Criticism of the case for war Anti-American protests in Beijing, China, 1999 Some criticised the NATO intervention

as a political diversionary tactic, coming as it did on the heels of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Some support for this hy pothesis may be found in the fact that coverage of the bombing directly replaced coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal in American news cycles.[161] Also, som e point out that before the bombing, rather than there being an unusually bloody conflict, the KLA was not engaged in a widespread civil war against Yugoslav fo rces and the death toll among all concerned (including ethnic Albanians) skyrock eted following NATO intervention.[161] However, the absence of war did not mean the presence of peace between Albanians and Serbs, as other sources have noted, citing the deaths of 1,500 Albanians and displacement of 270,000 prior to NATO i ntervention[148] and the systematic repression of the Albanian population[162] t hrough constitutional changes by the Milosevic[163] regime that imposed an "apar theid" in Kosovo.[163][164] U.S. President Clinton and his administration were accused of inflating the numb er of Kosovo Albanians killed by state forces.[165] After the bombing of the Chi nese embassy in Belgrade, Chinese Premier Jiang Zemin said that the US was using its economic and military superiority to aggressively expand its influence and interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. Chinese leaders called the NATO campaign a dangerous precedent of naked aggression, a new form of colonial ism, and an aggressive war groundless in morality or law. It was seen as part of a plot by the US to destroy Yugoslavia, expand eastward and control all of Euro pe.[166] The United Nations Charter does not allow military interventions in other sovere ign countries with few exceptions which, in general, need to be decided upon by the United Nations Security Council; this legal enjoinment has proved controvers ial with many[151][153][154] legal scholars who argue that though the Kosovo War illegal, it was still legitimate. The issue was brought before the UN Security Council by Russia, in a draft resolution which, inter alia, would affirm "that s uch unilateral use of force constitutes a flagrant violation of the United Natio ns Charter". China, Namibia, and Russia voted for the resolution, the other memb ers against, thus it failed to pass.[167] The war inflicted many casualties. Already by March 1999, the combination of fig hting and the targeting of civilians had left an estimated 1,500 2,000 civilians a nd combatants dead.[168] Final estimates of the casualties are still unavailable for either side. John Pilger said that the bombing campaign was partly designed to prepare the wa y for a free market-based reconstruction by wealthy foreign powers.[169] Perhaps the most controversial deliberate attack of the war was that made against the h eadquarters of Serbian television on April 23, which killed at least fourteen pe ople. Casualties Civilian losses In June 2000, the Red Cross reported that 3,368 civilians (2,500 Albanians, 400 Serbs, and 100 Roma) were still missing, nearly one year after the conflict.[170 ][clarification needed] A study by researchers from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atl anta, Georgia published in 2000 in medical journal the Lancet estimated that "12 ,000 deaths in the total population" could be attributed to war.[171] This numbe r was achieved by surveying 1,197 households from February 1998 through June 199 9. 67 out of the 105 deaths reported in the sample population were attributed to war-related trauma, which extrapolates to be 12,000 deaths if the same war-rela ted mortality rate is applied to Kosovo's total population. The highest mortalit y rates were in men between 15 and 49 (5,421 victims of war) as well as for men over 50 (5,176 victims). For persons younger than 15, the estimates were 160 vic tims for males and 200 for females.[citation needed] For women between 15 49 the e

stimate is that there were 510 victims; older than 50 years the estimate is 541 victims. The authors stated that it is not "possible to differentiate completely between civilian and military casualties". In the 2008 joint study by the Humanitarian Law Center (an NGO from Serbia and K osovo), The International Commission on Missing Person, and the Missing Person C ommission of Serbia made a name-by-name list of war and post-war victims. Accord ing to the Kosovo Memory Book, 13,421 people were killed in Kosovo during the co nflict, from 1 January 1998 up until December 2000. Of that sum, 10,533 were Alb anians, 2,238 were Serbs, 126 Roma, 100 Bosniaks and others.[172] Civilians killed by NATO airstrikes Main article: Civilian casualties during Operation Allied Force Yugoslavia claimed that NATO attacks caused between 1,200 and 5,700 civilian cas ualties. NATO's Secretary General, Lord Robertson, wrote after the war that "the actual toll in human lives will never be precisely known" but he then offered t he figures found in a report by Human Rights Watch as a reasonable estimate. Thi s report counted between 488 and 527 civilian deaths (90 to 150 of them killed f rom cluster bomb use) in 90 separate incidents, the worst of which were the 87 A lbanian refugees who perished at the hands of NATO bombs, near Kori a.[173] Attack s in Kosovo overall were more deadly due to the confused situation with many ref ugee movements the one-third of the incidents there account for more than half of the deaths.[174] Civilians killed by Yugoslav forces Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers investigate an alleged mass grave, alongside US Marines Various estimates of the number of killings attributed to Yugoslav forces have b een announced through the years. An estimated 800,000 Kosovo Albanians fled and an estimated 7,000 to 9,000 were killed, according to The New York Times.[175] T he estimate of 10,000 deaths is used by the United States Department of State, w hich cited human rights abuses as its main justification for attacking Yugoslavi a.[176] Statistical experts working on behalf of the ICTY prosecution estimate that the total number of dead is about 10,000.[177] Eric Fruits, a professor at Portland State University, argued that the experts' analyses were based on fundamentally flawed data and that none of its conclusions are supported by any valid statisti cal analysis or tests.[178] In August 2000, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (I CTY) announced that it had exhumed 2,788 bodies in Kosovo, but declined to say h ow many were thought to be victims of war crimes.[179] Earlier however, KFOR sou rces told Agence France Presse that of the 2,150 bodies that had been discovered up until July 1999, about 850 were thought to be victims of war crimes.[180][pa ge needed][dead link] Known mass graves:[181] In 2001, 800 still unidentified bodies were found in pits on a police training g round just outside of Belgrade and in eastern Serbia. At least 700 bodies were uncovered in a mass grave located within a special anti -terrorist police unit's compound in the Belgrade suburb of Batajnica. 77 bodies were found in the eastern Serbian town of Petrovo Selo. 50 bodies were uncovered near the western Serbian town of Perucac. NATO losses A downed F-16C pilot's flight equipment and part of the F-117A shot down over Se rbia in 1999 on show at a Belgrade museum. Military casualties on the NATO side were light. According to official reports, the alliance suffered no fatalities as a result of combat operations. However, i n the early hours of May 5, an American military AH-64 Apache helicopter crashed not far from the border between Serbia and Albania.[182] Another American AH-64 helicopter crashed about 40 miles (64 km) northeast of Ti

rana, Albania's capital, very close to the Albanian/Kosovo border.[183] Accordin g to CNN, the crash happened 45 miles (72 km) northeast of Tirana.[184] The two American pilots of the helicopter, Army Chief Warrant Officers David Gibbs and K evin L. Reichert, died in that crash. They were the only NATO ground casualties during the war, according to NATO official statements. There were other casualties after the war, mostly due to land mines. After the w ar, the alliance reported the loss of the first US stealth plane (an F-117 Night hawk) ever shot down by enemy fire.[185] Furthermore an F-16 fighter was lost ne ar abac and 32 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) from different nations were lost.[ 186] The wreckages of downed UAVs were shown on Serbian television during the wa r. Some claim a second F-117A was also heavily damaged, and although it made it back to its base, it never flew again.[187] A-10 Thunderbolts have been reported as casualties, with two shot down[38] and another two damaged.[38] Three Americ an soldiers were captured by Yugoslav Forces across the Macedonian border.[41] Yugoslav military losses Wreckage of Yugoslav MiG-29 jet fighter shot down on March 27, 1999, outside the town of Ugljevik, Bosnia and Herzegovina Destroyed tank near Prizren NATO did not release any official casualty estimates. The Yugoslav authorities c laimed 462 soldiers were killed and 299 wounded by NATO airstrikes.[188] The nam es of Yugoslav casualties were recorded in a "book of remembrance". Of military equipment, NATO destroyed around 50 Yugoslav aircraft including 6 Mi G-29s destroyed in air-to-air combat. A number of G-4 Super Galebs were destroye d in their hardened aircraft shelter by bunker-busting bombs which started a fir e which spread quickly because the shelter doors were not closed. At the end of war, NATO officially claimed that they had destroyed 93 Yugoslav tanks. Yugoslav ia admitted a total of 3 destroyed tanks. The latter figure was verified by Euro pean inspectors when Yugoslavia rejoined the Dayton accords, by noting the diffe rence between the number of tanks then and at the last inspection in 1995. NATO claimed that the Yugoslav army lost 93 tanks (M-84's and T-55's), 132 APCs, and 52 artillery pieces.[189] Newsweek, the second-largest news weekly magazine in t he U.S, gained access to a suppressed US Air Force report that claimed the real numbers were "3 tanks, not 120; 18 armored personnel carriers, not 220; 20 artil lery pieces, not 450".[189][190] Most of the targets hit in Kosovo were decoys, such as tanks made out of plastic sheets with telegraph poles for gun barrels, o r old World War II era tanks which were not functional. Anti-aircraft defences wer e preserved by the simple expedient of not turning them on, preventing NATO airc raft from detecting them, but forcing them to keep above a ceiling of 15,000 fee t (5,000 m), making accurate bombing much more difficult. Towards the end of the war, it was claimed that carpet bombing by B-52 aircraft had caused huge casual ties among Yugoslav troops stationed along the Kosovo Albania border. Careful sear ching by NATO investigators found no evidence of any such large-scale casualties . However, the most significant loss for the Yugoslav Army was the damaged and des troyed infrastructure. Almost all military air bases and airfields (Batajnica, L adevci, Slatina, Golubovci, Kovin, and akovica) and other military buildings and facilities were badly damaged or destroyed. Unlike the units and their equipment , military buildings couldn't be camouflaged. thus, defence industry and militar y technical overhaul facilities were also seriously damaged (Utva, Zastava Arms factory, Moma Stanojlovic air force overhaul center, technical overhaul centers in Cacak and Kragujevac). Moreover, in an effort to weaken the Yugoslav Army, NA TO targeted several important civilian facilities (the Pancevo oil refinery,[191 ] Novi Sad oil refinery, bridges, TV antennas, railroads, etc.) KLA losses Question book-new.svg This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this s

ection by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challe nged and removed. (September 2012) KLA memorial in Smir, Kosovo Kosovo Liberation Army losses are difficult to analyze. According to some report s there were around 1,000 fatalities on the KLA side. Difficulties arise in calc ulating an accurate figure. Things are complicated by the difficulty of determin ing who was a KLA member and who was a civilian. For example, the Yugoslavs cons idered any armed Albanian to be a member of the KLA, regardless of whether he wa s officially a card-carrying member, so someone who is counted as a civilian by the Albanian side might be counted as a KLA combatant by the Serbs. Also, many K LA members were not wearing any uniforms and had no identification.