Kosova Crisis Center
link to alb-net
Serb military and police forces are
shelling civil population in Nerodime (KP)
Nerodime, May 11th (Kosovapress) Today in the Operative Zone of Nerodime serb terrorist
forces started a new offensive against civil population in the mountains of these
zone.Serb military and police forces are shelling civil population which is gorge of a
mount Topilla.Here are 70 thousand people .The enemy is using hard artillery.According to
our informations the shellings in this zone are of higher intensity and are continuing in
the same way during these moments we are informing.
WAR CHRONIC FROM LIPJANI (KP)
Lipjan,the 11th May (kosovapress) On the 3 th may, serb forces ordered by the
commander of police in Lipjani,Nikolla opened a grave and took from there corpses of the
people who where massacred on the 18th april in Hallaq te Vogel.They have been buried in
one big hole in the village.With the help of some local roms ,the corpses have been
transferred near the building of Lipjani,where they forced their families to come and
identify dead bodies and to bury them again but now separately.Since the family refused to
do this,the police ordered tho roms to bury separately dead bodies. The police of Lipjani
have ordered the inhabitants of the villages of Lipjani,who are still in their houses ,to
form urgently councils of 5 members.Then this council has to cooperate with police
body.After this ,they will be obliged to registrate on the numbers of refugees who are
placed in these villages and to convince the peasants to deliver their arms.Till now the
police did not succeeded in forming these councils, but the pressure over the albanians of
these side is every day becoming harder. Four policemen of the commune of Lipjanit: Ceka,
Toshiq, Vasiq and Nikolla, are known as leaders of serbian expedition against the
albanians in this commune. They are responsible for many crimes that are made these days
against the albanian civilians.
The serbian forces in counterattack with armoured
military vehicles in Koshare (KP)
Junik, May 11th (Kosovapress) In the border zone Kosova-Albania, fierce fighting are
continuing between the forces of KLA and the serbian fascist-terrorist forces. The serbian
killing forces have gotten massive reinforcements in military troops and military technics
and have made a strong counterattack. Today, since 4.00 o'clock of the morning, the
serbian forces for the first time in these fierce fighting, have used armoured vehicles:
tanks, armoured vehicles, praga, etc, as well as they are shelling without rest towards
the units of KLA. With all the military arsenal used in the attacks, they are trying to
penetrate towards Koshare and to gain the position of KLA.
The executions by Serbian
police-military in the town of Rahovec go on (KP)
Rahovec, May 10th (Kosovapress) According to our sources, in the town of Rahovec, 12
civilians are executed, including women and children. Yesterday have been executed: the
family of Ali Sharkut with seven members, Njazi Miftari with his wife and the family with
three members of Emin Abaz Ibres.
Today the column of the deported people has moved
toward Albania
Rahovec, May 10th (Kosovapress) Even today, there are reports on massive columns of
expelled people, which have come from Mitrovica. While the other column, also a massive
group of civilians, have been gathered in the beverages cellar in Rahovec. There are no
reports concerning their fate up to now. They have walked on foot, hungry, tired and
exhausted.
U.S. Plans Airdrops to Refugees
Inside Kosova (NY Times)
By ELIZABETH BECKER
WASHINGTON -- The United States is planning to begin dropping supplies to the half-million
Albanians forced from their homes and hiding in the Kosova hills with little food or
medicine, the State Department announced Monday.
"The U.S. has been preparing a strategy for airdrops, and we are going to be doing
airdrops, hopefully, starting two weeks from tomorrow," said Julia Taft, assistant
secretary of state for refugees.
The decision follows the quiet inauguration of daily truck convoys by the governments of
Greece, Russia and Switzerland to carry food and medicine to Kosova, Serbia and Montenegro
in hopes of heading off starvation or death from hunger-related diseases.
In a departure from the previous stances of both sides, the Yugoslav government and NATO
agreed last week to permit the convoys to pass safely into Kosova. But the convoys alone
are not thought to be enough.
"In plain terms of need there are hundreds of thousands in Kosova itself, and they
are in desperate need," said Alex Rondos, the envoy for humanitarian affairs for the
Greek Foreign Ministry.
Rondos calculates that the Kosova Albanians who have been displaced from their homes but
who are still in Kosova will need a minimum of 10,000 tons of foodstuff per month. At
best, the convoys will be able to bring in 4,000 tons each month.
"We're concerned that these isolated populations are in very bad shape," said a
Pentagon official. "We're looking at all the options now -- ground and
airdrops."
In the last three weeks, the Air Force has been making practice airdrops in the United
States to be prepared if NATO decides to begin airdrops.
"We know it's possible to make the airdrops," said one Pentagon official.
"But we can't promise that the food will reach the right people or that the flights
will be risk-free."
Until Monday, the Pentagon and the State Department had expressed doubt about airdrops
because the bundles could be picked up by Yugoslav troops and Serbian police and because
they would be risky for the pilots flying the cargo airplanes.
"They've been exploring quite a number of options but there seemed no reliable
suggestion short of ground troops to get the food where it was needed," said Bill
Frelick of the U.S. Committee for Refugees, a private relief group, who has consulted with
Ms. Taft. "Airdrops indicate the level of desperation we're in."
State Department officials warned that the details have yet to be completed and that the
plan could be stymied if the Yugoslav government refuses permission.
"It might involve the U.S. government funding a private group, pursuing this option
the way the Greeks have pursued their ground convoys," said James Rubin, the State
Department spokesman.
In April, the Greek government and a Greek relief organization began sending aid to Kosova
with permission from the Yugoslav government and NATO. Now the governments of Switzerland
and Russia have banded together with Greece to send in the daily convoys. The operation
informs NATO about the convoy schedules, and NATO then tries to insure that its bombers do
not hit the relief trucks.
"The Serbs have told us we can go where we want and we are going to test that
proposition," Rondos said. "That makes it a bit of a high-wire act."
The separatist Kosova Liberation Army rebels have opened up a supply corridor into Kosova
with the capture of a border post, NATO officials say. Aid group officials say the rebels
have used the corridor to ship in arms and ammunition but might be willing to let in
relief supplies for civilians.
For the past year, the Yugoslavs have used food as a weapon in ejecting Albanians from
Kosova, systematically destroying their food stocks, burning down silos and haystacks, and
killing livestock. By the end of last year, Kosova was dependent on food assistance from
international aid organizations. In March, when the bombing began, the aid groups fled to
Macedonia.
"Since then, the Serbs either took over the food stocks or destroyed them,"
Frelick said.
With the war engulfing most of the province, it is unlikely that there will be much of a
harvest this summer, according to classified American reports. "In the last few weeks
the theme has been consistent -- again and again it is food," said Fred Abrahams, who
heads the Human Rights Watch delegation on the Albanian border. "Tens of thousands of
people in central and northern Kosova are in danger of running out of food."
A State Department Report Documents
Serbian Massacres in Kosova (NY Times)
By PHILIP SHENON
WASHINGTON -- The United States has gathered evidence from Albanian refugees of mass
executions in at least 70 towns and villages in Kosova since large-scale deportations
began in late March, according to a report described by the State Department on Monday as
the most comprehensive documentary record to date on atrocities there.
The department's report said that refugee accounts suggested that Serbian forces had
executed more than 4,000 Kosovars, and that surveillance photographs taken either by
satellites or airplanes had identified seven possible sites of mass graves.
The report said that rapes of Albanian women were being reported in increasing numbers,
with systematic mass rapes apparently carried out in the cities of Djakovica and Pec.
In the western city of Pec, it said, young Albanian women were reportedly herded into a
hotel where groups of soldiers were allowed to visit the hotel on a rotating basis to rape
the women.
Many of the conclusions of the report, titled "Erasing History: Ethnic Cleansing in
Kosova," appear to depend almost entirely on information from refugees' accounts.
There was no suggestion that American intelligence agencies had been able to verify most,
or even many, of the accounts by the refugees of war crimes, and the words
"repeatedly" and "allegedly" appear throughout the document.
In releasing the report at a news conference, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said
the full extent of the atrocities carried out in Kosova was still not known.
"Horrific patterns of war crimes and crimes against humanity are emerging in Kosova:
systemic executions, organized rape and a well-planned program of terror and
expulsions," she said. "Only when fighting has ended and the people of Kosova
can safely return home will we know the full extent of the evil that has been unleashed in
Kosova."
The report offered few, if any, examples of mass killings or other atrocities that had not
already been reported by news organizations or human rights groups.
State Department officials said the report's value was instead in its chronological,
city-by-city, village-by-village account of war crimes, a compilation that they said
bolstered NATO's argument for stepping up its air war against Yugoslavia despite the furor
created by last week's accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.
"There is a huge difference between NATO, which has done everything it can to avoid
civilian casualties, and Mr. Milosevic, whose military campaign is directed first and
foremost at civilian targets," Albright said. "Ample evidence of this is
provided in the report we release today, which gathers the facts as we know them and
demonstrates the immensity of the human tragedy taking place in Kosova."
In an extensive chronology, the report says that the Serbian effort to depopulate Kosova
of its Albanian majority began in earnest before NATO air strikes were launched on March
24, undermining the Serbian argument that the bombing was what led the Albanians to flee.
On March 19, it notes, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that
333,000 Kosova Albanians had been displaced from their homes by the Serbs, with almost
28,000 already across the border in neighboring Albania or Macedonia. By March 21, it
said, 25,000 Kosovars had been displaced in the Drenica region, where Serbian forces were
reportedly looting and burning the homes of Albanians.
State Department officials said the refugee accounts of atrocities by Serbs tended to
support one another -- in theme and often in graphic detail. And they said that aerial
photographs left no doubt that there were at least two mass graves in Kosova -- in Pusto
Selo and Izbica, with five other sites in the province considered possible mass graves --
and that more than 300 villages had been burned, many to the ground.
"Besides houses and apartments, mosques, churches, schools and medical facilities
have also been targeted and destroyed," the report said. "Many settlements have
been totally destroyed in an attempt to ensure that the ethnic Albanian residents do not
return."
The provincial capital of Pristina, it said, had been left "a ghost town" after
Serbian forces reportedly expelled between 100,000 and 120,000 Albanians in four days.
What It Would Take to Cleanse
Serbia - Sonja Biserko From Belgrade Suggests Denazification of Serbia (NY Times)
By BLAINE HARDEN
Along the blood-spattered timeline of Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia, Kosova is merely
the hideous Now. There was a Before -- in Croatia and Bosnia. Assuming that Milosevic
retreats from Kosova with his dictatorship intact, as now seems likely, Balkans experts
foresee an unspeakable After.
It may feature: Fratricidal civil war in Montenegro. Ethnic cleansing of Hungarians in the
Serbian province of Vojvodina. Mass murder of Muslims in the Sandzak region of Serbia. No
need, for the moment, to bother about the location or correct pronunciation of these
obscure places. The world will likely learn. Just as it learned where Kosova is -- or was
-- before more than 700,000 human beings were chased from their homes in a systematic
military campaign of burning and intimidation, theft and murder.
If the pattern holds, Milosevic will soldier on, using Big Lie manipulation of television
to tap into a collective soft spot in the Serbian psyche. Even as legions of non-Serbs are
dispossessed or killed, he will continue to inflame the Serbs and preserve his power by
reassuring them that, yes, they are the victims.
Given the character of Milosevic's regime and knowing that there is almost certainly more
horror to come, a bold, if impractical, question is just now beginning to be formulated.
Is it finally time for outside powers to make the effort necessary to cure a national
psychosis inside Serbia that has been destabilizing a corner of Europe for a decade?
Put another way, has the time come for NATO to do in Serbia what the Allies did in Germany
and Japan after World II?
To follow that model, Serbia's military would have to be destroyed, and Milosevic crushed,
by an invasion that almost certainly would cost the lives of hundreds of U.S. soldiers.
After unconditional surrender, the political, social and economic fabric of Serbia would
be remade under outside supervision so that the Serbs could take their place in a
prosperous and democratic world.
The question cuts three ways. Will it happen? Should it happen? Could it possibly work?
The answer to the first part of this question, at least for the foreseeable future, is a
resounding No Way. The other answers, however, are provocative enough to make it
worthwhile to suspend disbelief and indulge the fantasy of a post-Milosevic Balkans.
Let's start, though, with the real world. Policy-makers and long-time students of the
West's slow-motion intervention in Yugoslavia during the 1990's see no possibility of
Milosevic's military defeat or of Serbia's occupation.
An agreement last week between the West and Russia outlined the kind of solution the
outside powers would seek instead -- a withdrawal from Kosova of the Yugoslav army, police
and paramilitary fighters, with an international security force to replace them. Details
of the deal are still being argued over, but one thing was clear: If the outside powers
can get him to sign on, Milosevic would remain in power in his shrinking Yugoslavia. Thus,
he would have the opportunity to "cleanse" another day. The West's calculation
seems to be that avoiding a land war, keeping NATO together and cementing relations with
Russia outweigh the long-term costs of letting Milosevic off the hook.
That, then, is the real world.
Such a course does nothing, of course, to eradicate extreme Serb nationalism.
The only way to stamp out the disease, protect Serbia's minorities and bring lasting peace
to the Balkans is a Japan- or Germany-style occupation of Serbia, according to Daniel
Serwer, who until two years ago was the director of European intelligence and research for
the State Department. Serwer concedes that occupation has never been on the West's list of
serious options, but he echoes many experts on the Balkans when he argues that it should
be.
"It is very hard to see how Serbia undergoes this process all on its own," said
Serwer, now a fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, a research group in Washington.
"This regime is deeply rooted. It is not like some dictatorship that you take off its
head and it will die. It is so corrupt and the corruption is not superficial."
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, a Harvard historian who wrote "Hitler's Willing Executioners:
Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust," published a kind of manifesto last week that
demands Serbia "be placed in receivership."
"Serbia's deeds are, in their essence, different from those of Nazi Germany only in
scale," Goldhagen wrote in The New Republic. "Milosevic is not Hitler, but he is
a genocidal killer who has caused the murders of many tens of thousands of people."
It is worth remembering, though, that Milosevic is an elected leader, having won three
elections that were more or less fair. That, along with the Serb leader's soaring
popularity in the wake of NATO bombing, support an argument that what ails Serbia goes far
deeper than one man.
No one makes this argument more powerfully than Sonja Biserko, director of the Helsinki
Committee for Human Rights in Serbia and a former senior advisor in the European
department of the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry. Ms. Biserko, who fled Belgrade a week after
the NATO bombings began, said in New York last week that Serbia's fundamental problem is
not Milosevic, but a "moral devastation" that has infected her nation.
"People in Serbia are undergoing a mass denial of the barbarity of the ethnic
cleansing in Kosova," Ms. Biserko said. "This denial is itself commensurate to
the crime taking place before the eyes of the world."
Ms. Biserko, who met 10 days ago with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and urged her
to consider occupation, believes that Serbia's opposition politicians are incapable now of
coming to grips with a culture of victimhood. "Serbs have managed now with the NATO
bombing to convince themselves they are victims and as victims they cannot be responsible
for what happened in Kosova," she said.
A surreal sense of victimhood in Serbia is nothing new. During the siege of Sarajevo, when
Serb forces ringed that city with artillery and routinely killed its civilians, Belgrade
television reported that Bosnian Muslims were laying siege to themselves. "The Serbs
continue to defend their centuries-old hills around Sarajevo," said Radio-Television
Serbia.
To shatter this Looking Glass victimhood, Ms. Biserko offers a prescription: Indictment of
Milosevic by the War Crimes Tribunal. A military defeat of Serbia and demilitarization of
the country. Highly publicized trials that will force Serbs to confront the savagery
committed in their name. A Western takeover of the mass media, with strict prohibitions
against the dissemination of extreme Serb nationalism. A Marshall Plan for the Balkans.
Asked why the West should be willing to undertake an occupation that would risk many
lives, cost billions and take years, Ms. Biserko shrugged: "What other choice is
there?"
"The Western world has lost its political instinct," she said. "To bring
substance to the ideals of human rights, at some point you must be willing to commit
troops."
But could the occupation of Serbia work? Could it break the cycle of violence? Two
prominent historians believe it could, if done properly.
"The key in Japan was unconditional surrender," said John W. Dower, a professor
of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of "Embracing
Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II." "The Americans went in and they did
everything. They had a major land reform. They abolished the military, simply got rid of
it. They drafted a new constitution. This is what you can do when you have unconditional
surrender."
Dower was struck by the eagerness with which a defeated people welcomed reform. "In
Japan, the average person was really sick of war, and I think that would be the case in
Yugoslavia," he said. "The Americans cracked open a repressive military system
and the people filled the space."
The occupation of Germany also suggests ways of dealing with Yugoslavia, according to
Thomas Alan Schwartz, a historian at Vanderbilt and author of "America's
Germany."
"When Germany was totally defeated, it provided opportunity," he said. "You
could be physically there, controlling the flow of information and using war-crime trials
to show the Germans that atrocities were done in their name."
Without something similar in Serbia, Schwartz said, "We can look forward to more
trouble in Serbia.
"What reminds me of Germany is the comparison to the end of World War I," he
added. "Then, the Germans had this powerful sense of being victims. There was a deep
resentment that Hitler was able to exploit. It will be the same in Serbia when NATO
bombing stops."
The Japan and Germany analogies, of course, are flawed. Those major-league powers ravaged
parts of the world that America cared about. Occupation was nothing less than emergency
triage for the worst violence in history.
Milosevic, by comparison, is small potatoes. He leads a minor-league country that
periodically lays waste to poor, unpronounceable, strategically irrelevant places.
Pristina is not Paris.
There is, though, an inkling that the West has begun to try for a solution. In Bosnia,
32,000 NATO-led troops and High Commissioner Carlos Westendorp are even now doing the
hard, slow, complex work of healing that country.
Westendorp has not attempted a Japan-style remake of the Serb-populated half of Bosnia
(just as nobody has tried to do that in neighboring Croatia, with its own accomplishments
in ethnic cleansing). The indicted war criminals Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic have
not been hunted down. Radical Serb parties have not been banned. But tough action is being
taken. Westendorp ordered radical Serb nationalists out of state television. He has fired
the nationalist zealot who was elected the Bosnian Serbs' president. If Serbs violently
object to what the peacekeepers do, NATO-led forces shoot to kill.
In a recent interview in Sarajevo, Westendorp said most Bosnian Serbs are cooperating
because they are sick of war. It will take time, he said, but the West has enough money
and muscle in Bosnia to extinguish the will to war. The one insoluble problem, he said,
was the leader in Belgrade.
"If getting rid of Milosevic fails," he said, "then everything fails."
Why Albanians Have Deep Affection
for Americans (Chicago Tribune)
The war for Kosova has given long-ignored Albania the chance to demonstrate a decades-old
affection for America,...
May 11, 1999
TIRANA, Albania
There is a magic word in Albania that can be invoked to solve all kinds of problems.
Those who utter it are waved through checkpoints by police. Receptionists at overbooked
hotels suddenly manage to find a room. Waiters scurry to secure the best table in the
restaurant.
The word is "American," and for anyone who can lay claim to being one, it is
hard to imagine a more welcoming place on Earth than Albania.
This isolated, impoverished country on the outskirts of Europe has long held a special
place in its heart for America.
But until the crisis in Kosova, those feelings had remained unrequited and unreciprocated.
If Albania had registered at all in the consciousness of ordinary Americans, it may have
been because of its role as the country against which a fictitious U.S. president declared
war in the movie "Wag the Dog."
The film's premise was somewhat unfair because it would be difficult for America to
declare war on Albania. If it did, the Albanians probably would just welcome the Americans
in--or simply refuse to believe it was true.
Albanians still refuse to believe that U.S. pilots accidentally bombed two Kosova refugee
convoys, despite NATO's admission that they did--offering proof, said Albanian Information
Minister Musa Ulqini, of the enduring nature of Albania's pro-American sentiments.
"These feelings are not just of the moment but are rooted in the past, the present
and the future," he said. "This is a country where for 50 years we were unable
to express our true feelings toward America."
Now, Albania finally is getting the chance. The Kosova crisis has brought thousands of
American troops here to support NATO's air campaign and to help the refugees, along with
hundreds of journalists and aid workers. Albanians are relishing the sudden attention from
their favorite country.
"This is the first time America has taken us seriously, and for that we are truly
grateful," said Ilira Gilka, a doctor. "It is the first time in years we've felt
some hope."
The U.S. role in leading NATO's efforts to help the Albanians of Kosova, the ethnic
cousins of Albanian nationals, explains some of the warmth of the welcome, but not all.
Memories are long in the Balkans, and every Albanian knows that it is only because of
America that Albania exists at all. In the wake of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson
overrode a British and French plan to divide Albania among Italy, Greece and Serbia, which
were occupying it at the time.
Albania's survival as a nation was ensured, and Albanians have not forgotten. When U.S.
Secretary of State James Baker visited Albania after communism collapsed in 1991, an
ecstatic crowd estimated at 1 million thronged the streets of Tirana to greet him.
Many members of the crowd waved placards inscribed simply with the word
"Wilson," who these days enjoys the stature of a national hero, the only
foreigner to have a street named after him.
The paranoid, isolationist form of communism that kept Albania locked in a state of
ignorance and underdevelopment for four decades makes the endurance of Albania's affection
for America all the more remarkable.
The countryside is still dotted with hundreds of thousands of strange, mushroom-shaped
pillboxes built to defend Albania against a U.S. invasion that its xenophobic communist
leader, Enver Hoxha, always warned was imminent.
Children were taught to recite that "America is the true enemy of the world and of
the working class," and every Albanian was obliged to read Hoxha's book, "The
Anglo-American Peril to Albania." Hoxha severed relations with China's Chairman Mao
Tse-tung, once his only friend, in disgust at Mao's meeting with President Richard Nixon.
Hoxha would not be happy if he were alive today to see what has become of his
indoctrination. The U.S. military has taken control of Albania's airspace. A U.S. force of
5,300 combat troops bristling with armor and tanks has turned Albania's only functioning
airport into a base for launching Apache helicopter attacks.
Secretary of State Baker was the first and the last senior U.S. official ever to visit.
America's attention was diverted by more pressing problems in the Balkans, and by more
promising nations than Albania, which has yet to recover from the strangling legacy of its
communist past.
Anarchy lurks beneath the surface, and bouts of civil unrest have kept it off-limits to
tourists and businessmen. Albanians are sincerely hoping that the Americans will stick
around, and that talk of "long-term" solutions to the Balkans crisis will
include them.
But if they don't, if Americans pack their bags and walk away when the crisis is over,
Albanians will understand, said Ulqini. "America has already done more than enough
for Albania," he said. "We owe a debt of gratitude we will never be able to
repay."
Canadians urged to 'adopt'
refugees
By SEAN DURKAN, Sun Media Ottawa Bureau
OTTAWA -- The government has launched an adopt-a-family campaign to help 5,000 Kosova
refugees start new lives in Canada.
Immigration Minister Lucienne Robillard yesterday called on Canadians to sponsor families
to help them find homes of their own, jobs and community services -- and to provide
emotional and practical support to help them settle here.
"Through this initiative, the Kosova refugees will receive the support they need to
alleviate their suffering and regain control over their lives," Robillard said.
The government is working with the provinces and volunteer groups -- 61 organizations in
Canada sponsor international refugees each year -- and has set up a toll-free hotline at
1-888-410-0009 for anyone interested in helping.
The campaign isn't looking for cash from sponsors because the government will provide
financial assistance to the refugees in the form of welfare payments and health care for
up to 24 months, Robillard said. She estimated the cost of caring for the 5,000 refugees
for just six months at $100 million.
Nor are Canadians being asked to open up their homes to the refugees, but rather to help
them find a place of their own.
"The refugees lives have been so disrupted that it is important they be able to be
established in their own homes," said Michael Casasola, director of refugee
sponsorships for the Catholic diocese of London and a spokesperson for the Canadian
Council for Refugees.
Robillard and Casasola recommend interested Canadians form a group of five to sponsor a
family.
Robillard said the goal is still for the refugees to one day return to their homes in
Kosova. But until then, Canada wants them to live as normal a life as possible, not herded
together on military bases, she said.
Refugees who wish to stay in Canada for good will be allowed to apply for permanent
residence.
Yugoslavia Near Goals in Kosova,
Now Selling Arms to Libya (W. Post)
By R. Jeffrey Smith and Dana Priest Washington Post Staff Writers Tuesday, May 11, 1999;
Page A1
Yugoslav military forces can afford a partial withdrawal from Kosova because they have
accomplished most of their war aims there and can trim operations without jeopardizing
control of the Serbian province, according to Western intelligence and defense officials.
Over the past seven weeks, 40,000 Serb-led Yugoslav troops and specially trained police
have scattered the province's separatist guerrilla army and forced all but about 10
percent of Kosova's 1997 population of 1.7 million ethnic Albanians from their homes --
and more than 700,000 of them out of the province.
As a result, government troops are devoting much of their effort to digging in for a long
stay in Kosova, often using forced ethnic Albanian labor to build bunkers and dig trenches
in preparation for a NATO ground invasion, according to intelligence officials.
"There's no one left; it's time for peace," a top U.S. military officer said
sarcastically.
New information obtained by Western sources has convinced NATO officials that Yugoslav
President Slobodan Milosevic ordered the Kosova offensive explicitly to slash the
province's majority ethnic Albanian population to reinforce Serbian control.
Military operations still underway in Kosova are aimed both at completing this task and at
rousting the remaining units of the rebel Kosova Liberation Army. Government forces have
launched attacks on enclaves of civilians who had been under rebel protection; the largest
of these, holding about 130,000 people, has been isolated east of the town of Pec in
western Kosova. Roughly 16,000 civilians from this area fled this weekend into Albania and
Montenegro -- Serbia's disaffected sister republic in the Yugoslav federation.
The pace of the expulsions has recently averaged more than 10,000 ethnic Albanians a day,
meaning that most of those remaining may be forced out or are on their way out in only a
few more weeks.
As one NATO official put it, if the conflict were a tug of war between NATO and Yugoslavia
and "we stop at this moment . . . we would be looking at the mud pit" between
the two teams. In a contest with the world's most powerful military coalition, said
another, Belgrade's low-tech security forces thus far have achieved far more of their
goals than NATO. Ivo Daalder, a former aide to President Clinton and National Security
Council specialist on the Balkans, said Yugoslav forces "are basically done" in
Kosova. In an apparent sign of Belgrade's confidence, a Yugoslav ship, the Boca Star, has
been spotted at the Montenegrin port of Bar loading military equipment for export to
Libya, intelligence reports showed.
After numerous setbacks, said a senior diplomat, NATO's aim is now the "rollback, not
the prevention" of Belgrade's war aims. Although NATO has boasted officially of
pinning down government forces in Kosova, officials now say that these forces have shown
renewed energy. A NATO spokesman said Yugoslav troops and Serbian police had taken
advantage of heavy cloud cover -- poor flying conditions for NATO warplanes -- to step up
their campaign of evicting ethnic Albanians and to maneuver tanks and other armored
vehicles to new positions.
Yugoslav helicopter gunships last weekend conducted their first attack since early April,
this one on the village of Kosari, part of a main supply route for the Kosova Liberation
Army. At the same time, the 72nd Special Operations unit was conducting operations in the
Rogova Mountains, acting as forward spotters for artillery batteries seeking to wipe out
remaining pockets of rebel activity.
On Saturday, government forces in central Kosova were repositioned to fight rebels in the
Drenica region. Both Yugoslav army and Serbian police units moved ground forces and
armored vehicles of the 252nd Armored Brigade to rebel transit routes between
Klina-Malisevo and Srbica.
Despite the announced troop withdrawal, Yugoslav forces also have been fortifying their
positions in the province. Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic, commander of the Yugoslav 3rd Army,
based in Pristina, the Kosova capital, is now engaged full time in planning a defense
against a possible NATO invasion of Kosova, Western intelligence officials say.
One intelligence official predicted that in the next month "both sides will be making
gains," meaning that as NATO attacks from the air, Belgrade government forces will
expel more civilians on the ground.
Several officials envisioned an eventual stalemate, with Yugoslav troops largely
dispersed, inactive and focused on strategic defense. "Without an assembly point [to
attack], these [NATO] guys will fly and fly and fly," said one military official.
"We can't bomb the woods."
After seven weeks of bombing, Yugoslav troops and Serbian police forces are largely intact
and able to move within Kosova, Western officials say. NATO has destroyed only 20 percent
of all armored vehicles deployed in the province, according to NATO estimates. Even
heavily attacked air defenses remain a sufficient threat to prevent NATO aircraft from
routinely flying below 15,000 feet -- and never within the range of hand-held antiaircraft
weapons. Yugoslav forces have been aggressively trying to shoot down NATO planes, firing
62 "barrages" of optically guided surface-to-air missiles last week.
Despite a European Union ban on fuel exports to Yugoslavia and NATO emphasis on stopping
the supply of fuel to the Yugoslav military, as of yesterday "large quantities"
of fuel were flowing into the country via the Danube River, and along highways from
Montenegro, Croatia and Romania, intelligence reports showed.
Two Western diplomats at NATO headquarters said they do not expect Belgrade to give in
soon to the alliance's demand for a pullout of its forces from Kosova, despite a recent
flurry of diplomatic maneuvers. One went so far as to describe the airstrikes to date as a
"failure" that left the alliance with no option other than escalation.
Milosevic "has pretty much ruined Kosova," said a NATO military officer.
"There's hardly been a village that's not trashed," he said, noting that more
than 300 were damaged in the past month and 200 last year.
In an interview at his Brussels headquarters, NATO Secretary General Javier Solana said it
is now clear that Milosevic intended from the outset to "empty the country" of
ethnic Albanians. But as the Yugoslav military built up its forces in and around Kosova in
the weeks before the airstrikes began in March, "not even the United States was
prepared to act; the United States was then in the lead of talking, not acting,"
Solana said.
The Yugoslav Army "got away with its plan for the first two weeks," conceded one
intelligence official.
Tribunal Considers Indictment of
Milosevic (W. Post)
By Charles Trueheart Washington Post Foreign Service Saturday, May 1, 1999; Page A13
PARIS – In the usually discreet world of the international war crimes tribunal, it is
an open secret that investigators are collecting evidence that could make Yugoslav
President Slobodan Milosevic the first sitting chief of state in modern history indicted
on war crimes charges.
Prosecutors are lobbying NATO countries to provide intelligence data that could help
bolster the case against Milosevic and his senior commanders in connection with the
killings and mass expulsions of civilians in Kosova. In Paris last week, the French
government turned over a number of such documents, following similar public gestures by
the British and Germans.
At tribunal offices in The Hague, testimony from refugees is pouring in through
nongovernmental humanitarian and human rights groups working in refugee camps in Albania
and Macedonia, all but overwhelming a legal staff with account upon account of atrocities.
"There's not a single refugee coming out of there who doesn't have something to
contribute," said Louise Arbour, the tribunal's chief prosecutor. "There are
500,000 stories in the naked city, and it would take us 20 years to hear all of
them."
But while legal experts say evidence makes clear that war crimes have occurred in Kosova,
there is less certainty about the kind of case that could be built against Milosevic. The
effort is complicated by unfolding events that have kept key evidence from investigators
and by the possibility that an indictment – enthusiastically sought by NATO allies
several weeks ago – might now interfere with a diplomatic settlement of the Kosova
conflict.
Richard Goldstone, the tribunal's former chief prosecutor, said that an indictment
"would make it impossible to negotiate with him, but I would hope no Western leader
would sit down with Milosevic anyway."
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, set up in The Hague by the
U.N. Security Council six years ago, was chartered to investigate crimes in Bosnia's
1992-95 factional war. But from the outset it has claimed, with Security Council support,
jurisdiction over all the territory that comprised the old six-republic Yugoslav
federation, and the enormity of what is happening in Kosova has displaced Bosnia as its
main business.
Unlike Bosnia, where assessing criminal responsibility has been a largely historical
exercise, crimes are occurring in Kosova in what the prosecutors call "real
time." The same intelligence gathering conducted by NATO countries to plot airstrikes
and assess bomb damage is pertinent to tribunal lawyers seeking to build a case against
Milosevic and his senior military and police commanders.
Among legal experts both within and outside the orbit of the tribunal, there is some
debate about whether Milosevic is ultimately responsible for the horrors of Kosova:
Summary executions, mass detentions, forced marches, torture, rape, looting, burning and a
host of subsidiary savageries that constitute crimes under the post-World War II Geneva
Conventions that codified international criminal law.
If the crimes were conducted because of the victims' ethnicity or religion, that makes
them not merely crimes against humanity but genocide, the gravest charge the tribunal
could bring against Milosevic, and perhaps the toughest to substantiate.
Even so, said Goldstone, "there is no suggestion that [Milosevic] doesn't know what
is going on. He's the head of state. There are crimes against humanity being carried out
by his troops. I don't see any missing legal link in the chain of command."
Responsibility for authorizing war crimes, as distinct from commission of the crimes, is
not strict. "Even assuming he hasn't given the orders," Goldstone said, "it
would be sufficient that he could have stopped them and didn't."
But Arbour is counseling patience and has insisted that any case the tribunal might bring
against Milosevic and his senior lieutenants be as close to ironclad as circumstances
permit. "International justice is slow, and it's based on the facts; it is not built
on presumptions or speculations," Arbour said in New York recently. In an interview
last week in Paris, she added: "This tribunal can't be a lynch mob, pursuing
politically correct indictments. . . . We have to guard against being used as part of any
demonization campaign" that NATO governments might wage against Milosevic.
Arbour's current traveling agenda – to Washington and European capitals, and last
week to Albania and Macedonia – seeks also to ensure tribunal access to Kosova after
the fighting stops. Speaking of the international military force the NATO allies are
pressing Milosevic to accept as a condition for ending the bombing, Arbour said: "I
want to be riding on their shoulders on their way into Kosova. And I need to roll in with
my investigators on day one. If we have to wait any longer, the Serbs will say all the
damage was from NATO airstrikes. I'm telling NATO: You need me in there to establish the
truth, otherwise the world will never know."
Arbour said the hardest proof of war crimes gathered so far is in the hands of the Western
governments she has been courting for help – and it is the most jealously guarded
kind of intelligence. Photographic imagery from high-flying surveillance aircraft can show
mass graves one day where none existed the day before and even identify the military units
in the area at the time of the crime.
More useful yet for the tribunal's purposes – but so sensitive as military
intelligence assets that some officials will not even call them by name – are
electronic intercepts and other surreptitiously recorded conversations that could link
front-line officers to field commanders to ranking generals to Milosevic, establishing
– with voice recognition if necessary – who gave orders to do what.
Arbour said the tribunal has been given the kind of information that is useful to military
tacticians – distilled, analyzed intelligence product. But in a courtroom, she said,
"the finished product isn't enough. It's uncheckable, unverifiable. I need the raw
stuff, with dates and times and places."
Legal experts say the evidence available to indict Milosevic for his role in the Bosnian
conflict was as good as that mustered by the tribunal to indict his two Bosnian Serb
collaborators, political leader Radovan Karadzic and military leader Ratko Mladic. But
Milosevic, like another potential indictee of that period, Croatian President Franjo
Tudjman, was too valuable as an interlocutor to Western powers and a guarantor of the
U.S.-brokered Dayton accords that ended the war in 1995. So, to the consternation of many,
he was spared.
"Milosevic used to be useful to the West," observed Gary Bass, a war crimes
historian who teaches at Harvard University. "Now he's evil; now he's scum." But
a NATO-country diplomat said there is concern that a war crimes indictment might
"spook" Milosevic, or glue his hard-line commanders to his side rather than peel
them away, and in the process jeopardize or delay any U.N.-sponsored end to the fighting.
Whatever the consequences, Arbour said, "I am not part of the war effort. I was not
appointed to make politicians' lives miserable or happy." Arbour has told the allied
leaders she has visited that the best move they could make to convey their seriousness of
purpose to Milosevic would be to arrest Karadzic and Mladic, who are still at large but
whose whereabouts are no secret to international monitors overseeing the fragile stability
of Bosnia.
The prevailing policy of not arresting such major figures is evidence to many – not
least to Milosevic, critics say – that war crimes indictments may have no more effect
than paper planes. Goldstone speculated that if Karadzic and Mladic had been arrested five
years ago, when the indictments were issued, the crimes in "Kosova might well have
been prevented. It would have shown a will to act, and it would have chilled the spine of
Milosevic."
Historian Bass said: "We've given him so many signs over the years that we don't mean
business. . . . If you're going to write the check, you have to be ready to cash the
check. You shouldn't do it to make yourself feel better."