Pope Pleads for End to Kosovo Woes


By Frances D'emilio
Associated Press Writer Sunday, May 30, 1999; 2:49 p.m. EDT


ANCONA, Italy (AP) -- Pope John Paul II, journeying to Italy's coast on Sunday across the sea from the war and misery in Yugoslavia, pleaded for an end to a conflict he called ``a heavy defeat for humanity.''


An Italian air force helicopter flew John Paul to this port city on the Adriatic, whose waters have been crossed by thousands of Kosovo refugees in smugglers' boats and have lately become a dumping ground for NATO pilots' bombs.


``In Kosovo and in the Yugoslav Republic, unfortunately, oppression and violence continue relentlessly, with many victims and enormous environmental damage,'' the pope told 30,000 young people after celebrating Mass in a sports stadium in Ancona.


``Faced with the persistence of violence, we can't do without our trusting pleas for the populations of Kosovo and Yugoslavia, for too long victims of a situation that marks a heavy defeat for humanity,'' the pope said.


Renewing his plea for peace, the pope urged that ``dialogue, solidarity and love prevail over many forms of pride and lies.'' He lamented conflicts in other countries as well, including those in Africa.


The official reason for Sunday's one-day papal trip was the 1,000th anniversary of Ancona's cathedral.


Squinting in the sun, John Paul, who turned 79 this month, appeared weary but seemed buoyed by the cheers of the young.


During the Mass, two fishermen, barefoot and wearing yellow bandanas, brought the pope gifts of a basket of fresh fish and a replica of a wooden boat.


Many fisherman have been forced to temporarily abandon their work for fear of snagging unused bombs, discarded in the Adriatic by NATO pilots returning from airstrikes against Yugoslavia.


Farther north in the Adriatic, near Venice, a netted bomb exploded recently, wounding three fishermen.


NATO minesweepers are engaged in the slow work of plucking the bombs from the sea.


The sound of NATO planes taking off has become commonplace here since March 24 when the airstrikes began in an effort to force Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to accept a negotiated peace settlement for Kosovo and withdraw his forces from the province. Nearly 850,000 refugees have fled Kosovo since the fighting began.


Thousands of people identifying themselves as Kosovo refugees have crossed the Adriatic this week alone. About 800 reached the Puglia coast between Saturday evening and Sunday morning, Italian authorities said.


John Paul has used both prayer and diplomacy to try to foster peace. Shortly after the NATO raids began, he sent a Vatican diplomat to Belgrade and sent letters in an unsuccessful effort to get NATO and Milosevic to agree to a truce.


John Paul wrapped up his trip Sunday with a stop at an Ancona hospital, again turning his thoughts to war -- and its victims.


``This is the worst ill -- hatred and violence of man against his own brother. Fratricidal hate -- that is the first illness of the spirit that we must fight,'' he said.


© Copyright 1999 The Associated Press

To Afroditis.

If you are saying there is no genocide in Serbia/Kosova, then there is no bombing of Nato, either!

Zoja

THE NEW YORK TIMES

May 29, 1999

DJAKOVICA

Emptying a City of All but Bodies

By JOHN KIFNER

The Serbs began attacking Kosovo Liberation Army strongholds
on March 19, but their attack kicked into high gear on March
24, the night NATO began bombing Yugoslavia.

Djakovica was one of the Serbs' first major targets.

A look at a map explains the strategic significance of this city of 60,000,
which was populated almost entirely by Albanians. The city and its
surrounding chain of villages, stretching between Junik and
Prizren, lie in the shadow of the Accursed Mountains, a remote,
rugged range running along the border between Albania and Kosovo.

The Kosovo Liberation Army maintains its camps and staging
areas on the Albanian side of the mountains. A Western military
officer, sketching out a map, slashed a series of lines down the mountains
into the valleys around Djakovica, indicating rebel infiltration routes.
Clearly, he said, the Serbs want to empty the area of ethnic Albanians,
fortify and control it to block the rebels.

Those who survived it say they will never forget the focused fury of the
Serbian forces who attacked Djakovica in the hundreds hours after
the first NATO bombs fell.

"A group of six men with masks came, and they took the women
and children out of the houses, and they burned the houses," said
Mehdi Halilaj, a 27-year-old economist, recalling that first night. "The
first night they burned 50 or more shops and about 35 houses. They
were helped by the police."

"They took 11 men and killed them, and some they cut up their
bodies," he continued, speaking in English. "They left their bodies in
the street for everybody to see, and nobody dared take them away.
The city was very scared from Wednesday on."

A woman called Ardina, who asked that her family name not be
used, said: "The second night we saw their lights, cars, trucks, an
armored vehicle. They started shooting like I have never heard in my
life. I thought everyone was dead."

"We were lucky," she said, speaking in English. "All the houses
around us were burned and people killed. That night killed two
brothers were, a man about 40 burned in his house and my
sister-in-law with Down syndrome, they burned her in her house.
She is dead. There was a body on the street, nobody could touch
that body all day long."

As in many places, the Serbs were guided to the most affluent and
influential families, the people who helped give the Albanian
community its cohesion. It is not known whether this was on
instruction, or perhaps motivated by the greed, or grudges, of
individual attackers, but one effect may be to damage Albanian
prospects for rebuilding their communities.

"In this block, they burned a lot of houses," Ardina said. "They were
the best houses in town, the rich people," she said. "There was a
Serb from the city guiding them. He told them: 'Burn this house. Kill
this one.' Everyone in Djakovica knows him. They killed a large
number of intellectuals, especially doctors. They shot a prominent
surgeon, Dr. Izet Hima. They went for the rich people, to steal their
television sets or whatever they see, burn their houses and kill
them."

From the first days, the speed and scale of the Serbian campaign
were stunning, even by the violent standards of Balkan wars as
waves of paramilitary thugs, special policemen, regular soldiers and
armed Serbian civilians swept through region after region of
Kosovo, acting in concert.

The burning and killing in the center of Djakovica went on for three
weeks beginning in the narrow streets and small Ottoman-style
houses of the Old Town, and then moved on to the newer high-rise
buildings in the more modern section. "In the beginning they were
just burning at night," Ardina said. "But after a week they were
burning all day long, starting at 9 o'clock in the morning."

"There were selected homes burned in the beginning, after that it
was all the buildings," Dr. Flori Bakalli said, in English. "There
were special police, local police, paramilitaries, and some of them
civilians, armed. They were burning the houses and they started to
scream like a wolf -- 'woo, woo' -- and they shot people in the back.
Near my house there were five of them I saw myself."

Ethnic Albanians moved from house to house and apartment to
apartment, fleeing and moving in with relatives and friends, they said,
to stay ahead of the advancing Serbs. In the old town, where many
of the dwellings were built close together, Albanians broke holes
through the walls so they could run from one home to another to
escape if the Serbs knocked on the door.

Everybody, children included, slept fitfully in their clothes and shoes,
ready to run. Someone had to be always awake, peering through a
window or the peepholes of steel gates to see if the Serbs were
coming.

Hoxha, a dignified white-haired man, took a reporter's notebook to
sketch his family's compound and their futile attempts to elude
Serbian attackers as they killed and burned their way through the
neighborhood.

"We moved from one house to another and finally to my older
daughter Tringa's house," he said. "That night I saw an old man,
about 80, killed and burned and a 15-year-old boy as well. We
stayed there for four nights, and the fifth night the Serbs came."

"It was around 12 o'clock, and we didn't have any electricity, when
they came, about 30 people, paramilitary, V.J. and Serbs from
Djakovica who had been given uniforms and guns," Hoxha said,
using the initials by which the Yugoslav Army is known. "We were
sleeping. My son-in-law was watching through the hole in the steel
gate and came and told us to wake up."

They had parked a car sideways across the gate to block it, but the
Serbs pushed through with a heavier vehicle. Thinking that the
Serbs were looking only for men of military age, Hoxha and two
other men climbed out a second-story window, dropped onto a wall
and escaped.

He spent the next seven hours hiding in the narrow space between
two buildings, squeezed between the concrete walls, listening to
shouts and screams and gunshots.

In the morning he came back to the compound and found the bodies
of everyone who had been left behind, some of the bodies burned.
Later he said he had learned that the Serbs had first shot his
15-year-old daughter, Flaka, in front of her mother, then the older
daughter, Tringa. His wife pleaded with them not to kill the children,
but then they killed her. One of his granddaughters, Shihana, a
spunky girl of 6, ran away and tried to hide in a closet, but they killed
her there and set fire to the closet.

After he explained all this, he put his head in his hands and cried.

Next door, in the Caka family house, 20 people were hiding in the
basement, when the Serbian forces broke in. They shot 18 people in
the back of the head. A 10-year-old boy, Dren Caka, was somehow
only wounded in the left arm, and escaped by pretending to be dead,
and later gave his account to reporters at the medical tent set up at
the Morini border crossing. After the Serbs left, he said, he managed
to slip out a window, but he could not take his 2-year-old sister with
him and she was burned alive when the Serbs torched the house. It
was he who witnessed the killing of Hoxha's family.

Over the course of the assault, more than 100 boys -- presumably
regarded as potential Kosovo Liberation Army recruits -- were
captured, refugees said, and taken to a sports center. No one
knows what has happened to them.

In just seven days, March 30 to April 5, some 51,880 people were
herded on foot, according to records of the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees, from Djakovica to a tiny remote border
crossing in the mountains called Qafar-e-Prushit. The way looks like
a road on a map, but it really becomes just a muddy footpath up the
steep climb, which can be traveled only on foot because vehicles
would set off the mines the Serbs had planted. They were city
people in city shoes, and they pushed the sick and elderly along with
them in wheelbarrows.

As Djakovica suffered, other Serbs were at work nearby purging a
wide area they regarded as a rebel highway.

In a rare account by a Serb, a captured soldier described to NATO
interrogators how his infantry battalion was sent without explanation
to Pec.

On March 27, the soldier said, his commander gathered about 100
men outside an elementary school and outlined their mission:
expelling Albanians from their homes. The time had come, he said,
to drive the Albanians out of Serbia, according to an American
official familiar with the account.

The troops were to move through the city house by house, he said,
ordering residents to dress in a few minutes, pack one small bag
and leave in the direction of Decani, a city to the south. The soldiers
looted jewelry, torched homes. At day's end, many were driving new
cars.

An artillery and armoured unit deployed to the nearby village of
Ljubenic used rougher tactics. The soldier said a friend in the unit
had told him they had killed 80 men while expelling the women,
children and elderly.

In another of the region's villages, Bela Crkva (Bellacrkva in
Albanian), on March 25, soldiers and special policemen torched the
homes and farm buildings and killed at least 62 people, most of
them gunned down with automatic weapons in a stream bend.

"They just started shooting," Zheniqi, a survivor, said in an interview.
"The dead bodies behind me pushed me over a cliff and into the
stream. I was lucky because all the dead bodies fell on top of me."

It was one of a series of mass killings over the next few days along
a seven-mile stretch of villages in the rolling hills, including Celina,
Pirane, Krush-e-Vogel (called Mala Krusa in Serbian) and
Krush-e-Mahde (Velika Krusa), where Bekim Duraku remembered,
life was so "beautiful, if someone offered to take me to the United
States, I wouldn't have gone."

On March 26, the third day of the NATO bombing, the idyllic life
ended in one of the best-documented of the mass killings, including
an amateur videotape of the bodies. Serbian forces stormed
through the village shooting down people in several areas, burning
some bodies, digging a mass grave with a backhoe for others and
leaving some lying in piles on the ground.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

May 29, 1999

VILLAGES

Expelling Refugees for a Relief Crisis

By JOHN KIFNER

The violent emptying of the Djakovica region had a specific
military purpose: cutting off the Kosovo Liberation Army supply
lines. The Serbs followed it up by planting more mines,
strengthening their forces along the border and mounting raids into
Albania.

But in a long stretch of villages, towns and cities across Kosovo --
places either close to the border or on main transportation routes --
there were similar, if less intensely concentrated, outbursts of killing
and burning in those same days with another aim: driving out the
majority Albanian population.

How it worked is readily discerned by comparing the refugee figures kept at
the Albanian, Macedonian and Montenegrin borders with a map of
Kosovo. What the comparison shows is how areas close to the
border were cleared first, often by wild bursts of killings that served as
an example. This cleared transportation routes that facilitated
the hounding out of people from other villages, who gathered in the main
town of a region, and from the cities.

Sweeping his hands over a map in
broad arcs across the major roadways, Fron Nazi, an
Albanian-American scholar heading up a major human rights study
and in touch with both refugees and the rebels, demonstrated how
the Serbian strategy was apparent: first to empty the population
centers and control that scorched earth, then to isolate the rebel
fighters in the forests where they could be contained, squeezed and
even starved out.

Forcing the refugees over the borders, NATO intelligence experts
believe, served another purpose: overwhelming NATO troops
stationed in Macedonia with an unmanageable relief crisis,
calculating that the task of feeding, housing and caring for hundreds
of thousands of refugees would consume the alliance's energies
and divert it from preparing a military campaign.

"It was the first use of a weapon like this in modern warfare," a
NATO intelligence officer said. "It was like sending the cattle against
the Indians."

The refugees accounts in their thousands bear a striking sameness
as they tell of Serbian gunmen bursting into their homes, threatening
to kill if the Albanians do not give up jewelry, of seeing relatives or
neighbors killed. Almost every Albanian interviewed begins by telling
the exact time the Serbs arrived. But after days of hiding or plodding
along in refugee columns, they often could not remember what day
it was.

In many accounts, it is possible to discern a division of labor among
the Serbian attackers.

Typically the Yugoslav Army, usually the Pristina Corps of the Third
Army, surrounded an area, shelling it with tanks, artillery or or
Katyusha rockets. Then the police, local Serbs who were
sometimes reservists, and the paramilitaries moved in for the
close-in dirty work, going block by block, house by house, pounding
on doors, demanding money, and often shooting people on the spot.

After the door-to-door terror, the military moved in to herd the people
out, either on foot or tractor, or sometimes on trains and buses, the
refugee accounts agree.

The Pristina Corps, in close conjunction with the blue-uniformed
Serbian Interior Ministry troops, cleared transit routes. As the flow
of refugees accelerated, regular soldiers in green camouflage were
deployed at key intersections to control movement.

By all accounts, it was a tightly ordered, coordinated campaign,
from the artillery that shelled villages, to the masked gunmen
who killed, looted and spread terror, to the armored cars and lines of
troops who chased people hiding in the woods to corral them in larger
central towns for eventual expulsion. In some cases, human
rights workers interviewing refugees say, different groups of
gunmen were distinguished by different colored armbands or
headbands.

Even the wild-appearing masked irregulars -- Arkan's Tigers, the
White Eagles and others -- were under tight control, NATO experts
said, and reported to the intelligence arm of the Serbian
Interior Ministry.

"They were in there with Belgrade's blessing," a NATO intelligence
official said. "What they would be allowed to do is up to the local
commander."

The level of violence varied widely, depending on the whim of the
local Serbian official in charge, or even individual gunmen. An
international official visited a woman of about 50 in a hospital with
both of her nipples hacked off.

"All she wanted was to tell her brother in Srbica what happened," he
said, referring to a town in north-central Kosovo. "How could I tell
her Srbica doesn't exist any more."

Some people were clearly targeted, particularly men age 15 to 50,
suspected or potential rebel fighters, and those who worked for or
rented space to the observer teams from the Office of Cooperation
and Security in Europe. One key political activist who was a bridge
between Kosovar factions, Fehmi Agani, was pulled off a train
outside Pristina by the Serbian police and killed. There were reports
by human rights groups that doctors had been singled out.

Evidence on the incidence of rape is less complete. President
Clinton and other Western leaders often charge that there has been
organized rape. But while it is clear that there have been rapes,
accounts that are available do not resolve whether they were
systematic. Rape was not mentioned in the indictment by the war
crimes tribunal.

But for all the signs of a logic behind the purge of Kosovo, many of
the individual episodes -- including the gunning down of women and
children -- seem inexplicable in military terms, except that the very
unpredictability of the savagery added the powerful fear that drove
the exodus.

"That's what so terrifying -- there are no rules," said an official in
close touch with the international war crimes investigation in The
Hague. "It's so random. One set of people might be spared, and the
people next door do the same thing and are all killed. There was a
man who gave the police 10 marks and they let go, and another who
gave them 250, so they thought he must have more and killed him."

By the time, three weeks into the campaign, that the Serbs came to
drive the ethnic Albanians out of the north-central city of Mitrovica,
said Jacques Franquin, a United Nations official, it was enough for
them to gun down an old woman and a teen-age girl in one
neighborhood for everyone around to quietly board buses and be
directed out of town through traffic control points.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

May 29, 1999

PRISTINA

'In Every House They Broke the Doors'

By JOHN KIFNER

In Pristina, the knock on Bajram Kelmendi's door came at 1
o'clock in the morning of the night NATO started bombing.

"We will kill you if you do not open in five seconds," the Serbian
police shouted, his wife, Nedima, recalled. Five uniformed
policemen burst in, forced the family to lie on the floor and
demanded money, one warning, "If you are lying, I will kill the little
children."

They took away Kelmendi, a well-known human rights lawyer, and
his two sons, age 30 and 16. They told the elder son, Kastriut, "Kiss
your wife and two children because this will be the last time you see
them," the elder Mrs. Kelmendi said.

The family found the three bodies by the side of the road two days later.

Brutal, too, but Pristina was different.

In the Djakovica region, the Serbs had a clear military goal: to cut off the
Kosovo Liberation Army. But Pristina, like the other cities the Serbs
emptied, was not a rebel stronghold. Indeed, in previous outbursts of
fighting in Kosovo, villagers often went to stay in the city until things
calmed down.

Born in the Drenica valley, the Kosovo Liberation Army was largely a
rural movement and tied in with the traditional clans, although it did
begin to pick up urban sympathy with a Serbian crackdown in March
1998.

Within the divided Kosovar society, Pristina was the base of the
nonviolent leader Ibrahim Rugova and his Democratic League of
Kosovo, whose tactics won the praise of Western leaders -- mainly
because they did not cause trouble. Among the city's educated elite,
there had been suspicion and criticism of the Kosovo Liberation
Army.

In Pristina, the Serbian aim appears to have been depopulation.

And from some of the targets chosen, like Kelmendi and Agani, the
activist pulled from a train and killed, it also seems clear that the
Serbs set out to destroy the Albanian political class and its
institutions.

The offices of Rugova's Democratic League was burned down on
March 24, and a guard was shot and killed by the police at the
newspaper Koha Ditore, whose publisher, Veton Surroi, had been a
delegate at the talks in Rambouillet, France, early this year. The
next night, the warehouse of the largest Kosovar charity, the Mother
Teresa Society, was burned. On March 28, the house of Rexhep
Qosja, a prominent academic, head of the Albanian Democratic
Movement and another member of the Rambouillet delegation, was
torched.

The first few days of the NATO bombing were marked in Pristina
by nightly arson and bomb attacks on Albanian homes, shops and
businesses, refugees recall. Police cars raced through the night, amid
explosions and gunfire that terrified the Albanian residents.

Some people began fleeing, mostly middle-class residents who had
cars.

"At first, while the telephone was working, friends were calling and
telling us this house was burning, or they arrested this guy and so
on," said Ali Muriqi, 34, of the engineering faculty at Pristina
University. "They were talking about intellectuals. Then at 6:30 in the
evening, the electricity went off. Then the movement started, the
police going around with weapons." Muriqi fled Pristina by car on March
29.

On March 30, in a chilling display of force, the Serbs began
systematically emptying Pristina's neighborhoods -- Vranjevci,
Tashlixhe, Dardania, Dragodan -- marching the Albanians along
streets lined with gantlets of masked gunmen draped with
weaponry, refugees said.

By the tens of thousands -- in an operation that required extensive
advance logistical preparations -- they were herded into the city's
railroad station overnight. At dawn some were packed aboard trains
-- one refugee said he was among 28 people in a compartment
meant for eight -- bound for Macedonia. Others were loaded on
buses and even a refrigerator truck that normally transports sides of
beef and dumped near the Albanian border to leave the country on
foot.

"I walked out into the garden, and there were three people with black
masks and big guns," said Suzana Krusniqi, collapsing in tears as
she crossed the Albanian border with her elderly parents the next day.

"In every house they broke the doors," she said, speaking in English.
When we went out, everyone was in the street walking between
men with black masks and big guns."

The forced exodus of Pristina gathered momentum in April. When
the Serbs marched Ramadan Osmani and his family from their
home to the railroad station in early April, he said, it was so crowded
they had to wait 12 hours for a train to Macedonia, where they slept
in a field for six days before finding a space at the Bojane refugee
camp.

Some ethnic Albanians tried to stay in Pristina. Many lived a
cat-and-mouse existence after eluding the first wave of Serbian
looting and expulsions, hiding in other people's homes or fleeing to
nearby villages. Fearing discovery, they left always by back doors,
made little noise, lit candles only in rooms where heavy blankets
covered the windows, and sent old people out to buy food.

Hafiz Berisha and his family evaded being expelled from Pristina for
two months, hiding in five homes. But last Sunday, the 70-year-old
retired policeman was standing in line to buy bread when Serbian
policemen walked up and pulled his cousin and a neighbor, both
men under 30, out of the line and hustled them away. Berisha said
he had seen two people gunned down in front of him and 40 bodies
in a mass grave, but the sight of the helpless men being led away
was too much. "You can't even buy bread," he said.

He fled the next day.

Luljeta Jarina, 19, and her father, Ramiz, who had worked in the
personnel department of a mining company, were among those
who went into hiding. Once when she ventured into the garden
behind her home out of boredom, a Serbian sniper shot at her, she
recalled.

And each night, Serbian soldiers and policemen cruised the streets
of the city, firing their Kalashnikovs wildly into the air. Just this
Wednesday, the Serbs rounded up 18 men, including her father, at
gunpoint. All but her father and two others were taken away, to an
unknown fate, she said.

"We waited two months, hoping something would happen," she
said.

On Sunday, they found a Serb cruising the city in a bus -- a new
entrepreneur driving refugees to the border for 20 to 100 German
marks apiece, about $10 to $55 -- and fled their native land.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

May 29, 1999

How Yugoslav Military Planned and Mounted Kosovo's Ravaging

By MICHAEL R. GORDON and THOM SHANKER

The purge of Kosovo this spring was led by Yugoslav army
officers handpicked by President Slobodan Milosevic to
replace the internal security forces who had tried and failed
the previous summer to wipe out the Albanian rebels, NATO officials
say.

Allied officials now acknowledge that they missed signs that the
Yugoslav army was preparing a much more extensive operation in
Kosovo than they had attempted in 1998, one that would move well
beyond attacking Kosovo Liberation Army strongholds to cities and
towns that had no direct ties to the rebels.

The Interior Ministry's drive against the rebels last year was no
half-measure. Special policemen and soldiers drove as many as
400,000 ethnic Albanians from their homes in and around rebel
strongholds. Then they swept east to west across the province,
sifting through the hordes of refugees in search of the elusive rebel
fighters.

But NATO officials say the Serbs made a tactical error in that earlier
purge. They did not seal off the borders with Albania or Montenegro,
allowing the rebels to mingle with civilians and escape. The Kosovo
Liberation Army was battered, but not defeated, and NATO officials
say the Yugoslav army concluded that an even more brutal attack
would be needed to quell the rebellion.

The fighting continued sporadically into the fall, when the United
States brokered a cease-fire under which the Serbs agreed to pull
back many of their troops.

That agreement did not last long. Plainclothes intelligence
operatives from the Interior Ministry filtered back into the province as
the Kosovo Liberation Army renewed its attacks. Western nations
convened talks at a medieval castle in Rambouillet, France, in
hopes of forcing a permanent settlement.

NATO officials say they failed to appreciate that the Serbs were
girding for war while they talked of peace. In November, Milosevic
fired the chief of staff of the Yugoslav army, Gen. Momcilo Perisic,
who had made clear his distaste for ethnic cleansing.

He was replaced with Gen. Dragoljub Ojdanic, a career officer who
NATO officials say had close ties to Milosevic and had served
previously in Kosovo. A NATO intelligence official said this
appointment was ominous for another reason: reports that
Ojdanic's daughter had been raped by an Albanian when he was a
commander at the Yugoslav army base in Prizren in Kosovo.

Milosevic also replaced the overall commander of army forces in
southern Serbia, turning to a general whose wife is said by Western
officials to be related to the Serbian leader's wife, Mirjana Markovic.

That officer, Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic, had previously commanded
the main Serb army in Kosovo.

Even more sinister was the appearance in Kosovo during the winter
of the notorious paramilitary groups that had played such a large
part in the killing and purging of Bosnia.

There were Arkan's Tigers, the private army of the indicted war
criminal Zeljko Raznjatovic, a parliamentary deputy from Kosovo.
Also spotted were the White Eagles of Vojislav Seselj, the
pistol-waving law professor who is a Serbian deputy prime minister,
and a band known as Frenki's Boys, led by Franko "Frenki"
Simatovic.

Such units had previously been the strong arm of Serbian ethnic
cleansing in Bosnia and Croatia. In Kosovo, according to U.S.
officials, they were formally under Belgrade's command, reporting to
Serbia's intelligence agency.

The United States threatened to bomb the Serbs if they did not sign
a peace deal, which the Albanians had reluctantly accepted. In
February and March, Western diplomats monitoring the shaky
cease-fire saw the Serbs building up their forces. The question was
why.

Pavkovic's predecessor as Third Army commander offered a clue
early that winter, warning that his soldiers could look forward to a
"hot spring."

By this time, NATO officials say, Pavkovic and his colleagues had
worked out a new plan for attacking the Kosovo Liberation Army that
took account of the lessons from the failed attack last summer. The
Yugoslav army was in charge, with the Interior Ministry taking orders
from army officers.

This time, the army planned to seal Serbia's border with Albania so
rebel fighters could not escape. A torrent of refugees unleashed by
the ethnic cleansing would be pushed across the border with
Macedonia, tying down NATO troops there that were poised to
enforce any peace settlement. It was, NATO officials now say, a
"hammer and anvil" plan in which the army would drive the rebels
against the closed border and crush them.

NATO officials said they had no proof that Milosevic reviewed the
specifics of the operation. But one U.S. official monitoring the
situation said the military campaign "was signed off and approved at
the General Staff level, and then, obviously the final go-ahead would
have been given by President Milosevic, as head of state."

This assessment is based on the fact that as head of the Yugoslav
state, Milosevic was president of the Supreme Defense Council,
with ultimate responsibility for military operations.

At NATO headquarters, alliance diplomats signed off on a military
plan of their own to bomb the Serbs.

Both sides prepared to execute their plans in March.

The Serbs moved first. On March 19, the Yugoslav army attacked
key rebel strongholds and lines of communication on the periphery
of Kosovo, saying it was defending itself against new rebel
operations. The 1,300 Western observers pulled out of Kosovo the
next day.

Pavkovic made no secret of his intentions, warning publicly that his
troops were poised to take care of "internal enemy" if NATO went
through with its threats to bomb.

On March 23, Serbian security forces began setting fire to villages
that had never known rebel activity and -- even more telling -- began
expelling ethnic Albanians from cities, which had never been used
as bases by the rebels. NATO began bombing at nightfall. The war
was on. Within days, tens of thousands of refugees would be
streaming across three international borders.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

May 29, 1999

THE DISPLACED

A Family, Part of the Lucky Few, Makes It Out

By STEPHEN KINZER

GURPINAR, Turkey -- Twenty years ago, Ismail Bolukbasi
opened a restaurant in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, and it
quickly attracted a clientele as diverse as Kosovo itself.

Albanian intellectuals dined alongside Serbian police officers.
People whose ancestors were Turkish, as Bolukbasi's were, mixed
freely with Macedonians, Jews, Croats, Greeks, Slovenes -- anyone
who found their way through his portals. Cognac was the social
lubricant of choice.

Today, Bolukbasi is that faceless being called a refugee, part of the
human flood that has surged out of Kosovo in recent weeks. He has
lost his home, his restaurant, many of his friends and everything he
worked to build.

Now he finds himself responsible for a family of 23 people, including
small children and his 67-year-old mother. They are jammed into a
small apartment in a dreary concrete colony here, outside Istanbul.

Despite his misfortunes, Bolukbasi knows that he is lucky. He and
most of his relatives escaped the Balkan inferno. Thanks to help
from a Turkish friend, they have a place to live and food to eat.

"Life was beautiful in Kosovo until 1989," Bolukbasi said. "I wouldn't
trade a minute of that time with anyone in the world."

It was in 1989 that Slobodan Milosevic, now Yugoslavia's President,
began his climb to power with fiery promises to his Serbian brethren
in Kosovo. Soon afterward, Albanian-language schools in Kosovo
were closed, thousands of Kosovo Albanians were dismissed from
their jobs and replaced with Serbs, and a spiral of ethnic chauvinism
was set in motion that led to the savagery of the last two months.

Bolukbasi, whose wife is of Albanian extraction, fled his home at the
end of March. He spent his last evening in Pristina with a band of
Serbian militiamen, who urged him to bomb the apartment of his
upstairs neighbor, an Albanian nationalist.

"I told them I couldn't do that, because if I bombed the building my
family would also die," he said. "One of the thugs reached into his
shirt and pulled out a knife. He told me, 'O.K., if you can't bomb the
guy, just go up and cut his throat.' "

An hour after escaping from that encounter, Bolukbasi and eight
relatives packed themselves into a car and set out on a trek that
took them first to Macedonia and ultimately to Turkey. He has vague
dreams of joining relatives in Germany, but he seems to lose
concentration when he considers the future. The past only brings
tears to his eyes, so he lives only in the present.

As the oldest of five siblings, Bolukbasi, 45, must now assume the
role of patriarch. One member of his clan is a 20-year-old woman
whose mother, Bolukbasi's sister, was turned back as she tried to
flee Kosovo. The younger woman rarely speaks, and no one in the
crowded apartment knows what has befallen her immediate family.

Tuade Bolukbasi, 35, landed in Turkey after a harrowing monthlong
journey from Kosovo.

"The police came to our house with guns and told us we could leave
the building if we each paid 200 marks," Ms. Bolukbasi said, naming
a sum equivalent to about $130.

"Then they made the women watch while they beat the men. They
told us: 'Look at how we can beat Albanians. You wanted NATO, so
now you have NATO. See if NATO can help you.' "

So far, only one member of the Bolukbasi clan has found work in
Turkey. He is a 16-year-old who packs groceries at a market. The
family is sustained by his salary, help from their Turkish patron and
donations from municipal officials.

Turkey has deep historical ties to the Kosovo Albanians. Some
Serbs assert that Ottoman Turks created the region's ethnic
problem centuries ago by capturing the region and persuading
some citizens to convert from Orthodox Christianity to Islam.

This history has given Turks a feeling of kinship with the people
fleeing Kosovo. Turkey has accepted about 16,000 of them since
March, according to the Turkish press. More than 5,000 are living at
a camp at Kirklareli in western Turkey, and the rest, like the
Bolukbasi family, have melted into the population.

President Suleyman Demirel of Turkey visited the Kirklareli camp
recently, distributed radios and other gifts and told refugees, "You
will be back home in your land before winter comes."

That pledge sounds far-fetched to refugees like Bolukbasi. "Even if I
could go back, what would I go back to?" he wondered. "What would
I do? How would I live with neighbors who killed children?"

After a lifetime of friendship with people whose ethnic identity never
seemed important, Bolukbasi now finds himself among those who
want revenge.

"I like what NATO has done so far," he said solemnly. "But now I
want them to start killing people. All Serbs are Milosevic now. All of
them are maniacs. Everything I knew can never be again."

THE NEW YORK TIMES

May 29, 1999

VOICES

To Some Midwesterners, Milosevic Indictment Gives War New Meaning

By DIRK JOHNSON

ROCKFORD, Ill. -- With no end to the bloodshed in Yugoslavia
after two months of NATO bombing, Marcia DeClerk, a
54-year-old computer programmer who initially favored the
airstrikes, started to wonder if maybe the American troops should
just come home.

"When things drag on," she said, "you start to lose sight of what
you're there for."

But the indictment of the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, on
war crimes charges by a U.N. tribunal has washed away her
doubts.

"We've got to stop him," said Mrs. DeClerk, tending a flower garden
on a brilliant spring day in this Midwestern city of 150,000 people.
"You can't ignore the people dying, the homeless. It would be wrong
for us to look the other way."

In more than two dozen interviews conducted at barbershops and
bookstores, shopping malls and motorcycle dealerships since the
indictment of Milosevic, the people interviewed for the most part
expressed support for American military action in Yugoslavia.

"These horrible things we've been hearing -- they're true," said
Duard Bennett, a 38-year-old engineer sitting astride a Harley
Davidson motorcycle.

This old factory town on the Rock River, encircled by corn and bean
fields, has traditionally been guided by a middle-of-the-road political
ethos. Conversations with people here several days ago, before the
indictment of Milosevic, revealed a growing restiveness about the
presence of American troops in Yugoslavia, and plenty of second
guessing about whether President Clinton had acted too hastily. But
the sampling of those interviewed today tended to amplify quite
another question.

"Why weren't we there long ago?" asked James Jackson, 59, who
works in the real estate business.

"It's been obvious that Milosevic has been guilty of war crimes for a
long time."

Jackson and many others called for the use of ground troops to
bring a quicker end to the war.

"Not quite enough and a little too late," said Brad Hyland, 42, an
engineer, describing the American military strategy. "We need to
commit to ground troops or we're not going to get the job done."

To be sure, many people remain opposed to American involvement
in Yugoslavia.

"It's a European concern -- it's not our thing," said Spring
Thompson, 22, a clerk at a convenience store along U.S. Route 20.
"I feel terrible about the awful things that are happening to those
people. But it's just not for us to stick our noses into."

Others criticized the American entrance into Yugoslavia but said
there was little choice now but to fight to the end.

"Unfortunately, I think we're stuck there now," said Larry Steltmann,
56, an executive for a gas-burner manufacturer here. "I don't think
we utilized the diplomatic options effectively. We didn't use Russia,
which could have been helpful."

Some people said they did not trust Clinton, expressing concern
that the president might be eager to secure a legacy that would
eclipse his impeachment. At the very least, said Steltmann, it is
difficult to have faith in a leader who has been untruthful with the
people before.

"Everybody wonders if he's telling the truth," said Steltmann. "Even
most of his supporters will tell you they don't really trust the guy."

Dean Hamilton, a 76-year-old retired phone company worker,
faulted Clinton for being naive about military affairs and
underestimating the mettle of the Serbs.

"You don't announce right off that you're not going to use ground
troops," said Hamilton, as he stood outside the Cherryvale shopping
center. "It puts you in a bad position to negotiate. Of course, Clinton
doesn't have the nerve to face the political repercussions of sending
ground troops."

But the president had a defender in Frank Livingston, a 37-year-old
barber, who said it was quite a stretch to tarnish Clinton's foreign
policy because he had earlier tried to conceal an extramarital affair.

"Despite his private life, he makes sound judgments as a president,"
said Livingston, who added that he was inclined to favor American
military involvement if the White House deemed it necessary.

The apparent difficulty in stopping Milosevic has surprised many
people here.

Leonard Hahn, a 46-year-old technician for an aerospace company,
said he initially shrugged off Milosevic as a pipsqueak despot who
would wilt under the thunderstorm of bombs.

"I thought we'd go in, drop the bombs, and he'd quickly back down,"
said Hahn. "I think everybody thought this would be over in 30 days."

For Dan Saalfeld, 19, who has peers entering the Army, the
American military action at first seemed to be a case of
unwarranted adventurism.

"I thought, we really shouldn't be there," he said. "It wasn't our
business." But Milosevic's indictment and the details of the war
crimes have provoked a change of heart.

"We have to take a stand," said Saalfeld, who plans to enroll at
Boston University in the fall. "People being killed simply because
they belong to an ethnic group, you just can't let that happen."

Larry Creamer, a 48-year-old manager for Federal Express, said he
could not fathom how anyone needed a tribunal to validate the
accounts of war crimes.

"All you had to do was look on TV," said Creamer. "America should
be ashamed of itself if we don't stop this brutality."

Phil Nelson, 46, a carpenter, said he had little hope that Milosevic
would ever be brought to trial.

He also worried that the indictment could make Milosevic less willing
to negotiate. "His back is against the wall," Nelson said. "He's got
nothing to lose now."

Creamer's wife, Linda, a 48-year-old bookkeeper, expressed
concern about her 18-year-old son, and said she wished the United
States could take a break from acting as "everybody's policeman."

"Isn't it time somebody else around the world stood up and rose to
the challenge?" she asked.

Susan Moore, a homemaker in her 30s, said she had agonized
about the nation's proper role in the conflict.

Now she has become convinced that American ground troops
should be sent, even though it would almost surely mean some
casualties.

"It wouldn't be the first time America lost lives in a fight for freedom,"
she said. "But that's what being an American is all about."

THE NEW YORK TIMES

May 29, 1999

OP-ED

AT HOME ABROAD / By ANTHONY LEWIS

Which Side Are We On?

The indictment of Slobodan Milosevic by the International War
Crimes Tribunal told us nothing new about his character or his
record. He has been carrying out crimes against humanity
since 1991, when his forces leveled the Croatian city of Vukovar and
executed 260 men in a Vukovar hospital.

But the indictment does make a difference, a profound one. It
clarifies the nature of NATO's war against Mr. Milosevic over
Kosovo. And it requires those who have been critical of that war to
think again about which side they are on.

Just as Mr. Milosevic is the first serving head of state to be charged
with war crimes, so this war is a first. The reason was eloquently
stated by President Vaclav Havel last month in a speech to the
Canadian Parliament, reprinted in The New York Review of Books.

"This is probably the first war that has not been waged in the name
of 'national interests,' " President Havel said, "but rather in the name
of principles and values. . . .

"Kosovo has no oilfields to be coveted; no member nation in the
alliance [NATO] has any territorial demands on Kosovo. . . . It is
fighting out of concern for the fate of others. It is fighting because no
decent person can stand by and watch the systematic
state-directed murder of other people."

NATO air attacks have killed Serbian civilians. That is regrettable.
But it is a price that has to be paid when a nation falls in behind a
criminal leader. It happened in Germany. And it has happened again
in Serbia.

How can a young man, a Serbian paramilitary, demand money from
an Albanian family for a child's life -- and, when they have none to
give, knife the child? That, and other savageries, could take place
only because an evil leader had infected his people with the notion
that others are less human -- are untermenschen.

Even Serbs distant from the atrocities have been affected. Reports
from Belgrade say most people see themselves as victims. They
are oblivious to what Serbian forces have done to other human
beings over the last eight years -- oblivious to Vukovar, to the rape
camps and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, to the massacres in Kosovo.

In 1992 the Serbian commander in Bosnia, Ratko Mladic, told his
gunners in the hills around Sarajevo, "Burn it all." And they did:
hospitals, universities, mosques, homes. That should be
remembered when Serbs today describe themselves as victims.

That NATO's purpose is just does not, of course, mean that it has
fought the war wisely. It has not. Serious military analysts are
agreed that the alliance should not have forsworn the use of ground
troops at the start of its campaign, and should not have begun the
air war so tepidly.

Nor was the war inevitable. American diplomacy went in fits and
starts before the final crisis, seeming to lose its way in dealing with
Mr. Milosevic's broken promises on Kosovo.

In the critical months beginning in January 1998 President Clinton
was persistently distracted by a special prosecutor obsessed by
sex. And Mr. Milosevic well knew that.

But we are in the war now, and for the most urgent political as well
as moral reasons we must win. Even achieving NATO's declared
objectives in Kosovo will not necessarily end the menace of
Slobodan Milosevic. Unless he is captured, he will no doubt make
more trouble in Montenegro and elsewhere. But victory, limited
though it be, is essential.

The indictment of Mr. Milosevic may change the politics of the war in
this country too. Many Republicans have tried to use the war
politically. That was the strategy of Representative Tom DeLay, the
G.O.P. whip, when a motion to support the war came before the
House. He urged Republicans to vote no, making it Bill Clinton's war
-- an astonishing position for a party that usually touts its patriotism.
The motion lost on a tie vote.

The President should go to the country now, on the strength of the
Milosevic indictment, to tell people what this war is about. He needs
stronger public support as a moment of truth approaches.

A summit meeting of the seven leading economic powers and
Russia will be held in Cologne on June 18. If the air war has not
brought Mr. Milosevic to accept NATO's demands by then, the
prospect of winter means that the unthinkable will have to be
confronted: a ground war.

Information, Activism, and Resistance to U.S. Militarism and War, Linking with Struggles Against Racism and Oppression within the United States

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Sign up Online to Volunteer for or Endorse the June 5
March on the Pentagon!/ Endorsers Lists

Wash DC - Saturday, June 5th,National March on the Pentagon to stop bombing Yugoslavia, starts at 12 noon at the
Vietnam Veterans Memorial and marches to the Pentagon.

SAN FRANCISCO->June 5 -- Mass March and Rally to Stop the War.
Gather, 11 a.m. UN Plaza, Market St., between 7th & 8th Sts.
March, 12 noon to Dolores Park, 18th & Dolores St. for rally beginning at 1 p.m.


more at:

http://www.iacenter.org/

It's Memorial Day in the USA.

I've put my life on the line for my country before.

Have you?

!!THERE ARE NO NATO BOMBS FALLING IN YUGOSLAVIA!!

!!ONLY METEORS!!

What a democracy! What a humanity! What respect for human life! NATO only killed 30 people in the last 24 hours.

Guido the big hero who is happy to kill little animals behind his trailer(so he claims); has a family and kids
and is posting this kind of stuff...
realy sad.

What a democracy! What a humanity! What respect for human life! MILO only killed 300 people in the last 24 hours.

NATO raid kills 11 in refugee-housing health centre.
BELGRADE, May 31 (Itar-Tass) - A NATO air raid last night has killed at least 11 people at a sanatorium in the town of Surdulica, which is located 290 kilometres south of Belgrade. The sanatorium accommodates Serb refugees from Croatia
and Bosnia.
Missile strikes killed six people in a nearby home for the elderly.

Nighttime air raids on the capital Belgrade left one person dead and several others injured in downtown Zvezdozara neighbourhood. Blasts of bombs and missiles damaged many buildings on Revolution Boulevard. Attacks on Belgrade's suburb Ripnja
destroyed three houses.

NATO's air power repeatedly attacked Serbia's power network. Air strikes set on fire Nikola Tesla electric station 30 kilometres from Belgrade. Bombing caused extensive destruction of a relay electric station near the Vojevodina
province's administrative centre Novi Sad and left the city without power supply.
In Kosovo province, NATO planes unloaded dozens of bombs and missiles. One struck a television and radio transmitter at the mountain resort of Brezovica.

Air strikes destroyed a bridge over the Southern Morava river in the city of Vladicin Han and damaged houses in the vicinity of the bridge.
NATO planes cracked down on Vranje, Nis, Leskovac and Aleksinac, in which tens of houses were reduced to rubble.
At 11 p.m. Moscow, time, or half an hour after an all-clear to nighttime bombing was sounded, air raid alerts howled anew in Belgrade and several explosions rumbled soon thereafter.
Over the past 24 hours, a record-high number of air raids was mounted on Yugoslavia in 68 days of the NATO aggression. Air raid alerts sounded five times.