Serb group appeals to Milosevic to STOP WAR
04:03 p.m May 20, 1999 Eastern

BELGRADE, May 20 (Reuters) - A citizens' group in central Serbia
issued a public appeal to Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic on
Thursday to end the war over Kosovo, despite threats from
Belgrade to arrest one of their leaders.

The letter from the self-styled ``citizens' parliament'' in the town
of Cacak also urged the Serbian and Yugoslav parliaments to
``harmonise their decisions with the decisions of the international
community and to halt the war,'' the independent Yugoslav news
agency Beta reported.

``At this moment you are deciding about the fate of all the peoples of
Yugoslavia,'' the letter told Milosevic. ``We appeal to you to
immediately end the war and adjust your decisions to the grave
suffering of all the Yugoslav peoples.''

It called for an end to ethnic, party, religious or other divisions and
said ``the price that we have paid so far with isolation and war is too
great.''

``You now have the highly responsible task of deciding about
the life and death of your people,'' it went on. ``Remember, you are
writing history, you are not the generation that is killed and
remember that the people are waiting for your decisions.

``We consider human life the greatest value and ask of you to
safeguard the lives of all the citizens of Yugoslavia.''

The anti-war ``parliament'' was formed earlier this week in Cacak,
one of a handful of provincial Serbian towns where protests
have erupted in recent days criticising Milosevic as well as
NATO and to which several hundred deserting Serb soldiers
have returned from Kosovo.

Hardline Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Vojislav Seselj earlier on
Thursday accused the Mayor of Cacak Velimir Ilic of ``calling the
people to armed rebellion'' after Ilic attacked Milosevic at an earlier
meeting of the ``citizens' parliament.''

Seselj said the ``conditions were met'' for Ilic's arrest. The deputy
prime minister made similar charges against the chairman of
the League of Social Democrats of the northern province of
Vojvodina, Nenad Canak.

Blaming the anti-war protests on ``anti-Serbian and traitor elements
coordinated with NATO forces,'' he said investigations into the
involvement of the opposition Serbian Renewal Movement in
unrest was also under way.

---

Come on, SLOB, you know you face defeat. Even your own people are deserting you....

Run Maja, run Nique, run Sergey and Basil, run all of your, run run, Daniela, Majas stories are NOT coming true, they were wishful thinking.... Better tie up your pants at the ankles, to prevent the crap from running out!

Zoja

Serb troops beg for food at border- Albanian paper
08:15 a.m. May 20, 1999 Eastern

TIRANA, May 20 (Reuters) - Serb soldiers have been begging
Albanian border police for bread and have offered them their
watches for cigarettes in recent days, one of Albania's main daily
newspapers reported on Thursday.

The newspaper Koha Jone, whose report could not
immediately be confirmed, said a number of Serb reservists from
the border villages of Krusevo and Restelica had repeatedly shown
up at the border in search for food.

The paper said the reservists had reported that Yugoslav troops in
southern parts of Kosovo were suffering from lack of food and
asked for guarantees if they surrendered to Albanian authorities.

They also said that many of them were recruited by force.

``During the last days, the reservists mobilised in the Serbian
army walked to the border line near the village of Shistavec and
hoisted a white flag,'' the paper said.

``They threw their automatic weapons on the ground and asked
for bread and cigarettes from our border policemen. They were
willing to trade their watches for a pack of cigarettes,'' the daily
added, quoting Albanian border guards.

The paper quoted the reservists as saying that ``the Serb army
was panicking as a result of the NATO air raids and the lack of
food.''

``Our border police in Shishtavec have not reacted to the repeated
requests of the Serb reservists,'' a police inspector in the northern
border town of Kukes told the newspaper.

---

Unity in Serbiahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!! Hey you Slob Milo lovers, are you still so convinced about the mass support for your 'fantastic leader'???

Zoja

LATimes, Saturday, May 29, 1999


Milosevic's Political Rivals Looking to Postwar Struggle


By DAVID HOLLEY, RICHARD BOUDREAUX, Times Staff Writers


PODGORICA, Yugoslavia--The beefy bodyguard, on duty protecting one of Serbia's top opposition figures, jumped nervously from his seat when he saw an approaching soldier in camouflage uniform.
The soldier had just entered the lobby of the Hotel Montenegro and was visible through the glass doors of the nearly empty hotel restaurant, where Zoran Djindjic, the president of the largest party in Serbia fully committed to democracy, was giving an interview.
It isn't easy being an opposition politician anywhere in Yugoslavia these days. Even here in the relative safety of Montenegro--the republic ruled by pro-Western political opponents of President Slobodan Milosevic--Democratic Party leader Djindjic and his bodyguard couldn't completely relax.
But the soldier had other business in the hotel--he went to the men's room. Djindjic carried on explaining how he and Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic hope to use this small republic as a base from which to spread democratic ideas and objective information into Serbia, the much larger of the two republics that form Yugoslavia. Both men appear to assume that Milosevic may well survive in office once the war is over, despite his indictment Thursday, along with four top aides, on war crimes charges.
"We must find a way to explain to the people what has happened during the war and our position on different issues," Djindjic said.
As Djindjic spoke, he was constantly interrupted by calls on his mobile phone. With one of the calls, his voice suddenly adopted a tone of enormous respect as well as a touch of formality.
"Your statement on BBC was very good," Djindjic said into the phone. "There's no one who is a greater patriot than you. . . . Your compliments mean a lot to me. I appreciate your support above everything."
The caller was Crown Prince Alexander, the British-born heir to the Yugoslav throne, who lives in London but has emerged as one of the players trying to build a healthier society for postwar Yugoslavia.
Among the greatest assets Djindjic and Djukanovic bring to the struggle for democracy in Yugoslavia are their strong connections to Western Europe and their ability to charm foreigners--a sharp contrast to the dark aura surrounding Milosevic and his inner circle.
The indictments of Milosevic and his closest supporters will make life harder for the democratic opposition in the weeks ahead, but in the long run the Yugoslav president's power will wane, Djindjic said.
"It is a high-risk game now, between Milosevic and the people around him and NATO," Djindjic said on the day the indictments were announced. "We can try to survive in Montenegro as a democratic element, try to survive in Serbia as democratic parties not in direct confrontation with Milosevic. He will be very dangerous now."


Lobbying Efforts for Western Backing


Both Djindjic and Djukanovic have traveled to Western Europe in recent weeks. That was partly to lobby for what they called, in a joint statement written for Western leaders, "decisive international help" in the formation of a democratic postwar Yugoslavia--including backing for a television station they plan to launch.
"Montenegro needs more support," Djindjic said. "It's very important that normal life be protected in Montenegro without crises in food, oil, gas lines, this kind of thing. The international community ought to give financial support for refugees and for the economic situation. It will be enough."
But close ties to the countries that are bombing Yugoslavia are also the two men's greatest liability, because such ties open them to charges of disloyalty.
In Djukanovic's case, that liability is compounded by his policy of keeping Montenegro out of Milosevic's fight with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. And for Djindjic, it is aggravated by his decision a few weeks ago to flee Serbia and set up operations in Montenegro, largely out of fear that goons in the service of Milosevic might kill him.
Djindjic's fear is not unfounded. Prominent opposition journalist Slavko Curuvija was killed last month after being accused on state-run television of being a traitor. State media in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, and pro-Milosevic politicians are now bombarding Djindjic with the same charge.
Some fellow opposition figures have also blasted Djindjic, among them former Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister Vuk Draskovic, the leader of the Serbian Renewal Movement. A onetime opposition ally of Djindjic who joined Milosevic's government early this year, Draskovic was fired after making critical remarks last month and has been maneuvering in recent weeks to portray himself as the country's leading opposition figure.


Sniping From Ostensible Allies


Draskovic--whose democratic credentials are much weaker than Djindjic's--has criticized the Democratic Party leader for "running away from Serbia at its most difficult moment." Djindjic has even faced sniping from within his own party. Earlier this month, a Draskovic-controlled television station, Studio B, aired an hourlong interview with Miodrag Perisic, a leading figure in the Democratic Party and a critic of Djindjic. The interview was widely interpreted in Belgrade as an effort by Draskovic to draw supporters away from a weakened party. But Perisic, a former party vice president, is still on the Democratic Party's executive board. He showed up at its headquarters recently while it was under attack by pro-Milosevic demonstrators. Perisic, who was hit by two eggs on the way into the building, said he does not believe he betrayed his party by giving the critical TV interview. He said he understood Djindjic's decision to leave Belgrade, but he faulted Djindjic for not turning over leadership of the party to someone else.
Djindjic is doing a fair job of shuttle diplomacy," he said. "But he needs to untie himself from the party. He cannot run it by remote control." In the protest that Perisic encountered at the party headquarters, a crowd of several dozen pelted the building with rocks and eggs. Most of the demonstrators were young men with short hair. Still, there are indications that Djindjic and Djukanovic are providing fresh inspiration for some people in Serbia, especially younger ones.
Secondhand information reached me about democrats from Serbia in Montenegro and that they were working on some postwar political plan," said Stojan Miladinovic, 27, a student in Belgrade. "When I found out through my friends in Montenegro what exactly it's all about, that gave me some kind of new energy and hope to believe in tomorrow.
I admired President Djukanovic ever since he managed to brace himself and beat old-fashioned Communists. I was dreaming of a politician like Djukanovic for Serbia. Believing that kind of man and his kind of plan has a chance to succeed, through motivating the right people, I recently joined the Democratic Party." Democratic Party Vice President Slobodan Vuksanovic seemed ambivalent when asked about Djindjic's departure.
I cannot defend him, nor can I accuse him," he said. "I'd like to see him here, but I couldn't take responsibility for urging him to stay." Some powerful figures within his party strongly back Djindjic's move.
Djindjic is in Podgorica because with the beginning of the war, an atmosphere of lynching and liquidations of people who are political opponents of the regime was created in Serbia," said Zoran Zivkovic, the mayor of Nis, Yugoslavia's third-largest city and an opposition stronghold. "This was proved by the liquidation of Mr. Curuvija.
Mr. Djindjic got information from circles close to the regime that he is the next one. No one could guarantee us that that was not true." Djindjic said that he really had no choice and that, besides, he can be more effective for now in Podgorica, the Montenegrin capital, because he can work with Djukanovic.
It was very dangerous," Djindjic said. "From the beginning of the war, I was only two times in my apartment. . . . My bodyguards [in Belgrade] cannot have guns. You need a special license, and it was rejected for me. All criminals in Belgrade and Serbia work for Milosevic, and they are armed." Vuksanovic said the opposition's task in Serbia "is simply to present ourselves as normal patriots--there are too many crazy patriots now." The only politics possible at this time, he said, is to help people survive the NATO bombing. This is the main focus of democratic politicians who govern cities such as Nis and Novi Sad, he said.
The war has hurt all democratic forces in Serbia, but it is not damage that cannot be repaired," said Zivkovic, the Nis mayor. "People who voted for the Democratic Party know who they voted for. They know that it is not a party of traitors, that we're not using empty rhetoric and that beating the chest is not our style." Another tool of Milosevic's control has been the selective targeting of political opponents for induction into the army. Ljiljana Lucic, another vice president of the Democratic Party, said presidents of 20 local party chapters and about 1,500 other party members have been mobilized into the reserves during the war. A messenger arrived at party headquarters Thursday with a government notice for Djindjic. Lucic said the message was thought to be an army induction notice. The messenger was turned away.

Holley reported from Podgorica and Boudreaux from Belgrade.


Copyright 1999 Los Angeles Times. All Rights Reserved

THE NEW YORK TIMES

May 29, 1999

HORROR BY DESIGN

How Serb Forces Purged One Million Albanians

By JOHN KIFNER

In the night of March 24, as NATO bombs began falling over
Yugoslavia, Hani Hoxha said he saw black-masked Serbs
swaggering through Djakovica, shooting, cutting throats and
burning houses.

At 3:30 in the morning, about nine miles east, a tank pulled up and
parked in front of Isuf Zhenigi's farmhouse in the village of Bela
Crkva. At daybreak the slaughter began there.

That day, in Pec, 22 miles to the northwest, and Prizren, 15 miles
southeast, Serbian forces began firing wildly and burning
Albanian-owned shops.

Meanwhile, in Pristina, about 44 miles to the northeast, Serbian
operatives driving military jeeps and private cars set fire to
Albanian-owned cafes, clinics and the printing presses of Kosova Sot,
an independent Albanian newspaper.

These were the opening assaults in what quickly became a drive to
empty the city, the provincial and intellectual center of Kosovo.

As it began, the Serbs' purge of more than one million ethnic Albanians
from Kosovo seemed from the outside to be a random kaleidoscope
of violence. But a reconstruction of the early days of the operation --
based on interviews with scores of refugees, and with senior
officials in Washington and NATO, as well as on a computer
analysis of reported horrors from many sources -- shows that it was
meticulously organized and aimed, from the outset, at expelling
huge numbers of people.

From this reporting over the last nine weeks, it is possible to see the
design behind the roster of atrocities cited by the United Nations war
crimes tribunal in The Hague in its indictment on Thursday of
President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia and four of his top
officials for crimes against humanity.

With specific charges including the wave of killings in Djakovica and
its surrounding villages and the forced expulsion of Albanians from
Pristina, the indictment charged the Serbian forces with a
"campaign of terror" that "intentionally created an atmosphere of
fear and oppression through the use of force, threats of force and
acts of violence" in order to drive out Kosovo's majority Albanians.

The Serbs have insisted in recent months that most of the refugees
fled Kosovo because of NATO's bombing. Western officials,
however, say the plans were drawn up by the Yugoslav Army and
the Interior Ministry of the Serbian Republic and carried out, under a
single command, by a variety of Serbian forces acting in concert:
regular soldiers, the blue-uniformed Special Police of the Interior
Ministry and the dreaded private armies of ultra-nationalist warlords
who had achieved a reputation for blood lust and looting in Bosnia
and Croatia.

The plan was a harsh refinement of a campaign last summer by
Interior Ministry forces that failed to crush Albanian rebels. It was put
into effect after a mounting campaign of terrorism on both sides,
including the ambushing of Serbian police patrols and officials by
the Albanians and several instances of the kidnapping and killing of
Serbian civilians.

But in retrospect, it seems evident that the operation had at least
two major goals from its inception: crushing the rebel Kosovo
Liberation Army and permanently changing the ethnic balance of
Kosovo by driving out as many Albanians as possible.

Hounding more than a million Albanians from their homes
accomplished two purposes for the Serbs.

First, it removed the guerrillas' base of support and cover, in
effect, drying up the sea in which the guerrilla fish swam.

With the Serbs controlling the borders and scorched earth along
the highways, they could isolate and mop up the Kosovo Liberation
Army in the forests and mountains. Young men viewed as potential
rebel recruits were singled out and either killed or removed to an
unknown fate.

In the longer run, depopulating Kosovo defused a demographic
time bomb for the Serbs: Albanians already made up 90 percent of the
population and were reproducing at a far higher rate than the Serbs.

Although killing and torching were plentiful, the Serbs' most potent
weapon was fear. The seemingly random, flamboyantly public killings
of the first few days meant that as the campaign progressed, all it took
was a handful of armed, masked Serbs to drive thousands of people
from their homes, rob them and send them off in caravans, their
houses in flames.

Independent accounts indicate that there have been mass killings of
from a dozen to roughly 100 people in more than 40 places. The
State Department now puts the death toll at 4,600, a number only
likely to increase as time goes on and more is known. But even that
horrifying statistic indicates a goal of depopulation rather than
extermination; it is low by comparison with the ethnic cleansing of
Bosnia, where in one massacre alone, at Srebrenica, the Serbs
were accused of killing 7,000 people.

To amplify the effect of the killings in Kosovo, Serbs gunned down
Albanians in the streets and in their homes, sometimes at random,
sometimes from target lists. Bodies have been mutilated, with ears
cut off, eyes gouged out or a cross, a Serbian symbol, carved into
foreheads or chests.

In many places the Serbs compounded the fear with humiliation.
Older men were beaten for wearing the white conical hats of the
Albanian mountains or forced to make the Serbian Orthodox
three-fingered sign. One refugee convoy passed row on row of
white conical hats set atop fence posts.

Two months into the campaign now, the terror has been
devastatingly effective and virtually unhampered by NATO's
bombing campaign, judging by accounts from refugees, relief
workers and officials from international agencies, NATO and the
United States Government.

By early May, 90 percent of all ethnic Albanians in Kosovo had been
expelled from their homes, the State Department says, 900,000
driven across the province's borders and 500,000 more displaced
inside Kosovo. Most of those remaining have been chased into
hiding in forests and mountains, huddled together in villages penned
in by snipers waiting to be allowed to flee, or captured, their fate
unknown.

More than 500 villages have been emptied and burned, the State
Department said.

And there was another element to the pattern: The Serbs made
every effort to insure that those who fled abroad would not come
back. Almost universally, refugees reported that they had been not
only robbed but also systematically stripped of all identity papers,
rendering them, in effect, stateless nonpersons, at least in the eyes
of the Serbian government, and making it difficult for them ever to
return home. Even the license plates of their cars -- the Serbs kept
the good ones -- were methodically unscrewed at the borders. "This
is not your land -- you will never see it again," the refugees were
told. "Go to your NATO -- go to your Clinton."

U.S. Classified Data Placed Milosevic in
Chain of Command

By William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 28, 1999; Page A30=20

The day before an international war crimes tribunal in The Hague issued an
arrest warrant for President Slobodan Milosevic, the U.S. government
turned over long-sought classified information that implicated the Yugoslav
leader personally in the chain of command responsible for crimes against
the ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo, U.S. officials said yesterday.

The trove of secret information, delivered last Friday, included videotapes
that neither the tribunal nor the U.S. government has yet disclosed, the
officials said. The following day, Louise Arbour, chief prosecutor at the
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, signed arrest
warrants for Milosevic and four top aides. The indictment on which they
were based was confirmed by a tribunal judge two days later and made
public yesterday.

The classified material helped buttress the indictment's charge that
"beginning in 1999 . . . the accused planned, instigated, ordered,
committed or otherwise aided and abetted in a campaign of terror and
violence directed at Kosovo Albanian civilians," the officials said.=
Tribunal
investigators were aware that the United States possessed the information
and had specifically requested it.

"It was something they very much wanted," said an official familiar with the
transaction.

The last-minute delivery was part of a persistent tug of war over classified
evidence that has frequently put Washington at odds with the tribunal. It
also highlighted a struggle by competing interests within the U.S.
government.=20

Since last year, a secretive war crimes bureaucracy here has been
compiling evidence of Serbian atrocities in Kosovo, poring over satellite
imagery, studying the results of electronic eavesdropping and
cross-checking everything with the accounts of refugees. That effort
accelerated dramatically after NATO began a bombing campaign against
Yugoslavia March 24.

Other governments, notably the British, have also given the tribunal
classified information, and numerous private human rights and relief groups
have flooded it with accounts from thousands of the 780,000 Kosovo
refugees who have been driven into exile in neighboring states. Many of the
groups now are recording the accounts on standardized forms that are then
fed into a computerized database, allowing tribunal investigators to quickly
identify and interview good potential witnesses.

In response to insistent requests by Arbour, and after overcoming some
reluctance in U.S. intelligence agencies, the government in recent weeks
has provided classified material that has helped document massacres cited
in the indictment, officials said. Among the material is overhead imagery
from satellites or U.S. reconnaissance planes and other unspecified
information from "national technical means," a rubric that includes
electronic intercepts by intelligence-gathering equipment carried aboard
satellites or planes such as the RC-135 "Rivet Joint" surveillance aircraft.

The U.S. material is collected by the Interagency Balkan Task Force, an
intelligence unit housed at the CIA that also includes representatives of=
the
Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the State
Department's intelligence and research bureau.

"What we provide is often never seen in a courtroom because it's the basis
for further investigation," said David Scheffer, head of the State
Department's war crimes office, in an interview before the indictments
were announced.

This information is provided under a tribunal rule that promises
governments that their classified material will be used only as "lead
evidence" to guide investigators and will not be disclosed publicly without
authorization.

Although the State Department has pressed for public disclosure of some
evidence to help make its case about war crimes before world opinion, the
tribunal itself has urged that much of the U.S. material it receives be kept
secret for fear of alerting Serb authorities to "crime scenes" that they can
then try to clean up. Examples include imagery of mass graves that the
tribunal hopes eventually to have examined by forensic experts after the
conflict ends.

"We have reports that Serb forces have burned bodies exhumed from
mass graves in an attempt to destroy forensic evidence," Scheffer said at
NATO headquarters last week. He said "mass executions" have been
reported in at least 75 Kosovo towns and villages and that the United
States estimates that 225,000 Kosovo men are "unaccounted for."=20

To help examine "the most significant crime scene on the European
continent since World War II," the FBI has offered to send a large forensic
team to Kosovo once it is safe to do so, Scheffer said.

Although the U.S. government and the tribunal for months have
painstakingly sought to compile proof of Milosevic's role in the alleged war
crimes, human rights groups have said his "command responsibility" has
long been evident from the planning that went into the forced expulsion of
hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians.

"The coherence and similarities of the witness accounts reveal the
deportations from Kosovo as part of a systematic policy in which the
modus operandi, participants and objectives can only have been
pre-planned," the French group Doctors Without Borders said in a recent
report.

Villages typically are shelled or targeted by sniper fire to pin residents
indoors, then Serb forces go house to house to order people to evacuate,
often throwing grenades inside if the occupants are reluctant to leave. Once
the villagers are gathered together, men are often separated from their
families. Empty villages are systematically burned, and the refugees are
forced out along predetermined routes.

The Yugoslav army, police from the Serbian Interior Ministry known as the
MUP and masked paramilitary groups act in close concert in these
operations, refugees have reported.

Some of the material transferred to the tribunal documents "the integrated
nature of the operation," with the different forces "operating under a=
unified
command structure" headed by Milosevic as chairman of the Yugoslav
defense council, said Jon Western, a former government war crimes
analyst.

"Milosevic was directly responsible for putting in place those commanders
who subsequently engaged in the atrocities," he said. Among those installed
since late last year were the Yugoslav armed forces chief of staff and the
commander of the Third Army Corps that has been operating in Kosovo.

"Based on everything I've seen, it's pretty clear this entire ethnic=
cleansing
campaign was planned six months to a year before," said Patrick
Eddington, a former CIA analyst.

To date, however, U.S. authorities have had difficulty identifying the
perpetrators inside Kosovo. Many of the attackers have worn ski masks,
and there have been conflicting reports on the involvement of paramilitary
groups under notorious Serb commanders who were active in Bosnia.


=A9 Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company

ARMED CLASH BETWEEN YUGOSLAV ARMY, MONTENEGRIN POLICE.
More than 500 Yugoslav army reservists and about 40
Montenegrin police exchanged fire at a police training
camp on the road leading from Cetinje up Mt. Lovcen on
31 May, RFE/RL's South Slavic Service and Reuters
reported. An important television and radio relay center
is located nearby. The soldiers briefly detained three
policemen, along with five civilians from Cetinje, who
had come to help the police. The soldiers freed the
detainees after an unspecified number of citizens in
Cetinje demonstrated for their release. Top army and
police officials began negotiations aimed at defusing
what Montenegrin officials described as a very tense
situation. The Yugoslav army recently placed artillery
and mortars "on three sides of Cetinje," "The Daily
Telegraph" reported. Observers note that Montenegrin
officials have long predicted that one incident could
set off an armed conflict between supporters and
opponents of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. PM

ETHNIC MONTENEGRINS FLEE TO ALBANIA. Ten ethnic
Montenegrin refugee families arrived in Shkodra on 31
May, an RFE/RL correspondent reported from Tirana. They
fled Montenegro after refusing to send their sons to the
Yugoslav army. The refugees were transferred to the
Austrian refugee camp in Shkodra.

SERBIAN POLICE BAN DEMONSTRATION IN CACAK. Police
officials on 31 May banned an anti-war protest in Cacak,
which city officials had called for 1 June, RFE/RL's
South Slavic Service reported. City officials appealed
to citizens to respect the ban and avoid provoking the
police. In Belgrade, the League for Change (SZP), which
is a coalition of several opposition parties, issued an
open letter to the Serbian authorities calling on the
government to take "concrete measures" to end the crisis
in Kosova and bring a halt to NATO air strikes. The
opposition parties called for general elections in
Serbia following the end of NATO's bombing campaign. In
Nis, a military court sentenced three army conscripts to
five years in prison each for failing to report to their
units after their leave was over, AP noted. In Krusevac,
army authorities recently detained 24 conscripts who did
not respond to their call-up letters.

Although the following article is from June22 it proves still valuable reading, as nothing much really has changed since then. However, it does give a good insight into morale and press in Serbia.

---

SAT, 26 JUN 1999 00:08:39 GMT

On the Air in Serbia

Freedom of Media Unsealed
AIM Podgorica, 22 June, 1999

(By AIM correspondent from Belgrade)

The television and radio air in Serbia, in these postwar days, seems quite chaotic: hardly anybody is producing the program like they used to do before the war, from the same place, via the same transmitters and on the same channels. And even if they do - it is very questionable who can see or hear their program... One of the important targets of NATO air-force were transmitters and repeaters of Radio-Television Serbia (RTS) and some other TV and radio stations close to the regime both in Belgrade and inside Serbia.

Results of the two-month air campaign are obvious: in a large part of Serbia it is impossible to watch programs of RTS via its own transmitters. Since the news programs of RTS - the central TV daily news show above all - are the main propagandist pillar of the current regime, all RTV stations in Serbia received a directive from the ministry of telecommunications and information that they had to carry the central information shows of TV Serbia; how far this has gone is best illustrated by the fact that even on the exquisite Third Program of Radio Belgrade - for decades reserved only for intellectual debates and classical music - you can listen to the audio version of TV daily news program. During the war, nobody (publicly) complained because of such practice of directives, but nowadays, the number is increasing of stations which are meeting this obligation with unease, expecting to free themselves of it as soon as possible.

Belgrade Studio B, which is controlled by city authorities governed by Draskovic's Serb Revival Movement (SPO), has already broken this imposed "cooperation" with RTS, but was soon "asked" to renew it as long as the state of war is in force, which was done by this station with a certain amount of appropriate grumbling.

It is no surprise that the regime is very keen on having RTS's parainformative fabrications disseminated unhindered around the whole of Serbia, because they are one of the indispensable factors of preservation of power. The citizens who are interested in access to uncensored information are more interested in how much "information pluralism" there is and will be in the postwar media landscape. It should be reminded that during the first night of the war already, under a worthless pretext, the cult Belgrade radio station B92, which had been the "brain" and the "backbone" of independent electronic journalism in Serbia in the nineties, was shut down by force. After that, a series of other "undesirable" stations around Serbia were also shut down or prevented from working which automatically frustrated normal operation of ANEM, the network of independent electronic media which during the previous years had managed to do what is the most difficult: to bring uncensored information closer to people "deep inside" Serbia and pauperised population which neither has serious readers' habit nor money to buy independent press regularly.

It need not be stressed that this is the population which is the source of the most loyal voters and that this is the reason why the regime is so jealously protecting it from "contamination" by different information. Nevetheless, after the end of the war, the citizens are manifesting the unwillingness to tolerate such usurpation any further: in Cacak, important industrial city in central Serbia and stronghold of democratic opposition, local authgorities and citizens demanded from the inspectors for telecommunications to enable broadcasting of TV Cacak again, or else they would do it on their own. What the citizens of Cacak are announcing has already happened further to the south, in Sokobanja tourist resort: the local authorities - also members of Serb democratic opposition - removed the seal off the premises of TV Sokobanja and restarted making free and uncensored program. VK1, the first independent radio station in northern Voivodina also started work. There are similar examples in Nis, Kraljevo, Bajina Basta and other cities and towns around Serbia.

In the meantime during the war, the authorities appointed their men in Radio B92 (using the Achilles heel of many media in post-communist societies: unresolved and vague ownerdhip status), so that the people who had made this station a globally recognised phenomenon and symbol of independent journalism in Eastern Europe are at the beginning of the chaotic and politically arbitrary legal system of Milosevic's Serbia to get back the radio station they themselves had created. Nobody in fact believes in the favourable outcome without serious political changes, and therefrom political deblocking of the judiciary.

Among the non-regime media which survived and which can be heard in Belgrade, the citizens trust Radio Pancevo the most, because even during the most difficult war circumstances - which were indeed even more difficult in Pancevo than in any other city in Serbia outside Kosovo - this radio station proved that it was both professional and that it had civil courage by distributing all relevant information from all sides and all sources, showing to those less resolute and less brave that "censorship" is primarily an ideal pretext for those who are ready to make even unnecessary compromises, and then everything else. Radio Pancevo survived that too and reinforced its position and reputation among the listeners. Studio B is also a firm and important source of information which carries everything that does not exist in state media. Its fatal limitation is the fact that it is controlled by SPO, so that the citizens who have a sensitive taste can hardly swallow the very obvious favouring of this party and its president which not rarely reaches the proportions of distasteful and counterproductive caricature.

One of the side-effects of the past war is "emptying" of the air over Serbia due to destruction of numerous transmitters and due to dissolution of the electric power system: in the long war nights without electric power, citizens of Belgrade could listen on their transitor radio sets to various stations from Croatia, B&H, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, and that competition on the air is a very serious business is proved by the fact that somewhere in the vicinity of Serbia (those well informed claim: in SFOR bases near Tuzla) a powerful FM radio transmitter was installed which enables the citizens of western and northwestern Serbia, a considerable part of Voivodina and Belgrade to have high-quality reception of programs by BBC, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Deutsche Welle, Radio France International and other international stations. This of course is not at all agreeable for the regime, because it is no secret that these stations have become quite popular during the war, which mars the image of the war the authorities claim to have a monopoly on; the prescribed image of its causes, its course and its consequences. That is why the official newspapers are full of enraged commentaries that these stations are "dinosaurs of the cold war". This, in fact, is not completely unfounded criticism, but in their satanisation rhetoric of the cold war is used - but from the east...

The majorty of citizens of Serbia - bombed from without and oppressed and robbed from within - do not care to listen to anyone's "truth" any more. That is why they seek delusive oblivion in "light entertainment", but that is where regime infrastructure awaits them again - the department of the authorities in charge of entertainmen in the media, that is, the escapist musical and film stations such as TV Pink and TV Palma (owned by high officials of the ruling party) and RTV Kosava (headed by Marija Milosevic, daughter of the president of FRY). After NATO had bombed the sky-scraper of the former Central Committee of the Communist Party (which is now owned by Milosevic's post-communists) at the top of which were transmitters of these stations, their programs could not be seen or their range has been significantly reduced. Now they have put up new antennas on the top of this from within destroyed building which means that the gay "production of oblivion" with cheap Latin American TV soap-operas and literally indescribable trash-music will continue in full swing. That is how for a decade already, strange days of modern Serbia are passing: a little bit of singing, a little bit of shooting, and then, all over again.

Teofil Pancic

(AIM)

And the same goes for this piece

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Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1999
ANEM media update
TV SOKO CLOSED AGAIN;
Ristic imprisonment upheld;
Ministry Threatens Charges for FREQUENCY Fee Defaulters

BELGRADE, June 27 -- TV Soko in Sokobanja was again closed down on June 25. Telecommunications inspectors, backed by more than ten police, entered the station's premises and seized transmission equipment. Just hours after this raid, TV Soko resumed broadcasting using backup equipment.

TV Soko was first closed down on March 27. The Yugoslav Inspector for Radio Links attempted to seize transmission equipment from the station but was prevented from this by Sokobanja residents who had gathered to defend their broadcaster. After lengthy negotiations, partly aimed at securing the safety of the inspector and avoiding a violent conflict between police and residents, it was agreed that the station's broadcasts would be banned, but its equipment remained in the studios. The premises were then sealed.

The justification for this first closure was that the station had operated without a licence. TV Soko is one of a number of independent broadcasters which tendered in the February 1998 frequency competition but received no response to their applications.

On June 12, after the Nato attack against Yugoslavia ended, TV Soko removed the seals from the studios and resumed broadcasting.

The station's editor-in-chief, Nebojsa Ristic, is presently serving a one-year prison sentence after the Zajecar District Court on June 6 upheld a one-year prison sentence handed down to Ristic in the Sokobanja Municipal Court on April 23. The Zajecar District Court dismissed an appeal against the sentence and conviction for the criminal act of disseminating untrue information under Article 218 of the Criminal Code of Serbia. The charges related to Mr Ristic displaying a "FREE PRESS, MADE IN SERBIA" poster in the station's studios in protest at the repression of the free press in Serbia.

The rulings of both courts cite criminal acts abolished by the Serbian Constitutional Court on December 17, 1991 and are therefore illegal as they are based on a regulation which is contrary to the constitution. This article's contradiction of international guarantees of freedom of expression has been emphasised in almost every report on the human rights situation in Yugoslavia and Serbia.

Up to June 25 a number of ANEM affiliates had received warnings from the Yugoslav Telecommunications Ministry that they would be prosecuted if they failed to pay fees for the use of their frequencies. Payment of the exorbitant fees may force the closure of stations as they have little or no opportunity to generate revenue in the current dire economic situation.

The Yugoslav Telecommunications Ministry and the Yugoslav Government had previously passed a decree exempting from payment of the fee those broadcasters which had put their equipment "at the service of the country's defence". The latest warnings from the ministry disregard the fact that ANEM's affiliates have been forced to put their resources at the service of the Yugoslav Army and Radio Television Serbia.

RTV Devic in Smederevska Palanka, an ANEM affiliate, has already been banned with the justification that it had not paid the fee. Other broadcasters, unable to raise the fee, face a similar fate.

It is of particular concern that there is no legal basis for demanding frequency fees from stations which have been denied a licence by the authorities, despite having met all the requirements of the February 1998 round of frequency bids.

July 3rd, 1999
Serb Refugees Rejected By Belgrade

Serb refugees on the move out of Kosovo are being directed away from Belgrade, for fear that their presence might upset the state's preferred image of victory over the 'NATO aggressors'

By Milenko Vasovic in Gornji Milanovac

Two tractors pulled into the courtyard of Radoslav Otovic, close by the Meridijan fruit processing plant in the Serbian town of Gornji Milanovac which lies two dozen kilometres south of Belgrade. Both vehicles were loaded with pieces of furniture, blankets and clothing - and four Serb families from the Kosovo village of Prekale.

All are tired from the journey. The eldest among them, Bogic Kozic, who is over seventy-five, is crying. Everything he owns is left behind in Kosovo. He has a thirty-five-year old daughter, who is mentally retarded, with him. "I don't know what's happening to us," says Bogic. "What have we done wrong?"

Of his five children, one son lives in Belgrade. The old man is hoping to reach him. Hoping, he says, because it is not so easy to reach Belgrade these days. While some have made it and are staying with families or sleeping rough in the city's parks, most

Kosovo Serb refugees found their road to the capital blocked by the police who ordered them elsewhere. It seems the refugees are not desirable in Belgrade - where they might spoil the celebratory mood of the "victors against the NATO aggressors." The refugees had planned to gather in front of the building of the Yugoslav Parliament to protest what they see as the government's calculated decision to ignore their plight.

In Belgrade today, you can not see or read anything in the official media about the suffering of the Serbs and Montenegrins and others who have left Kosovo - just as previously, we have been unable to read anything about the Albanians forced out of the province earlier.

But a picture of sorts is now being presented to viewers of the Belgrade television station Studio B which is controlled by Vuk Draskovic's Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO). Zivan Zivkovic from the village of Musotiste, in the Suva Reka municipality of Kosovo complained to viewers how he was ordered by the Yugoslav Army, just like other Serbs from the village, to leave, and that they had only three hours to pack up.

He told the station how he and his family had been travelling north for three days. "When we were coming no one paid attention to us, helped us, or gave food for the children or offered us a roof over our heads. We even had to pay two German Marks per litre for the fuel to bring us here. I don't know where I'm going. My sister lives in Belgrade, but people get fed up with guests quickly. I left a lot of things behind including three houses, property, cows, pigs - all worth over a million German Marks... only four of five Serbs stayed in the village, no one knows what happened to them."

Practically the entire Serbian state structure has been moved out of Kosovo. The municipal functionaries, who by rule are all members of the ruling party, were the first to leave, says Marko Jaksic, the president of the Regional Board of the Democratic Party of Serbia. One president of the municipality was even trying to sell his flat to the municipality at the last minute.

The entire police, judiciary, even prisoners were moved, as well as the municipal registrars and archives, so that one cannot now obtain even the simplest document. There is no record as to whether some factories have been moved, but there are rumours that this may have indeed happened. Ontop of this, many of the cars and vehicles in the columns heading out of Kosovo have been striped of their license plates - a sure indication that they were stolen.

The police in Serbia are conducting detailed searches of the refugees and their vehicles, looking for and confiscating arms. Nearly everybody, women and children included, now have their own guns-a legacy of the war in Kosovo. A middle-aged man in the column complained to the Belgrade weekly Vreme: "When we reached Serbia, some gentlemen ordered that our weapons should be confiscated. I did not give them to the UCK (Kosovo Liberation Army), I did not give them to NATO, nor will I give them to these people."

The exact number of Serbs who have fled Kosovo is unknown. The number is growing by the day, and it is estimated to be between 30,000 and 80,000. The majority of them have relatives in Serbia and Montenegro, but many are still out in the open. In some places, like in Kragujevac for example, these people have a problem with food. That is the reason why many are now thinking of returning so long as their security can be guaranteed."

The Serbian authorities have changed their tune in recent days and have begun a somewhat panicky appeal for the refugees to return home. The appeals are aimed at keeping those yet to leave in place as much as they are initiating the return of refugees, who after all do not have much access to television these days.

On the state run channels therefore, one can already see reports from Serb enclaves in Pristina or in Kosovo Polje, in which the interviewed Serbs are filmed saying somewhat unconvincingly: "This is our land, we are staying here, we are safe here..."

Milenko Vasovic is a journalist based in Belgrade.



© Institute of War & Peace Reporting

A lot of lessons can be learnt by Kfor on how things are working out in Bosnia.....

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No Peace For The Protectorate's Protected

The flawed peace that emerged from the Dayton Agreement - which halted the war but did not resolve the conflict in Bosnia - bodes ill for the future of Kosovo.

By Senad Slatina in Sarajevo
(Published on June 22, 1999)

As the international community approaches the mammoth task of building a lasting peace in Kosovo, the lesson from Bosnia is: if you want to be successful quickly, do not try to do any serious political business with former warring parties - impose a protectorate instead.

Such is the unofficial advice given by those people who have been tasked with implementing the Dayton peace agreement which brought two, if not three warring parties together in a grand scheme to build up a new multi-ethnic state.

While it was the best settlement that could have been achieved at that time, the peace implementation has shown up a lot of shortcomings. On top of this lies the inescapable fact that the peace is suffering from the fact that no one side won the war. And by its failure to at least appoint one side as the moral winners and by remaining silent on this issue, the international community has allowed all sides to claim their own victory and behave as if their policies prevailed.

In dealing even-handedly with all the former enemies and pushing them, step by step towards working together, the international civilian team hopes to move them closer toward agreeing to a Bosnia as envisaged by Dayton. But almost four years after the war, substantial progress is still missing.

"Those who are in power now are more or less the same ones who led these peoples during the war", says Carlos Westendorp, the international community's High Representative in Bosnia. "The mentality of those leaders will not change the mentality of the people here. The people are still scared, and they still vote for their national representatives."

Both Serbs and Croats are trying to strengthen the autonomy of the two entities at the expense of the Bosnian state. At the same time, Croats from inside the Federation entity are trying to keep their strong ties to Croatia proper. Across the inter-entity line, the reverse is happening in the Republika Srpska under the leadership of Prime Minister Milorad Dodik,

The RS started to cut its ties with the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) before the war in Kosovo and has already introduced customs tariffs in trade with the FRY, as well as replacing the Yugoslav dinar with Bosnia's own Convertible Mark (KM). The RS is also looking to establish strong relations with other trading partners in the region.

For their part, the Bosniaks are focused on strengthening Bosnia's state institutions and are accused by both Serbs and Croats of trying to create a unitary state that they would dominate. Thus the three sides in Bosnia today hold much the same positions as they did before and during the war. These positions are highly unlikely to change unless the international community takes a more active approach in encouraging them to do so.

While the three parties agreed that Bosnia would continue to be one internationally recognised state; Dayton gave only minimal authority to the state institutions necessary. While Bosnia boasts a tripartite presidency, council of ministers and a parliament with two houses, all are weak precisely because full agreement by the representatives of all three peoples is required by all three institutions.

Without continual pressure applied by the Office of the High Representative (OHR), the three bodies would probably not be functioning at all. OHR officials still make sure the three institutions have regular sessions, examine agendas, advise on items to include and even suggest the order in which they are to appear.

The inefficiency of the state institutions and the different interests of the three people can best be illustrated by two recent affairs: an especially lame session of the Bosnia and Herzegovina House of Representatives and an attempt by Presidency member Zivko Radisic to drop Bosnia's genocide case against the FRY before the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

Bosnia's House of Representatives held its sixth session on June 8th and of the 15 laws put forward by the OHR to be debated and then adopted, only two were passed. Among those rejected was the draft Law on Establishment of Joint Police Forces against Terrorism, Inter-Entity Crime and Drug Trafficking. Serb delegates, who opposed them because they related to the functioning of Bosnia on the state level, blocked most decisions.

"The level of debate and seriousness of the delegates is, frankly speaking, laughable," says OHR spokeswoman Alexandra Stiglmayer. "The Common Institutions are almost not functioning. It requires interventions and a lot of pressure from the international Community to even get a minimum of work done. (...) We are seriously wondering if any laws and decisions will be passed unless the High Representative imposes them."

The Steering Board of the Peace Implementation Council, which met on June 15th in Brussels at the level of political directors, was also unusually critical. "The Steering Board is alarmed by the inadequate level of functioning of the Common Institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), in particular the BiH Parliament," read a statement put out by the OHR afterwards. "Unless the situation improves considerably soon, BiH's leaders risk losing the financial support of the International Community and their efforts to integrate Bosnia and Herzegovina in Europe."

The attempts by Presidency member Zivko Radisic to single-handedly stall Bosnia's genocide case against the FRY before the International Court of Justice is more telling. Without informing his two colleagues in the Presidency, Radisic on June 9th had an associate contact the Court to declare that Bosnia was "not going on with the proceedings in the case concerning (...) the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide" on the basis that it was "not in accordance with the provisions of the Dayton-Paris Agreement." Though unresolved, the case created outrage among Bosniaks, and Radisic's action is not even legal since he did not secure the necessary agreement from both of his colleagues on the Presidency.

International officials do not pretend that Bosnia would be able to function without them and that war would break out if both the civilian and the military implementation force were to pull out.

"We are miles away from a self-sustaining peace," says a Western official who does not wish to be named. However, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic aside, these Western officials are not ready to admit - or genuinely do not believe - that it is impossible to build peace using the same leaders who led Bosnia into and during the war.

"Perhaps the international community has now realized that the problem in previous years was that we tried to include a pyromaniac in a fire brigade by considering Milosevic a solution instead of recognizing him as part of the problem", Simon Haselock, Deputy High Representative for Media Affairs told the Bosnian weekly 'Ljiljan'.

Bosniak leaders who long for a unified, multi-ethnic Bosnia with strong state elements, look with envy at the events in Kosovo. Haris Silajdzic, current co-Chair of the Council of Ministers and Foreign and Prime Minister of the war-time Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, has repeatedly openly asked for the use of force "like in Kosovo" to return refugees to their homes of origin, and advocated changing the Dayton peace agreement to create a functioning, multi-ethnic state.

"The Agreement was a result of circumstances that existed then, as well as of numerous political compromises both among domestic forces and among the international community. That does not mean that it is ideal under current circumstances (...) The situation in Serbia, that is Yugoslavia, presents a significant change. (...) I am asking everybody: Is it logical to use force to return Albanians to Kosovo, but not use the same force to return Serbs to Croatia, and Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats to their homes in BiH?"

At the moment, a change of the Dayton Peace Accords is not likely. When asked how it can ever work, international officials give one answer: it will take time. "The Agreement is a good one," says Stiglmayer. "Everything could have happened and would happen faster if we had a protectorate here. Without it, it will take a long time - 10 years, perhaps even more. The main problem is the political structures here, the fact that the country is run by nationalist parties which rule with absolute power, which are organized like the old Communist Party, which control every sphere of the society, and whose power is based on 'ethnic fear.'

"They can maintain their power only if they convince their constituencies that the other two people are bad and dangerous, that all questions, such as economic prosperity or the rule of law, are of secondary importance, and that only they can save their ethnic constituency from the evils that the other two peoples are cooking up. These parties are gradually losing power. We - the IC - are slowly dismantling their power structures, and the people themselves are focusing on other things. But it will take a long, long [before] Bosnia and Herzegovina gets responsible leaders."

In the meantime, Bosnia looks set to continue to meddle along, with the International Community keeping its Common Institutions running - unless the West one day loses interest - either because of a lack of commitment from local leaders, or because of more pressing demands elsewhere.

According to at least one Western diplomat in Sarajevo, "the worst would be if the International Community left troops here to preserve the peace, but stopped building a self-sustaining peace and democratizing the country. In that case, Bosnia would become a ghetto."

Another, more frightening scenario is put forward as a possibility by the noted Balkans expert and writer Laura Silber. "A change of borders could, after all, be the inevitable solution," she says. As has been well proved so far, the country's three peoples are not likely to agree about that without another war -and a war which this time produces a clear winner.

Senad Slatina is a journalist with Slobodna Bosna magazine in Sarajevo.