2 min read
John Pilger is a standing affront to decent journalism, espousing some pretty vile causes under the guise of exposing the truth. Marko Attila Hoare, an expert on the Balkans, has a compelling account of how he exposed Pilger's lies at a meeting at Kingston University, which you can read here. Rather than attempt to defend his record, Pilger tried to play the numbers game with me (people like Pilger are under the impression that if the total number of victims in a campaign of mass murder turns out to be lower than some of the earlier estimates, it vindicates the deniers and the apologists). He asked me what I thought the death-toll in the Kosovo conflict was. I replied that it was about ten thousand. He then countered that no, the number of bodies found, including both civilians and combatants and members of all ethnic groups was ‘only’ four thousand, according to members of forensic teams working in Kosovo. This, it should be pointed out, is something of an upward revision for Pilger, who as recently as a year and a half ago was claiming that the total death-toll in Kosovo was ‘only’ 2,788, and that therefore the justification for the NATO operation against Serbia was an ‘invention’.
I reminded Pilger that the Milosevic regime had systematically concealed and destroyed the bodies of its Kosovo Albanian victims; that more mass graves were being discovered as time went by; and that the body count was therefore likely to rise. He did not appear to have a counter-argument; his only response was to tell me ‘you clearly have an agenda’ and ‘you shouldn’t be teaching here’. Which, given that I was teaching at the invitation of, and in conjunction with, senior members of the same faculty and university as those who had invited him to speak, was something of an insult to his hosts. He then tried to shift the discussion away from the topic of the body-count (that he had himself introduced) and to claim that ‘the NATO war was to destroy the state called Yugoslavia’. I told him that was ‘nonsense’, and he decided that this was the time to move on to the next question. After the meeting and in the following days, several Kingston students and staff members approached me to tell me how shocked they had been at his reaction to my question and his inability to address it.
Unknown to either myself or Pilger, a forensic expert who had worked on-site in Kosovo examining the bodies was also present in the audience. After the meeting, she approached him, told him who she was, challenged his version of events and asked him to tell her who the alleged forensic experts he had cited were, because they were probably people she knew personally. Pilger’s response was ‘I have to go now’. Although when I passed him in the entrance to the auditorium, he was talking to someone else and did not appear in any great hurry to leave.
As I noted above, deniers such as Pilger are under the impression that if they can ‘win’ the numbers game - if the death-toll in Kosovo turns out ‘only’ to have been four thousand rather than ten thousand, for example - then they believe it will prove their case that genocide did not occur, the assumption presumably being that four thousand deaths are ‘too small’ to count as genocide. Do read the whole thing. It's important that Pilger and his ilk are exposed for what they really are: peddlers of fiction and defenders of murderers.