Kosova Crisis Center

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SERBIAN MASSACRES

• Although the agreement is signed the Serb forces continue shelling and mining (KP)
• 100 Serb military vehicles removed (withdraw)
• Shelling continues in Berisha mountains
• Serb forces are shelling villages of Hasi
• 7 killed and 400 men abducted by Serbs yesterday in Mitrovica
• Kosova refugees in Macedonia: "We will believe we will go home, when we are home" (Radio21)
• For Kosova's Scattered Refugees, the Internet Is a Lifeline (NY Times)
• Despite Pact, Kosovar Albanians Doubt They'll Go Home (NY Times)
• U.S. Photos Show Ground Work at Suspected Site of Mass Grave (NY Times)
• NATO Troops May Enter in Few Hours

Although the agreement is signed the Serb forces continue shelling and mining

Deēan, June 10, (Kosovapress)

Although the agreement is achieved, Serb forces again begun their provoking addressing to the KLA units today. Thus in the early morning Serb forces started to shell the KLA positions in Ratishė tė Epėrm, Lumbardh and in Dashinoc, from the Serb positions in Irzniq and Pozhar.

Serb forces are massively burning the Kosovar houses in Junik, Mulliq, Ramoc and in other places around Reka e Keqe. It is also reported that Serb forces are mining the regions, main streets and narrow roads in following villages where Serbs have been placed: Broliq, Kodradiq, Kosuriq, Lumbardh, Pozhar and Gėrgoc.

100 Serb military vehicles removed (withdraw)

Podjevė, June 10, (Kosovapress) Today at 13.00, the withdrawal of Serb forces begun. Until now there were seen 100 Serb vehicles which have removed toward Serbia. 34 were Serb trucks filled with soldiers, 31 buses, 16 picgauer, 19 campanola, three trucks transporting bulldozers and 7 AAA.Until know the withdrawal went without any serious concerns. But in some places Serb forces are attempting to plunder the Kosovar houses but the KLA do not allows them.

Shelling continues in Berisha mountains

Malishevė, June 10, (Kosovapress) Throughout last night Serb forces shot with light weapons towards the KLA locations.These shooting have continued today as well. Serb forces have launched a great number of "kacusa"missiles and they also launched granades towards Liadroc and Tėrpezė villages and in Berisha mountains. Bajram Avdullah Bytyqi (aged 75) who has been captured by Serbs ten days ago has been killed in his house in Bytyqi district of Arllati. One Serb tank last night was destroyed at the place called Varri i Gjakovės because of entering into minefield.

Serb forces are shelling villages of Hasi

Has, June 10, (Kosovapress) At the time of signing the agreement in Kumanova for the Serb troops withdrawal from Kosova,Serb forces using heavy artillery, starting from 22.00 last night up to 5 in the morning, shelled the Planejė, Gorozhup and Milaj villages in the region of Hasi of Prizereni and towards KLA positions. From informations coming from the ground we could learn that Serb forces starting from 8 in the morning are attacking again with heavy artillery. Until now we could get no information for eventual casualties.

7 killed and 400 men abducted by Serbs yesterday in Mitrovica

Mitrovicė, June 10, (Kosovapress) Yesterday, Serb police after they gathered a large group of Kosovar civilians in the village of Zhabar, killed 7 of them. Among them were Dervish and Enver Kamberi while we have no information about the identity of the five others. We only know that one of them is from Gushafci, one from Vinarci, the surname of one of them is Begu the last two we have not been able to gather any information.

From the mass of civilians that the Serb police abducted yesterday in Zhabar, 400 men were taken away to an unknown destination.

Serbs continue to shell Kabash and Muzhnjak

Prizren, June 9,(Kosovapress) Today from positions in Korishė of Greikoc, Serb forces have shelled Kabash of Muzhnjak, and from surrounding hills on the village of Greikoc. In this village are close to 5 thousand civilians. The shelling continues to intensify in the afternoon hours. Our correspondents in the area cannot reach to village to report casualties.

Kosova refugees in Macedonia: "We will believe we will go home, when we are home" (Radio21)

Kosova refugees in Macedonia say that will believe they are home when they are home. Our correspondent Bahtir Cakolli talked to some of the refugees in Kercova, Macedonia.

Skender Pasholli, Kosova refugee in Kercova, Macedonia, says that he believes the peace agreement will be implemented, but he added that Albanians must be engaged to defend and protect Kosova as they want to.

"We should engage ourself, all, young Albanians and everybody else, to work not eight hours, but twelve hours and more to make Kosova", the refugee says.

Mr. Pasholli underlines that Kosova Albanians should built up their own national strategy to built and develop their country and called Kosova young Albanians, come back and remain in their homeland.

Another Kosova refugee, Kadush Veka, says that he couldn't be that happy on the agreement because thousands of Albanians have been killed in Kosova. He adds that Albanians know Milosevic very well and they will believe they will go home, when they reach Kosova.

"We will believe we will go home, when we are home in Kosova", the Kosova refugee says.

For Kosova's Scattered Refugees, the Internet Is a Lifeline (NY Times)

By LISA GUERNSEY

FORT DIX, N.J. -- Twice a day for the last week, 52-year-old Ramize Bajrami has walked up the metal steps into the makeshift Internet trailer here, hoping to find news about family members she left behind in Kosova. She sits down at one of the trailer's 12 computers and begins to scroll through Web sites, her gray hair pulled back in a white kerchief. Her hazel eyes search the screen for names she has written on a crumpled paper she clutches in her hands.

"Every day she comes in here and says to me, 'How can I find my children?' " said Kujtim Latifi, a 17-year-old Albanian refugee and computer assistant who speaks enough English to translate for the United States Information Agency staff members in the trailer.

Ms. Bajrami, a refugee, has four sons who are fighting for the Kosova Liberation Army and a son and a daughter who she thinks are still in Kosova. She recently heard from her brother that another son and his family are in Macedonia, but she has not been able to get in touch with them.

For now, the Internet is her only hope -- and in that sense, Ms. Bajrami is lucky. She has access to Web sites, to Internet radio broadcasts, to e-mail. Refugees in most other camps around Europe do not yet have Internet trailers like the one here; many are still relying on dribbles of information that come in letters or week-old newspapers.

To change that, the information agency is coordinating the Kosovar Refugee Internet Assistance Initiative. The Internet trailer at Fort Dix is the project's first online center. A similar center in Germany just opened this week, said David Zweigel, the agency's overseas technologist. Another center in Germany, two in France and two in Poland are also about to go online, Zweigel said. Getting Internet access to the camps in Albania and Macedonia is trickier, because fewer Internet hubs were already in place, but officials hope to connect a pool of laptops in Macedonia via a satellite link this week and in Albania by mid-July.

If the experience here is any indication, those centers will be packed as soon as they open. Since the Fort Dix trailer opened on May 20, Zweigel said, hundreds of refugees have visited it each day.

On Tuesday, nearly 50 people had crowded into the 40-foot-long trailer. The sounds of multiple radio and video broadcasts -- all in Albanian -- were bouncing off the trailer's walls. In one corner, six gray-haired men bent to the computer, listening. Next to them, Latifi helped Ms. Bajrami find a Web site that might enable her to send an e-mail message that could be delivered to the Macedonian refugee camp.

At the other end of the trailer, a handful of teen-age boys sat stone-faced, scrolling through photographs of victims of a massacre that according to international monitors took place in Racak in January. The photos, displayed on an anti-Serb Web site called the Kosova Crisis Center, show slain men sprawled on the ground and a dead baby covered with cuts.

When asked why the boys wanted to look at such horrific pictures, Latifi paused then spoke. "Because they would like to see what the Serbs have done," he said. On Monday, he said, a man who was looking at the pictures "saw his uncle, killed." Then, he said, the man looked away and cried.

Providing open access to information is the U.S.I.A.'s primary mission, said Jonathan Spalter, associate director and chief information officer for the agency.

"Access to objective and reliable information will be key to restoring structures of civil society for these terribly dispersed communities of Kosovars," he said.

Reconnecting family members is also a major part of the project.

On this Tuesday, a 20-year-old refugee named Liridon Durigi, whose parents are still in Kosova, found that a cousin is now in a refugee camp in Albania. He found his cousin listed on a Web site called the Family News Network (www.familylinks.icrc.org/), which was opened in mid-May by the International Committee for the Red Cross. Pointing to the name, he asked a nearby computer assistant to help him send an e-mail message.

If the Kosova peace settlement is actually carried out, reliable connections between people could become even more important, Zweigel added. "People will be able to correspond and say: 'I'm going home. You can come home, too,' " he said.

Until then, many visitors to the Internet trailer are happy to be able to read Albanian Web sites and hear Albanian news broadcasts. "When these people came in and heard the news in their own language, it was amazing," Zweigel said. They had just arrived in the United States, with foreign customs and a foreign language spoken all around them. "It was like they felt that this made them real people again," he said.

More than a dozen companies and foundations are participating in the United States Information Agency project. Nongovernmental organizations and foundations are managing the donations and helping to distribute equipment.

Other groups are directing projects that could tie into the agency's effort, like as a project led by professors and students at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. They have been helping organizations in Macedonia and Albania create a Web-based database of refugees' registration information and information about what they saw in Kosova.

But hurdles abound. The telephone system in northern Albania, for example, is so limited that stringing high-speed Internet lines is very difficult. And often the people that refugees have the least information about -- families hiding in Kosova, for example -- are the least likely to provide information on the Internet.

Villarrubia Olga, an official for the Central Tracing Agency at the International Committee for the Red Cross, said that people inside Yugoslavia or in Macedonia are unlikely to give information because they fear being discovered by Serb forces. "They are more comfortable" elsewhere in Europe, she said.

Ms. Bajrami, meanwhile, sat in front of a computer here, her eyes welling up as she wondered aloud why she had not heard from her daughter and son still in Kosova.

But then her voice strengthened. "Every day," she said, slapping her hands against her lap and looking around her, "I will come until I find them."

Despite Pact, Kosovar Albanians Doubt They'll Go Home (NY Times)

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

KUKES, Albania -- There may be a relative peace in the Balkans, but the 120,000 Kosovar Albanian refugees who have staggered across the border into this hot, dusty and rubble-strewn mountain town are still anxious about how they will ever safely go home again.

Many refugees were stripped by Serbian officials of all identity cards, drivers' licenses and passports as they fled Kosova. And if Serbs control the re-entry process, as Yugoslav officials are insisting is essential, then the Kosovar refugees say the Serbs will simply keep them out by telling the refugees that they have no proof that they belong in Kosova.

The refugees say this was part of a long-range Serbian plan. "They're going to say we have no identity cards, and we're not Albanians from Kosova, we're from Albania," said Murtez Zeqiri, 30, an unemployed graduate of the University of Pristina, who spoke Wednesday in his tent at one of the seven refugee camps here.

Zeqiri added that he had heard on the radio that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was opposed to a Serbian control of re-entry, but was nonetheless worried.

"The Serbian intellectuals were working a long time on this project, to have ethnic cleansing in Kosova," he said.

Zeqiri came across the border on May 26, and told a story similar to those heard many times in the camps. On May 15, Zeqiri said, Serbian police took over the streets of his neighborhood in Mitrovica, a town in northern Kosova, then came to his door and ordered him with his parents, sister and sister-in-law to the yard of the local elementary school.

The police separated the men from the women and children, then transported the men to Smrekovnica, a prison north of Pristina, Kosova's capital. There they were beaten, fed only bread and tea and ordered to sign papers "confessing" to being members of the Kosova Liberation Army, the separatist rebel force.

"They said, 'If you don't sign, you can be killed,"' Zeqiri said. He added that although he sympathized with the KLA, "I wasn't an armed member. I never used a gun."

After 11 days, Zeqiri said the Serbian police drove him and a busload of other prisoners to a village near the border. "We heard the police talking, how they were going to kill us," Zeqiri said. Instead, the men were released and told to walk to the border. "I cannot express my feelings at the moment when the police separated us. You should be there to see how we cried, all the men together," Zeqiri said. "To separate young boys from their parents, it was terrible to see and feel."

Other men in Zeqiri's camp agreed that the Serbs would give them trouble in re-entering Kosova. "They don't want to let us inside," said Nezir Rexhepi, 33, from the southern Kosova city of Prizren, who owns a supermarket and a barber shop. "For 50 years, they're thinking about this project."

Cynicism was rampant among the refugees. "If they control the re-entry, of course we can't go back," said Nashide Kulkeci, a 29-year-old woman from the village of Vraniq, near Prizren. "It's better for us to stay here."

So far, the refugees have not been issued any identity cards in Albania, although plans are under way for registration system to be run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the Albanian government.

Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard have donated computer hardware and software, but a UNHCR spokesman here, Rupert Colville, said there were logistical delays. "The problem is, however super-duper the equipment, you've still got to go out and find the refugees," Colville said.

There are 450,000 ethnic Albanian refugees in Albania, two thirds of them in private homes and apartments.

The suspected Izbica grave site on May 15, left, and on Thursday. The
new photo, the Pentagon said, "shows what appears to have been a
bulldozing." Photo by AP

U.S. Photos Show Ground Work at Suspected Site of Mass Grave (NY Times)

By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON -- Photographs taken by United States spy satellites seem to show that Serbian forces dug up the bodies of their victims to hide evidence of a massacre in Kosova, the chief Pentagon spokesman said Wednesday.

The official, Kenneth H. Bacon, said the pictures provided cold scientific evidence to back up the vivid and terrified accounts of Kosovar refugees that something terrible had occurred at the village of Izbica.

Bacon had already acknowledged that the Pentagon had heard reports from refugees that Serbs were trying to conceal the evidence of massacres.

"We didn't have any evidence," Bacon said. "Now we do have some firm evidence."

Recalling that the Pentagon had received reports of killing in central-western Kosova as early as April, Bacon displayed a satellite picture from May 15 of what analysts concluded was a site that held 143 graves.

Then he displayed a picture taken last Thursday. "This second picture shows what appears to have been a bulldozing over this area," he said, pointing to a black splotchy section.

Bacon said the Thursday photo seemed to dovetail with refugees' accounts and Albanian television reports that Serbian troops had entered Izbica on the same day and destroyed graves.

"There were reports that many bodies were exhumed and that earthmoving equipment or bulldozers could have been used to cover up the mass grave site," Bacon said. "So this is one example that we have run across recently that leads us to believe that there is some evidence supporting the refugee accounts of tampering with mass-grave sites.

"It looks as if a bulldozer or other earthmoving equipment has been run over where the individual graves used to be. But we don't have pictures of bulldozers running over this site."

He said refugees had told of having seen exhumed bodies being carried toward Klina, eight or nine miles away.

NATO Troops May Enter in Few Hours

Solana said the first troops of the international peacekeeping force would
deploy in a few hours.

``If everything goes okay ... tomorrow we may see the first KFOR
(Kosova peacekeeping) soldiers deployed in Kosova.''