Civilians killed by Yugoslav ground forces
Various estimates of the number of killings attributed to Yugoslav ground forces have been announced through the years.
In June 2000 the
Red Cross reported that 3,368 civilians (2,500 Albanians, 400 Serbs, and 100 Roma) were still missing, nearly one year after the conflict.
[39]
In August 2000 the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) announced that it had exhumed 2,788 bodies in Kosovo, but declined to say how many were thought to be victims of war crimes.
[40] Earlier however, KFOR sources told Agence France Presse that of the 2,150 bodies that had been discovered up until July 1999, about 850 were thought to be victims of war crimes.
[41]
Some of the missing civilians were re-buried in mass graves in Serbia-proper. In July 2001, the Serbian authorities announced the discovery of four mass graves containing nearly 1,000 bodies.
[37] The largest grave was found on a Serbian Police training ground in Batajnica just outside of Belgrade.
Although it far exceeds the 4,400 killings reported to human rights groups, statistical experts working on behalf of the
ICTY prosecution estimate that the total number of dead is about 10,000.
[42] Their higher estimate was based on the controversial assumption that most people wouldn't report the killing or disappearance of a loved one.
[43]
The estimate of 10,000 deaths is also used by the U.S. State Department, which cited human rights abuses as its main justification for attacking Yugoslavia.
[44]
A study by researchers from the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in
Atlanta, Georgia published in 2000 in medical journal
the Lancet estimated that "12,000 deaths in the total population" could be attributed to war.
[45] This number was achieved by surveying 1197 households from February, 1998, through June, 1999. 67 out of the 105 deaths reported in the sample population were attributed to war-related
trauma, which extrapolates to be 12,000 deaths if the same war-related mortality rate is applied to Kosovo's total population. The highest mortality rates were in men between 15-49 accounting for 5421 victims of war as well as for the man over 50 accounting for total of 5176 victims of the war. For persons younger than 15 the estimates were 160 victims for males and 200 for females. For the woman between 15-49 the estimate is that there was 510 victims and for the woman older than 50 years the estimate is 541 victims. The authors stated that it is not "possible to differentiate completely between civilian and military casualties".
