PROPAGANDA AND EVIDENCE: THE CASE OF HALIT BERANI

Kosovo Albanian separatist sources justified their recent anti-Serb rampage as a response to the drowning of three Albanian boys who, allegedly, had been chased into a river by Serbs with dogs.

Almost immediately after this story had begun to circulate, the spokesman for the UN mission in Kosovo, Derek Chappell, informed the media that it was definitely not true "according to the account of the surviving boy, who had told his parents that he and three friends entered the river alone and were immediately caught up in the heavy current". [Beta, 17 March 2004]

Following the wave of violence, reports appeared that the NATO-led force in Kosovo had arrested and released a certain Halit Berani, chairman of the Council for Protecting Human Rights and Freedoms in Kosovo, who had told Kosovo reporters that the drowning had been Serb revenge for a previous incident in which a young Serbian man had been shot [INET, 21 March 2004, and BBC Monitoring, 22 March 2004].

Mr Berani has been caught out spreading inflammatory anti-Serb material before. During the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, a story emerged that Serbs were rounding up Albanian men and dumping their bodies in the Trepca mine complex. The story was picked up and widely disseminated in the mainstream Western media. But when investigators searched the mine after the war they found no evidence of such crimes at all.

In an article published in the Wall Street Journal on 31 December 1999, Daniel Pearl and Robert Block revealed the source of the Trepca mine story:  Halit Berani, described as "head of a branch of the Council for the Defence of Human Rights and Freedoms". He had spent the war "moving from village to village with his manual typewriter, calling in reports to foreign radio services and diplomats with his daily allotment of three minutes on a KLA satellite phone" (…) In early April 1999 he phoned in a report to the German international radio service Deutsche Welle that the mines had become a body disposal site.

Although they must have known that Berani was an unreliable source, the prosecution in the case against former Serb and Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic at the Hague saw fit to call him as a key witness to Serb atrocities in Kosovo during the war.

So, next time you read or hear assertions in the media to the effect that "thousands of Albanians" were massacred by Serbs forces in Kosovo, remember that the source of such claims may well be none other than Halit Berani.

Colin Meade 25 March 2004

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