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| Scientists
Call for Kosovo Catastrophe Web Site |
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WASHINGTON
- April 8 - The following was released today by the Federation of American Scientists:
The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) called on the international humanitarian
and philanthropic community to organize the debriefing of the ethnic Albanian
community of Kosovo with regard to deportation, family separation, murder, rape,
theft and other related crimes and to establish a central repository on the World
Wide Web on which this voluminous information would be archived, cross-referenced
and validated.
In this era, the World Wide Web provides a method to accumulate, and make readily
available, amounts of information which could not, heretofore, be managed and
which, in the case of the Nazi Holocaust and the Cambodian Genocide were necessarily
collected too late. At the outset, it is entirely possible that bilingual refugees
could be trained to start this work.
Such an archive would lay a basis for future prosecution for war crimes and could
be used, also, through its accessibility on the Web, to help reunite separated
families by providing locations of persons listed. Because the Web site would
be universally available on the Internet it could, in addition, be a method of
persuading world opinion of what is happening in Kosovo by interlinking stories
and showing patterns of truth. (Information determined to be too private, or too
open to retribution, could be saved in a linked but locked portion of the site.)
Eventually, the Web site could become a kind of "cyberspace security blanket"
for returned deportees, or persons otherwise in Kosovo, since, with access to
the Internet, they could, using e-mail, link up to the Web site and provide continuing
assurance of their well-being and continuing reports of their problems.
But, above all, the mere announcement that this unusual Website archive was being
created might cool the ardor of Serb military, paramilitary or irregulars to commit
further criminal acts. This is particularly important with regard to the well-being
of surviving ethnic Albanian males being held by the Serbs. On a related part
of the Web site could be placed the names of Serbian officers and paramilitary
personnel who will, in due course, be questioned about their role in these affairs
along with any information known about their participation in crimes.
In effect, the Serbs are waging a 19th century campaign of ethnic cleansing complete
with destruction of documents on the theory that sufficient chaos can be created
to make it impossible to reconstruct events. To discourage this campaign, a 21st
century method, like the Internet, is needed to show that this population of ethnic
Albanians of Kosovo cannot be placed in an Orwellian memory hole.
For further information contact Jeremy J. Stone at FAS, 202-546-3300; Comments
collected at http://www.fas.org/kosovo
------
Federation of American Scientists is a non-profit, civic organization, founded
in 1945, devoted to issues of peace and security and sponsored by 57 Nobel Prize
winners.
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