the State Department's strongest yet in denouncing Yugoslav President Slobodan Milo?ević[13]." The State Department also gave the highest estimate of dead Albanians. The New York Times reported, "On April 19, the State Department said that up to 500,000 Kosovar Albanians were missing and feared dead[14]."
However, the numbers given by Clinton and his administration have been proven false. The official NATO body count of the events in Kosovo was 2,788 (not all of them were war crimes victims)[15], with Slobodan Milo?ević charged with the "murders of about 600 individually identified ethnic Albanians[16]". Critics have noted that these numbers can not be considered genocide. The headline of The Wall Street Journal, which had launched an investigation into whether genocide had occured in Kosovo, on December 31, 1999 was "War in Kosovo Was Cruel, Bitter, Savage; Genocide It Wasn't"[17]. The Wall Street Journal wrote, "the U.N.'s International War Criminal tribunal has checked the largest reported sites first, and found most to contain no more than five bodies, suggesting intimate acts of barbarity rather than mass murder... Kosovo would be easier to investigate if it had the huge killing fields some investigators were led to expect. Instead, the pattern is of scattered killings[18]."
In addition, a United Nations Court had previously ruled that Serbian troops did not commit genocide against Albanians. The court wrote "the exactions committed by Milo?ević's regime cannot be qualified as criminal acts of genocide, since their purpose was not the destruction of the Albanian ethnic group[19]". According to BBC, "the decision was based on the 1948 Geneva convention which defines genocide as the intent 'to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such'[20]". Milo?ević was not charged with genocide in Kosovo by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) but the more broader "crimes against humanity"[21]. Spanish forensic surgeon Emilio Perez Pujol, who led the Spanish forensic team in Kosovo, gave an interview to the British paper The Sunday Times. The paper wrote, "In an outspoken interview, Pujol complained he had been sent to head a large investigation team attached to the ICTY, consisting of pathologists and police specialists, to work in the north of the country. But he found that what was publicised as a search for mass graves was 'a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because we did not find one?not one?mass grave.'[22]".
Others have called Clinton a war criminal for the NATO bombing campaign during the Kosovo war. In the aforementioned article, The Wall Street Journal wrote, "As the war dragged on?NATO saw a fatigued press corps drifting toward the contrarian story: civilians killed by NATO's bombs. NATO stepped up its claims about Serb 'killing fields'." The actual number of civilian deaths is debated, with the numbers as high as 5,700 claimed by Yugoslavia, and with NATO acknowledging it killed, at most, 1,500 civilians. Critics note that there were more civilian deaths caused by NATO than the amount of deaths Milo?ević was charged with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton
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Now I will say I do not agree with all of this in fact I think Kosovo was one of few high points in his career and was glad to see he took action on some cause. and I believe the reason we had no casualties was because we did little of actual fighting--had we taken any results would have probably been instant replay of Somolia.
---anyway that is where I got my # for deaths --from the U'N troops that were there and did the counting not from the NYT or other media reports.