Serbs Made Prisoners Fight Each Other -Refugees
08:00 a.m. May 23, 1999 Eastern

By Elaine Monaghan

KUKES, Albania (Reuters) - Disorientated, thin and
traumatized, the biggest group of ethnic Albanian men to emerge
from Kosovo since March told consistent stories Sunday of
systematic beatings during weeks of Serb captivity.

Their stories could not be independently confirmed but
several men interviewed separately described daily
beatings to the hands, kidneys or knees in a prison at Smrekonica
where they were held as Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) suspects.

When they crossed the border Saturday, none of the men was
wearing the uniform of the KLA which the forces of Yugoslav
President Slobodan Milosevic are trying to crush.

They said anything from five to 20 men were fainting or seriously
injured each day at the prison. All the men interviewed said many
hundreds more were still being held when they left.

Fitim Syla, 24, said he was so weak he could not lift even five
kilograms. ``I was lucky. I was beaten only on the hands, 70 to
100 times. Others were forced to fight with each other. They gave
them broomsticks and told them to fight,'' he said.

The UNHCR refugee agency's spokesman Rupert Colville said
the men had been seized from a big group of refugees which set off
from the town of Mitrovica in central Kosovo in mid-April.

He said there was no evidence that they were members of the
KLA but was anxious that they should not join their ranks.

Many of the men who gathered around aid agency tents on the
central square of Kukes to be registered, like more than 430,000
other refugees in Albania, looked very weak or emaciated.

KLA soldiers and doctors were milling around but there was no
clear sign of the ex-prisoners being recruited.

They were at a loss to explain why the Serb police had freed them but
generally suspected it was meant as a sign that the men of fighting
age who have been largely absent from refugee groups crossing into
Albania and Macedonia had not all been killed.

Several men told Reuters that some of their fellow inmates had
been forced to fight each other with broomsticks, deprived of food
for days at a time and held in rooms where they could only sit
down by hugging their knees close to their chests.

``Physically this is the worst group we've seen by quite a long way,''
Colville said of the 583 men who crossed the border late Saturday
saying they had been freed from prison.

``We found quite a few broken bones and one man had a broken
foot. They are very traumatized and spaced out,'' he added.

Colville said some of the men had stomach problems when they
were given a meal late Saturday.

The men said they had been fed bread or eggs most days but got
no food for up to three days for periods in their captivity.

A group of men in their 20s, 30s and 40s told Reuters they had
been separated from their families fleeing Kosovo in a convoy, held
first in private buildings and later in prison.

Based on their registration numbers and by adding up how
many groups were let out of their cells for food, their estimates for
the population of the prison ranged from 2,000 to 3,000.

A Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) official
told Reuters the injuries they had seen were some days old but
confirmed there was medical evidence of the beatings they
described.

The story told by Hajrullah Smakiqi, 41, was typical.

He said he had been expelled on April 3 from his home at Mitrovica
and told to go to Albania.

After walking 75 km (47 miles), he reached a village called Gremnik
where police came and took away men of fighting age first to a
private building, then to a school and eventually to Smrekonica.

``For 72 hours we had nothing to eat. They beat us on the kidneys,
knees, head and toes, with broomsticks and axe handles.

``They separated out the fathers and sons and gave them wooden
sticks and told them to fight,'' he said.

``When they got tired the fathers were released and the sons were
kept and beaten,'' he added.

``One day a young man was taken out of the cell. We knew he was
dead, he was so badly beaten,'' he said.

'There is no genocide committed by Serb forces.'- by Nick. May 23rd.

Henceforth to be referred to as:
NaziCK.

Zoja

The Washington Post Editorials

Splits in Serbia
Sunday, May 23, 1999; Page B06=20

TO THOSE WHO question its contention that the air war is working in
Kosovo, the Clinton administration now claims to detect serious and
growing fractures in Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic's hold on his army
and his people. Drawing on intelligence sources in parts of Serbia and
Kosovo not normally open to Western journalists, the administration cites
reports of civic unrest, popular demonstrations, disaffection at the middle
level of the officer corps, a new boldness among the political opposition
and the onset of a change in the public mood from a readiness to rally
around the Milosevic leadership to a grim concentration on economic
survival amid the harshness of daily life. By the official political
calculus, it
adds up to a vindication of the Clinton strategy to intensify the air war
rather than add the component of a ground attack as well. The recent spell
of good weather is cited as a break permitting a surge in daily sorties.

Would that the air war finally was generating the sort of pressure to induce
Serbia to conclude that in pressing its aggression it has bitten off more=
than
it can chew. The notion that air sorties, now counted in the tens of
thousands, could compel an early or an eventual change of heart by
Slobodan Milosevic is an attractive one even to skeptics. We have favored
the air war from the start. But frankly we find that at this point the=
evidence
presented for its likely success seems frail and tenuous as a basis for
sticking just with the air campaign.

NATO and the Serbs, while both trying to project high measures of unity
and steadfastness for themselves, are also both trying to play on real or
imagined shortfalls in the other's public support. NATO has a keen eye out
for indications of social and economic tension within embattled Serbia. The
Serbs are looking no less eagerly for meaningful splits in the 19-nation
NATO alliance. In this sense, each is conducting its own propaganda for
the purpose of breaking the other's will. NATO takes comfort from its
belief that Slobodan Milosevic supposedly did not think NATO would
generate a bombing campaign for the sake of the refugees, and did not
think the alliance would stay together as it has once the campaign had
begun and intensified.

The reported discovery of splits in the other side's key constituencies and
the reliance on those splits to avoid hard choices has a long history in=
war.
That is what troubles us about the administration's seeming confidence in=
its
air war policy now. It may be so that Mr. Milosevic has begun to
acknowledge casualties, but the losses do not seem to be of numerical
significance so far. The Serbian strongman has made a fuzzy embrace of
NATO's principles for a political settlement in an evident exploration of a
way out of the war. Still, there is no sign that he intends to accept the
alliance's key condition for a settlement, the insistence on a NATO core in
the international force that would enter Kosovo to ensure the safe return
and homecoming of all the Kosovar refugees. Until the Serbs meet this
entirely reasonable and necessary condition, and not only this condition, a
readiness to take the war to a ground campaign will remain a requirement
of an effective war policy.=20

=A9 Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company

---

Sorry, guys, this is actually news a week old already (I heard it over the phone from reliable sources then), but at the time was not complete enough for publication yet.

Emina

ATHENS, May 23 (AFP) - Two unidentified gunmen fired shots at
>the offices here of the Dutch insurance company Nationale
>Nederlanden overnight, but no one was injured, police said Sunday.
> The attack, which investigators suspect is linked to the Kosovo
>conflict, was claimed in a telephone call to a private radio station
>by a Greek group that identified itself as Revolutionary
>Organization-Red Line.
> The shots, fired from a motorcycle, damaged windows in the
>building on a large avenue which connects the Greek capital with the
>port of Piraeus.
> Revolutionary Organization-Red Line first made headlines in June
>1998 when it carried out a similar attack against the seat of
>Athens' chief public prosecutor's office. It claimed responsibility
>for four more recent attacks in Athens that only caused minor
>damage.
> In February shots were fired at the Athens Stock Exchange and
>the seat of the Orthodox Church. On April 24, offices of the United
>Nations were targeted and on May 9 an American Express branch office
>was also hit.
> Attacks against western interests over NATO's air campaign
>against Serbia, a longstanding Greek ally, have increased in the
>past weeks.
>

---

Speaking of terrorists......

Zoja

Saved this one especially for NazICK.

---

THE TORONTO SUN, Sunday, May 23, 1999

Israeli voters are ready to give peace a chance

By ERIC MARGOLIS
Contributing Foreign Editor

NEW YORK -- The landslide victory by Labour party leader Ehud Barak in
last Monday's elections showed just how fed up Israelis were with
slippery Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the little ayatollahs of
the religious far right who supported him.

Barak's welcome victory also dramatically underlined public desire for
revival of the Oslo peace process with the Palestinians, which Netanyahu
had blocked or sabotaged over the past three years. Predictions that
normally fractious Israelis would deliver a muddled electoral message
were wrong. Israeli voters thundered they'd had enough of Netanyahu's
politics of fear, which played to the basest instincts and most extreme
elements of Israeli society.

Netanyahu, a Bill Clinton clone, is gone. In place of the plastic
politician, is a real man, Israel's most decorated soldier, Gen. Ehud
Barak, something of an old-style Labour party leader: an untelegenic,
piano-playing, highly cultured kibbutznik, as comfortable in a Viennese
cafe as in the turret of a tank.

Barak's election, and rout of Netanyahu's Likud party, ignited hope
across the Mideast that the moribund peace process would be revived. The
new Israeli leader vowed as much, though he cautioned there would be no
compromise on sole Israeli rule over Jerusalem, no return to 1967
borders, no major reduction of settlements, and no substantial Arab
military force on the West Bank.

Shimon Peres, Labour's former leader, and architect of the Oslo peace
accords, dramatically summed up the situation facing Israel: "There are
five million Jews and four million Arabs between the Mediterranean and
the Jordan River. Our choice is either Oslo or Kosovo."

Peres meant that if Israel didn't manage to conclude a fair deal with
the Palestinians there would be more violence and a resumption of the
intifada, leading to calls within Israel for the mass expulsion of
Palestinians into the deserts of neighbouring Jordan.

Similarities

This is unlikely to happen, but one wonders how much events in Kosovo
subconsciously or consciously affected the thinking of Israeli voters.
The expulsion of 800,000 or more Albanians from their ancestral homes by
Serbs, who claimed Kosovo was given to them by God and was their holy
ground, bears some similarities to events in Palestine during 1947-49.

About 750,000 Palestinians, mostly farmers and villagers, were expelled
from their homes by Jewish regular and irregular forces, and driven to
flight. Israeli extremists staged a few, selective massacres to incite
fear and accelerate the exodus. Claims that Palestinians fled on orders
of Arab governments were simply propaganda designed to mask Israeli
ethnic cleansing, as the late Israeli historian, Simcha Flapan,
demonstrated in his authoritative book, The Birth of Israel.

Five Arab states sent modest forces to stop the expulsion of the
Palestinians and, if possible, defeat the new Israeli state, or at least
force it back to the original borders mandated by the UN. But the Arab
"armies" proved even more inept and ineffective than the NATO coalition
has in Kosovo, devoting more effort to bickering and intriguing among
themselves than fighting. Israel emerged triumphant; the uprooted
Palestinians became permanent refugees who roil the Mideast to this day.

Watching Kosovo, many Israelis must have uncomfortably recalled the dark
secret that still haunts their nation's creation, and may have gained
better understanding of the simmering rage and anguish felt by the
ever-homeless Palestinians.

Tellingly, Israel's government and individual Israelis rushed to aid the
pitiful Kosovar refugees. It was not just the terrifying deja vu of Jews
being herded off to Nazi death camps. One senses some Israelis were also
trying to make up for the wrongs of their own past by aiding the
"Palestinians of the Balkans."

While Israel opened its heart to the Kosovars, and Jewish groups across
the U.S. demanded the weak-kneed Clinton take effective military action
to stop Serb crimes, the Muslim world, ever ready to denounce Israel for
persecuting fellow Muslims, sat back and did absolutely nothing to help
the persecuted, mostly Muslim Kosovars. One longed to see Israel's
Defence Forces go after Slobodan Milosevic and his gangs of ethnic
murderers.

The horror of Kosovo, and Shimon Peres' warning, should encourage
Barak's new government and the PLO to resume serious movement toward a
final peace. Syria has openly signalled it is ready to talk to Barak,
and let Israel out of the bloody quagmire in southern Lebanon. The
Israeli public is ready, so are most of the Arabs - and even Iran's new,
moderate government. The alternative is escalation of the Mideast's
nuclear, chemical and biological arms race.

Politicians start most wars; soldiers end them. Gen. Barak now has a
golden moment to seize the diplomatic initiative and become an Israeli
de Gaulle by having the courage to press his people into the worrisome,
distasteful, but absolutely essential acceptance of a viable Palestinian
state.

Pray this window of opportunity is not slammed shut by the Arab or
Jewish extremists who would create another Kosovo.

Refugees Discuss 'Human Shields'

By Greg Myre
Associated Press Writer
Sunday, May 23, 1999; 9:02 p.m. EDT

KUKES, Albania (AP) -- A refugee Sunday told how he and 50 other
Kosovo Albanians were handcuffed together and forced to march in front
of Yugoslav troops and vehicles to protect against NATO attacks.=20

As the prisoners approached a guerrilla position, the Kosovo Liberation
Army rebels recognized the hostages as fellow Albanians and retreated
instead of fighting, according to the refugee, Zehnullah Mangjolli.=20

NATO has made repeated allegations of Kosovo civilians being used as
human shields by the Serbs, but witnesses have been hard to come by.
Yugoslavia says the human shield allegations are ``crazy.''=20

However, a few Kosovo men reaching the Albanian border this weekend
have recounted tales of their role as human shields.=20

They were among 2,000 fighting-age men pulled from refugee convoys
over the past few weeks and held in prison near the northern Kosovo
town Koskova Mitrovica.=20

Without explaining, the Serbs began releasing the men Saturday, and more
than 1,000 arrived at the Albanian border over the weekend, including
400 Sunday, according to Albanian officials.=20

Mangjolli, 46, said he was picked out of a refugee column April 25th
along with other men in Skenderaj village, not far from Koskova
Mitrovica.=20

``The Serbs gave us nothing to eat and kept swearing at us and swearing
at (President) Clinton,'' Mangjolli said.=20

The next day, the Serbs piled 50 hostages into vehicles, drove them to a
place near the village and forced them to become human shields, he said.=20

``If one of you is killed, all of you will be killed,'' a Serb commander=
told
the men, according to Mangjolli.=20

The Serbs then pointed guns at their necks and forced them to burn
homes in the area, he said.=20

Mangjolli said the men received only bread and water, and occasionally
eggs. Many have described similar stories of being beaten with wooden
sticks on the hands, arms and back.=20

Eventually they were put in prison and then released.=20

=A9 Copyright 1999 The Associated Press

Serb Official Explains Purge=20

By Candice Hughes
Associated Press Writer
Sunday, May 23, 1999; 7:11 p.m. EDT

KOSOVSKA MITROVICA, Yugoslavia (AP) -- When the Serb head
of the regional government was asked what police did to protect citizens
two months ago in Kosovo, his answer was simple: They ran tens of
thousands of ethnic Albanians out of town.=20

The admission didn't reveal any dark secret. Many fled to neighboring
countries, where they described the purge, one of hundreds that took
place in Kosovo.=20

But it was stunning to hear the tale from the other side -- where Serb
authorities often do their best to keep things murky.=20

The Yugoslav government has blamed the exodus of nearly 800,000 of
Kosovo's ethnic Albanians on NATO bombs. The refugees blame Serb
police, soldiers and paramilitaries.=20

Zdravko Trajkovic, however, didn't deny. He justified. He tried to explain
what happened.=20

The moment of unscheduled frankness took place Sunday as a U.N. team
wrapped up its tour of Kosovo, the first by international observers since
NATO began bombing Yugoslavia in a bid to force it to the bargaining
table over the Yugoslav province.=20

Serb officials wanted to show Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N.
undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, what seemed like every
NATO bomb crater. But time after time, they barred him from places that
might shed light on what had happened to the province's ethnic Albanian
majority.=20

``We now have a pattern of denial which raises questions,'' Vieira de
Mello said Sunday after more requests were turned down for security
reasons.=20

The U.N. team, which had been promised full access, stopped briefly
Sunday in Kosovska Mitrovica, where 76 percent of the residents had
been ethnic Albanians.=20

Large sections of the city were burned and looted. The city center was a
virtual ghost town. Soldiers stood at street corners. Virtually no civilians
were in sight.=20

When the violence broke out, Vieira de Mello asked Trajkovic, what had
police done to protect the city's citizens?=20

Fumbling for an answer, Trajkovic said the rebel Kosovo Liberation
Army stepped up its activity when NATO began bombing. Serb police
responded by clearing out ethnic Albanians because KLA fighters might
take up positions in their homes and businesses, he said. The KLA has
been fighting for Kosovo's independence.=20

``The authorities prevented (the KLA) from doing what they intended to
do and saved the citizens from terror as much as possible,'' Trajkovic
said.=20

In all, police cleared out 30,000 of the city's roughly 56,000 ethnic
Albanian residents, he said. But the goods from their shops, he assured
the U.N. team, had been stored so their owners could someday reclaim
them.=20

``After NATO, terrorist activity increased,'' he explained through a
translator. ``It is normal that the authorities are called on to prevent all
activity aimed at disrupting the state order.''=20

Trajkovic claimed 10,000 ethnic Albanians had come back and were
being ``registered'' with authorities. More would have returned, but they
feared NATO bombs, he said.=20

After all, he said, standing amid the ruins, Kosovska Mitrovica is a city
``where people of mixed ethnicity lived in peace.''=20

=A9 Copyright 1999 The Associated Press

MORE ADYGEIS FROM KOSOVA ARRIVE IN NORTH CAUCASUS. A group of
53 ethnic Adygeis, whose ancestors were forcibly resettled
first to Ottoman Turkey and then to Kosova in the late 19th
century, arrived in Maikop on 23 May, Russian agencies
reported. A contingent of Adygeis evacuated earlier told "Die
Presse" on 17 May that they are being subjected to
discrimination in their ancestral homeland, that housing
built especially for them has been occupied by others, and
that they are unable to find work. They also expressed alarm
at being unable to make telephone contact with other Adygeis
who had remained in Kosova in the village of Donji Stanovci.
LF

Emina

Zpka-'Zoja' is studying Yugoslav Law now!
Good for you girl.

And

©Human Rights Watch
reported : we are still working closely with the KLA (UCK) and their
gangs for the heroin smuggling
operations. Also, our main source of donations is the money distributed
by their (KLA) operations.

We also need to state that, working for the "AID organisations" is one
of the most profitable bussineses
one can wish to operate.

ps. ask Bob Geldof for the references

According to the latest information, during NATO attacks on prison
facilities in Istok area (Kosovo) few days ago, about 100 people were
killed and more than 200 were wounded.

Monday May 24 3:51 PM ET

UN Team Inspects Kosovo Conditions
Full Coverage
NATO - Serbia War


By CANDICE HUGHES Associated Press Writer

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP) - NATO pounded power plants and airfields Monday, saying there were signs Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic was ``cracking'' after two months of airstrikes. A U.N. team, meanwhile, found the humanitarian situation worse than expected in Kosovo.

Visits to more than seven Kosovo towns over three days showed conditions in the province to be ``a lot worse than we feared,'' said Sergio de Mello, head of the U.N. fact-finding mission.

Although mission members were unable to visit all the places they wanted, what they heard and saw was enough for a ``picture of what went on. Everything indicates that there is an attempt to displace, ethnically cleanse Kosovo,'' he said, calling the scale of the crisis ``gigantic.''

Aid workers see possible 'final push' to move out ethnic Albanians

A new wave of ethnic Albanian refugees enters Macedonia from Kosovo

May 24, 1999
Web posted at: 10:53 a.m. EDT (1453 GMT)

BLACE, Macedonia (CNN) -- Aid officials said Monday the latest wave of refugees entering Macedonia from Kosovo may represent a final effort by Serb forces to rid the Serb province of all its ethnic Albanian residents.

"We've seen over the past days that cities like Pristina and Urosevac are completely being emptied," said Astrid Van Genderen Stort, a field officer representing the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. "Whether it is the final push, I don't know, but there are not that many people left."

Monday's arrivals were expected to push the refugee total since Friday to more than 20,000. The massive influx prompted Macedonian officials, concerned about upsetting the delicate ethnic balance in their own country, to try to transfer newly arrived Kosovars directly to Albania.

UNHCR officials objected to Macedonia's attempt to let in only those ethnic Albanians who signed an agreement to go to Albania.

U.N. envoy Dennis McNamara came to the border crossing late Sunday to negotiate a settlement with Macedonian officials.

He later said it was the third time he had rushed to the border "in the middle of the night" to stop Macedonian officials from transporting ethnic Albanians out of the country.

Many of the refugees spent the rainy night under plastic sheeting waiting for Macedonia to allow them in.

Britain sends war crimes investigator to Albania
Thousands of refugees also flooded into Albania over the weekend -- including several hundred ethnic Albanian men believed dead by their families. The men, bewildered and often injured or sick, crossed the border in two waves Saturday and Sunday. The Serbs, they said, had released them from prison where they'd been held for nearly a month.

British Defense Secretary George Robertson said Monday the men's plight was reason enough for the continuation of NATO's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.

"The world could see on their gaunt faces the terror they had endured," he said.

Robertson said Prime Minister Tony Blair had asked Britain's war crimes coordinator, David Gowan, to go to Albania to interview the refugees.

He also warned that many more men may still be missing in Kosovo.

"We've had several hundred men cross the border from Kosovo," he said. "That could leave as many as 200,000 other men of military age who are missing -- 200,000 more tales of savage cruelty, 200,000 more families forced to suffer the pain of separation, 200,000 more reasons why we must see this through to the end."

Correspondents Tom Mintier and Martin Savidge contributed to this report.

http://headlines.yahoo.com/Full_Coverage/World/Kosovo/

UN mission finds evidence of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo
BELGRADE, May 24 (AFP) - The head of a UN mission to Kosovo confirmed Monday that the province's Albanian residents had been victims of ethnic cleansing, as key cities in Yugoslavia were blacked out after NATO hit power stations overnight.
More than 1,000 refugees from Kosovo, including hundreds of exhausted women and children and another group of prisoners released from Serbian jails, crossed into Albania at the Morina border post.

Returning from a three-day visit to Kosovo, UN Undersecretary for Humanitarian Affairs Sergio Vieira de Mello said his team had seen "enough evidence" to confirm there had been ethnic cleansing in the southern Serbian province.

"The answer is ... unfortunately affirmative," de Mello said when asked whether he saw evidence of the brutal Serb campaign to drive out or kill Kosovo's ethnic Albanians.

"In a word, it is pretty revolting," he said in the Montenegrin capital of Podgorica.

"I think we have seen enough evidence and heard fully sufficient testimonies to confirm that there has been an attempt to displace internally and externally a shocking number of civilians," de Mello told reporters.

The "destruction, burnt houses and a number of ghost towns and villages" confirmed testimony by refugees about what had happened in the province, he added.

The UN envoy's findings are to be presented soon to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan just as the big powers at the UN Security Council are seeking to agree on a resolution to endorse a peace proposal for Kosovo.

Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, the European Union's Kosovo envoy, and US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott were expected in Moscow Tuesday to resume talks with Russian leaders on the peace plan.

Russia's envoy to Yugoslavia, Viktor Chernomyrdin, announced he may travel to Belgrade on Thursday for talks with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

Chernomyrdin last met Milosevic on May 19 to press Belgrade to sign on to the peace outline drafted by the the Group of Eight (G8) club of industrial powers: Britain, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States.

The G8 framework calls for a withdrawal of Serb forces from Kosovo and a return of refugees, but remains vague on an international security force and the post-war administration of the province.

On the 61st night of air strikes, NATO planes destroyed a power station in Obrenovac and Lazarevac, near Belgrade, and hit facilities of the Serbian electricity authority EPS in Novi Sad, Kostolac and Nis.

The raids left many towns and cities without power, including parts of the capital Belgrade, EPS said.

Seven people were injured, two of them seriously, when NATO missiles hit an ethnic Albanian residential area of Urosevac in southern Kosovo after apparently missing their target, a metalwork factory, witnesses told AFP.

NATO began air strikes against Yugoslavia on March 24 to force Milosevic to end repression in Kosovo, where the ethnic Albanian majority had been seeking independence.

Almost a million ethnic Albanians -- more than half the population -- have now fled Kosovo, according to figures from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Most of the refugees who arrived in Albania Monday were from Drenica in the centre of Kosovo. They reported having been turned back several times by Yugoslav forces before reaching the Albanian border.

They also said they were beaten by armed Serb civilians who demanded money.

Almost 1,000 men freed from Kosovo's Mitrovica prison crossed into Albania at the weekend in poor health and saying they had been beaten, subjected to psychological torment and given hardly any food and only filthy drinking water.

More than 15,000 refugees arrived into Macedonia at the weekend, in the biggest influx in the past three weeks, swelling the number there to more than 232,000.

German Defence Minister Rudolf Scharping insisted Monday that air strikes were the right strategy, one day after Britain and the United States suggested that a ground offensive was still possible.

British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the BBC Sunday that NATO might have to intervene with ground troops and US President Bill Clinton also indicated he no longer ruled out other military options to end the conflict.

http://asia.yahoo.com/headlines/250599/world/927561900-90524160543.newsworld.html

Belgrade Turns Back a Bulgarian Aid Convoy

Brussels May 23,
Serb authorities have turned back a Bulgarian humanitarian mission which was headed for Kosova. According to NATO officials, the humanitarian assistance that came from Bulgaria was turned away at the border because the organization wanted to distribute the assistance themselves.

A few days earlier, the NATO spokesperson on humanitarian issues, Colonel Maltinti, declared that NATO headquarters has no control of the distribution of humanitarian assistance inside Kosova or Serbia.

Since the beginning of NATO's air campaign, there have been cases when international organizations (Greek and French) entered Kosova, but only up
til Prishtina. In the past week, Colonel Maltinti, reported that 13 convoys arrived to Prishtina while 12 others stopped in cities inside of Serbia. In another instance, an Italian aid convoy was confiscated by Serb forces in Montenegro.

Allied spokesperson, Jamie Shea, stated today that he has no information where this humanitarian assistance goes and indicated many organizations
want to assumethe distribution of the assistance themselves in order to insure the supplies goes to victims, especially to the thousands of displaced civilians inside Kosova who for two months have not received any help from international humanitarian organizations.