Nato knows what it did to 74 refugees in Kosovo

April 1999: Robert Fisk reminds the ‘peaceful’ organisation of the carnage they left along the Prizren-Djakovica road

The Nato bombings of Kosovo Albanian refugees led to protests outside the White House (AFP/Getty)

When you stand at the site of a massacre, two things happen. First, you wonder about the depths of the human spirit. And then you ask yourself how many lies can be told about it. The highway of death between Prizren and Djakovica – on which the Serbs say Nato slaughtered 74 Kosovo Albanian refugees in a series of bombing raids – is no different.

Only hours after I slipped on a dead man’s torso near an old Turkish bridge, less than a day after I stood by the body of a young and beautiful girl – her eyes gently staring at me between half-closed lids, the bottom half of her head bathed in blood – I watched James Shea, Nato’s spokesperson, trying to explain yesterday why Nato still didn’t know what had happened on Wednesday.

All those torn and mangled bodies I had just seen – the old man ripped in half and blasted into a tree at Gradis, the smouldering skeleton with one bloody, still flesh-adhering foot over the back of a trailer at Terezick Most, the dead, naked man slouched over the steering wheel of a burnt tractor – all, apparently, “were a mystery to Nato”. So perhaps The Independent can help clear up this unhappy state of affairs with some evidence from the scene.