Report Blames NATO for 500 Civilian Deaths

About 500 civilians were killed by NATO bombs in Kosovo and other parts of Yugoslavia last year, Human Rights Watch said Sunday in a report that accused the United States and its allies of doing too little to minimize such casualties.

The privately funded human rights group based its estimate on a three-week investigation last August that included visits to 91 cities, towns and villages and inspections of 42 sites where civilian deaths were thought to have occurred. The 79-page report says civilians were killed in 90 separate incidents.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has not issued an estimate of civilian deaths, but the Pentagon has said that 20 to 30 incidents resulted in such casualties. The Yugoslav government claims that NATO bombs killed 1,200 to 5,000 noncombatants.

“We recognize that NATO went to considerable lengths to avoid killing civilians,” Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said in a telephone interview. “We applaud that, but the report points out that there was much more that should have been done to prevent civilians from being killed. We in no sense want to equate NATO’s actions with the Serb and Yugoslav forces that were intentionally killing civilians.”

Nevertheless, the report says NATO’s shortcomings in preventing civilian casualties amounted to violations of international humanitarian law. It calls on NATO governments to establish an independent and impartial commission to investigate the incidents.

The report says more than half the deaths resulted from “attacks on illegitimate or questionable targets” such as the headquarters of Serbian radio and television in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, as well as the Belgrade heating plant and seven bridges that were not used primarily by the military.

“In each case that we considered illegitimate, we looked very closely at the circumstances and either found that there was no military value at all or that the marginal military value was outweighed by the civilian cost,” Roth said.

NATO has maintained that all of its targets--except for some, such as the Chinese Embassy, that were hit in error--had military value. For instance, the alliance said the radio-television headquarters was used to rally the Serbian population and to encourage attacks in Kosovo on ethnic Albanian civilians. Kosovo is a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s dominant republic.

“Even if you assume that there is some value to stopping propaganda, that is clearly marginal to the people who lost their lives,” Roth said. “This was in downtown Belgrade, so it was foreseeable that there would be civilian casualties.”

Human Rights Watch said about one-third of the incidents in which civilians were killed happened in Kosovo. Most of the rest were elsewhere in Serbia. Of the incidents in Kosovo, many were attacks on convoys or military forces in the field, resulting in casualties to nearby civilians. Some convoys included both military and civilian vehicles.

NATO acknowledged civilian casualties from several convoy attacks at the time they occurred, sometimes explaining that rules requiring high-altitude bombing made it more difficult to identify the vehicles.

Roth said NATO made several changes in its rules of engagement during the conflict that helped to hold down the number of civilian casualties. He said that, in the later stages of the war, pilots were allowed to fly lower to make more accurate target identification.

Far more significant, he said, was the Pentagon’s decision in May to stop using cluster bombs. Roth said the clusters--which spew out dozens of bomblets that are lethal to people caught in the open--caused as many as 150 civilian casualties, perhaps 30% of the war’s civilian toll.

The report, in effect, says NATO’s performance fell short of its stated objective of using precision-guided munitions to minimize so-called collateral damage.

“For a war with the reputation of being the smartest in history, there is an unfortunate pattern of NATO ignoring many important lessons from previous conflicts,” William M. Arkin, a military consultant to Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.