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French Troops in Kosovo Accused of Retreat
  
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By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, February 9, 2000; Page A14 


KOSOVSKA MITROVICA, Yugoslavia, Feb. 8 –– United
Nations policemen led by a veteran officer from
Midland, Tex., charged into a jeering, chanting
Serbian mob in this city in northern Kosovo last
Thursday night, trying to reach several colleagues and
ethnic Albanians who were under siege in an apartment
building. 

When one of the Serbs struck the lead officer in the
back with a wooden stick, knocking him to the ground,
the officer turned around, expecting to see French
peacekeeping soldiers charging to his rescue. Instead,
he saw their backs as they retreated toward two
armored personnel carriers and a nearby apartment
building, several officers said.

After cursing angrily on the police radio that the
French troops had left, the officer decided he had
little choice but to retreat and regroup. Hours later,
a Danish military company lent needed assistance and
the rescue was performed. But the bitterness lingers
throughout the 65-man police force patrolling the
northern quarter of this divided city, which is about
30 miles northwest of Pristina, the Kosovo capital.

"Every nationality here wants to know why they walked
off and left us," an officer said, on condition he not
be identified. "Everyone was calling them, but the
French did not respond."

The commander of the NATO peacekeeping troops in
Kosovo, German army Gen. Klaus Reinhardt, said on
Sunday that he could not fault the performance of the
French troops during the worst night of violence in
Kosovo since the end of the war last June.

The criticism, which echoes comments by local ethnic
Albanian residents, has touched a raw nerve in the
French military command, which has been responsible
for NATO peacekeeping operations in northern
Kosovo--including this bitterly divided city--for the
past eight months. The commander of the 250-man French
infantry battalion responsible for peacekeeping in
northern Mitrovica, Col. Jean Philippe Bernard, and
several other French officers denied the allegations.
Bernard said that "most Albanians who asked for help
received it."

But 11 U.N. police officers from three countries said
in interviews that the soldiers fell short of
fulfilling their responsibility for keeping peace and
maintaining order. The officers charged in interviews
here that the French soldiers had failed to provide
essential support during the riot, and that the French
had not adequately protected ethnic Albanians from the
Serbian mob.

During the mayhem, which evidently was provoked by a
grenade attack on a bar packed with Serbian patrons,
at least eight ethnic Albanians were killed. Since
then, more than 500 ethnic Albanians have been forced
to flee to the southern side of the Ibar River, which
bisects the town and forms a natural barrier between
its rival Serb and Albanian enclaves.

French soldiers "could have caught these people as
they came out of buildings," said one officer of the
Serb assailants. "Instead, it was free sledding for
the criminals."

One of the police officers reported that when he asked
the commander of a group of French tanks and armored
personnel carriers to follow him into the center of
the city for a second attempt to rescue trapped
policemen, the drivers of the vehicles instead threw
them into reverse and withdrew 50 yards.

Two other officers and a local resident said French
soldiers remained hunkered down in two armored
personnel carriers despite "blood-curdling" screams
from an ethnic Albanian woman who was being beaten
nearby. Bernard and several of his men say they were
indeed stationed in the area but saw no one beaten.

Several other U.N. policemen complained that the local
French military hospital refused to treat any of the
dozen or so ethnic Albanians wounded by gunshots or
grenades, following a policy decision to reserve its
beds for potential casualties among French soldiers
that night. Two of the victims later died at a
Moroccan military field hospital that French officers
conceded lacks comparable expertise in treating war
wounds.

Danish soldiers who arrived in northern Mitrovica
later in the evening provided prompt and reliable
assistance, in contrast to the French response, the
U.N. officers said.

A local Serbian community leader, Oliver Ivanovic,
defended the performance of the French troops, saying
"there were too many angry people in the same place at
the same time" for any NATO peacekeeping intervention
to be effective. But Ivanovic added in an interview
that the French troops should have been better
prepared. "You have to have instincts about what's
happening," he said. "They didn't have enough soldiers
for what happened."

About 4,600 French troops patrol northern Kosovo, one
of the five sectors in the province created by NATO
when its forces entered the province last June
following the withdrawal of Serb-led Yugoslav army and
police units. The four other sectors are under
American, British, German and Italian command. Last
Thursday's riot followed a series of tit-for-tat
attacks that caused U.N. officials and Serbian
community leaders to warn French troops of increased
dangers. On Jan. 31, three days before the riot, two
ethnic Albanians in the nearby city of Srbica were
killed. Two days later, a rocket-propelled grenade was
fired at a bus carrying Serbian civilians close to
Mitrovica. Two of the passengers were killed.

But Bernard said no additional French troops were
deployed on the north side of the city on Thursday,
before the riot began, because commanders felt the
existing number was sufficient. The riot started
shortly after several grenades were tossed into a cafe
packed with Serb patrons and a Serb mother
claimed--falsely, as it turned out--that ethnic
Albanians had taken her 12-year-old son hostage,
according to Ivanovic.

Shortly after learning that a mob of as many as 700
people had gathered at the intersection of King Peter
and Lola Rebara streets, Bernard ordered 300 extra
soldiers dispatched to northern Mitrovica, where they
helped keep peace and rescue trapped ethnic Albanians,
he said.

Bernard said they got no request for assistance from
U.N. police officers, a claim disputed by all of the
officers interviewed, by the French liaison officer to
the U.N. police, and, according to sources, by the log
books at the police station. Bernard also said the
only time any of them were pulled back from their
posts was shortly before the arrival of the
supplementary Danish battalion about 45 minutes later.
Several of the policemen said that relations between
the 250-member French battalion in northern Mitrovica
and the relatively small U.N. force of 65 police
officers here were poor before this event.

Several police officers said, for example, that French
troops on Sunday afternoon declined their request for
military backup to conduct a search at the Dolce Vita
cafe in northern Mitrovica--a hangout for officials
from Belgrade--after two witnesses had reported seeing
patrons carrying grenades. A French liaison officer
responded that his troops did not want to participate
in such a provocative act because ethnic tensions were
beginning to wane. As a result, the search was
subsequently called off.

Two of the U.N. police officers who described what had
happened initially were willing to allow their names
to be used in this article. But they said they changed
their minds after being threatened with suspension in
response to pressure from the French military staff to
keep quiet. One said a senior French officer
threatened today to suspend all future cooperation
with the police unless the officers halted the
disclosures.


© 2000 The Washington Post Company 
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