TRANSCRIPT OF BACKGROUNDER
GIVEN BY JAMIE SHEA AND AMB. DAVID SCHEFFER
IN BRUSSELS ON TUESDAY, 18 MAY 1999

JAMIE SHEA:
Ladies and Gentlemen, good morning, it is good to see you all.


Just let me say that we will have, as always, the usual operational update
with General Jertz and myself at 3 o'clock in the usual way and I would
like to introduce the special guest, this morning, special visitor,
Ambassador David Scheffer of the United States and he is the Ambassador at
Large of the US State Department for War Crimes Issues and he has just been
in The Hague and he has also had a meeting here this morning with the
Secretary General, Javier Solana, and in just a few moments I will turn
over to him to brief you on the US perception of the situation in Kosovo,
in Yugoslavia, particularly from the angle that Ambassador Scheffer covers.


For my part, I would just like to give you two updates: the first is on
the Secretary General's meeting this morning with Ibrahim Rugova. Many of
you, I imagine, attended the press event but I'd just like to say that from
the NATO perspective it was a very cordial, very warm meeting and we were
very pleased that Dr. Rugova could come and see us this morning. The
Secretary General described to him the results of the Washington Summit,
particularly the five key cardinal conditions that NATO is not going to
back away from for resolving the crisis in Kosovo. The Secretary General
further urged Dr. Rugova and all the Kosovar Albanian leaders to work
together to maintain the united front that they had during the Rambouillet
negotiations as the best way forward for Kosovo now once the conflict has
come to an end; and thirdly, the Secretary General stressed that NATO will
continue to do all it can, while waiting for the crisis to be resolved, to
help the Kosovar Albanian people both in the refugee camps but also those
internally displaced Kosovars that remain inside Kosovo and of course Dr.
Rugova shares, as you would imagine, our concern regarding the condition of
those internally displaced persons.


For his part, Dr. Rugova stressed two points: the first that he totally
supports what NATO is doing and sees the NATO action as the only way to
achieve a lasting peace in Kosovo and to get the refugees back; and
secondly, the need for NATO to continue with its air operations until the
five conditions are met and you heard him also say the same thing during
his press briefing.


The second point is the usual overnight update. I can be very brief here
because I think all of you by now will have had the details for some time
already. Let me just stress that the weather continued to affect the air
operations last night on Day 55 of Operation Allied Force but nonetheless
NATO aircraft were able to fly 566 sorties of which 190 were strike sorties
and 62 suppression-of-air-defence sorties and despite the bad weather
conditions we were still able to successfully hit a number of ground
targets in target areas - more than 20 artillery pieces, mortar positions,
anti-aircraft artillery pieces, tanks, armoured vehicles and riveted - that
is to say partially-hidden - military vehicles and also, as you know,
yesterday in an attack against Botanica airfield we were able to destroy a
MiG-29 and a MiG-21 on the ground. Other strategic targets included
highway bridges in three locations and a TV/FM transmitter at Kapaonik and
all aircraft, I am grateful to say once again, returned safely to their
bases but General Jertz will have much more on all of that at 3 o'clock and
now I am very happy again to turn the floor over to Ambassador Scheffer for
his update on the war crimes issue.


AMBASSADOR SCHEFFER:
Thank you very much, Jamie, and it is my great pleasure to be here today.
I came here to meet with Secretary General Solana, we had a good meeting
this morning and I was heartened - as I have been throughout this campaign
- by his commitment to the full investigation of the ethnic cleansing
campaign in Kosovo, an investigation that will last long after this
conflict is resolved militarily. By the way, I am also going to be at
the Tribunal tomorrow holding my consultations with various Tribunal
officials - I do this quite regularly as do other governments - so it was a
good opportunity to come here and see Secretary General Solana and have
this opportunity to meet with the European press and the international
press here.


Let me tell you what I intend to do this morning so that you have a sort of
game plan of how I am going to get through about 15 minutes of a statement
to you and then I'd be happy to take your questions.


After a short introduction, I'm going to talk about some of the information
that we have coming out of Washington that I think would be of interest to
you this morning to make certain that you all are aware of some of the
information that is coming out of Washington. And then I am going to
focus on the issue of human shields not only as a factual matter in Kosovo
but also I am going to ask your indulgence for about three or four minutes
to literally talk with you about the law and how it applies to the use of
human shields as I think understanding where this comes in under
international law is particularly useful.


I do want to say that I learn a lot and we all gain a tremendous amount
from the heroic work the journalists are doing in the Kosovo theatre; it
is an enormous amount of information that comes in from what we describe as
"open sources" and the media is included in that and I think the entire
international media must take great pride in the focus and the hard work
that it is undertaking to try to get the facts out and we certainly take
notice of that in Washington.


With the exception of Rwanda in 1994 and Cambodia in 1975, you would be
hard pressed to find a crime scene anywhere in the world since World War II
where a defenceless civilian population have been assaulted with such
ferocity and criminal intent and suffered so many multiple violations of
international humanitarian law in such a short period of time as in Kosovo
since mid-March 1999.


There are hideous crime scenes elsewhere recently - Sierra Leone, the
Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan come to mind - but Kosovo
represents a government-planned campaign to eliminate either through forced
deportation or killing, most of an ethnic population from its home. The
criminal character of such an enterprise, divorced in large part from any
semblance of military necessity, cannot be ignored. The list of war
crimes and crimes and again humanity being committed in Kosovo is diverse,
covering such a wide range of criminal behaviour that it represents almost
a text-book example of how not to wage warfare.


We believe that the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia unquestionably has jurisdiction in Kosovo, every government has
the responsibility to co-operate with the Tribunal. We recently hosted
Justice Arbour in Washington for discussions with Cabinet members,
including Secretary Albright, on the whole range of issues of co-operation
with the Tribunal and we felt those discussions were not only constructive
but quite successful.


We have been co-operating with the Yugoslav Tribunal with an accelerated
and intensified information-sharing programme, many hundreds of documents
pertaining to Kosovo alone, classified and otherwise, have been provided to
the Tribunal since March of 1998; hundreds have been provided since
mid-March of this year and many more are in the pipeline. These documents
are provided pursuant to rule 70 of the Tribunal Rules.


This work is very labour-intensive, it takes time. We do need more
budgeted resources for support for the War Crimes Tribunal and that is a
goal we in the United States are working on with the United States Congress
and I am very pleased to see that as the Kosovo Supplemental Bill moves
through the Congress, there is a significant amount of money in that Bill
for support for war crimes investigations with the Yugoslav Tribunal and
that will make a very big difference with respect to the capabilities of
the Tribunal to undertake a full range of investigations in Kosovo.


We also were pleased to announce last week that the Federal Bureau of
Investigation has offered to provide a forensics team that would accompany
the international security force when it goes in at the request of Justice
Arbour to assist with the investigation of parts of this major crime scene.


We were pleased recently to give $500,000 to an NGO to help conduct refugee
interviewing in the theatre and also to help co-ordinate and assist with
the actual questionnaire that is being used with refugees.


We provide information to the ICTY, the Yugoslav Tribunal, to facilitate
its investigations, including with respect to command responsibility and
the legal obligation of the field commanders and the leadership in Belgrade
to prevent and punish criminal conduct by their subordinates. We not only
support the Tribunal's mandate to investigate wherever the evidence leads
it but we also look forward to the day when a democratic Serbia with a
strong independent judiciary brings other perpetrators of crimes in Kosovo
to credible justice.


Last week, we released a report, the cover of which I will show you here,
called Erasing History. This was released by the State Department and by
Secretary Albright last Monday and I do want to call it to your attention
one more time. It is on the relevant web sites of the State Department and
the US IA, it also includes maps in it that I think would be extremely
useful for journalists to see in terms of more than 600 damaged villages
and towns etc. and a couple of examples of the overhead imagery which you
have seen previously, including that shown by Jamie in a previous briefing.


Let me give you some facts and figures that are not only in the Erasing
History report but have been more recently reported by the United States
government and which I think I can bring to your attention today. Keep in
mind that we have a web site whereby we regularly each week put an ethnic
cleansing in Kosovo report and I do strongly encourage you to look at that
each week, that is a good distillation of information that we are collecting.


The numbers of towns and villages where we have reports of mass executions
have now risen to 75. We have new reports of mass graves in Dibrousavac -
I apologise for some of my pronunciation - Drenica, Lipjon, Kanisu, Risala,
Malisevo, Paklac, Pristisello and in the Pagarusa Valley.


We have reports that Serb forces have burned bodies exhumed from mass
graves in an attempt to destroy forensic evidence.


The number of individuals that we have a fairly firm count on as having
been killed in mass executions has now risen to 5,000. I must emphasise
that is a totally minimalist figure, we are simply trying to give you the
most conservative confirmed figure that we can from good refugee reporting.
We can only assume the worst and that the figure is actually much higher
than that.


We have reports of systematic rapes in Dukovica and at not only the Karguch
Hotel in Pec but also the Metohia Hotel in Pec.


You have heard in the past our reporting to you of the number of men
unaccounted for, we simply don't know their whereabouts in Kosovo or what
has become of them. We have talked in the past about a figure of around
100,000; more recent reporting that we have places that figure higher now,
a figure of about 225,000 in terms of men who are unaccounted for. That
does not mean a kill figure, that means unaccounted for, we do not know
what their fate is, a large number of them could in fact be alive but the
point is we don't know their exact fate at this time and that is a figure
that is part of the internally displaced figure of about 550,000 but we
simply don't know the actual fate of these particular men at this time.
Those are men between the ages of 14 and 59 approximately.


We also have new refugee reports describing widespread starvation and
disease among internally displaced persons in Kosovo especially among those
who have been in the hills for weeks.


On the issue of human shields, since late March ethnic Albanian refugees
have reported on numerous Serb atrocities through the province, we all know
that. In addition to the murders and rapes, refugees have claimed that
Serb forces are using Kosovars to escort Serb military convoys and fuel
facilities throughout the province. This clearly is an act of desperation
on the part of the Serb forces and I want to describe to you three
different acts, categories of desperation.


First, he is using human shields to escort military forces and under that
category since late March Serb forces have reportedly used ethnic Albanians
to protect military assets in the field. On March 29, Serb forces
reportedly used 500 Kosovar men as human shields during fighting with KLA
forces near Klina. In early April, Serb forces in Orahavic reportedly
forced as many as 700 ethnic Albanian men to stand in front of tanks in the
rain for two days with their hands tied behind their backs as the Serbs
exchanged fire with KLA forces.


As the fighting with KLA forces diminished and the fear of NATO air strikes
became more daunting, Serb forces in the field began to change their
tactics. Beginning in mid-April, refugees reported that Serb forces were
using ethnic Albanian men to shield military convoys from NATO air strikes.
Serb forces reportedly removed young ethnic Albanian men from refugee
columns and forced them to form a buffer around Serb military convoys.
Numerous refugees claim to have witnessed and participated in this activity
on roads between Pec, Dakovica, Jakovica, Kasovska Mitrovica, Pajahava and
Pristina.


Additional refugees claim that on May 6, Serb forces dressed in Red Cross
and Red Crescent uniforms moved with convoys of refugees between Djakovica
and Berkovac in an attempt to prevent NATO air strikes. In order to
conceal their military logo, Serb forces covered their wagons with plastic
tarpaulins taken from NGOs.


The second category of human shield use is shielding key facilities and
under this we have first defensive uses. Since NATO bombing started in
late March, there have been reports of Serb forces gathering large numbers
of ethnic Albanian civilians at sites in Pristina, Pec, Shrobica and
Vutran; these included a munition factory in Seres, a cement factory in
Jakovic and a possibly defunct ferro-nickel plant in Glogovac, all
plausible military or industrial targets. Subsequent analysis indicated
that in some cases the Serbs were using these facilities as temporary
detention centres before expelling the ethnic Albanians to Macedonia and
Albania.


With respect to offensive uses, unconfirmed reports claim that Serbian
military forces are intentionally positioning ethnic Albanians at sites
they believe are targets for NATO air strikes. However, the ethnic
Albanians reportedly are not being used in an ostentatious manner to deter
attacks but rather are kept concealed in NATO target areas apparently in
order to generate civilian casualties that can be blamed on NATO.


We have taken note of unconfirmed press reports from early April claiming
that Serbian forces are attempting to disguise their murder of ethnic
Albanian civilians by placing the bodies in the ruins of locations recently
bombed by NATO. In addition, refugee reports claim that Serb forces have
forced ethnic Albanian men to don Serb military uniforms, probably so they
cannot be distinguished by NATO aircraft.


These reports differ from the use of human shields during the Bosnian
conflict. During the fighting in central Bosnia from 1992 to 1995, the
combatants often positioned captured civilians at highly-visible locations
in key military facilities in an attempt to deter attacks from opposing
forces and NATO air strikes. In addition, units sometimes positioned
captured civilians in the front lines to force their opponents to stop
shelling - that was in Bosnia.


The final category of human shields would be forced labour. Serb forces
reportedly forced 25 ethnic Albanian civilians to dig defensive positions
on the south-east side of Iresovac on 10/12 April apparently in
anticipation of a NATO ground attack through Macedonia. Whether it was
the intended purpose or not, these civilians constituted a de facto shield
for the nearby Serb security forces.


Similar forced labour was observed during the Bosnian conflict although
those detainees were actually working in organised labour units on the
front lines in the cross-fire between the warring parties.


Let me just finally in terms of the facts that what impresses someone like
me who deals with war crimes investigations every day, is that this has
become a shell game of civilians manipulated by Serb forces, moved around
the countryside in a shell-game strategy to expose them to the risk of
military conflict and that, folks, is illegal, that is a war crime.


Let me just talk for 3 to 4 minutes about the law if I might because I
think this is very important:


The practice of involuntarily holding innocent civilians in the vicinity of
military targets is illegal and reprehensible. International law
prohibits the practice of deliberately placing non-combatants around
military objectives in an effort to "protect" them from attack. The use
of human shields is an illegal tactic that was used by for example by the
PLO in Lebanon in 1982 as well as the lawless Somali militia and by Saddam
Hussein in occupied Kuwait. In the context of operations in Kosovo, the
use of Kosovar Albanians to insulate military targets would violate norms
of customary international law. The prohibition against the use of human
shields is reflected in the following provisions of the law and I am just
going to quickly check this off for you:


First, article 27 of the Geneva Convention relative to the protection of
civilians in time of war which was signed in 1949 specifies that protected
persons shall "at all times be humanely treated and shall be protected
against all actions of violence or threats thereof"


Article 28 mandates that protected persons cannot be used to render areas
immune from military attack. This provision it might be argued is
technically inapplicable because Kosovars would not be protected persons in
the hands of their own government. However, article 28 reflects the solid
grounding of the concept in the framework of humanitarian law and was
clearly articulated and I actually helped the draft the provision of the
Rome treaty on the Permanent International Court last summer that clearly
embodied this principle as a chargeable count by the Prosecutor of the
Permanent International Criminal Court when a sufficient number of
ratifications are achieved to bring it into force.


Second, common article 3 mandates that persons taking no part in the
hostilities will "in all circumstances be treated humanely." Article 3
specifically outlaws the taking of hostages; groups of civilians who are
held at gunpoint and forced to remain in the vicinity of legitimate
military targets are hostages in both common sense and legal meaning of
that word; they are held against their will in an environment where they
are endangered.


Three, protocol 1 of 1977, article 51, sub-paragraph 7, mandates that "the
presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians
shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military
operations in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from
attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations; the parties to
the conflict shall not direct the movement of the civilian population or
individual civilians in order to attempt to shield military objectives from
attacks or to shield military operations."


It is important that the commentary to the protocols of 1977 points out
that the formulation of article 51, sub-paragraph 7 is broader than the
class of persons covered by either of the applicable Geneva Conventions of
1949. In addition, the commentary notes that the word "movements" is
intended to include instances where the civilian population is moving of
its own accord.


I have just another brief comment on the law:


The relevant principles of law associated with the tactic of using human
shields to insulate military objectives from attack are discrimination and
proportionality.


The principle of discrimination is one of the most fundamental components
of the law of armed conflict. This principle was reflected as early as
the 1899 Hague Convention requirement that combatants wear a fixed,
distinctive emblem recognisable at a distance and carry their arms openly.
Customery international law requires that combatants shall "at all times
distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and shall direct
their operations only against military objectives." There is absolutely
no question that that is exactly what NATO is doing, it is distinguishing
between civilian and military objectives and in fact I would argue just as
a scholar of the laws of war that you cannot find another armed conflict in
the history of modern warfare where there has been more discipline and care
taken to comply with the laws of war and to make that distinction than in
the targeting exercise of the NATO Alliance.


The use of human shields would represent an attempt to deter an attack
against a military target by affecting the proportionality analysis of the
attacking state. The principle of proportionality prohibits attacks where
the loss of life and/or damage to property incident to legitimate attacks
would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military
advantage to be gained. Commanders must take all feasible means to
minimise collateral damage and the effort of using human shields to hope
that the proportionality analysis would deter the attack. In some, using
civilians in an attempt to insulate legitimate military objectives from
attack violates well-established principles of international war. NATO
forces have complied with the law of armed conflict principle that attacks
not be wilfully directed against the civilian population as such or
deliberately disproportionate.


Thank you for your indulgence.


JAMIE SHEA:
Ambassador Scheffer, thank you very much for that and I can see as I
imagined that it has provoked many questions.


QUESTIONS & ANSWERS


PATRICIA KELLY, CNN:
Ambassador, presumably if your investigations do lead to indictments, you
will be dependent on KFOR to carry out any arrests but KFOR won't be there
unless the Serb and Yugoslav military withdraw so how do you think you are
going to get these people? From what we are hearing, the international
community is also adamant that President Milosevic should be indicated.
How do you expect him to agree to some kind of a negotiated peace
settlement because presumably that would be part of it and he would be
signing his own indictment in effect and how do you expect any of this to
be successful considering SFOR and IFOR in Bosnia have been unable to
arrest key figures who have been indicted such as Radovan Karadic and Ratko
Mladic even when they were almost living on top of each other?


AMBASSADOR SCHEFFER:
Thank you, Patricia. On the issue of arrest first, it is premature at
this stage to know exactly who might be indicted from the investigations
that Justice Arbour is undertaking at the Yugoslav Tribunal. That is not a
job of the United States government or any other NATO government, it is a
job that Justice Arbour is doing. We fully support her, we have fully
encouraged her to go wherever the evidence takes her, we are providing as
much information as quickly as we possibly can to her on an accelerated and
intensified basis particularly with respect to Kosovo, including command
responsibility issues.


As far as how one actually arrests individuals who haven't been indicted
yet, all I can say is that I think NATO and the Tribunal will take the
circumstances as they are when they arrive with respect to that issue in
Kosovo. No-one has any idea at this point what the circumstances will be
in terms of the locations of the individuals who have been indicted or what
opportunities may arise to actually bring them into custody.


It is first and foremost the obligation of Belgrade of course to provide
that anyone indicted by the Tribunal is transferred to The Hague
immediately. We have stated many times that Belgrade has completely failed
in its responsibility and it is one reason why Belgrade will remain
isolated from the international community regardless of what happens in
Kosovo, until those transfers are made and that includes not only the
Vukovar Three - the three Serb officers responsible allegedly for massacres
in Vukovar in 1991 - it also includes Arkon and it includes General Mladic
all of whom are finding sanctuary in Serbia at this time and have for a
very long time.


With respect to Mr. Milosevic and the future, let me just say that there is
no immunity deal to be cut with the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal, it is not
part of their mandate. We created the Tribunal to go wherever the evidence
takes it, it is up to the Tribunal to determine who is investigated and who
is indicted and it is not up to either the United States government or, I
would argue, NATO to dictate to the Yugoslav Tribunal any particular
formulations that it should use in determining how to investigate and how
to bring indictments. That is why we created the Tribunal, to make those
independent judgements.


The Serb leadership, including President Milosevic, have known since 1993
that there is a Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal, it exists, it has a clear
mandate to investigate and bring indictments and Mr. Milosevic has also
known that no particular government has any power to prevent the Tribunal
from undertaking its obligations and to fulfil its statutory mandate so
those are the facts and those are the facts that will have to be lived with
in whatever discussions take place in the future.


MARK LAITY, BBC:
A couple of points, just one technical one. You mentioned common article
3 and protocol 1 connected with 1977, I didn't catch what they are
referring to.


AMBASSADOR SCHEFFER:
Common article 3 is common article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Convention and it
refers to internal conflicts and what applies with respect to internal
conflicts and protocol 1 is from 1977, that is protocol 1 to the 1949
Geneva Convention, it was an updating of the 1949 Convention.


MARK LAITY:
You distinguished between some of the points about the corroboration and
how certain you were and not surprisingly the Serbs deny all of it. How
certain are you about the veracity of these reports? It is very difficult,
exaggeration is common, people have motivation to lie and so on so how
certain are you that these reports add up to a compelling body of evidence
that is going to stand up before a court?


AMBASSADOR SCHEFFER:
You know it is remarkable. We are fairly certain but in a relative sense.
It is actually rather unique in the history of warfare to have so many
thousands of refugees now out of harm's way and able to speak frankly,
openly and honestly about what they have witnessed and what I have found so
impressive in the thousands of accounts of refugees is how remarkably
consistent they are one to the next about the pattern of ethnic cleansing,
about the character of the criminal campaign under way, about the enormous
number of the laws of war which are being violated and how they describe
they are being violated. The consistency is what is remarkable. If we
had very disjointed, inconsistent and contradictory reports coming out of
Kosovo from refugees, we would have to stand back and be really quite
sceptical about what is going on in Kosovo but when you have so many eye
witnesses who say essentially the same thing about what they have
experienced in all different corners of Kosovo, that is fairly convincing
but we do stress that it is only that much. In other words, it is
difficult until we get on the ground, until the Tribunal's investigators
get on the ground in Kosovo, to confirm a lot of this and that allows me by
the way to simply stress that we are very conscious of the fact that when
the international security force enters Kosovo it will need adjacent to it
- or as Justice Arbour has said in her terminology "riding on its
shoulders" - Tribunal investigators to be able to go to the individual
scenes as quickly as possible to confirm what has occurred and to do
forensic analysis and other important responsibilities.


Justice Arbour has spoken about this but I want to emphasise that the
United States government takes that responsibility very seriously, that an
international security force that goes in on the ground is going to provide
the opportunity for the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal to very competently
and thoroughly investigate this unprecedented crime scene and it is one of
the reasons why the Federal Bureau of Investigation has offered a crack
forensics team to go in at that time.


MARK LAITY:
What would be the position legally, given the amount that Serbs appear to
be using human shields, if NATO because it felt it had an overriding
military necessity say to take out that target and was aware of human
shields there and attacked it anyway, what legal position does that put
NATO in?


AMBASSADOR SCHEFFER:
Two things. First, it cannot be the case under the laws of war,
otherwise they would make no sense, that simply proliferating human shields
around a battlefield area neutralises the ability of an opposing force to
actually engage in combat at all, that would turn the laws of war on its
head, that one illegal act totally neutralises the ability of another side
to engage in a very justified military campaign.


At the same time, though, I must emphasise and stress as strongly as I can
that the targeting exercise of NATO is so rigorous and so disciplined and
so thorough, even though certain mistakes have occurred, a very small
number - and frankly, I would sometimes argue whether they were mistakes or
not, they are targets that have succumbed to certain circumstances imposed
by the Serb forces that created civilian casualties - but that being said,
certainly in the targeting analysis as targets are chosen it is very clear
that our military and our legal staffs take into full account the reality,
if they can determine it is a reality, of the presence of civilians and
then that becomes a real decision and a judgement call within the targeting
exercise as to that balance which I described to you when I was talking
about the law.


DIMITRI KHAVINE, RUSSIAN TV AGENCY:
Speaking about human shields strictly from the legal point of view, not
moral, how will these legal notions and terms work when war is not
officially declared because it looks like the civilian population living
close to something which is considered by the other side, by somebody, as a
legal military target is a human shield anyway in any country?


AMBASSADOR SCHEFFER:
Let me just say that there is no need at all for a declaration of war for
the laws of war to apply, the Geneva Conventions don't require it nor does
customary international law so that is simply not a necessary trigger for
these laws to apply.


DIMITRI:
Yes, but the civil population living around something which is a military
target, which is normal in normal life?


AMBASSADOR SCHEFFER:
I have to be very frank with you. I wish that were the case in Kosovo, I
wish people were normally living in their homes perhaps adjacent to an
industrial plant or some military munitions plant, I wish that were the
case, it would be a heck of a lot easier for the NATO Alliance if that were
the case. The fact is more than 90 per cent of Kosovar Albanians have
been forcibly expelled from their homes and we don't know where a lot of
them are literally and those where we do know generally where they are, are
internally-displaced persons who are herded back and forth along roads, who
try to hide in forests so it would be a much easier calculation if in fact
they were living in their normal homes.


PIERRE:
You talk about accounts of eye witnesses but how can you confirm that these
terrible facts are real if NATO, the US, haven't got official forces on the
ground? Is it maybe by pictures or movies taken by the aircraft or only
by the witness?


AMBASSADOR SCHEFFER:
It is a combination of sources. It is not just refugee reports. We also
have overhead imageries some of which we have been able to show publicly to
you but we are providing a lot of that kind of information to the Tribunal
whether it be classified or otherwise. A tremendous amount of that is
moving towards the Tribunal and has moved towards the Tribunal but it is
also diplomatic reporting, it is a whole range of different sources of
reporting that we do draw upon, it is not only the refugee accounts.


I think what is impressive about the refugee accounts is that there are eye
witness accounts in thousands and thousands - and it will be tens and tens
of thousands by the time the Yugoslav Tribunal questionnaire is filled out
by Kosovar refugees and provided to the Tribunal - and we are assisting the
Tribunal in building a database that can start to collate this information
and provide more statistical figures that are drawn from the questionnaires
but that is first and foremost the property of the Tribunal to analyse
before it is analysed by anyone else. My point is that those witnesses,
when you really come down to putting on a trial and providing key evidence
that stands up in a courtroom, those eye witness accounts, bodies in
courtrooms that actually testify to what they have seen are extremely
crucial evidence so no-one should underestimate the importance of the
refugee accounts.


SAME QUESTIONER:
In case of human shields, you have pictures from your aircraft of these
human shields?


AMBASSADOR SCHEFFER:
I would not comment at this time whether we do or not. Whatever we can
show you we will show you, otherwise it is made available to the Tribunal.


JAMIE SHEA:
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much and Ambassador Scheffer, thank
you very much for coming and briefing the press, I am grateful to you for
that and just to remind you that the next briefing is 3 o'clock.