Letter: It was a war worth fighting

NATO BOMBS have left thousands of incinerated and dismembered corpses in Kosovo. During this intensive bombardment, probably thousands more were killed in a massive escalation of the war between the KLA and Yugoslav forces. It is surely obvious that, while the filling of mass graves is a filthy indictment of war, it does not automatically imply that the dead were systematically murdered in cold blood. Yet every location at which several bodies have been found is marked, prior to investigation, on an MoD map labelled "massacre sites" ("The long trail to justice", 20 June).

The MoD acknowledges that the map, to date, is based in large part on KLA reports. Last August mutilated human remains were found in a lime- kiln at Klecka, one of the MoD's listed sites. The US State Department acknowledged that these were 22 civilian victims (including children) of KLA torture and execution. The KLA is now, strangely, a tour-guide for the mass-graves of Kosovo, and such an unimpeachable source of information that the only job for (largely Nato-directed) investigators is to allocate a priori guilt.

Many of Nato's direct victims are known to have been defenceless civilians, and their violent deaths were described as "inevitable" by those who directed the killing. It will take more than the MoD's propaganda map to alleviate our responsibility for the agony we have so wantonly inflicted on Kosovo and Serbia.

PETER McKENNA

Liverpool