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LETTERS OF SUPPORT

SERBIAN MASSACRES

 Updated at 1:40 PM on June 11, 1999

Serb forces continue actions against the UÇK and Albanian civilians in Gjakova

Kosova Press reported today that UCK is complying with its promise not to attack Serb forces during their withdrawal. The agency said that there are the Serb forces the ones who surrounded a UÇK brigade, Brigade Number 137 of Gjakova area, Dukagjin zone.

The commanders of this brigade say the situation of the civilian population in this area is grave. Albanian houses in Gjakova have been constantly plundered and burned.

Hundreds of men from Gjakova and the neighbourhoods, have been arrested by the Serb forces and there is no information for them.

Kosova refugees in Macedonian camp protest against the deployment of Russian troops in Kosova (Radio21)

Kosova Albanians in the biggest Macedonian camp of Cegran, protested yesterday against the deployment of the Russian troops in Kosova.

Our correspondent Bahtir Cakolli, says that thousands of refugees protested under the slogans "NATO in Kosova, Russians out". They refused categorically the definition of a single sector of the Russian troops and said that if there will be Russian troops in Kosova, they should be dispersed in different parts.

The refugees said they will not go back in Kosova is this is not realized.

Homes are set ablaze as troops quit Prishtina (Irish Times)

As Serb forces began withdrawing, Lara Marlowe watched them in Podujevo

President Slobodan Milosevic had the effrontery to claim his country had won a victory thanks to his "peaceful policies". But the Yugoslav army must have been glad to get out of Podujevo.

A former Kosova Liberation Army stronghold in the north of the province, Podujevo changed hands several times, and the Serbs' hold on it was always tenuous. One of the soldiers I talked to yesterday, a medic from Nis, had four friends shot there the week before last, one of them fatally.

So it was not surprising that Gen Nebojsa Pavkovic, the head of the Yugoslav Third Army, began his pull-out from Kosova in Podujevo.

As we left Prishtina to follow the departing troops yesterday, smoke rose from two or three burning Albanian homes in the northern suburb of Vranjevac - a last spiteful gesture by the Serbs - and a handful of old Albanians with hollow eyes stood along the main road to Belgrade to watch the dust-covered buses filled with soldiers.

On the outskirts of Podujevo an estate wagon sped past us, carrying four men with shaved heads and bushy black beards, their rifle barrels showing through the car windows: militiamen, a rabble.

There are destroyed villages all over Kosova, but Podujevo had been fought over. Overturned cars had served as barricades. Sofas, chairs, twisted metal, an old cooker lay in the deserted streets; the sort of place where you find landmines and snipers.

Smoke from a burning house drifted towards us. Two horses munched on grass in an overgrown garden, and we finally happened upon a small group of frightened Serb civilians.

Where was the army? They had left, half-an-hour ahead of schedule.

We caught up with the tail end of the convoy a few kilometres later. Young conscripts with short haircuts waved cheerfully from the back of a truck, glad that the war was over and that they were going home.

"We live for freedom," said a banner in Cyrillic stretched across the highway.

Among the thousands of troops we watched leaving Kosova, there were disciplined men with intelligent faces who would not have looked out of place in any NATO army. There were also overweight, middle-aged men in grey-green reservists' clothing. And there were unkempt ruffians wearing ersatz uniforms: the "uncontrolled elements" alluded to with embarrassment by some army officers.

The mixture of things military and civilian - one of the greatest difficulties that confronted NATO in its bombing campaign - was also apparent.

Civilian lorries carrying equipment were driven by soldiers. There were white refrigerator trucks, a plethora of vans with red crosses, even a handful of soldiers on tractor-pulled wagons.

For 20 kilometres (12 miles) we wended our way in and out of this exodus of Serb forces, overtaking trucks loaded with ammunition and artillery shell boxes, communications vans towing generators, olive-green engineering equipment, a few old Russian armoured personnel carriers and dozens of ordinary tour buses filled with soldiers.

After 150 vehicles we gave up counting and turned back to Prishtina before reaching the front of the convoy, which was by now into Serbia proper.

Not one vehicle had a scratch on it. Where had they been hiding for 11 weeks, to have escaped such a fierce bombardment? An armoured Russian BMP mounted with multiple rocket-launchers drove past the ruins of an old Orthodox church.

I counted five Praga mobile anti-aircraft artillery pieces, a funny old beast with a podiumlike gunner's turret to one side. Their crews waved and smiled, but the encounter was chilling. A few hours earlier, an Albanian who managed to stay in Kosova through the war had told me how the Pragas were used to shell columns of refugees within the province.

A soldier held a framed portrait of Marshal Tito out the back of his truck. The message was clear: Tito created the Yugoslav army. He didn't hide in bunkers, but fought with his troops, and was wounded.

Outside the cafe where I'd seen soldiers resting on three previous trips down this road, women, children and a few reservists stood waving three-fingered Serb salutes at the interminable convoy. From the other direction, driving south from Serbia, came empty buses, a tank transporter and lorries, on their way to pick up more men and equipment.

Some soldiers stared listlessly from the back of their trucks. One fair-haired young man lay stretched out on the tailgate, his hands behind his head, smiling into the sun. A few nervous footsoldiers puffing heavily on their Marlboros were positioned by the roadside, to guard against KLA attacks.

An officer from Novi Sad stood beside his Soviet-era armoured personnel carrier. "I'm a soldier and I have no political views," he said when I asked what he thought of the pull-out. "No comment."

But his lips trembled and his eyes were angry.

There were a few burning houses on the road back to Prishtina, three or four; after nearly three months of "ethnic cleansing" there is not much left to burn in Kosova's ghost towns.

Just north of Luzane is a bungalow that used to be inhabited by Yugoslav soldiers and the interior ministry police known as MUP. There is still a sand-bagged antiaircraft artillery position on the front lawn, but not a soul in sight.

The withdrawal slowed at Luzane, where NATO killed at least 34 people in a bus when it bombed a bridge on May 1st. So the departing Serb forces had to cross a substitute, single-lane bridge.

We were forced to stop next to a burned-out house as they hurtled down the rutted track in clouds of dust. These troops had come from Prizren, in south-west Kosova near the Albanian border.

They were rougher than the convoy out of Podujevo. Many still had tree branches and camouflage nets on their trucks and helmets, and dozens of Mr Milosevic's MUP were mixed among them. Two dozen soldiers perched on old sofas in the back of a blue rubbish truck.

One of them had his arm around an Alsatian dog. Another swigged from a bottle of Slijvovica, while his companion fired volleys of Kalashnikov bullets into fields of brilliant red poppies, blue lupins and yellow mustard flowers.

Russian Troops Move in Kosova Before NATO?

By Deborah Charles

BELGRADE (Reuters) - A first group of Russian peacekeeping troops entered Yugoslavia from Bosnia Friday --a day before NATO forces are due to arrive in Kosova, witnesses said.

NATO military sources in Macedonia confirmed that a token force of fewer than 100 Russian troops had headed toward Kosova overland from Bosnia.

``They're going to get their feet on the ground first, that's what this is about,'' the source told Reuters.

The Russians were the first foreign troops to arrive in Yugoslavia after the signing of an international peace deal under which NATO ended its 11-week bombing campaign Thursday and Yugoslav security forces began pulling out of Kosova.

Reuters cameraman Fedja Grulovic saw about 50 Russian vehicles, including 20 to 30 heavily armed armoured personnel carriers, on the road between the Bosnian border and Belgrade.

By early afternoon they had passed Belgrade and were heading for Kosova.

Most had ``KFOR'' -- the abbreviation for the international Kosova peacekeeping force which will eventually number about 50,000 -- painted on the front. On some, the ``K'' was painted over an ``S.'' The Russian troops stationed in Bosnia were part of the NATO-led Stabilization Force (SFOR).

They also bore Russian flags and several had ``Russia'' painted on them in English.

Grulovic said there were not many troops in the convoy, and its leaders had said that after passing through Belgrade they would head south to Kosova, although their final destination was not yet known.

Russia's Interfax news agency said they would not move into Kosova until given the green light to do so.

Tensions have persisted between the Western alliance and Russia, which played a leading part in brokering an accord on ending NATO's 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia.

The sudden entry of the Russians recalled the last weeks of World War Two, when Russian and Western troops raced each other into Germany from opposite directions to capture as much territory as possible before the war ended.

But Western officials were quick to try to defuse any concerns about the rapid Russian move in Yugoslavia.

Vice President Al Gore said he was surprised but that Moscow had given assurances that the troops would not enter Kosova unilaterally.

In London, British Armed Forces Minister Doug Henderson said Britain had always wanted Russia to take part in peacekeeping.

Earlier, a military source said that NATO's commander, British Lieutenant-General Sir Mike Jackson, expected to be in the Kosova capital Prishtina by Saturday afternoon after his forces secured the main road north from the Macedonian border.

British, U.S., German, French and Italian troops will take part in the thrust into Kosova designed to restore peace to the southern Serbian province and allow hundreds of thousands of refugees to return.

In a sharp reminder of military and diplomatic hurdles still ahead, President Boris Yeltsin said that Russia's ties with the Western alliance remained frozen despite Thursday's suspension of the bombing, although he did not rule out an improvement.

Setting his face in a scowl, Yeltsin growled: ``Relations with NATO are still frozen. As for the future, we'll see.''

Talks in Moscow between Russian and U.S. generals were suspended amid a deadlock over whether Russia would be allowed to police Serb-populated parts of Kosova, a Russian general said.

Leonid Ivashov, head of Russia's delegation, said the U.S. side had asked for a time-out for consultations. NATO says it must command peacekeepers in all of Kosova, but Russia wants a sector of its own.

Earlier President Clinton, in a televised address, declared victory in the air campaign but said that the coming peacekeeping operation was dangerous. He blamed Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic for the Yugoslavs' suffering and said the United States would give them no aid for reconstruction while he stayed in power.

NATO has massed 19,300 troops on the borders of Kosova, poised to march in on the heels of retreating Yugoslav forces.

Seselj Says All Paramilitaries Were Under Authorities Control

Belgrade weekly SVEDOK (5 June) carries a recent interview which Vojislav Seselj gave on Palma-Plus TV. In the interview, Seselj notes that the paramilitaries in Kosova were under the command and control of the authorities, undermining the out-of-control-elements doing the nasty deeds defense.

"In Kosova and Metohija there were and there are no paramiliatry forces whatsoever. All the forces are part of the force structure either of the Yugoslav Army or of the Serb police." Seselj also proposes moving all the shrines and rebuiolding them in Serbia if the Serbs leave Kosova.

About 40 Israelis fight alongside Serbs in Kosova (AFP)

JERUSALEM, June 10 (AFP) - About 40 Israeli men have been fighting alongside Serb forces against ethnic Albanians in Kosova, the Yediot Aharonot newspaper reported on Thursday. The Israeli volunteers, all recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union and ex-soldiers in the Red Army, fought primarily in mixed Russian-Serb units of the Yugoslav security forces, it said.

The newspaper's military correspondant, Ron Ben Yishai, said he encountered some of the Israeli volunteers during a trip this week to Kosova. He said the Israelis, some Jews but also non-Jews who married Jewish women and obtained Israeli citizenship, included veterans of fighting in Afghanistan and Chechnya.

Gaunt Faces of Prisoners Tell Tale of Deprivation (LA Times)

Prishtina: As Serbian forces leave, freed ethnic Albanians, looking weary and hungry, say little as they trudge home.

By PAUL WATSON, Times Staff Writer

PRISHTINA, Kosova--Free after 45 days in prison as suspected guerrilla fighters, 110 gaunt-faced and exhausted ethnic Albanian men walked silently on Thursday through the heart of this provincial capital. A few of them winced in pain as they leaned on the shoulders of fellow prisoners after a 10-mile trek north from the town of Lipljan, where they had been locked up in the local prison.

Unlike hundreds of other Kosova Albanian men who crossed into neighboring countries in recent weeks after Serbian police opened their cell doors, these freed prisoners were already on their way home. The men, most of whom were of fighting age, all are from Podujevo, a 20-mile walk north of Prishtina, one of them said. They were being allowed to return just as Serbs formed military convoys in the Podujevo area, formerly the base of the separatist Kosova Liberation Army's most hard-line commander, and began to withdraw. Most of the ethnic Albanians had shaved heads and looked like their Serbian jailers had fed them very little during more than six weeks of imprisonment. Several carried plastic bags of small bunches of green onions, apparently their only meal before the last leg home to Podujevo, a northern Kosova town from which Serbian forces withdrew earlier Thursday.

One prisoner said they planned to spend the night along the road near Prishtina before continuing their journey home. They struggled to walk in small groups along both sides of Prishtina's main street about 5:30 p.m., past Serbian police in camouflage uniforms who carried assault rifles. The freed prisoners were still too frightened to speak in any detail. But their hollow cheeks and tired eyes left little doubt that they had suffered badly when Serbian police jailed them after the first month of NATO's air war against Yugoslavia. Such ethnic Albanian men recently freed from jails in Kosova are a small fraction of the thousands of fighting-age men who are unaccounted for in the province. Some freed prisoners who arrived as refugees in neighboring countries said they were imprisoned without charge after police pulled them out from columns of ethnic Albanians ordered from their homes. With peacekeeping troops heavily dominated by NATO forces about to move in, there is no longer any reason for Serbian authorities to detain suspected guerrilla fighters. Gen. Vladimir Lazarevic, commander of Yugoslav army troops in Kosova, considers guerrillas of the Kosova Liberation Army to be the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's problem now. Lazarevic predicted Thursday that the KLA would eventually begin attacking the peacekeepers.

Senior KLA commanders have promised to disarm once the peacekeeping troops take full control of Kosova. But the rebels also insist that the overwhelming majority of Kosova Albanians want independence from Yugoslavia, a move that NATO rejects. In the first stage of the Serbian security forces' retreat from Kosova, a convoy of about 85 army trucks, a few antiaircraft guns and at least one mobile surface-to-air missile launcher headed north just after noon Thursday. Serbian military officials in northern Kosova, where the convoy was spotted rolling past hundreds of gutted ethnic Albanian farmhouses and shops, said it had come from the Podujevo area. Thick gray smoke was rising from three houses on the edge of Podujevo, apparently from fires set the night before, when Serbian generals formally accepted NATO's terms for a pullout. A convoy of 47 military ambulances and buses loaded with stretchers and other field hospital equipment waited to leave Podujevo. The streets were deserted except for a few police.

NATO Expects Separate Kosova, Without Yugoslav Police or Taxes (NY Times)

By JANE PERLEZ

COLOGNE, Germany -- Although the political future of Kosova is left vague in the settlement that ended the war, American and NATO officials say they envision an international protectorate that will in theory be part of Yugoslavia but that may well, after a few years, become independent.

As refugees return and society is rebuilt, a senior NATO official said Thursday, Kosova will become virtually "walled off" from Yugoslavia. People living in Kosova would not serve in the Yugoslav Army or pay taxes to Yugoslavia; a new police force and judiciary would have to be created without Serbian influence; the currency would probably be either the German mark or the American dollar, and trade would turn south and west toward Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro instead of north toward Serbia.

None of these points are spelled out in the settlement that President Slobodan Milosevic signed. Indeed, in framing a political solution to the war, the NATO allies had been careful to state that Kosova would remain within Yugoslavia.

The emphasis on keeping the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia and not allowing Kosova to break away immediately was an essential ingredient for winning the agreement of Milosevic and the Russians to a peace accord. And West Europeans are generally wary of the possible consequences of a breakaway Kosova.

But the resolution passed by the United Nations Security Council today includes the phrase "taking full account of the Rambouillet accords," a signal that can be interpreted to infer that down the road independence is a probability, Administration officials said.

Under the Rambouillet accords -- which Milosevic refused to sign, a move that led directly to the air strikes -- the future status of Kosova was to be decided by calling an international conference in about three years. The views of the conference, as well as the "will of the people" of Kosova and views of Serbians, would determine the final status of the province, according to those accords.

The accords offered a detailed blueprint for an autonomous Kosova, including a 120-member parliament, election rules, an independent judiciary, local government structures, a police force and border security.

Under the plan approved this week, Kosova will become increasingly separated from Serbia, the dominant republic in what is left of Yugoslavia, and the likelihood of Serbs having a significant say in the status of Kosova will diminish, officials said.

The physical reconstruction of Kosova was addressed briefly today at a meeting here by the foreign ministers of the Group of Seven industrial countries and Russia, who said that they would soon organize a conference of potential donors to start raising the billions of dollars needed for the task.

The foreign ministers also announced a stability pact for southeastern Europe that is intended to help already poor economies made poorer by the war. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund will be called on to provide assistance, the ministers said.

President Clinton said Thursday that because the United States carried most of the cost of the military campaign, the bill for rebuilding the burned homes, damaged roads and torched schools would be paid mostly by the European Union.

The Clinton Administration has requested $100 million in a supplemental appropriations bill for Kosova and the redevelopment of the region, but Congress is expected to approve only a portion of this.

The United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan, is expected to announce soon his choice to become the world body's Special Representative for Kosova, a job that will probably resemble that of a Governor General.

A spokeswoman for the French Foreign Ministry, Anne Gazeau-Secret, said today that her Government had requested that Annan appoint a European to the post. This would be appropriate, she said, because most of the money for reconstruction would come from the European Union. Clinton Administration officials have said that, despite doubts about the efficiency of United Nations programs, they were resigned to the United Nations taking overall responsibility for Kosova, with the European Union playing a major role as financier.

The United Nations was a preferred choice as the dominant player, the officials said, because the United States has influence there but not in the European Union.

Another organization, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a 54-member trans-Atlantic body based in Vienna, would also play a central role in rebuilding Kosova, officials said. In particular, the group would organize elections for a time yet to be set and could assist in forming a police force.

In recent months, Clinton Administration officials have been careful not to rule out independence for Kosova, even though European countries are more apprehensive about the idea; the possibility of independence is considered important as an inducement for rebels of the Kosova Liberation Army to disarm.

As a moral question, the possibility of independence is important to the Kosova Albanians, who before the war made up more than 90 percent of the province's population. Balkans experts say it is very likely that many Serbs still left in Kosova will move to Serbia proper, leaving almost only Kosova Albanian.

For Western Europe, an independent Kosova, or a Kosova adjoined to Albania, is less conceivable than for the United States, European diplomats said.