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Who is Nataša Kandić?
A Serbian woman who, in 1992, created the Humanitarian Law Centre (HLC) in Belgrade. Funded generously by George Soros, The National Endowment for Democracy and the Ford Foundation among others, this NGO regularly popped up at crucial times with stories damaging to Serbian interests.
What were these stories?
The best known were The Freezer Truck Story (2001) and the Skorpion video (June 2005). The former was presented as proof that the Serbs were collecting the bodies of murdered Albanians in Kosovo and, in an attempt to conceal war crimes, transporting them up to Belgrade for reburial. The latter was claimed to be proof that the Bosnian Serb Army was involved in mass executions near Srebrenica.
Were the stories true?
No. Both were soon seen to be crude fakes, though that didn’t stop the BBC from broadcasting a documentary on The Freezer Truck in 2002. Nor did it prevent Geoffrey Nice, Lead Prosecutor in the Milosevic case, from introducing both as ‘evidence’ in the Milosevic trial in 2005. In fact, Nice also suggested, in his contributions to a BBC Storyville documentary on the Milosevic trial, broadcast in 2007, that they had provided powerful evidence to support the prosecution case.
How were the stories shown to be untrue?
Investigators discovered that the Freezer Truck was being used for people smuggling by the Kosovo Albanian mafia and had nothing to do with the war in Kosovo. The Scorpion tape was soon shown to have been filmed more than 100 kilometres from Srebrenica, at a different time of year, and dishonestly edited (not very well). Alternative edits, including some where the ‘victims’ were seen to get up after execution and chat to their ‘murderers’, also showed up on the internet. The only link that was found between the Skorpions and Serbs was a very brief period, several years earlier, when they had provided security services for the Krajina Serbs (guarding the petroleum refinery).
What else did Natasa Kandic do?
She regularly passed on stories to journalists which were apparently sourced, but contained little or no specific corroboration. One which purported to link the government of Slobodan Milosevic to ethnic cleansing in Kosovo resulted in an article in USA Today by James Kelley. Doubts about this story eventually led to an internal inquiry at USA Today which in turn resulted in Kelley’s resignation.
How did this affect Kandic?
Not a great deal. Lionised by NGOs and human rights activists, she carried on proving the maxim that – once put in the public domain – the damage done by false stories could never really be undone. Kandic was however sued in the Belgrade courts by Serbian Army Commander Ljubiša Diković over claims she made against him and he was awarded damages of 550,000 dinars. With Soros behind her, this probably caused little problem.