I just couldn't resist not to put the whole article; Mr Pruden is regularly having fun on Clintons' expence, which is not really dificult
when dealing with the idiot such as Clinton is...


Published in Washington, D.C. 5am -- June 1, 1999 www.washtimes.com
Here's a deal on
guns Clinton can't
refuse


The Republican leaders in the Congress are by definition
not the most daring young (or old) men who ever swung
from a trapeze, but they could surprise us with a little boldness.
***************************

They feel trapped by Bill Clinton, the accomplished master
of the phoniest kind of sincerity. Mr. Clinton flew to Colorado
to wring the last full measure of bathos out of a tragedy that an
honorable man, particularly an "honorable" man busy elsewhere
blowing up women, children, refugee columns and tuberculosis
hospitals with his smart bombs, would have let alone.

*******************

Just as he was tuning up his tear ducts in Colorado the news
arrived from Georgia. For just a moment it seemed that his
timing was, for once, off. There he was in Colorado, exploiting
a tragedy already a month old and the fresh material 1,500
miles away. As it turned out, the gunplay in Georgia was
bush-league stuff, as these schoolhouse tragedies are
measured. Nevertheless, the news arrived just as the Senate
was about to take a vote on his latest gun legislation, a piece of
imagery that everyone knows won't have any effect on the
problem at hand.

************************


The Republican leaders, as usual as tough as
a tea party of soccer moms, fell into a full swoon.
They don't deserve it, but the Republican leadership has
another chance to step out of the box where the president and
his congressional Democrats have put them. For starters,
Speaker Dennis Hastert should get himself up five minutes
earlier of a morning, stand before his bathroom mirror, and
repeat to himself:
"Today I will pretend I am a Democrat.
"Today I will pretend I am a Democrat.
"Today I will pretend I am a Democrat."
Armed with this borrowed courage, he could break from
the perpetual embrace with the foe that old rasslers feel so
comfortable in and march off to the House to inflict a little
punishment, extract a little tribute, and persuade the
increasingly skeptical Republicans in the boonies that maybe a
Republican majority in the House is worth saving.
Gun control legislation is the place to start. Americans, long
intimidated by their children, are suddenly terrified of them.


Having abdicated responsibility for teaching their kids right and
wrong and tolerating the poison that Hollywood, the television
networks, the American Criminal Liberties Union and certain
others have been dumping into the culture for 40 years, they're
not sure when their kids are going to start shooting, or who
they're going to shoot when they do. Maybe if Congress could
do something -- anything -- parents won't have to. And if it
means infringing the rights of others, well, what's a
constitutional right worth if it's a right that's important only to
someone else?
Fortunately for the Republicans, the soccer moms, the
artists and crafties, the men so sensitive they're often mistaken
for ladies, all determined to eliminate the constitutional right to
bear arms, are the very people who are determined to protect
the right to abort their unwanted children. They're so
determined, in fact, that they panic at the suggestion that
partial-birth abortion be forbidden, even though many of them
agree that partial-birth abortion is not abortion at all, but
barbaric elimination of careless inconvenience.
Banning partial-birth abortion, by their reckoning, is the first
step on the slippery slope that leads inevitably to barring a
woman's right to an authentic abortion. This is similar to the gun
owners' argument that gun-control legislation, though
meaningless as something to eliminate violence, nevertheless
nibbles away at the Second Amendment, and is thus a step
down a similarly deadly slippery slope.
Dennis Hastert and •••• Armey and Tom DeLay should
ask themselves, what would the Democrats do with an
opportunity born of this confluence of events? The answer
would almost certainly be to link the competing -- and not
exactly unrelated -- fears. Here's the deal the Republicans
should offer the Democrats: "We'll give you these incremental
gun-control provisions, the safety locks and modified
gun-show-sales safeguards, and in return you give us the
prohibition on a doctor sticking his scissors into an unwanted
baby's brain."
The Democrats might not go for it. A lot of their
constituents would rather give up the children they already have
to keep the right to abort any who follow. Some gun owners,
who imagine the Second Amendment gives them the right to
guns so big they come on wheels, would similarly squawk. But
if they don't go for it, the Democrats finally reveal themselves
as unreasonably partisan, and who knows? Demanding
something for something, instead of giving up something for
nothing, might feel so good the Republicans would be tempted
to do it again on an issue somewhere else.


Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Times.


http://www.washtimes.com

Victims of NATO's war

Who is responsible for the deaths of
Milena Malobabic and Sanja Milenkovic?

By David Walsh
2 June 1999



In the last three days of May, NATO bombing assaults on Serbia
resulted in the deaths of at least 50 civilians and the wounding of
hundreds more.

On Sunday in Varvarin, in south-central Serbia, NATO aircraft
destroyed a bridge at one o'clock in the afternoon, when the area was
crowded with local people attending the town market. At least 11
civilians died and another 40 were injured in the attack. Witnesses said
four cars fell into the Juzna Morava River. Bystanders who came to help
those who were victims of the initial attack were hit by a second wave of
bombing. Four NATO jets took part in the raid.

On Monday NATO warplanes bombed a sanitarium and old people's
home in Surdulica, a town in southeast Serbia. This was the second
deadly attack on the town of 15,000. On April 27 NATO missiles
landed in a residential area, killing 11 people. In the most recent attack at
least 27 civilians died. Approximately 100 people lived at the sanitarium
complex located on the outskirts of the town. Sixteen residents and
patients were killed when two NATO missiles slammed into two of the
seven buildings on the property. Another five were buried under the
rubble. More than 40 others were injured.

Serb media reported as well that NATO missiles killed 10 people and
wounded 20 when they struck the central Serb city of Novi Pazar on
Monday.

NATO spokesmen made no apology for the daytime attack on Varvarin
or the deaths, describing the bridge as “a designated and legitimate
target.” Jamie Shea, the military alliance's mouthpiece, declared, “There
is always a cost to defeat evil. It never comes free, unfortunately. But the
cost of failure to defeat a great evil is far higher.”

A chasm exists between the self-serving and hypocritical comments of
Shea, Clinton, Blair and the rest—who proclaim that they are not waging
war “against the Serb people”—and the brutal reality of NATO's war.

The claim by the American and European media that the attack on
Varvarin and similar atrocities are “fatal blunders” has worn thin. If, in the
first stages of the war, allied military officials claimed that bridges and
other elements of the infrastructure were attacked at night to “minimize
casualties,” then does this now mean that they are being attacked in the
middle of the day to maximize them? There is no other reasonable
conclusion to draw except that NATO is now conducting an operation
aimed at killing and terrorizing Serb civilians.

The ferocity of the US-led campaign has intensified in recent days.
NATO has now flown some 15,000 combat missions over Serbia in 70
days. Its aircraft are now making as many 350 to 400 attacks a day, in
round-the-clock assaults. Nothing like this has been seen in Europe since
the end of World War II. And there is no let-up in sight. On the contrary,
US military officials promise a stepping up of the bombing to force Serb
leaders to capitulate to the NATO countries' demands.

The NATO regimes and their propagandists have spent a good deal of
energy in attempting to criminalize the entire Serb population, to make it
an accomplice in Milosevic's “war crimes.” They have seized upon a
bitter ethno-communalist war in the Balkans, in which atrocities have
been committed by nationalist forces on all sides, and exploited it for their
own, predatory purposes. Both to cover up the crimes of the US-led
forces and to make the Serbs inhuman in the eyes of public opinion, the
American media has revealed as little as possible about the suffering of
the Serb population.

Indeed as the air campaign becomes ever-more savage, the major media
outlets in the US, particularly the television networks, provide less and
less coverage of the devastation. Where is Brent Sadler of CNN who
gave at least some indication of the extent of the death and destruction in
reports from Aleksinac in early April? Now, nothing. Or next to nothing.
Only when a particularly egregious crime takes place can the major
television networks—grudgingly, always providing the official NATO
excuses—be prodded into mentioning them.

The attacks on Varvarin and Surdulica were particularly cruel and
ominous incidents. That quality must have communicated itself to a
number of journalists, because for once they provided a glimpse of the
human face of NATO's victims.

Kevin Cullen, a reporter for the Boston Globe, wrote a moving and
unusual account of visiting the site in Surdulica. He observed: “Outside
one of the two buildings that took direct hits, the bodies of four elderly
people were lined up on stretchers. Rigor mortis had set in and one
woman's arm was rigidly aloft, her finger pointed almost accusingly....
The force of the explosion sheared off the tops of trees and sprayed
other trees with clothing. Shirts, pants and stockings hung from evergreen
trees, 50 feet in the air, like Christmas tree ornaments.

“Dr. Srboljub Aleksic, 60, the sanitarium director, stood amid the
wreckage, accusing NATO of engaging in the war crimes it is so quick to
accuse his president, Slobodan Milosevic, of committing.

“‘This building is a hospital. There is a Red Cross sign on the roof,' he
said. ‘For NATO to say that it didn't know this is a place for sick people
is a lie.'”

Ironically, in addition to housing patients with respiratory illnesses and
retirees, the medical complex was also home to Serb refugees from
Bosnia and Croatia, forced out by US-approved “ethnic cleansing” in
1995. One of the dead was a mother of three children, Bosiljka
Malobabic, who was driven from her home in Croatia. Two of her three
children, Milena and Rade, were also killed. One Serb bystander
commented bitterly about the 1995 events, “No one wanted to bomb
Croatia.”

A reporter for the Irish Times, Lara Marlowe, was also affected by a
visit to Surdulica. And she too commented on the death of 19-year-old
Milena Malobabic. Marlowe wrote: “Milena's body was the last in the
row, and she was a sadly pretty girl, with black hair and silver hoop
earrings, whose blue-green eyes seemed to stare out in pain, even in
death. She was one of a family of four treated for tuberculosis at the
sanatorium.”

Reporters apparently found the girl's notebook outside the bombed
sanitarium. “‘This notebook is dedicated to Dejan,' she had written inside
the front cover, entwining her beloved's 1972 birth date with her own. ‘If
you only know how much I suffer now,' she began a poem in Serbian,
the first letters of which formed an acrostic of his name. ‘Maybe it's
wrong, but I want to go back to you. Your Milena still loves you, but I
feel the wound...'”

And what about Sanja Milenkovic, 17, a top mathematics pupil at a
Belgrade high school, who had just crossed the bridge in Varvarin when
NATO planes bombed it? According to Carlotta Gall in the New York
Times, the girl was so badly wounded by shrapnel that she died on the
way to the hospital. “After the first strike, people rushed from the nearby
market to help those injured on the bridge. Then the planes came back
and struck again, unleashing two bombs that smashed the bridge off its
concrete supports and sent lethal shrapnel flying up the street into the
marketplace, witnesses said.”

Gall described the aftermath: “Eight bodies were lying on stretchers in the
morgue at the entrance to the town cemetery. Father Ciric stood out in
his black suit trousers and city shoes. The other men were in cheap
workers' clothing. Their bodies were mangled horribly. The woman
whose body was found in the river, in her stocking feet, alone appeared
calm in death. Ms. Milenkovic's body was still at the hospital.”

This is the horrifying logic of NATO's war against Serbia. Milena
Malobabic and Sanja Milenkovic had the tragic misfortune to cross paths
with the US-dominated war machine. In a profound sense, they are the
victims of politically-motivated homicide. Who, if anyone, will ever be
called to account for these crimes? Will Clinton, Clark or Blair?

The US and other governments proceed in part with further and more
intense attacks because there is not yet a mass public outcry against their
actions. This barbaric war—which is not in fact a war, but a one-sided
bombing campaign—is being fought in the name of the American, British,
French, German and other peoples. These populations must come to
understand its true dimensions and implications. Those who continue to
delude themselves with the thought that the US-led forces are conducting
this war to set things right in the region, to establish “democracy,” to
defeat “a great evil,” had better think again. No military assault
conducted in this fashion, indiscriminately targeting civilians and
destroying the economic and social life of an entire people, can possibly
have progressive goals.

See Also:
Why is NATO at war with Yugoslavia? World power, oil and gold
Statement of the Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site
[24 May 1999]
The Milosevic indictment: legal document or political diatribe?
[1 June 1999]
Former Croatian general has US backing
New KLA leader was responsible for ethnic cleansing
[29 May 1999]
Human rights group charges NATO bombing is war crime
Calls for indictment of British government officials
[29 May 1999]


http://www.wsws.org

To whoever is unhappy with the previous postings
there are some URLs to write to if you are unsatisfied with the interpretations of the certain religon or customs.


It also applies that there are various practicies
or "interpretations" of the 'Qu'ran'(as you call it- emina zoja whoever) .


So read it carefully next time...and don't insult
if you can control yourself at all...

To Dani, Daniela, whatever.

So, nice, these URL's, but its facts are wrong anyway. Don't forget, Dani, Daniela, who ever that you are talking to Muslims.

And once again, what does religion have to do with war.... nothing. It's all about power, like I said earlier. Religion is a tool to stir people up, so they will do what the power hungry want. As soon as you stop being religiously prejudiced, like you, or your URL, or whatever is evedently showing, most flames of war will be extinguished.

Using ANY religion for war purposes is ABUSING religion.

Zoja

To Dani, Daniela, whatever.

This article seems to be especially written for you. It's about closing your eyes to the truth, and about prejudice.

---

THE GLOBE AND MAIL, Wednesday, June 2, 1999


Yugoslavs skeptical of refugee stories


But a Serb doctor says defensive mentality causes his compatriots to close their eyes to tragedy


MARCUS GEE
IN BELGRADE


An uninformed visitor could spend days here without knowing anything about the tragedy that has befallen the Albanians of Kosovo. The censored media never mention the fact that nearly a million ethnic Albanians have been forced to flee their homes, and people rarely talk about it.


But that doesn't mean Yugoslavs are unaware. Contrary to the view of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that Yugoslavs have been kept in the dark about it, many people here know what has happened to the Albanians. They just don't believe it's Yugoslavia's fault.


“It's not true that we attacked them,” said Nikola Nestoronic, 18, who sells kerosene burners in a roadside market. “They attacked our people, the Serbs. They wanted Kosovo for themselves. We were only defending our territory.”


Like many people, Mr. Nestoronic has heard about the Kosovo refugees on the Internet or satellite television, which bring in foreign networks such as the British Broadcasting Corp. and CNN. Those networks have given wide coverage to the refugee exodus, and word seems to have spread even to people without television sets or computers.


But most people don't believe that the number of refugees is as large as NATO says it is. Nor do they believe NATO when it says the Yugoslav armed forces have systematically driven the Albanians out of their homes.


In interviews on the streets of Belgrade, most people say that that Albanian separatist rebels and NATO bombs are responsible for the exodus. “A war is going on down there and they are caught in the middle, so they leave,” Mr. Nestoronic said.


That is the official position of the Yugoslav government, and judging by an unscientific street sampling, most people in Belgrade believe it.


Last week's war-crimes charges against President Slobodan Milosevic and four associates do not appear to have changed anybody's mind. The United Nations war-crimes prosecutor, Louise Arbour, said that the five accused were “criminally responsible” for the deportation of 740,000 Kosovo Albanians and the murder of 340.


“Nobody believes these charges,” said Olivera Pejovic, 28, who sells T-shirts up the street from Mr. Nestoronic. “They are all NATO lies.”


She believes that NATO itself has expelled the Albanians as part of a Western plan to dominate the Balkans. “All this has been planned for years,” she said.


Whomever they blame for the exodus, almost all say that the international media are giving too much attention to the ethnic-Albanian refugees and not enough to the bombing of Serb civilians.


“On CNN and BBC all they talk about is Albanians,” said Melena, a young mother who preferred not to give her last name. “What about us? We are being bombed every day.”


Natalija Micunovic, a Belgrade university teacher, had a question for Westerners who have been moved by the Albanians' plight.


“If you really think what is happening to the Albanians is so terrible, why don't you adopt an Albanian child or come and work in a refugee camp instead of sending some son of a bitch to drop bombs on people indiscriminately?”


Not everyone feels that way. Some residents of Belgrade condemn their fellow Serbs for being indifferent to the refugee tragedy. Vuk Stambolovic, an intense, bearded doctor who opposes the Milosevic government, said Serbs are closing their eyes to the Albanian tragedy in the same way that Germans closed their eyes to the persecution of the Jews during the Second World War.


“This is some kind of defensive mentality,” he said. “People simply refuse to believe.”


He said the same thing happened during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia, when many in Belgrade refused to believe that their fellow Serbs were carrying out atrocities against Bosnian Muslims. He tells the story of a man in Sarajevo who called a friend in Belgrade to say there was a tank in his yard, shelling the city. “Don't believe that Muslim propaganda,” the friend said.


Dr. Stambolovic said that many Serbs look down on Albanians, whom they see as clannish and primitive. Some people interviewed on the street clearly believe those stereotypes, saying that Albanians had too many children or too many clan feuds.


Others, however, described them as honest and hard-working. “If we can live together, we should,” said Jovan Stajic, 50, who has been laid off from his job in a tractor factory since NATO bombs damaged it.


Like many people in Belgrade, he said he would support self-government for the Albanians as long as they did not try to take Kosovo out of Serbia altogether. Like others, he also said that the refugees should be allowed to return to their homes.

---

Zoja

The Washington Post
May 30, 1999, Sunday

Words of War

TRUTH OR PROPAGANDA? As bombs fall in Yugoslavia, the world's
opinion makers are launching their own grenades.
Here's some of what they have to say.

Their Pens Draw Blood as Well as Ink

By Charles Trueheart

PARIS -- The second front of the war in Yugoslavia, the one among
the intellectuals, has been slow bubbling to the surface in Europe,
but now it has, releasing pungent gases of ire and derision. By turns
pro-Serb and anti-American, pro-peace and anti-media, the argument
against the NATO air campaign more than anything else is packed to shock.

"U.S. foreign policy can be defined as follows: 'Kiss my arse or
I'll kick your head in,'" declared British playwright Harold Pinter
in one article. "Nato's action is ill-thought-out, ill-considered,
misjudged, miscalculated, disastrous. It is also totally illegal and
probably represents the last nail in the coffin of the U.N."

Peter Handke, the Austrian novelist who has been leading a pro-Serb
crusade for much of the 1990s, quit the Catholic Church over what
he saw as its bland acquiescence to NATO's campaign in Kosovo. He is
staging a play in Vienna next month to dramatize his point. A couple
of weeks ago he told an interviewer that "anti-Serbs are as evil and
unconscionable to me as the antisemites were at their worst."

Angry critics such as these remain a tiny if noisy minority in Europe.
What is most striking about this nascent intellectual opposition to
NATO's bombing campaign is that it dwells not so much on the rights
and wrongs of military or political strategy as on the public's
very understanding of the conflict itself.

What's at issue, for these outspoken intellectuals, is the truth.
Their strategy is not counter-argument, but counter-reality. These
are their taunting questions: Is Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic
really a bad guy? Isn't the Kosovo Liberation Army just a bunch of
hoods and cutthroats? Haven't ordinary Serbs suffered, too? And is
ethnic cleansing actually going on?

The intellectual who has articulated these questions most explosively here
is a man named Regis Debray. Debray has solid credentials among the
international left set, as a follower of Ernesto "Che" Guevara in the
1960s--he was jailed for it--and as an influential adviser, many years
later, to France's Socialist president Francois Mitterrand. Debray quit
Mitterrand's entourage over French participation in the "imperialist"
Persian Gulf War of 1991.

Long before this war began, Debray was portraying the United States as
a factory of evil dreams, a perpetrator of "ethnic cleansing" against
American Indians, an inheritor of Orwellian Big Brotherism. He is
now a journalist--in France and elsewhere in Europe, journalists are
counted without irony among intellectuals--and self-styled "mediologue,"
or media critic. His now-notorious J'accuse against the war effort was
launched two weeks ago.

In the footsteps of those other French literary itinerants, Andre Gide
and Andre Malraux, Debray traveled to Yugoslavia earlier this month
to see for himself what was going on. He returned to report what he had
previously suspected and asserted: That the European public, already
lobotomized by pervasive U.S. culture, is being "intoxicated" by a
news media fully implicated in NATO boosterism and anti-Serb propaganda.

It's important to make plain that the French, one of many European
polities now governed by Socialists, have been second to no NATO country
in backing the NATO effort, and their intellectual classes--legendary in
their attacks on American hegemonism from Vietnam to Central America--have
been a remarkable pillar of consensus.

If most of them have rallied to the war effort, it's not difficult
to explain why. Whatever misgivings a French leftist thinker, or
even an independent-minded Gaullist, might have about signing on
to an American military adventure against a historic French ally,
the sheer tragic weight of the humanitarian outrages being committed
against Albanian Kosovars has riveted the intelligentsia (and a
majority of the public) to the cause--or at a minimum buttoned
many a lip.

That support has been driven by the still-strong memory of national
passivity in the face of proximate barbarism--as recently as the ethnic
cleansing in Bosnia earlier in this decade, and as unforgettably as
France's tacit collaboration with Nazi occupiers a half-century ago.
The building of a new Europe today on explicitly economic grounds
has sharpened the hunger in intellectual quarters for a political
and moral dimension to unification, for a principle to champion beyond
common prosperity. The depredations suffered by Albanian Kosovars
offer that test.

Into the midst of this solidarity behind the U.S.-led war effort--and
in large measure because it is a U.S.-led war effort--Debray has tossed
the loudest grenade of contrarian outrage yet heard in Europe.

Days after his return from the front, Debray unleashed a front-page
comment in the daily Le Monde--evidence in itself that ideas, however
upsetting or far-fetched, do not frighten serious people in France. His
screed laid out his impressions of seven days on the ground in Yugoslavia,
four of them in Kosovo.

Debray said he had demanded freedom of movement from Yugoslav authorities
and an interpreter of his choosing, and claimed he had had a clearer look
than his journalistic colleagues, most of whom were in Albania and
Macedonia and subject to rumor-mongering engineered by KLA sympathizers
or to the "lies" of NATO briefers.

He painted a picture of a sad, suffering people, "approximately half"
of them now unemployed, and of schoolchildren driven in fear of bombing
from their classrooms to play with unexploded U.S. ordnance disguised
as "toys." Debray saw a democratic nation where debate is abundant
and criticism of Milosevic ("elected three times . . . respects the
Yugoslav constitution") is openly vented.

Buying into official Yugoslav estimates, Debray reported that the
ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo was much smaller than Western media
reflexively reported, and its Serb population much larger. The flow of
Albanian refugees, he suggested, had been exaggerated.

Debray's reports from Yugoslavia in Le Monde and later in Marianne,
the maverick weekly that dispatched him, are larded with substantiation
for his sympathies: descriptions of eating pizza in Pristina with
Albanian Kosovars as though nothing were amiss, of "intact" mosques,
of Serb soldiers protecting an Albanian bakery from looters, of Serb
families "massacred without military objective" by NATO bombers, of
Serbs victimized by Croats during the Bosnia conflict, of Serb honor
during World War II.

Taking the tendered bait, much of the rest of the intellectual class here
has lit into Debray, calling him everything from naive, to evil, to
off his rocker. His reporting was not only in conflict with mainstream
intellectual opinion. It was an implicit and occasionally explicit attack
on the work of nearly every war correspondent.

But Debray, like the other contrarians, also has flushed sympathizers
from the woodwork. "Thank you," gushed French historian Lilly Marcou,
"for shaking us with your testimony which, like all human testimony,
is fragile, based on bits of unpublished realities, sincere in its quest
for another truth."

Max Clos, who rules the opinion pages at the conservative (and pro-war)
Le Figaro daily, wrote an obliquely supportive column, explaining
sarcastically that "Regis Debray has committed an unpardonable error:
He has violated the sacrosanct rules of political correctness in
contesting the truth imparted by the (media) gurus. . . . Whoever
transgresses these taboos reveals his complicity with fascism and is
serving as Milosevic's errand boy."

Clos's barb is well-taken: Contrariness is good; groupthink is bad.
But what is most insidious about this intellectual insurgency is that it
plants seeds of doubt about what is truly knowable in the fog, as Debray
and others cast it, of half-truths and half-baked sentiments generated
by NATO and disseminated by European (among other) media.

When Debray's editor, Jean-Francois Kahn, refers to "the two propagandas"
(NATO's and Yugoslavia's), he is peddling moral equivalence, as many have
pointed out. "Your 'logic of impartiality' doesn't consist of telling
the factual truth, but of restoring balance between the parties"--and
the result is a resort to "fiction," wrote scholar Patrice Canivez, also
in Le Monde.

The subjectivity of facts, the plausibility of "another truth," the
suspect motives of news barons--these are seductive ideas in a cynical,
media-saturated age. They flow naturally from the postmodern intellectual
habit of unpacking received wisdom and promoting alternatives to
long-accepted meanings.

In war, this strategy has a name, born in Europe a half-century ago:
the Big Lie. But, the contrarians would reply, whose?

/Charles Trueheart is a Paris correspondent for The Washington Post./

I don't need your patronizing "Zpka";
and forget about talking to me -since nothing is going to change my stance "AGAINST THE WAR"!

I can see how your support for the NATO is helping everyone in this...

Actually, I newer know what or whom are you supporting? One post is "viva UCK", the next is
"viva Rugova" (which is an excellent combination of " viving " since UCK(KLA) want to kill Rugova;
just as they addmited of killing Fehmi Agani).


"One third of the people killed and 40 percent injured as a result of
NATO airstrikes are children. "

THE NATO AGGRESSION AGAINST YUGOSLAVIA IS CAUSING
ENORMOUS
SUFFERING TO CHILDREN

COMMENTARY: Voice of Russia, 6/1/99
http://www.vor.ru/Kosovo/commentaries_105.html

One third of the people killed and 40 percent injured as a result of
NATO airstrikes are children.

A commentary by Alexander Kushnir.

June 2, 1999; 1:00PM EDT

HEADLINES

Washington 1. Death of Freedom in America? March on
Pentagon Banned by Arlington Police!

Sweden 2. Anti-NATO Protests Banned in Europe;
Protesters Beaten by Police

Santa Cruz 3. California Anti-war Protester Beaten the
Rodney King-Style

---

1. Death of Freedom in America? March on Pentagon Banned by Arlington Police!

WASHINGTON, June 2 - As you saw in our Bulletins S90-93 and S99-94, there
is a big anti-war protest planned in Washington for this weekend. The plan
was to assemble at the Vietnam Memorial at noon, hold some speeches there,
and then march across the Potomac to Virginia, and reassemble for more
speeches at the Pentagon.

We've just received word from one of the protest organizers, the
International Action Center, that the Arlington police had denied us the
permit to march along public streets. If we allow this decision to stand
unchallenged, it will mean the death of constitutional guaranteed freedom
in America.

If you value your freedom of speech and that of peaceful assembly, we call
upon you to call or fax immediately the Arlington County Police, the
governor of the state of Virginia, the White House and the Justice
Department - and demand that they reverse this outrageous violation of our
constitutional rights.

(1) Arlington County Police--phone: (703) 228-4252, (703) 558-2222; fax:
(703) 228-4127, (703) 228-4192.

(2) Gov. James Gilmore, Virginia--phone: (804) 786-2211, fax: (804) 371-6351.

(3) White House--phone: (202) 456-1414, fax: (202) 456-2461.

(4) Justice Department/Attorney General Janet Reno--phone: (202) 514-2000
(Dept. of Justice, ask for Janet Reno), fax: (202) 514-0323.

And now, here is the text of the International Action Center's message:

URGENT ACTION NEEDED - Permit Denied

In an outrageous effort to suppress the June 5 anti-war March on the
Pentagon, the police authorities have denied a permit to march on the
streets to the Pentagon. We are launching a massive political and media
campaign to demand the right of the protest to march in the streets of
Virginia. We believe the White House and the Pentagon are colluding with
local police agencies in this effort.

We are appealing to all those who believe in free speech and especially to
those who oppose the war in Yugoslavia to assist us in a phone, fax, and
email campaign to protect the first amendment rights of all those who plan
to participate in the June 5 March on the Pentagon.

With just three days to go before the June 5 March on the Pentagon, the
Arlington County Police have denied the June 5th demonstration the right to
march on a small stretch of Virginia roadway between the Vietnam Veterans'
Memorial, located in Washington DC, and the Pentagon building, located in
Virginia. This is an arbitrary and political decision. It is an
outrageous attempt to violate the first amendment right to free speech. It
is an attempt to either stop the June 5th March on the Pentagon or to
create a chaotic situation at the demonstration.

While denying the right of the marchers to the roadways leading to the
Pentagon, police authorities are trying to reroute the march into a narrow
and dangerous bike trail that at points becomes a single-file line,
crossing a major highway. The police know that this is not a safe or
tenable route for a march of ten thousand or more. The Arlington County
Police refuse to return phone calls from the organizers and attorneys of
the June 5 march.

The June 5 demonstration is the largest mobilization to date against the
U.S./NATO war in Yugoslavia. We believe that it is impossible for the
county of Arlington police to unilaterally try to prevent us from carrying
out an orderly demonstration. We hold the Clinton White House and Virginia
Governor James Gilmore responsible for this flagrant violation of our rights.

We will not be stopped. The war in Yugoslavia has killed thousands of
innocent civilians. We will not allow the U.S. authorities to stop the
anti-war movement from exercising its rights.

Please immediately phone and/or fax to the following authorities an angry
protest against the denial of our rights to march on the streets to the
Pentagon. Tell the authorities, we demand the right to march on Route 27
to the Pentagon. Please phone and/or fax to the following:

(1) White House--phone: (202) 456-1414, fax: (202) 456-2461

(2) Justice Department/Attorney General Janet Reno--phone: (202) 514-2000
(Dept. of Justice, ask for Janet Reno), fax: (202) 514-0323

(3) Gov. James Gilmore, Virginia--phone: (804) 786-2211, fax: (804) 371-6351

(4) Arlington County Police--phone: (703) 228-4252, (703) 558-2222; fax:
(703) 228-4127, (703) 228-4192

---

2. Anti-NATO Protests Banned in Europe; Protesters Beaten by Police

SWEDEN, May 30 - As you have seen from our earlier reports, anti-NATO
protests have been also banned in Europe right from the start of the war,
with a number of protesters being arrested and/or beaten (see Day 4, Update
1, Item 1, Mar. 27, and Day 12, Update 2, Item 3, Apr. 4). This weekend,
we have received the following e-mail from a TiM reader in Sweden, which
provides an update on that situation:

"Thank you for sending me daily your very valuable TiM information. I share
it with some people here who don't have access to the Internet.

Now I have several pieces of information that I want you to check up and
comment upon.

1) According to reliable information, any public demonstration against the
NATO war is now prohibited in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. I
heard this from a friend in Brussels, a Russian woman living there. When
she and her friends tried to demonstrate, the police immediately clamped
down on them and beat them up.

2) Another friend has picked up from a German TV program that the ground
war was planned to be started on August 8.

3) Lots of physicians in Britain and France have been ordered to sign up
for brush up courses in war medicine and be prepared for service at the
coming front.

The sources of these pieces of information seem to be reliable enough.
Could you compare it with your own information? Keep up the good work."

Lars Adelskogh, Sweden

---

3. California Anti-war Protester Beaten À La Rodney King-Style

SANTA CRUZ, May 22 - When Rodney King was brutally beaten by the California
police, the whole country and much of the world was treated to constant
replays on network TV of an amateur video which recorded the event. No
such thing happened following the May 22 police assault in Santa Cruz, CA,
which left an anti-war protester comatose even though a local TV station
cameraman and a private citizen recorded the incident on video tape.

Anti-war activist, Steve Argue, was brutally beaten with night sticks by
the Santa Cruz police before being arrested during a protest prepared by
the Santa Cruz Coalition to Stop the (NATO) Bombing (of Yugoslavia). While
on the ground, a cluster of police kicked and struck him as one officer
forced pepper spray into his throat, and directly into his eyes. Then
police allegedly waited almost an hour before taking their nearly comatose
victim to the hospital.

The reason for such police brutality? The anti-war protesters brought a
boom box which played a recording sent from Belgrade of the bombing. And
they did it in front of the McPherson Center, site of a black-tie
fundraiser for Congressional Representative, Sam Farr. It was the third
event that week targeting Farr who had voted for war appropriations.

Here is an excerpt from an account of the incident by one eyewitness:

"It was too real for one Farr supporter and the Santa Cruz police. They
ripped the boom box out of the Yugoslav woman's hand, but didn't arrest
her. Instead, they arrested an 18-year old girl who was standing nearby.
This infuriated the peaceful crowd which started yelling at the police:
'Why are you arresting her?'

Police then lunged at other participants, taking as their immediate
targets, a young woman and a man, each holding young children. As an
officer (La Favor) seized the young woman and applied a pain compliance
hold, two other policemen tried to tear the child from her arms.

It was at this moment that Steve Argue intervened to rescue the woman and
her baby. He allegedly punched La Favor in the face. When the police
turned on him, Steve began to run. He didn't get far before police tackled
him to the ground, and started kicking and beating him mercilessly, à la
Rodney King.

Although he was nearly comatose and a hospital was located less than five
minutes away, the police refused for nearly an hour to take Argue to the
hospital. He was then taken to jail, and held in a solitary cell for over
72 hours. Argue has been charged with felony battery of a police officer,
as well as with resisting and obstructing.

News reporters from Radio Free Santa Cruz were also arrested, and their
tape recorders taken from them. Community activists and attorneys are
discussing bringing charges against the police and a civil lawsuit against
the city of Santa Cruz."

---

Bob Djurdjevic
TRUTH IN MEDIA
Phoenix, Arizona
e-mail: bobdj@djurdjevic.com

Visit the Truth in Media Web site http://www.truthinmedia.org/ for more
articles on geopolitical affairs.

War in The Balkans - Villagers on border
flee friendly fire

By Phil Davison in Morini

2 June 1999

Given the long list of Nato's errors during the Kosovo air campaign, perhaps
we should not have been surprised. But this could hardly have been a
mistake. When Nato warplanes bombed us yesterday, well inside Albania,
not in Kosovo, it was broad daylight.

They could surely see a couple of dozen journalists, a few hundred frontline
Albanian troops, the Albanian border police and the villagers of Morini. We
could certainly see them.

We had, after all, been based in more or less the same area for weeks,
interviewing Kosovo refugees and, more recently, watching cross-border
skirmishes between the Serbs and KLA fighters.

But still they dropped their bombs, five as we fled. And now we know how
the Serb soldiers must feel: scared and lucky to be in one piece.

No injuries were reported in Morini, a picturesque hillside spot. But the
attack, and another Nato raid on Albanian territory hours earlier, left Serb
forces in control of a crucial crossing point on the Albanian-Kosovo border.

Albanian troops raced from the border on lorries as the attack started at
2.20pm. Border police and customs officers jumped into their vans and
headed for the hills, yelling at us to do the same. And hundreds of villagers
and shepherds packed on to tractor trailers or ran towards the nearby town
of Kukes.

No one could understand why the warplanes, glinting in the sun as they
roared towards us up the Lake Fierze valley, were bombing territory on this
side of the frontier.

Adding to the chaos, the Albanians even opened up briefly with an ageing
anti-aircraft gun, vainly trying to down planes from the same countries whose
soldiers patrol the streets of Kukes.

We later saw dozens of Kosovo Albanian men, recently released from prison
in Kosovo, walk across the deserted border into Albania and join the
desperate flight to Kukes, 16 miles away.

United Nations buses and aid workers fled as soon as the bombing began.

Had the Nato planes merely hit Albanian territory once or twice, it might have
been described as a mistake. But the alliance unloaded a total of 32 bombs
or missiles on this village before dawn, then followed up with the five bombs
in the afternoon.

The confusion began after 9pm on Monday when Serb troops in Vermiza,
just across the border, fired 16 rockets at an Albanian tank column in
Bardhoc, about two miles inside Albania.

Eight Russian-made Katyhusha rockets exploded within 50 to 100 yards of
the tanks though none was hit. The Albanians did not return fire, but the tank
column was among Albanian units that fired live shells from Bardhoc on to
Serb positions last week.

The other eight Katyhushas exploded above Bardhoc, unleashing
booby-trapped packages that looked like toys, sweets or flowers and were
clearly intended to maim any child that picked them up. The Serbs may have
wanted to show Nato that they had survived Monday's heavy bombing of
Vermiza, or they may have been trying to draw the Albanians on.

A few hours later, we were all asleep in Kukes when we heard the first Nato
bombs. When we got to Morini after dawn, Albanian soldiers, border police
and villagers asked us what Nato was up to. The planes appeared to have
selected a dozen stone bunkers built by Albania's Cold War communists. The
bombs destroyed half a dozen of the bunkers, which were not manned but
were said to hold ammunition.

We found remnants of the bombs, marked "For use on MK-82, Fin-guided
bomb" and carrying assembly numbers.

Photographers were still taking pictures of that damage when the Nato planes
swooped down again in the afternoon. There was an almighty roar, too loud
to be a plane, then the first bomb hit. The following impacts, at intervals of
three or four minutes, appeared to chase the fleeing media vehicles up the
road. We retreated to hillside vantage points and saw the Nato jets bomb the
now-vacated Albanian customs building where, until last week's combat, we
used to interview incoming refugees.

Then the Serbs, again apparently to show us that their guns were still in
business, began firing mortar or artillery shells from Vermiza towards a hill on
the other side of the lake where KLA fighters are known to operate.


http://www.independent.co.uk/

There is no genocide committed by Serb forces in Kosovo.

The NATO leaders will pay for their crimes against humanity following the unlawful killing of civilians in Yugoslavia and
Kosovo.

4 those who r AGAINST THAT SAVAGE WAR,
go to that site
http://www.nato-warcrimes.gr
and sign to make a difference !

It's incredible, Daniela, your posting about the abuse of the freedom in USA, the country who WAS 4 everybody the simbol of HOPE & FREEDOM.
Really, the "world as we know it" is ending !
WHEN THERE'S NO FREEDOM, NOTHING ELSE CAN BE !!!

THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE

Number 47, May 30, 1999

No, No, Kosovo! No, No, Kosovo!

by L. Neil Smith

lneil@ezlink.com

Exclusive to The Libertarian Enterprise

You know, it's damned hard to write about
Bill Clinton.

(I was about to say "a guy like Bill
Clinton" when I realized that the last guy even
remotely
like

Bill Clinton had his elderly mother's belly
cut open with a sword so he could see where
he'd come from.)

It's also damned hard to shift from
fiction, which I've been writing the past several
months, to what

we laughingly call reality. At least I
believe it's reality -- I think I'd hallucinate
better than
this.

But I digress.

I like to temper the outrage that seems to
drive so much of my writing (it took the Littleton

shootings -- or rather the political
vultures feeding off of them -- to get me started
doing
columns again)

with a little absurdity now and again, but
Caligulito (as I've come to think of him) always
seems to be just

a little bit ahead of me in that
department.

Take this business in the Balkans. Over the
decades, to this baby boomer, Yugoslavia
has meant

Marshall Tito giving the finger to the
Soviets, Montenegro as the birthplace of Nero
Wolfe
as well as the

setting for one of his most interesting
adventures, and finally, the most ridiculous
automobile the world

has seen since the three-wheeled
Messerschmidt.

Like everybody else, I've been pretty
unhappy that people in the remnants of Tito's
jackbooted

stomping grounds haven't been able to get
along with each other. I knew they'd been
pretty artificially

jammed together at the end of World War I,
an arrangement almost Clintonian in its
arrogant stupidity. I

knew that they'd been held together by the
brute force of an almost Clintonian police
state until recently.

I'd watched the way Czechoslovakia quite
peaceably became Czecho and Slovakia and
wished the

Newgoslavians could do it the same way.

But no.

Before you knew it, while the rest of the
world was celebrating what looked like it was
gonna be

freedom by beheading countless thousands of
statues of Lenin, the former people of
that nation began

beating up, raping, pillaging, and killing
each other as if they'd fallen years behind
schedule during the

Tito regime and had to catch up.

It was ugly, it was stupid, and it was
regrettable. But you know what? Never once did I
imagine

that it had anything to do with me. Or with
you, for that matter. As a (now what's the right
expression,

here?) student of Ayn Rand, I've always
rejected the bald, unsupported assertion that I'm
my brother's

keeper. But even if I didn't, I think the
brother that I'd most likely keep would live at
least
as close as

Nebraska.

Or New Jersey.

But this was about Bill Clinton, wasn't it?
Look what we have in the absurdity
department: the

infamous Vietnam era draft-dodger and
self-described loather of all things military,
conducting what's

beginning to look like Johnson's late,
lamented war in southeast Asia by dropping
ordnance on the

Serbians in quantities rivaling those
dropped on Hanoi during the bad old days of Barry
Sadler and

Joanie Phoney -- and at the same time
imitating Nixon by secretly sending in ground
troops while

publicly proclaiming he has no intention of
doing so.

Remind me to call up the Fort Collins Peace
Center tomorrow and ask them where the
hell they are

with their protest songs and picket signs.

Now what are we to make of all this?
Clearly, much of it can be attributed to the
now-famous "wag

the dog" phenomenon. If you keep an eye on
Matt Drudge's wonderful website, you know
that China,

Inc.'s bagman Johnny Chung was never
missing, he was just being hidden out in
something like the

witness protection program and is now
eagerly ready (bulletproof vest and all) to
vocalize like the

proverbial dinosaur descendent. Combine
that with the steadily increasing number of
allegations of rape

against a pitiful excuse for a man whose
greatest crime (in the view of this child of the
60s) is giving oral

sex a bad name.

What does it add up to?

Kosovo.

I have a simpler (and sicker) explanation.
Clinton, not very deep inside, is a cowardly
pissant

desperate to prove he's a mensch by
throwing away other people's lives the same way
liberals try to

prove they're charitable (they're not, you
know; they're the meanest, tightest-fisted misers
on the planet,

and its worst racists, to boot) by spending
other people's money. This whole thing is
nothing more than a

disgusting little prick trying to buddy up
to his classmates in PE.

Of course he's carried overcompensation to
a level that can hardly be called sane.
That's why my

"exit strategy" for the Balkans (right
after we crazy-glue Madeline Albright to Janet
Reno
and let them

frighten each other to death) is to send
the men in the white coats to 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue and let

Algore take over for the rest of the term.

Stupid is better than crazy.

L. Neil Smith is the award-winning author
of The Probability Broach, Pallas, Henry
Martyn, Bretta Martyn, The

Mitzvah (forthcoming, with Aaron Zelman),
and 15 other novels. Order them from
Amazon.com via


http://www
.webleyweb.com/lneil/ or from
Laissez Faire Books at

http://www.la
issezfaire.org/ or ju