Archive through Jun...
 
Notifications
Clear all

Archive through June 27, 1999

70 Posts
14 Users
0 Reactions
14.5 K Views
 zoja
(@zoja)
Reputable Member
Joined: 17 years ago
Posts: 369
Topic starter  

To Jack.

Fortunately, it doesn't have to go that far. Emina and I have regular contact with Serbian people who are still dead set against Milosevic, and his criminals. The only thing is, they can't say it to loud, because then they get prosecuted.

But I figure, after the war is over, meaning Slob Milo and his murdering gang are locked up and the key thrown away, these very brave sensible people will stand up and make a truly free country out of Serbia. Remember the demonstrations in Belgrade of hundreds of thousands of people against Milosevic? Most of these people did not sway their opinion. They are just hiding until it is time to strike again. And we better offer our support to these people instead of demonizing everybody.

Hitler was bad, not the whole of Germany. Milosevic is bad, not the whole of Serbia.

Zoja


   
ReplyQuote
 zoja
(@zoja)
Reputable Member
Joined: 17 years ago
Posts: 369
Topic starter  

For Refugees, No Easy Road Home
Timing, Logistics, Politics Complicate Plans for Return

By Steve Coll and Philip Bennett
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, May 31, 1999; Page A01=20

CEGRANE, Macedonia=97The fastest growing city in the Balkans
cascades across a barren slope forested with thousands of white tents.
New residents arrive each day and a new terrace of tents goes up, each
one facing the mountains that separate everyone here from Kosovo.

It is a city of people waiting to go home. "Everything I am is over there,"
said Abadin Mirena, who came last month with his family, except one
brother who they said was shot to death by Yugoslav troops. "Once the
NATO forces intervene and the Serbs leave, I will go back. All the world
is trying to solve this problem, and I believe they will."

But as tens of thousands more ethnic Albanians staggered out of Kosovo
last week and thousands of NATO troops were dispatched to the region
with the mission of eventually resettling them, the prospects for the
repatriation of 800,000 refugees are being complicated by enormous
obstacles of timing, logistics and politics.

A sense of urgency is spreading among the refugees and citizens of
Macedonia and Albania, the countries where most refugees are living.
Families are trying to calculate when and how the conflict will end to
decide whether to endure another dislocation and take refuge in a third
country. Humanitarian groups and governments are studying whether to
transform the precarious tent cities into more durable accommodations,
while worrying that such action might signal weakening resolve to return the
refugees to Kosovo.

Relief agencies have just begun planning the huge task of rebuilding camps
so refugees can survive a brutal winter if a solution is not found by then.=
In
most camps, conceived in an emergency, tents are too small for stoves,
water pipes are uninsulated, and latrines will freeze with the first snow in
October.

From the start, the Clinton administration and its NATO allies have made
the return of all the refugees the central goal and most objective measure=
of
success of its military campaign against Yugoslavia. The timing and extent
of the repatriation have serious consequences for a variety of key
participants in the Balkans crisis. In Macedonia, the continued presence of
refugees could determine the outcome of presidential elections in
November. For the Kosovo Liberation Army -- the ethnic Albanian rebels
fighting for Kosovo's independence -- delays could make the exiles a
troubled base of support. For NATO commanders, the camps could
present a humanitarian disaster on the flank of a military operation --
peaceful or otherwise.

"When winter comes, who will be responsible for these people? Nobody!"
said Vasil Tupurkovski, a possible contender for Macedonia's presidency.
"It will be very difficult to save people in winter conditions, even more
difficult than saving them from the Serbs."

Some Kosovo Albanians predict a crisis will come earlier, during a long,
hot summer of confinement, or, in the case of Macedonia, in response to
the hostility and fear of local authorities and a domestic population=
worried
that the refugees will permanently alter a precarious ethnic balance.

"I don't think people will wait until September," said Baton Haxhiu, the
editor of Koha Ditore, a Kosovo newspaper now being published in exile
and distributed in the camps. "People will clash with police and that will=
be
it."

Even if a diplomatic solution is reached soon, many refugees will closely
examine the terms before deciding when and how to return, according to
interviews over several days with Kosovo Albanians in this camp of
42,000 people and in other tent cities in Macedonia and Albania. Refugees
said they would not go home if they did not feel that Kosovo had been
made secure for them, and that they could not imagine a secure Kosovo
without a dominant NATO force. Many also said they would rely on the
KLA to tell them when it is safe to go back, providing the guerrilla force
with a major source of leverage as any peace settlement unfolds.

Refugees also said that if Serbian security forces remain in the province --
or are present in any visible way at border crossings, as is now being
discussed in talks by Balkan envoys -- they were unlikely to return. They
uniformly rejected Russian troops as adequate on their own to guarantee
the refugees' security.

"Only the ground troops of NATO, together with the KLA, would
convince me," said Shaip Ramandani, 52, a school janitor from the village
of Ferezai, now living in a cramped tent with a dozen relatives and seeking
to find his way at least temporarily to Europe. "We have no faith in the
Russians, because they are friends with" Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic.

Even if a settlement resolved such anxieties, the history of refugee returns
offers little reassuring precedent. In most refugee crises, United Nations
specialists said, a large number -- sometimes a majority -- of exiles do not
go home again. They either disperse to third countries or settle in the=
haven
that first took them in. In the Bosnian war, the return of tens of thousands
of refugees who had been expelled because of their ethnic identity was also
a Western goal, but resettlement remains very sparse even four years after
a peace accord and despite the presence of 22,000 NATO troops in the
country.

NATO commanders in the Balkans argue that if Kosovo were
reconstructed with a large infusion of Western money after a settlement or
a military victory, large numbers of refugees would return. Unlike in
Bosnia, they said, Kosovo returnees would be moving back to a region
where they would be an overwhelming ethnic majority.

Bosnia "was very difficult," said U.S. Army Lt. Gen. John Hendrix,
commander of Task Force Hawk in Albania and a veteran of the Bosnian
resettlement effort. "The trouble was getting ethnic cooperation. . . .
Frankly, this would be easier."

Some refugees were not as optimistic.

"It was five years in the case of Bosnia, and nobody's gone back. I think
that it will be like that," said Afrim Berisha, an engineer from the city of
Djakovica now living in a tent city at a municipal swimming complex in
Tirana, the Albanian capital. He said he would try to settle his children in
Europe in the meantime, but would not go to the United States because, he
said, "People who go over the ocean don't come back."

Yugoslavia's official position is that it wants all the refugees to come=
home
as soon as possible. The government declares it never wanted them to
leave in the first place and blames NATO bombing for the mass migration.
But there is broad evidence from the testimony of thousands of refugees
and various other sources that the government planned to smash the
KLA's civilian base and to alter Kosovo's ethnic balance by systematically
expelling hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians. Kosovo is a
province of Serbia, Yugoslavia's dominant republic.

If Belgrade accepted that the refugees were to return, would it try to
manage the repatriation in a way that suits the overall goal of=
extinguishing
the prospect of an independent, ethnic Albanian Kosovo? Exiled Kosovo
Albanians fear that Milosevic would manipulate population data, property
and immigration laws, and other means to limit the return flow.

"The main point of the Serbs is to block people from coming back,"
surmised Ylber Hysa, executive director of the Kosovo Action for Civic
Initiatives. "This is why they are trying to destroy refugee documents and
identities."

After 1989, when Milosevic revoked Kosovo's political and administrative
autonomy, the province's ethnic Albanian majority developed a parallel
government outside the official Yugoslav system. While their population at
the beginning of this year was estimated at about 2 million, Kosovo
Albanians did not participate in the last two official Yugoslav censuses.
Milosevic "will play with the figures," Hysa predicted. "He'll say there=
were
only 1.5 million ethnic Albanians" before the war began, and that economic
migrants from Albania disguised as refugees must be kept out.

Even leaders of the democratic opposition in Belgrade seem uneasy about
a full-scale return of the refugees. Some argued that a complete return
would promote instability regardless of how Yugoslavia emerged from the
crisis.

Full repatriation of the refugees "would fulfill your sense of justice, but=
I
don't think it would be stable," said Predrag Simic, an adviser to Serbian
opposition leader Vuk Draskovic. "Besides, I think Milosevic would fight
hard against this because if he were to allow it, it would be asked, 'Why
did we take bombs for two months?' "

Draskovic himself worried during an interview that repatriation "could be
used by Tirana to send hundreds of thousands of 'real' Albanians into
Kosovo as refugees." He added, though, that the problem could be
managed through civil administration that included Serbian representatives,
and that he was not overly concerned.

Still, this sort of talk chills exiled Kosovo Albanians, many of whom are
pouring across the borders with Macedonia and Albania without passports
or other official papers. Many said they were deliberately stripped of their
documents by Serbian forces. Others said that in the speed of their
departure or the hardship of their journey they lost whatever papers they
had. Either way, there are now tens of thousands of exiles, mostly in
Albania, who lack proof of their identity.

"It's a big, big problem," said Benny Otim, a legal specialist with the=
office
of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Macedonia. In early June,
with support from Microsoft Corp., Otim will help launch a new program
of registration to produce U.N.-endorsed identity cards for refugees. The
cards could be used for elections and other purposes after a settlement
agreement, the United Nations hopes. But Otim and others worry that
even with scores of computers and special software, it may be difficult to
register all refugees, including those who live outside the larger camps,
especially amid Albania's erratically governed civilian population.=20

If the refugees do return in large numbers, it will be to villages and towns
that in many cases have been razed and burned beyond recognition -- 500
towns in all have been damaged, according to the State Department.
Property reclamation disputes will have to be settled and reconstruction
funds allocated. It's not clear what sorts of property and other civil=
records
remain in Kosovo. Some were reportedly carted out by Serbian forces just
before the bombing began. Others exist in a confused gray area between
the Yugoslav government and that of the former parallel Kosovo
administration.

A larger issue is what kind of society the refugees will reenter after=
months
of atrocities, displacements and bombing. Regional governments and the
refugees themselves expect the World Bank and other Western donors to
fund a massive reconstruction effort once a stable peace is achieved. But
rebuilt homes, roads and bridges alone cannot restore Kosovo to its
prewar state.

Will justice be meted out to Yugoslav police, army and paramilitaries, and
if so, who will administer it? How will the province's prewar Serbian
population be accommodated? Who will control the KLA and how?
Where in all of this will postwar Serbia find the breathing space it needs=
to
finally democratize, and what will happen if its politics are further
radicalized by its growing isolation?

Hysa foresees an interim phase, in which refugees are perhaps resettled
first in camps resembling those in Macedonia and Albania, but on the
Kosovo side of the border. Beyond that, he worries about what kind of
society will emerge in Kosovo from the pieces of a world blown apart.

"The old institutions . . . the middle strata were absolutely destroyed," he
said. "Even in a developed society it would be impossible to reorganize life
based on the elements of a civil society."


=A9 Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company


   
ReplyQuote
 zoja
(@zoja)
Reputable Member
Joined: 17 years ago
Posts: 369
Topic starter  

Lethal ring faces troops


Landmines: The road to Kosovo may be the deadliest in history Links, reports and background: more on Kosovo


Richard Norton-Taylor
Wednesday June 2, 1999 The Guardian


Whether Serb forces eventually agree to withdraw from Kosovo or not, Nato troops and returning refugees will face a serious threat from landmines. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of the devices - Nato cannot say how many - have been placed along Kosovo's borders with Albania and Macedonia.


They have been laid where KLA units are infiltrating Kosovo, and on the main route into Kosovo from Macedonia, which will have to be used by heavy armour in Nato's peace implementation force.


That road is described by Nigel Vinson, of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, as "the most mined in history". Refugees say mines and booby-traps have also been placed in fields, schools and houses.


Yugoslavia is one of the biggest manufacturers of anti-personnel mines, now banned under the Ottawa agreement which Belgrade has signed but not ratified.


Not so long ago, in specialist defence journals, Yugoslavia proudly advertised mines with fuel-air explosives. Once detonated, they release explosions with a yield said to be the equivalent of a thousand tons of TNT, showering blocks of molten tungsten over several acres, according to defence specialists. They contain two charges, the first to blow the mine into the air, the second to boost the explosion. They pose a threat to armoured personnel carriers and even tanks, as well as individuals.


The Serbs are also reported to have small circular mines, the size of a tin of shoe polish, and rectangular ones the size of a personal organiser.


Other mines in their arsenal include devices placed on a stake, which are set off by a trip-wire and can kill within a radius of 20m.


Serb units were encouraged to lay mines when the October 1998 agreement on Kosovo, negotiated by the United States envoy Richard Holbrooke, allowed Yugoslavia to establish a three-mile "no-go" zone along its southern borders, ostensibly to ensure the safety of "verifiers" from the Organisation of Security and Co-operation in Europe.


The agreement enabled the Serbs to lay mines with impunity, in some areas, far wider than the three-mile zone. There have since been reports that Serb units have forced ethnic Albanians to plant mines in civilian areas.


The high proportion of British, French, and German engineers and bomb disposal specialists attached to allied K-For peace implementation units in Macedonia with more to come reflect the huge task facing Nato troops when they finally enter Kosovo. Unmanned robots and even low-flying aircraft will be used to detonate mines.


But the mines will delay the entry of Nato armour and the return of hundreds of thousands of refugees. The presence of so many of these cheap, vicious and deadly weapons along the border is an additional factor pointing to the likelihood of helicopter-borne troops being dropped into Kosovo before heavy armour enters along the roads.


It will take months, possibly years, before all the mines are cleared.


© Copyright Guardian Media Group plc. 1999


   
ReplyQuote
(@jacklondon)
Reputable Member
Joined: 26 years ago
Posts: 266
 

Zoja,
you are right about TARGETING of all Serbs.
That is wrong.
Certainly there are good people amongst them.

Let's just consider that I was referring
to the fans of the Slob-Milo.
The bombing is not enough.
It is time for some justice
and these people must be made to see the error in their ways.

I think I would be happy just to see Milo and Arkan
as guests in the Jerry Springer show
with the Undertaker and the Steve Austin.
No IQ on either side - but also no talk necessary.


   
ReplyQuote
 pete
(@pete)
Eminent Member
Joined: 17 years ago
Posts: 41
 

To Guido:

I didn't say I never sin. We all fall down sometimes, but we're not supposed to live in that state. That's why 1 john 1:9 was written, "If we confess our sins, He [God, Jesus] is faithful to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness." But it also says, if we say we never sin we make God out to be a liar, and His word has no place in us. I'm made of flesh just like you are and I have the same capacity to sin that you or anyone else has. But I choose to let God rule my life, and so walk in the way He directs me. When a person is born again, God's Spirit takes up residence inside him. Life is like a minefield, but God knows where all the mines are and can lead you around them. But you have to let Him. He will NOT force Himself on you. And it's not like the idea some people have, of an angry God standing over you with a club or baseball bat, waiting to clobber you if you slip up. He leads you from within, like a skillful driver taking his truck around the potholes and obstacles of life, instead of just letting it run through them and tearing the truck up. When you let God lead your life it's like you are doing all these things of your own volition, but it is God in you leading you directly through your own spirit.

But you have to choose of your own free will to let Him do this. You can choose to let God guide your life from within and live a godly righteous life, or you can choose to follow your own sinful evil nature and live that kind of a life. It's sort of like a missionary once explained to an eskimo. "The Holy Spirit nature is like a white dog, and the old evil fleshly nature is like a black dog, and these two dogs are fighting inside you. Now which one of these dogs do you think is going to win?"
The eskimo replied, "Which ever one I say 'Sic 'em' to first."
And that's the way it is. The end of the story is up to you.

I hope this helps you. It is not my intent to condemn.

Pete


   
ReplyQuote
 zoja
(@zoja)
Reputable Member
Joined: 17 years ago
Posts: 369
Topic starter  

To Jack

Right on, Jack!

Let's not forget many people inside Serbia are being intimidated in saying pro Slob Milo/Markovic stuff. They get prosecuted otherwise. I hope that NATO and the whole international community will be there for these people once the dictatorial elements are gone from Yugoslavia, and the democrats have to take over!

I just hope they send some paras or Marines after S(l)ob, and jail him fast. He is just collatteral damage anyway.

Zoja


   
ReplyQuote
 zoja
(@zoja)
Reputable Member
Joined: 17 years ago
Posts: 369
Topic starter  

.... and this guy should also be indicted to make a true democratic Serbia possible


] afp- Seselj threatens revolt over peace plan
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

BELGRADE, June 4 (AFP) - Vojislav Seselj, the most outspoken of
Serbia's ultra-nationalist leaders, has consistently opposed the
prospect of NATO troops on Yugoslav soil and has threatened to pull
out of the government if the terms of the Kosovo peace plan are
implemented.
When the allied bombing campaign against Yugoslavia began on
March 24 the deputy premier called on Serbs around the world to
strike against US interests and he has since threatened to take on
NATO troops if they should enter Yugoslavia.
Even a month ago, after the publication of the Group of Eight
peace plan, he was scoffing that US President Bill Clinton "was
under a delusion if he thinks (Yugoslav President) Slobodan
Milosevic is drawing closer to NATO's terms."
Critics of government "are now hiding in holes like little
mice", he said. "The NATO aggressors may be surprised, but we have
no traitors in Belgrade."
With the acceptance of the peace plan by the Serbian parliament
Thursday, he warned that his Serbian Radical Party, the second
largest party in the assembly, "will not wait in the government for
an eventual deployment of NATO aggressor forces in Kosovo."
Seselj was one of the main movers behind a proposal to link
Yugoslavia in a pan-Slav Orthodox union with Russia and Belarus.
He first made a name for himself as leader of a paramilitary
group held responsible for numerous atrocities against Moslems
during the Bosnian conflict. He threatened to bombard any country,
including Italy, that tried to invervene militarily against the
Serbs.
His verbal and occasional physical excesses have found support
among Serbia's most underprivileged classes. Last December, during
his unsuccessful campaign for the presidency against Milosevic's
favoured candidate Milan Milutinovic, he promised he would settle
the Kosovo issue "in five days" by expelling all Albanians without
papers.
The nationalist leader has made massive strides since November
1990 when, as a frequently convicted petty criminal wearing a faded
tee-shirt bearing the words "Serb Crown" (in English), he was
proposed as a candidate Serbia's first multi-party elections by a
group of 293 citizens.
He was born in Hercegovina, in southern Bosnia, and grew up in
Sarajevo, teaching sociology at the university in the early 1980s
before deciding to enter politics.
He was elected deputy to a working-class district of Belgrade in
1991, and within a year was leader of Serbia's second largest
party.
Since then his tendency to outflank Milosevic on nationalist
issues has pitted him regularly against the Yugoslav president, who
on occasion has found pretexts to have him imprisoned.
He came within a few votes of obtaining sweet revenge in
December when he only just failed to defeat Milutinovic for the
Serbian presidency.
The durability of his populist appeal has won him friends among
other European far-right leaders such as France's Jean-Marie Le Pen
who visited him in Belgrade.


   
ReplyQuote
 zoja
(@zoja)
Reputable Member
Joined: 17 years ago
Posts: 369
Topic starter  

THE NEW YORK TIMES

June 4, 1999

THE OVERVIEW

Milosevic Yields on NATO's Key Terms;
50,000 Allied Troops to Police Kosovo

By STEVEN ERLANGER

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- On the 72d day of NATO's air war
against Yugoslavia, President Slobodan Milosevic accepted
an international peace plan Thursday to end the Kosovo
conflict and allow nearly one million ethnic Albanian refugees to
return to what is left of their homes.

After forcing most of those refugees to flee from Kosovo and
enduring thousands of Serbian military and civilian deaths, Milosevic
and the Serbian Parliament agreed rapidly to all key NATO demands
after envoys from Russia and other European nations brought what
they made clear was the best offer he was going to get from NATO.

OVERVIEW OF THE G-8 PLAN

The Kosovo peace plan that Yugoslavia
said Thursday it had approved is based on
principles agreed last month by foreign
ministers of the Group of Eight
industrialised countries. The main
demands in that plan were:

an "immediate and verifiable end of
violence and repression" in Kosovo;
"withdrawal from Kosovo of military,
police and paramilitary forces;"

deployment in Kosovo of "effective
international civil and security presences,
endorsed and adopted by the United
Nations;"

establishment of an "interim
administration" for Kosovo to be decided by
the UN Security Council to ensure
conditions for a "peaceful and normal life
for all inhabitants in Kosovo";

the safe and free return of all refugees
and displaced persons and an unimpeded
access to Kosovo by humanitarian aid
organisations;

a political process towards the
establishment of an "interim political
framework agreement providing for a
substantial self-government for Kosovo,"
taking "full account" of the Rambouillet
accords and the principles of Yugoslavia's
sovereignty and territorial integrity, and the
demilitarisation of the Kosovo Liberation
Army (KLA);

a "comprehensive" approach to the
region's "economic development and
stabilisation."

The G-8 is comprised of Britain, Canada,
France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United
States and Russia.

-- Agence France-Presse

In a swift retreat that may spell political trouble for him down the
road, Milosevic agreed to withdraw all Yugoslav military and police
forces from Kosovo within seven days and allow 50,000 foreign
troops under a United Nations flag -- many of them from NATO and
under NATO command -- to police the province.

That withdrawal could begin as early as Sunday, said Goran
Matic, a minister in the Yugoslav Government, once military leaders of
both sides agreed on the details. What is important for Belgrade is
that the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army not be allowed to fill the
vacuum and flood into Kosovo, he said, and that NATO keep its
commitment to "demilitarize" the rebels.

While NATO has emphasized the need for a strong force to
prevent the Yugoslav President from reneging on his commitments,
Belgrade officials and some Western diplomats here believe
that its real difficulties will come from the Kosovo Liberation Army,
which has received NATO support and is unlikely to give up its
ambitions for independence.

Initial public reactions in the West, which appeared to be taken by
surprise by the sudden prospect of victory, were cautious, and it
was not immediately clear when or through what means the conflict
will be brought to a conclusion. Western spokesmen said the Serbs
must begin a "credible and verifiable withdrawal" from Kosovo
before the bombs would stop, but NATO's bombing campaign
slackened noticeably Thursday.

The peace proposals accepted today were negotiated between
NATO and Russia, which was acting for Belgrade. Once the
Russian envoy, Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, agreed on the basics of the
deal with the American Deputy Secretary of State, Strobe Talbott,
Milosevic -- who was indicted for war crimes last week -- clearly felt
that he had no choice but to accept them or endure further destruction.

Under the proposals, fewer than 1,000 uniformed Serbs will be
allowed to re-enter Kosovo, to guard key border posts and Serbian
holy sites, as a symbol of Serbian and Yugoslav sovereignty over
the southern province. But there will be little substance left to
Belgrade's assertion of sovereignty. Kosovo will get "substantial
autonomy" within Yugoslavia but for all intents and purposes, will
have little to do with the Serbian or Yugoslav state.

An interim international authority will supervise the running of
Kosovo and the establishment of new democratic institutions and
elections, the return of all refugees and the rebuilding of the
province. In the meantime, there will be new negotiations between
Serbian and ethnic Albanian leaders to work out a long-term political
settlement.

But in what Belgrade pointed to as a victory, the proposals accepted
Thursday do not propose a new examination of Kosovo's
sovereignty after three years or any referendum on that topic, as did
the draft proposals accepted by the Albanian side only in
Rambouillet, France, in March. It was the Serbian refusal to accept
those accords that led to the opening of the NATO air war on March
24, the sharp acceleration in the Serbian effort to push the
Albanians out of Kosovo and the tidal wave of refugees into
surrounding countries.

Yugoslav officials also said their resistance had forced NATO to find
a solution within the United Nations and with the participation of the
Russians. And they emphasized the firm international guarantees of
Serbia's sovereignty over Kosovo, unlike the temporary sovereignty
proposed at Rambouillet.

But there was also important nationalist criticism of Milosevic and
this deal. The Radical Party and its leader, Deputy Prime Minister
Vojislav Seselj of Serbia, voted against the proposals in Parliament,
and Seselj vowed to quit the Government the day NATO troops
enter Kosovo.

A former President of Yugoslavia, the nationalist historian Dobrica
Cosic, called the vote "an extorted decision" and the proposals "a
post-modernist packaging for the occupation of Kosovo." In an
interview, Cosic, whose views on Kosovo carry much weight here,
called Parliament's acceptance "a matter of survival, and not a matter
of freedom and rights."

But there was no immediate political threat to Milosevic. The
weak democratic opposition parties supported the move, and Vuk
Draskovic, who was fired as Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister
during the war, praised the vote and said he would be willing to
rejoin the Government, especially if Seselj quit.

Some confusion remains over who will lead the international force and
over its exact makeup. The Russians are still insisting that their
forces going to Kosovo will not be under NATO command, and have
not yet agreed to send troops. The agreement accepted Thursday by
Milosevic says the forces will be under the auspices of the United
Nations, but European and American officials say the troops
will in fact be commanded by NATO.

Nor was it immediately clear when a military-to-military text would be
negotiated, or when the agreement would be codified into a United
Nations Security Council resolution.

But the deal may finally bring some peace, if not reconciliation, to
Kosovo. A year ago, the province contained some 2.2 million people,
about 90 percent of them ethnic Albanian.

Today, Kosovo is eerily depopulated, with nearly one million
Albanians now living abroad as refugees and several hundred
thousand more displaced from their homes. As many as 5,000 ethnic
Albanians, NATO has charged, have been killed by the Serbs.
Thousands of Serbian women and children have also fled the
province, and it is likely that many Serbs will not want to remain in a
Kosovo once their army and police have withdrawn.

With many thousands of ethnic Albanian shops and homes burned
and looted, and basic services like road transport, electricity and water
supplies destroyed or heavily damaged by the air war, the job of
reconstructing Kosovo will also be enormous.

And it is likely that foreign troops and aid workers will occupy the
province for many years to come, at a cost of billions of dollars.

After talks this morning between Milosevic and the diplomatic team
of Chernomyrdin and President Martti Ahtisaari of Finland, who
represented the European Union and articulated NATO's views, the
state news agency Tanjug said simply, "Yugoslavia accepts the
document for peace brought by the highest representatives of the
European Union and Russia."

The statement continued, "The three sides unanimously agreed that
commitment to peace was of vital importance, not only for
Yugoslavia, but for the whole region and all of Europe."

Earlier Thursday morning, the Serbian Parliament accepted the
proposals on which party leaders had been briefed by Milosevic the
night before. The Parliament voted 136 for and 74 against.
Presumably, the 74 against included most of Seselj's 80 deputies.

Afterward, Seselj was blunt. "For sure, we will not stay in the
Serbian Government from the moment that troops from aggressor
countries, particularly the U.S.A., enter Kosovo," he said. And he
warned that NATO troops "will not feel safe in Kosovo."

But Draskovic was ebullient, calling the vote "a great day for the
Serbian nation and all the citizens of Yugoslavia." He said, "The
Serbian Parliament today declared peace, and the beginning of
peace must be the beginning of a new policy of radical economic
and democratic reform."

Serbian state television tonight did not mention Seselj's opposition
or quote him at all, but it did give Draskovic time to praise Milosevic.

There was no statement from Milosevic himself. But the television
anchorman recited a long statement from Milosevic's Socialist Party
praising the Serbian nation and the international guarantees of
Yugoslavia's "integrity and sovereignty."

"This decision brings us the cessation of the criminal bombing, of
the killing of the people, and it brings us peace," the statement said.
"The role of the United Nations is being affirmed in accordance with
the U.N. Charter. Through the unity of the people and through the
heroism of our army and our police, we have defended the country
from a vastly superior enemy who committed aggression against
our country with the goal of annulling our integrity and sovereignty."

There was also a statement from the Yugoslav United Left party of
Milosevic's wife, Mirjana Markovic.

"We are proud of the heroic resistance of our people," it said, adding
that "in these circumstances we feel we can accept conditions" laid
down by the world. "We are looking for the end of the bombing, and
the great renewal," it said.


   
ReplyQuote
 zoja
(@zoja)
Reputable Member
Joined: 17 years ago
Posts: 369
Topic starter  

] NYT European Union vows to become military power
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=x-user-defined
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

THE NEW YORK TIMES

June 4, 1999

NEW ARMY

European Union Vows to Become Military Power

By CRAIG R. WHITNEY

COLOGNE, Germany -- The leaders of 15 European countries
decided Thursday to make the European Union a military
power for the first time in its 42-year history, with command
headquarters, staffs and forces of its own for peacekeeping and
peacemaking missions in future crises like those in Kosovo or
Bosnia.

Long an economic giant, the European Union Thursday has a
common currency, the euro, in 11 countries. But when it comes to
foreign and defense policy, Europe does not even have a telephone
number, as Henry A. Kissinger sarcastically observed 25 years ago
when he was Secretary of State.

All that will change by the end of next year, the 15 leaders vowed
Thursday.

By late 2000, according to the plan announced at the European
Union summit meeting here, a single foreign and security policy
czar will speak for Europe and carry out the military will of European
leaders.

The move will enable many of the members of NATO, as well as
several European nations that are not in the alliance, to mount their
own campaigns without America's might.

The European leaders declared:

"The union must have the capacity for autonomous action, backed
up by credible military forces, the means to decide to use them, and
a readiness to do so, in order to respond to international crises
without prejudice to actions by NATO."

They echoed language first used by President Jacques Chirac of
France and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain six months ago after
two crises in the Balkans showed how far Europe still had to go to
be taken seriously as a military power, even on its own continent.
Neither in Bosnia nor in Kosovo were European countries, whose
total armed forces exceed those of the United States in size, able to
project military power convincingly enough to halt the violence.

Thursday, all 15 leaders agreed to absorb the functions of the
10-nation Western European Union, a long-dormant European
defense alliance founded a year before NATO in 1948. They said the
Western European Union's 60,000-troop force, Eurocorps, would be
put at the disposal of the new, more assertive Europe that is taking
shape under the European Union. "In that event," they said, "the
W.E.U. as an organization would have completed its purpose."

With Germany's 1990 unification acting as a spur to its neighbors to
closer unity, the Treaty of European Union, negotiated at the end of
1991, committed the Europeans to a common currency and a
common foreign and security policy and defense policy, building on
the common market they created in 1957.

They reaffirmed those aspirations in another treaty signed in 1997,
and succeeded in launching the euro at the start of this year.

But the common foreign and security policy sputtered along through
successive crises in the Balkans in which the Europeans showed
little unity or common purpose until the Americans sent in armed
forces to help them in Bosnia in 1995.

Now Chancellor Gerhard Schr?der of Germany, Chirac, Blair and
the others are determined that Europe should be taken more
seriously on the world stage. Part of what is driving them, their
advisers say, is concern that the United States, with only 100,000
troops in Europe now compared with three times that many at the
end of the cold war, will not indefinitely be willing to pull the fat out of
the fire for Europeans who have long since been rich enough to
provide for their own defenses.

American diplomats have welcomed Europe's newfound willingness
to do more for itself. But they remain skeptical about whether they
will actually be willing to spend the billions of dollars it would take to
build the stronger European defense pillar that American defense
secretaries for decades have been saying they wanted.

Thursday's declaration by European Union leaders makes clear that
they still have a lot of work ahead of them to create the kind of
military decision making and planning ability that NATO has had for
many years.

Chirac suggested that the Western European Union's general staff
and military committee, both based in a small headquarters in the
center of Brussels some distance from NATO's, should be
transferred to the European Union and presided over by its new
foreign and security policy coordinator.

That could be Javier Solana of Spain, now Secretary General of
NATO, whose candidacy for the job was on the leaders' agenda
here Thursday night.

If Solana is selected, one senior American official said, "We would
be very happy."

G?nter Verheugen, a German Government official who has also
been suggested for that job, said of the plan to strengthen European
defense, "It is not a replacement for the Atlantic partnership, but a
significant and necessary complement to it."

The leaders themselves also noted, "The alliance remains the
foundation of the collective defense of its member states."

All 10 members of the W.E.U.

Britain, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Luxembourg, the
Netherlands, Germany, and Greece -- already belong to both NATO
and the European Union. Denmark does, too, but has only observer
status in the smaller European defense organization, as do four
other European Union members, Austria, Ireland, Finland and
Sweden, which are neutral or nonaligned and do not belong to
NATO.

These countries would be able to join future European Union
peacekeeping or military operations, but only if they wanted to, the
leaders agreed today, saying they would also welcome participation
by other European countries.

NATO leaders agreed at their summit meeting in Washington in
April on detailed arrangements to lend military headquarters
organizations, multinational staffs, and tanks, helicopters and other
equipment to the Europeans if they decided to undertake operations
the United States prefers to avoid.

But these arrangements exist only on paper so far. In reality, when
the NATO allies decided to use air power to try to force Yugoslavia
to accept a settlement in Kosovo, only the United States had the
hundreds of airplanes to throw into the battle and intelligence
satellites and weaponry to mount a campaign with minimal risk to
pilots.


   
ReplyQuote
 zoja
(@zoja)
Reputable Member
Joined: 17 years ago
Posts: 369
Topic starter  

THE NEW YORK TIMES

June 4, 1999

NEWS ANALYSIS

Fruit of Miscalculation

By STEVEN ERLANGER

BELGRADE, Serbia -- From the start, this has been a war of
miscalculation.

NATO, led by the Clinton Administration, assumed that a relatively
short period of bombing would be enough to cause President
Slobodan Milosevic to capitulate over Kosovo.

Drawing the wrong lessons from Bosnia, Western officials
underestimated the historical and cultural importance of Kosovo to
the Serbs.

And the allies badly undervalued the province's political importance
to Milosevic, who rose to power on the promise to protect the Serbs
of Kosovo against the Albanian majority.

But Thursday, as he accepted a deal not much better than he was
offered before the bombing began 10 weeks ago, Milosevic seemed
to have miscalculated as badly.

The Serbian leader, for his part, expected the NATO alliance to split,
particularly as the number of civilian casualties grew. He is unlikely
to have thought Bill Clinton would ignore those casualties and even
intensify the bombing.

While the alliance's southern tier became frazzled as refugees
flowed into Albania and Macedonia and then into Western Europe,
the human tide neither destroyed Serbia's impoverished neighbors
nor sundered the alliance.

Milosevic was right in his calculations that NATO did not want to risk
a ground invasion of Serbia, whose citizens, no matter how some
may revile Milosevic, seemed willing to die for their country.

While only a ground invasion could sweep him from power, he
ultimately came to believe that NATO could continue its
comparatively cost-free bombing campaign for many more months,
striking civilian targets as well as military ones and utterly
devastating Serbia.

With his own losses mounting -- at least 1,200 civilians have died in
NATO accidents and NATO estimated Thursday that at least 5,000
Yugoslav soldiers and policemen have died -- Milosevic clearly
decided that now was the moment to end an unequal war and
preserve his own power.

He is evidently calculating again. At least for now, he is surviving
NATO's war against his country with his power intact.

In a weak political field, he still looks like a titan, and for many in
Serbia -- especially the working classes, the old and the poor -- he
is likely to retain his aura of mastery. His party is already claiming to
have inspired this little nation to a noble resistance against the
combined forces of 19 of the world's most advanced nations.

"This is a little nation that resisted for two months against the
greatest might that has ever existed in history, and there was no
demoralization, no panic, no mass desertions," said Aleksa Djilas, a
historian, exaggerating only a little.

"This has shown that Western public opinion has proved less
humane than we believed: It was willing to tolerate far higher
casualties in the country being attacked than we had assumed, and
it was prepared to tolerate far fewer casualities on its own side than
we had assumed."

Serbia's weak democratic opposition parties, largely muzzled during
the war by censorship, have been eager to say that Milosevic's
problems will really begin after peace is established, once the
patriotic fever has passed and people awake to the economic ruin
around them.

There is some truth to that, even Milosevic's supporters agree, as
the country faces a hot summer and a cold winter with demolished
electrical power stations and heating plants.

The bombs have done enormous damage to the economy, which
was already battered by eight years of international sanctions.
Billions of dollars of factories and equipment have been smashed,
and nearly every important highway or railway bridge has been
damaged or destroyed, along with the country's only two oil
refineries.

And as long as Milosevic and his top aides, many of them recently
indicted for war crimes, remain in power, it remains to be seen
whether Serbia will get any serious reconstruction aid or investment
from Western countries or the European Union.

If anything, the West may tighten economic sanctions, increasing
the sense of isolation of its relatively cosmopolitan citizens.

Western aid itself -- or the promise of it -- is already being used as a
sort of incentive to Serbs to depose Milosevic, by electoral means or
otherwise.

And it is possible that the Yugoslav Army and the police, having
withstood NATO's extensive bombing in Kosovo without cracking,
will find that Milosevic has made peace at too cheap a price,
discarding their own sacrifice and that of their dead comrades.

Already Vuk Obradovic, a former general who leads a small
opposition party, has called for Milosevic's resignation and asked:
"What was the price of this war? And what did it accomplish?"

Those questions have now been echoed by the former Mayor of
Belgrade, Nebojsa Covic, who broke with Milosevic in 1996.

While military casualties have been a state secret, Yugoslav
generals have said recently that they were relatively low, estimating
that 1,800 people have been killed or wounded badly enough to
leave their posts.

But NATO officials, in a response today, estimated that perhaps
5,000 Yugoslav military and police troops have been killed and more
than 10,000 wounded -- the first time the allies have provided such
figures.

Whatever the number, the report by NATO seems to be another
effort to increase the political pressure on Milosevic from an angry
citizenry that may feel betrayed by the deal on Kosovo after so
many dead. The Serbs themselves like to speak of their small
families, compared to large Albanian ones, and the loss of enough
conscript sons could set off spontaneous demonstrations, like the
ones recently repressed in Krusevac, Aleksandrovac and Cacak.

While Yugoslav officials tried to minimize the importance of those
demonstrations, they also vowed to crush them, and this sort of war
weariness in the southern Serbian heartland, where Milosevic has
always found his strength, is likely to have been another important
factor in his decision to end the war.

For all Milosevic's new vulnerabilities, he remains lucky in his
fractured, disputatious opposition.

The ultranationalist leader of the Radical Party, Serbia's deputy
prime minister, Vojislav Seselj, vowed today to quit the Government
if NATO troops enter Kosovo. He will no doubt try to challenge
Milosevic in elections, but most Serbs are not going to find the
prospect of even more tension with the world community a politically
attractive platform. Once out of power, Seselj will also find the
draconian press laws he favored put to use against him.

And the democrats are too busy either knifing each other or
competing for Milosevic's favors in coalition governments to do him
significant harm.

Zoran Djindjic, the prominent leader of the Democratic Party, has
probably destroyed his political career in Serbia by fleeing to its
sister republic, Montenegro, while others remained in Belgrade
under the bombs.

Vuk Draskovic, the leader of the Serbian Renewal Movement and a
former leader of the democratic opposition, still commands the
largest political following there. He was prominent in pushing for an
early peace settlement, and he has his own television station
because his party controls the Belgrade municipality.

But Draskovic is considered flighty, and as he praised the peace
accord Thursday, he also made it clear that he would be more than
willing to rejoin Milosevic's Government, especially if Seselj quits. If
so, he could be a useful interlocutor with the West for the indicted
President Milosevic.


   
ReplyQuote
 zoja
(@zoja)
Reputable Member
Joined: 17 years ago
Posts: 369
Topic starter  

THE NEW YORK TIMES

June 4, 1999

THE NETTLES

Kosovo Problems Just Beginning

By SERGE SCHMEMANN

WASHINGTON -- Even if the agreement reached Thursday
with Slobodan Milosevic ends the bombing of Yugoslavia,
staggering problems lie ahead, first among them the
repatriation of nearly a million Kosovars to the land of ashes and
graves that was their home.

If they do return, experts on the region said, the Kosovars will
probably rally behind the guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army,
making the rebels even less likely to disarm or abandon their
dreams of independence, which NATO opposes.

"There are three things to watch as this unfolds," said Michael
Mandelbaum, a professor of foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins
School of Advanced International Studies. "First, the war isn't over
until the bombing stops. Second, it's not a success until the
refugees return. And third, it will not hold until the KLA is disarmed."

Beyond that, the United States and its allies must still find a way of
dealing with Milosevic, the president now indicted for war crimes but
still the man in charge in Belgrade, and presumably still viscerally
opposed to autonomy for the Kosovo Albanians.

Then the allies have to repair relations with the Russians and
Chinese, which have been sorely strained by the Kosovo conflict.

Beyond that stretches the enormously costly challenge of rebuilding
the devastated economies of Kosovo, the rest of Serbia and their
neighbors. Only if that succeeds can the United States and NATO
begin to think of ending the stewardship they have now assumed,
whether by design or miscalculation, in the perennially troublesome
Balkans.

"What remains unresolved far exceeds what has been resolved,"
said Richard N. Haass, director of foreign policy studies at the
Brookings Institution.

The gloomy and cautious talk stood in contrast to the hopes raised
by Belgrade's apparent agreement to conditions for an end to the
10-week bombardment negotiated by Viktor Chernomyrdin of
Russia, President Martti Ahtisaari of Finland and Deputy Secretary
of State Strobe Talbott of the United States. As described by the
negotiators, these conditions include the verifiable withdrawal of all
Yugoslavian troops from Kosovo, the deployment of a NATO-led
peace force and the return of refugees.

To the experts, however, the very fact that Milosevic had agreed to a
deal touched off alarms. Many voiced suspicions either that he
would test allied resolve further, as President Saddam Hussein has
done repeatedly in Iraq, or that he would undermine the peace in
other ways.

"Milosevic is a master of close negotiating sessions," said Walter R.
Mead, senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign
Relations. "He has been able in the past to manipulate Western
responses by coming close, moving away, appearing to agree."

David Rieff, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute who has
written extensively on the region, said: "If Milosevic is able to call
some kind of victory, this is a pause, rather than the end. I hope I'm
wrong, God knows. But my sense of this is that strife is mother's
milk to Milosevic. He hasn't changed. He's no different from the man
responsible for the Bosnian War and the mass expulsion of most
Kosovars and the murder, we'll probably discover, of many, many
thousands."

Assuming that the deal works, a Pentagon official said, NATO
forces must work swiftly to assess the situation in Kosovo and to
determine when and how the refugees can start returning home.
One problem, the official said, is to prevent a chaotic flood of
refugees. The official said the first priority would be to care for the
untold thousands of Kosovars driven from their homes but still
wandering about in the province.

Some experts, however, thought it might prove difficult to persuade
many refugees to return home.

"All I hear from people who follow refugees is that many will choose
not to go home," Mead said. "It's too late to put in a crop, their
homes are devastated and burned down, the roads are all in a
mess, there's nothing to go back to except a winter of starvation. In
the camps, they at least had food. So they'll probably have to
winterize the camps anyway. There's no chance for a lot to go back
before spring."

Haass added: "NATO cannot coerce them to return. It has to be
safe. They have to have shelter, a livelihood."

If NATO does succeed in bringing home the refugees, the
peacekeeping forces will be confronted with the problem of
disarming a strengthened rebel army and quelling demands for
independence. Thursday's agreement reportedly reaffirms that the
guerrillas should be disarmed and that Kosovo should remain, at
least formally, a province of Serbia.

The Pentagon official acknowledged that the guerrillas pose a
serious problem. "We are obviously paying a lot of attention to that
particular issue," he said.

The overarching problem, said Susan Woodward, a senior fellow at
the Brookings Institution, "is that all the people we want to help us
make a stable Kosovo have been destroyed by the effects of the
bombings. They're either in third countries, or so traumatized that
they can't be reorganized, or they've been killed."

"The people who are going to control the next stage of the process
are the KLA," she added, "however fragmented and internally
rivalrous they are. But they're not prepared. So all the assumptions
we are making -- that the refugees want to return, that we can work
with these people, that we can restore civil society -- are wrong."

The long-term challenge before NATO will be to find ways of
disentangling itself from the Balkans. That, the experts agreed, will
require restoring a viable economy to the entire region, including
Serbia, still its central force.

"Whether as monitors, European Union development and
reconstruction experts, NATO armies, I think that this decision in
Kosovo means that not only are we in Kosovo, but we're in the
south Balkans for a generation," Rieff said. "But there's no long-term
solution to this crisis without a solution to Serbia. Everything else
until then is just first aid."

But there was general agreement that no assistance for Yugoslavia
is possible as long as Milosevic is there. Experience shows that this
is not a man who will give way willingly, especially since all that
awaits him outside the presidential office in Belgrade is a trial for
war crimes in The Hague, Netherlands.

"We've taken ownership of the Balkan problem," said John J.
Mearsheimer, professor of politics at the University of Chicago. "I
kind of imagine Milosevic smiling and saying, 'We tried to deal with
the Kosovars and the KLA; now let NATO try."'


   
ReplyQuote
 zoja
(@zoja)
Reputable Member
Joined: 17 years ago
Posts: 369
Topic starter  

Macedonia PM Urges Balkans Aid Plan=20

Friday, June 4, 1999; 11:56 a.m. EDT

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Macedonian Prime Minister Ljubco
Georgievski said today the 242,000 Kosovo Albanian refugees in his
country may choose not to return to their homeland unless the West
provides sufficient economic support.=20

``If that happens, the result will be Milosevic achieving his aims,''
Georgievski said, referring to Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.=20

Georgievski, speaking through a translator at a news conference, said at
another point that he received news of Thursday's peace breakthrough
with ``great optimism'' because it meant that Milosevic had failed in his
quest to ``destroy Macedonia.''=20

He said Milosevic was intent on accomplishing this by flooding Macedonia
with refugees, thus creating an economic disaster and generating tensions
between the largely Muslim refugees and the Christian population of the
country.=20

``His aims did not succeed,'' Georgievski said. After Albania, Macedonia
was the prime recipient of refugees, with 330,000 arrivals all told. About
97,000 are in camps and 145,000 in private homes. The remainder have
resettled in third countries.=20

Georgievski, here for talks with administration officials, said the Balkans
need an economic development plan similar to the one that enabled
Europe to recover after World War II. He added that Macedonia is less
interested in loans than in ``real and fruitful'' compensation for the
losses it
suffered as a result of the Kosovo turmoil.=20

=A9 Copyright 1999 The Associated Press


   
ReplyQuote
(@gavriloprincip)
New Member
Joined: 26 years ago
Posts: 4
 

The only way to maintian peace is to keep everyone in poverty. That way they don't have the will or the time to fight.If they do they starve. Look at Croatia and Bosnia today perfect examples of peace cause no body has any money except the theives in power by the west.


   
ReplyQuote
(@jacklondon)
Reputable Member
Joined: 26 years ago
Posts: 266
 

Two steps to STABILITY :
Step 1. Kick the Serbs out of Kosovo
Step 2. Keep the Serbs out and far away.

How to implement this?

Step 1 is being implemented at this minute.

Step 2 is the DE FACTO INDEPENDENCE.

De Facto Independence will occur as follows :

It is a universally accepted principle,
ratified in the UN Charter,
that people must be free to elect their representatives,
and the government of their liking.

Belgrade has already lost all control
over Kosovo - moral and political control.

After we flood Kosovo with Albanians,
and return the ratio to 9-1 in favor of Albanians,
then we call for Independence.
Independence will NOT BE NEGOTIABLE.

KOSOVA will be a free and independent
nation-state, members of the United Nations.

UN will relieve NATO,
and the Kosovars will have a well funded
well trained armed forces to
invade Belgrade if provoked.

Who would oppose independence?
Milosovic and his Serbs?
If they attack, they would attack a sovereign nation.
Kosovars will take-over Belgrade.

Thanx to Milo
Greater Serbia shrinks everyday a little more.


   
ReplyQuote
(@pkurdo)
Active Member
Joined: 17 years ago
Posts: 8
 

The head of the Army of Peace walked into the tent.
This uniformed face, with more resemblance to a high priority Alcoholics Anonymous patient than a high-ranking officer, wore his helmet for the very first time since the beginning of the war.
He wasn't going to take any chances - he was about to meet the real Serbs.
But the Serbs didn't turn up. They, I guess, encountered difficulties passing the duty-free shop on the Yugoslav-Macedonian border.
Later, the same Serbs were delivered an ultimatum, which has never been signed due to the language barrier.

The Serb Army withdrew. As one US military expert on TV put it "they looked happy, were freshly shaved and had nice haircuts. They didn't look like an army that had lost a war."
They didn't know it. They don't watch CNN.

The war is over and everybody is safe, we presume. Therefore, the subsequent request for three times more soldiers by NATO high command made perfect sense.

Anglo-American troops code named "Marinated Gurkhins" rolled into the province.
No need to rush though. They have been given a firm promise by the Serbian generals that each of the allied soldiers has been designated its own personal mine.

Once they jumped over border minefields, soldiers swapped their boots for running shoes.
It's like a gold rush there. Whoever first drives the flag into the earth claims the place.
It comes as no surprise that each of the British soldiers included in the first wave had to be capable of making a hundred meters under eleven seconds.

All twenty-five Albanian refugees, still inside Kosovo and unaffected by NATO bombing, staged a mass rally in support of the incoming army. The event, predictably, got a prominent spot in the Blair Broadcasting Corporation's hourly bulletins.

News that the Kosovo separatists are not going to be disarmed in the near future has been received well. KLA share prices rose sharply on the Medellin stock market.

Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon, Woody Allen look-alike but without the sense of humour, states that he has nothing against the Serbs and would be very happy to assist their civilians with transport to the Kosovo border.

Meanwhile, a group of Russian paratroopers on a joy ride, took the wrong turn and ended up in Pristina, the capital of the province. It's NATO's fault, they say, all the traffic signs have been knocked off.
Consequently, they have fallen in love with the environment and decided to settle there.
No way, says NATO. US spent the last couple of months rearranging the landscape, not for somebody else's benefit.

George Robertson the British defence secretary, so popular among the Pentagon elite that they named the ground attack plane after him, has had his best week since the beginning of the conflict.
On the last press conference he managed to assemble a whole sentence without using "Serbian Thugs", two of his all time favourites in his twenty-word vocabulary.
Then, carried out by this exciting achievement, he decided to give Russia a choice - the airport or the IMF pocket money.
As we learned from a well-informed source, he's been given his medicine and British officials expect a speedy recovery.

Initial communication problems, affecting British personnel mainly, due to the total destruction of the province's network capabilities, has been solved. US will use its spy satellites to beam the signal to the most remote areas of Kosovo, making it possible for Her Majesty's troops to watch the TeleTubbies on a regular basis.

Mother Theresas in the camouflage uniforms killed a couple of Serbs, just for the TV audience.
NATO authorities investigated and accepted the argument that the temptation of an armed German with a Serb within a firing range was too much to bear. Naturally, nobody is guilty.

Before I finish I would like to use this opportunity to propose Mr Kiro Gligorov, the president of Macedonia, for the Nobel peace prize.
He and his government led the most neutral policy under the circumstances. He even didn't want to interfere in the internal affairs of his own country.

Now we all now why Clinton wanted this adventure to happen so quickly.
His presidency is running out, and there was a real danger of an intelligent successor dismantling this idiocy.

Pedro Kurdo is the business correspondent for the Internet Express News.
Copyright © 1999


   
ReplyQuote
Page 2 / 5
Share: