CHAPTER FOURTEEN: WHERE ARE ALL THE BODIES BURIED?
Given that Balkan revisionists often complain about being dismissed as genocide deniers (the truth hurts, don't it?), one would think that Parenti would shy away from such an obvious Holocaust denier parallel. Yet he doesn't--he really titles this chapter "Where Are All the Bodies Buried?" which brings up obvious echoes of the "Where are all the piles of ashes at Auschwitz" type claims of Holocaust deniers.
And the level of "discourse" and analysis in this chapter is on the same level as the title. As such, I won't dignify this chapter with a review at all. The fact that NATO wildly overestimated the number of dead Albanians at the beginning of the campaign is of no significance to me--frankly, I'm glad we overestimated the number of killed; it's one indication that we intervened quickly enough. Parenti's charge that NATO exaggerated the nature of Serb operations in order to justify invasion is weak: if NATO leaders chose to trumpet worst-case scenarios in order to justify an intervention to put an end to the brutalization of an entire people, I can live with that. NATO may have been guilty of sloppy Holocaust parallels (oh, the irony), but Milosevic's regime was guilty of imposing a brutal apartheid, and ultimately of attempting to expel and entire people.
And at any rate, the later revised figures have been verified. And, contrary to Parenti's snide remarks, plenty of forensic evidence has proven a coordinated campaign by Serbian forces to disguise and remove mass graves, many outside of Kosovo altogether.
Parenti compares the "inflated" death tolls to the "inflated" numbers of dead at Srebrenica. Since investigation and forensic work have since verified the number of dead at Srebrenica as well, it would behoove Parenti to release a revised edition of this book with an updated version of this chapter acknowledging that voluminous facts have come to light contradicting his revisionist version of events.
I am not holding my breath.
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