Kosovo is today's slow news. Slow news is news that is ignored or 
minimised. It is a highly effective, though generally unrecognised, form of 
censorship in democracies. 

The expulsion and terrorising of 240,000 Serbs and other minorities from 
Kosovo since Nato took charge is of little media interest. The Society for 
Endangered People says 90,000 Gypsies have been forced to flee an 
ethnic-cleansing campaign conducted on a grand scale by the Kosovo 
Liberation Army. 

But who cares about Gypsies, let alone the demonised Serbs? 

Even slower news is the justification for this continuing violence, indeed 
for the Nato bombing that left several thousand civilians dead and maimed, 
both Serbs and Kosovars, and devastated the environment and economic life 
of the region. 

Nato embarked on this epic destruction, the then defence secretary George 
Robertson said last March, to "prevent a humanitarian catastrophe" and stop 
"a regime which is intent on genocide". The G-word was repeated many times. 
Bill Clinton referred to "deliberate, systematic efforts at . . . genocide". 

The British press took their cue. "FLIGHT FROM GENOCIDE," said a Daily Mail headline over a picture of Kosovar children in a lorry. Both the Sun and 
Mirror referred to "echoes of the Holocaust". 

Figures were supplied. The US defence secretary, William Cohen, said: 
"We've now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing . . . They may have 
been murdered." Geoffrey Hoon, then Foreign Office minister, put the 
Albanian dead at 10,000, adding that "the final toll may be much worse". A 
widely quoted US Information Agency factsheet claimed: "The number of 
unaccounted-for ethnic Albanian men ranges from a low of 225,000 . . . to 
over 400,000." Cherie Blair told the Sun she was "horrified about the rape 
camps". 

In recent weeks, disquieting questions have been raised about this 
propaganda blitzkrieg. It seems that, although no place on earth has been 
as scrutinised by forensic investigators, not to mention 2,700 media 
people, no evidence of mass murder on the scale used to justify the bombing 
has yet been found. 

The head of the Spanish forensic team attached to the International 
Criminal Tribunal, Emilio Perez Pujol, says that as few as 2,500 were 
killed. 

In an interview with El Pais, he said: "I called my people together and 
said, 'We're finished here.' I informed my government and told them the 
real situation. We had found a total of 187 bodies." He complained angrily 
that he and colleagues had become part of "a semantic pirouette by the war 
propaganda machines, because we did not find one - not one - mass grave". 

The FBI has found 200 bodies in 30 sites. The village of Ljubenic was 
believed to hold a mass grave of 350 bodies. Seven bodies were found. So 
far, 20 forensic teams operating in Kosovo have found 670 bodies. Perhaps 
the most significant disclosure, confirmed by the International Criminal 
Tribunal on 11 October, was that the Trepca lead and zinc mines contained 
no bodies. 

Trepca was central to the drama of the investigation: the corpses of 700 
murdered Albanians were presumed hidden there. On 7 July, the Mirror 
reported that a former mine-worker, Hakif Isufi, had seen dozens of trucks 
pull into the mine on the night of 4 June and heavy bundles unloaded. He 
said he could not make out what the bundles were. 

The Mirror was in no doubt: "What Hakif saw was one of the most despicable 
acts of Slobodan Milosevic's war - the mass dumping of executed corpses in 
a desperate bid to hide the evidence. War-crimes investigators fear that up 
to 1,000 bodies were incinerated in the Auschwitz-style furnaces of the 
mine with its sprawling maze of deep shafts and tunnels." 

All this was false. 

This is not to say that evidence supporting a figure close to 10,000 may 
not yet materialise; fewer than half of the 400 "crime scenes" have been 
examined. But a pattern of truth versus propaganda is emerging. 

The numbers of dead so far confirmed suggest that the Nato bombing provoked 
a wave of random brutality, murders and expulsions, a far cry from 
systematic extermination: genocide. Other atrocities of particular media 
interest, such as the "rape camps" that so horrified Cherie Blair, are 
turning out to be fiction. 

Dr Richard Munz, the doctor at the huge Stenkovac refugee camp told Die 
Welt: "The majority of media people I talked to came here and looked for a 
story . . . which they had already . . . the entire time we were here, we 
had no cases of rape. And we are responsible for 60,000 people." He 
stressed that this did not mean that rape did not happen, but it was not 
the tabloid version. 

The same is true of the Milosevic regime. No one can doubt its cruelty and 
atrocities, but comparisons with the Third Reich are ridiculous. 

These facts and the questions they raise have not been judged newsworthy. A 
data-base search reveals hardly a word in the news pages of the serious 
mainstream national papers, with the exception of the Sunday Times. The 
Guardian has published only a piece by their columnist Francis Wheen, 
critical of the author of an article on the Kosovo figures in the Spectator 
on 30 October. BBC News, to my knowledge, has remained silent on the 
subject. 

This is understandable. With honourable exceptions, propagandists, not 
reporters, attended much of the Kosovo tragedy. Indeed, some journalists 
have been open in admitting that they, not Tony Blair's press secretary, 
deserve the credit for putting the government's case. 

The forbidden question was put last week by a troubled Andrew Alexander in 
his column in the Mail. "Could it turn out to be," he asked, "that we 
killed more innocent civilians than the Serbs did?"