From mentor at alb-net.com Thu Jun 3 14:51:58 1999 From: mentor at alb-net.com (Mentor Cana) Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 14:51:58 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [kcc-news] HORROR BY DESIGN-The Ravaging of Kosova (fwd) Message-ID: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ! READ & DISTRIBUTE FURTHER ! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Kosova Crisis Center (KCC) News Network: http://www.alb-net.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- Kosovapress http://www.kosovapress.com/ Kosova Information Center http://www.kosova.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- -------> Want to HELP the people of Kosova?? <-------- http://www.alb-net.com/kosovahelp/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- New York TIMES HORROR BY DESIGN The Ravaging of Kosova By JOHN KIFNER Although the purge of more than one million ethnic Albanians from Kosovo since late March seemed to be a random kaleidoscope of violence, a reconstruction of the early days of the operation shows that it was meticulously organized from the outset. Western officials say the plans were drawn up by the Yugoslav Army and the Interior Ministry of the Serbian Republic, then carried out by a variety of Serbian forces acting under a single command. It seems evident now that the operation had at least two major goals: crushing the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army and permanently changing the ethnic balance of Kosovo by driving out as many Albanians as possible. By early May, the State Department says, 90 percent of all ethnic Albanians in Kosovo had been expelled from their homes; 900,000 were driven across the province's borders and 500,000 more were displaced inside Kosovo. An additional 4,600 were reported killed -- a number that is likely to increase as time goes on and more is known. By expelling ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, Serbian forces aimed to restrict the guerrillas' base of support and cover. By controlling the borders and the devastated corridors along the major highways, the Serbs planned to isolate and then eradicate the Kosovo Liberation Army in the forests and mountains. The violent emptying of the Djakovica region is an example of such an operation. Hours after the first NATO bombs fell, special police, paramilitary officers and local police used a focused fury of violence and fear to clear the area of ethnic Albanians. In just seven days -- March 30 to April 5 -- some 51,880 people were herded on foot from Djakovica to a tiny remote border crossing in the mountains, according to records of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. But the Serbs did not limit their attention to suspected KLA strongholds. Another opening assault of the drive to empty Kosovo, this one in the troubled province's capital city of Pristina, illustrates another apparent aim of the Serb offensive: depopulation. By expelling ethnic Albanians from Pristina and other large cities, Serb officials were seeking to defuse a potential demographic time bomb. At the beginning of the Serb offensives, ethnic Albanians accounted for 90 percent of Kosovo's population. Moreover, the Albanian population was growing at a far faster rate than the Serb population. Still, for all the signs of logic and planning behind the purge, many of the individual episodes -- including the systematic gunning down of women and children -- appears inexplicable in military terms, except perhaps as an indication of the unpredictability and savagery that drove the exodus. PART I How Serb Forces Purged One Million Albanians .In the night of March 24, as NATO bombs began falling over Yugoslavia, Hani Hoxha said he saw black-masked Serbs swaggering through Djakovica, shooting, cutting throats and burning houses. At 3:30 in the morning, about nine miles east, a tank pulled up and parked in front of Isuf Zhenigi's farmhouse in the village of Bela Crkva. At daybreak the slaughter began there. That day, in Pec, 22 miles to the northwest, and Prizren, 15 miles southeast, Serbian forces began firing wildly and burning Albanian-owned shops. Meanwhile, in Pristina, about 44 miles to the northeast, Serbian operatives driving military jeeps and private cars set fire to Albanian-owned cafes, clinics and the printing presses of Kosova Sot, an independent Albanian newspaper. These were the opening assaults in what quickly became a drive to empty the city, the provincial and intellectual center of Kosovo. As it began, the Serbs' purge of more than one million ethnic Albanians from Kosovo seemed from the outside to be a random kaleidoscope of violence. But a reconstruction of the early days of the operation -- based on interviews with scores of refugees, and with senior officials in Washington and NATO, as well as on a computer analysis of reported horrors from many sources -- shows that it was meticulously organized and aimed, from the outset, at expelling huge numbers of people. >From this reporting over the last nine weeks, it is possible to see the design behind the roster of atrocities cited by the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague in its indictment on Thursday of President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia and four of his top officials for crimes against humanity. With specific charges including the wave of killings in Djakovica and its surrounding villages and the forced expulsion of Albanians from Pristina, the indictment charged the Serbian forces with a "campaign of terror" that "intentionally created an atmosphere of fear and oppression through the use of force, threats of force and acts of violence" in order to drive out Kosovo's majority Albanians. The Serbs have insisted in recent months that most of the refugees fled Kosovo because of NATO's bombing. Western officials, however, say the plans were drawn up by the Yugoslav Army and the Interior Ministry of the Serbian Republic and carried out, under a single command, by a variety of Serbian forces acting in concert: regular soldiers, the blue-uniformed Special Police of the Interior Ministry and the dreaded private armies of ultra-nationalist warlords who had achieved a reputation for blood lust and looting in Bosnia and Croatia. The plan was a harsh refinement of a campaign last summer by Interior Ministry forces that failed to crush Albanian rebels. It was put into effect after a mounting campaign of terrorism on both sides, including the ambushing of Serbian police patrols and officials by the Albanians and several instances of the kidnapping and killing of Serbian civilians. But in retrospect, it seems evident that the operation had at least two major goals from its inception: crushing the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army and permanently changing the ethnic balance of Kosovo by driving out as many Albanians as possible. Hounding more than a million Albanians from their homes accomplished two purposes for the Serbs. First, it removed the guerrillas' base of support and cover, in effect, drying up the sea in which the guerrilla fish swam. With the Serbs controlling the borders and scorched earth along the highways, they could isolate and mop up the Kosovo Liberation Army in the forests and mountains. Young men viewed as potential rebel recruits were singled out and either killed or removed to an unknown fate. In the longer run, depopulating Kosovo defused a demographic time bomb for the Serbs: Albanians already made up 90 percent of the population and were reproducing at a far higher rate than the Serbs. Although killing and torching were plentiful, the Serbs' most potent weapon was fear. The seemingly random, flamboyantly public killings of the first few days meant that as the campaign progressed, all it took was a handful of armed, masked Serbs to drive thousands of people from their homes, rob them and send them off in caravans, their houses in flames. Independent accounts indicate that there have been mass killings of from a dozen to roughly 100 people in more than 40 places. The State Department now puts the death toll at 4,600, a number only likely to increase as time goes on and more is known. But even that horrifying statistic indicates a goal of depopulation rather than extermination; it is low by comparison with the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia, where in one massacre alone, at Srebrenica, the Serbs were accused of killing 7,000 people. To amplify the effect of the killings in Kosovo, Serbs gunned down Albanians in the streets and in their homes, sometimes at random, sometimes from target lists. Bodies have been mutilated, with ears cut off, eyes gouged out or a cross, a Serbian symbol, carved into foreheads or chests. In many places the Serbs compounded the fear with humiliation. Older men were beaten for wearing the white conical hats of the Albanian mountains or forced to make the Serbian Orthodox three-fingered sign. One refugee convoy passed row on row of white conical hats set atop fence posts. Two months into the campaign now, the terror has been devastatingly effective and virtually unhampered by NATO's bombing campaign, judging by accounts from refugees, relief workers and officials from international agencies, NATO and the United States Government. By early May, 90 percent of all ethnic Albanians in Kosovo had been expelled from their homes, the State Department says, 900,000 driven across the province's borders and 500,000 more displaced inside Kosovo. Most of those remaining have been chased into hiding in forests and mountains, huddled together in villages penned in by snipers waiting to be allowed to flee, or captured, their fate unknown. More than 500 villages have been emptied and burned, the State Department said. And there was another element to the pattern: The Serbs made every effort to insure that those who fled abroad would not come back. Almost universally, refugees reported that they had been not only robbed but also systematically stripped of all identity papers, rendering them, in effect, stateless nonpersons, at least in the eyes of the Serbian government, and making it difficult for them ever to return home. Even the license plates of their cars -- the Serbs kept the good ones -- were methodically unscrewed at the borders. "This is not your land -- you will never see it again," the refugees were told. "Go to your NATO -- go to your Clinton." Part II GJAKOVA : Emptying a City of All but Bodies ''They were burning the houses and they started to scream like a wolf - 'woo, woo' - and they shot people in the back.'' Dr. Flori Bakalli The Serbs began attacking Kosovo Liberation Army strongholds on March 19, but their attack kicked into high gear on March 24, the night NATO began bombing Yugoslavia. Djakovica was one of the Serbs' first major targets. A look at a map explains the strategic significance of this city of 60,000, which was populated almost entirely by Albanians. The city and its surrounding chain of villages, stretching between Junik and Prizren, lie in the shadow of the Accursed Mountains, a remote, rugged range running along the border between Albania and Kosovo. The Kosovo Liberation Army maintains its camps and staging areas on the Albanian side of the mountains. A Western military officer, sketching out a map, slashed a series of lines down the mountains into the valleys around Djakovica, indicating rebel infiltration routes. Clearly, he said, the Serbs want to empty the area of ethnic Albanians, fortify and control it to block the rebels. Those who survived it say they will never forget the focused fury of the Serbian forces who attacked Djakovica in the hundreds hours after the first NATO bombs fell. "A group of six men with masks came, and they took the women and children out of the houses, and they burned the houses," said Mehdi Halilaj, a 27-year-old economist, recalling that first night. "The first night they burned 50 or more shops and about 35 houses. They were helped by the police." "They took 11 men and killed them, and some they cut up their bodies," he continued, speaking in English. "They left their bodies in the street for everybody to see, and nobody dared take them away. The city was very scared from Wednesday on." A woman called Ardina, who asked that her family name not be used, said: "The second night we saw their lights, cars, trucks, an armored vehicle. They started shooting like I have never heard in my life. I thought everyone was dead." "We were lucky," she said, speaking in English. "All the houses around us were burned and people killed. That night killed two brothers were, a man about 40 burned in his house and my sister-in-law with Down syndrome, they burned her in her house. She is dead. There was a body on the street, nobody could touch that body all day long." As in many places, the Serbs were guided to the most affluent and influential families, the people who helped give the Albanian community its cohesion. It is not known whether this was on instruction, or perhaps motivated by the greed, or grudges, of individual attackers, but one effect may be to damage Albanian prospects for rebuilding their communities. "In this block, they burned a lot of houses," Ardina said. "They were the best houses in town, the rich people," she said. "There was a Serb from the city guiding them. He told them: 'Burn this house. Kill this one.' Everyone in Djakovica knows him. They killed a large number of intellectuals, especially doctors. They shot a prominent surgeon, Dr. Izet Hima. They went for the rich people, to steal their television sets or whatever they see, burn their houses and kill them." >From the first days, the speed and scale of the Serbian campaign were stunning, even by the violent standards of Balkan wars as waves of paramilitary thugs, special policemen, regular soldiers and armed Serbian civilians swept through region after region of Kosovo, acting in concert. The burning and killing in the center of Djakovica went on for three weeks beginning in the narrow streets and small Ottoman-style houses of the Old Town, and then moved on to the newer high-rise buildings in the more modern section. "In the beginning they were just burning at night," Ardina said. "But after a week they were burning all day long, starting at 9 o'clock in the morning." "There were selected homes burned in the beginning, after that it was all the buildings," Dr. Flori Bakalli said, in English. "There were special police, local police, paramilitaries, and some of them civilians, armed. They were burning the houses and they started to scream like a wolf -- 'woo, woo' -- and they shot people in the back. Near my house there were five of them I saw myself." Ethnic Albanians moved from house to house and apartment to apartment, fleeing and moving in with relatives and friends, they said, to stay ahead of the advancing Serbs. In the old town, where many of the dwellings were built close together, Albanians broke holes through the walls so they could run from one home to another to escape if the Serbs knocked on the door. Everybody, children included, slept fitfully in their clothes and shoes, ready to run. Someone had to be always awake, peering through a window or the peepholes of steel gates to see if the Serbs were coming. Hoxha, a dignified white-haired man, took a reporter's notebook to sketch his family's compound and their futile attempts to elude Serbian attackers as they killed and burned their way through the neighborhood. "We moved from one house to another and finally to my older daughter Tringa's house," he said. "That night I saw an old man, about 80, killed and burned and a 15-year-old boy as well. We stayed there for four nights, and the fifth night the Serbs came." "It was around 12 o'clock, and we didn't have any electricity, when they came, about 30 people, paramilitary, V.J. and Serbs from Djakovica who had been given uniforms and guns," Hoxha said, using the initials by which the Yugoslav Army is known. "We were sleeping. My son-in-law was watching through the hole in the steel gate and came and told us to wake up." They had parked a car sideways across the gate to block it, but the Serbs pushed through with a heavier vehicle. Thinking that the Serbs were looking only for men of military age, Hoxha and two other men climbed out a second-story window, dropped onto a wall and escaped. He spent the next seven hours hiding in the narrow space between two buildings, squeezed between the concrete walls, listening to shouts and screams and gunshots. In the morning he came back to the compound and found the bodies of everyone who had been left behind, some of the bodies burned. Later he said he had learned that the Serbs had first shot his 15-year-old daughter, Flaka, in front of her mother, then the older daughter, Tringa. His wife pleaded with them not to kill the children, but then they killed her. One of his granddaughters, Shihana, a spunky girl of 6, ran away and tried to hide in a closet, but they killed her there and set fire to the closet. After he explained all this, he put his head in his hands and cried. Next door, in the Caka family house, 20 people were hiding in the basement, when the Serbian forces broke in. They shot 18 people in the back of the head. A 10-year-old boy, Dren Caka, was somehow only wounded in the left arm, and escaped by pretending to be dead, and later gave his account to reporters at the medical tent set up at the Morini border crossing. After the Serbs left, he said, he managed to slip out a window, but he could not take his 2-year-old sister with him and she was burned alive when the Serbs torched the house. It was he who witnessed the killing of Hoxha's family. Over the course of the assault, more than 100 boys -- presumably regarded as potential Kosovo Liberation Army recruits -- were captured, refugees said, and taken to a sports center. No one knows what has happened to them. In just seven days, March 30 to April 5, some 51,880 people were herded on foot, according to records of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, from Djakovica to a tiny remote border crossing in the mountains called Qafar-e-Prushit. The way looks like a road on a map, but it really becomes just a muddy footpath up the steep climb, which can be traveled only on foot because vehicles would set off the mines the Serbs had planted. They were city people in city shoes, and they pushed the sick and elderly along with them in wheelbarrows. As Djakovica suffered, other Serbs were at work nearby purging a wide area they regarded as a rebel highway. In a rare account by a Serb, a captured soldier described to NATO interrogators how his infantry battalion was sent without explanation to Pec. On March 27, the soldier said, his commander gathered about 100 men outside an elementary school and outlined their mission: expelling Albanians from their homes. The time had come, he said, to drive the Albanians out of Serbia, according to an American official familiar with the account. The troops were to move through the city house by house, he said, ordering residents to dress in a few minutes, pack one small bag and leave in the direction of Decani, a city to the south. The soldiers looted jewelry, torched homes. At day's end, many were driving new cars. An artillery and armoured unit deployed to the nearby village of Ljubenic used rougher tactics. The soldier said a friend in the unit had told him they had killed 80 men while expelling the women, children and elderly. In another of the region's villages, Bela Crkva (Bellacrkva in Albanian), on March 25, soldiers and special policemen torched the homes and farm buildings and killed at least 62 people, most of them gunned down with automatic weapons in a stream bend. "They just started shooting," Zheniqi, a survivor, said in an interview. "The dead bodies behind me pushed me over a cliff and into the stream. I was lucky because all the dead bodies fell on top of me." It was one of a series of mass killings over the next few days along a seven-mile stretch of villages in the rolling hills, including Celina, Pirane, Krush-e-Vogel (called Mala Krusa in Serbian) and Krush-e-Mahde (Velika Krusa), where Bekim Duraku remembered, life was so "beautiful, if someone offered to take me to the United States, I wouldn't have gone." On March 26, the third day of the NATO bombing, the idyllic life ended in one of the best-documented of the mass killings, including an amateur videotape of the bodies. Serbian forces stormed through the village shooting down people in several areas, burning some bodies, digging a mass grave with a backhoe for others and leaving some lying in piles on the ground. Part III Villages: Expelling Refugees for a Relief Crisis The violent emptying of the Djakovica region had a specific military purpose: cutting off the Kosovo Liberation Army supply lines. The Serbs followed it up by planting more mines, strengthening their forces along the border and mounting raids into Albania. But in a long stretch of villages, towns and cities across Kosovo -- places either close to the border or on main transportation routes -- there were similar, if less intensely concentrated, outbursts of killing and burning in those same days with another aim: driving out the majority Albanian population. How it worked is readily discerned by comparing the refugee figures kept at the Albanian, Macedonian and Montenegrin borders with a map of Kosovo. What the comparison shows is how areas close to the border were cleared first, often by wild bursts of killings that served as an example. This cleared transportation routes that facilitated the hounding out of people from other villages, who gathered in the main town of a region, and from the cities. Sweeping his hands over a map in broad arcs across the major roadways, Fron Nazi, an Albanian-American scholar heading up a major human rights study and in touch with both refugees and the rebels, demonstrated how the Serbian strategy was apparent: first to empty the population centers and control that scorched earth, then to isolate the rebel fighters in the forests where they could be contained, squeezed and even starved out. Forcing the refugees over the borders, NATO intelligence experts believe, served another purpose: overwhelming NATO troops stationed in Macedonia with an unmanageable relief crisis, calculating that the task of feeding, housing and caring for hundreds of thousands of refugees would consume the alliance's energies and divert it from preparing a military campaign. "It was the first use of a weapon like this in modern warfare," a NATO intelligence officer said. "It was like sending the cattle against the Indians." The refugees accounts in their thousands bear a striking sameness as they tell of Serbian gunmen bursting into their homes, threatening to kill if the Albanians do not give up jewelry, of seeing relatives or neighbors killed. Almost every Albanian interviewed begins by telling the exact time the Serbs arrived. But after days of hiding or plodding along in refugee columns, they often could not remember what day it was. In many accounts, it is possible to discern a division of labor among the Serbian attackers. Typically the Yugoslav Army, usually the Pristina Corps of the Third Army, surrounded an area, shelling it with tanks, artillery or or Katyusha rockets. Then the police, local Serbs who were sometimes reservists, and the paramilitaries moved in for the close-in dirty work, going block by block, house by house, pounding on doors, demanding money, and often shooting people on the spot. After the door-to-door terror, the military moved in to herd the people out, either on foot or tractor, or sometimes on trains and buses, the refugee accounts agree. The Pristina Corps, in close conjunction with the blue-uniformed Serbian Interior Ministry troops, cleared transit routes. As the flow of refugees accelerated, regular soldiers in green camouflage were deployed at key intersections to control movement. By all accounts, it was a tightly ordered, coordinated campaign, from the artillery that shelled villages, to the masked gunmen who killed, looted and spread terror, to the armored cars and lines of troops who chased people hiding in the woods to corral them in larger central towns for eventual expulsion. In some cases, human rights workers interviewing refugees say, different groups of gunmen were distinguished by different colored armbands or headbands. Even the wild-appearing masked irregulars -- Arkan's Tigers, the White Eagles and others -- were under tight control, NATO experts said, and reported to the intelligence arm of the Serbian Interior Ministry. "They were in there with Belgrade's blessing," a NATO intelligence official said. "What they would be allowed to do is up to the local commander." The level of violence varied widely, depending on the whim of the local Serbian official in charge, or even individual gunmen. An international official visited a woman of about 50 in a hospital with both of her nipples hacked off. "All she wanted was to tell her brother in Srbica what happened," he said, referring to a town in north-central Kosovo. "How could I tell her Srbica doesn't exist any more." Some people were clearly targeted, particularly men age 15 to 50, suspected or potential rebel fighters, and those who worked for or rented space to the observer teams from the Office of Cooperation and Security in Europe. One key political activist who was a bridge between Kosovar factions, Fehmi Agani, was pulled off a train outside Pristina by the Serbian police and killed. There were reports by human rights groups that doctors had been singled out. Evidence on the incidence of rape is less complete. President Clinton and other Western leaders often charge that there has been organized rape. But while it is clear that there have been rapes, accounts that are available do not resolve whether they were systematic. Rape was not mentioned in the indictment by the war crimes tribunal. But for all the signs of a logic behind the purge of Kosovo, many of the individual episodes -- including the gunning down of women and children -- seem inexplicable in military terms, except that the very unpredictability of the savagery added the powerful fear that drove the exodus. "That's what so terrifying -- there are no rules," said an official in close touch with the international war crimes investigation in The Hague. "It's so random. One set of people might be spared, and the people next door do the same thing and are all killed. There was a man who gave the police 10 marks and they let go, and another who gave them 250, so they thought he must have more and killed him." By the time, three weeks into the campaign, that the Serbs came to drive the ethnic Albanians out of the north-central city of Mitrovica, said Jacques Franquin, a United Nations official, it was enough for them to gun down an old woman and a teen-age girl in one neighborhood for everyone around to quietly board buses and be directed out of town through traffic control points. Part IV Pristina: 'In Every House They Broke the Doors' ''We waited two months, hoping something would happen.'' Luljeta Jarina n Pristina, the knock on Bajram Kelmendi's door came at 1 o'clock in the morning of the night NATO started bombing. "We will kill you if you do not open in five seconds," the Serbian police shouted, his wife, Nedima, recalled. Five uniformed policemen burst in, forced the family to lie on the floor and demanded money, one warning, "If you are lying, I will kill the little children." They took away Kelmendi, a well-known human rights lawyer, and his two sons, age 30 and 16. They told the elder son, Kastriut, "Kiss your wife and two children because this will be the last time you see them," the elder Mrs. Kelmendi said. The family found the three bodies by the side of the road two days later. Brutal, too, but Pristina was different. In the Djakovica region, the Serbs had a clear military goal: to cut off the Kosovo Liberation Army. But Pristina, like the other cities the Serbs emptied, was not a rebel stronghold. Indeed, in previous outbursts of fighting in Kosovo, villagers often went to stay in the city until things calmed down. Born in the Drenica valley, the Kosovo Liberation Army was largely a rural movement and tied in with the traditional clans, although it did begin to pick up urban sympathy with a Serbian crackdown in March 1998. Within the divided Kosovar society, Pristina was the base of the nonviolent leader Ibrahim Rugova and his Democratic League of Kosovo, whose tactics won the praise of Western leaders -- mainly because they did not cause trouble. Among the city's educated elite, there had been suspicion and criticism of the Kosovo Liberation Army. In Pristina, the Serbian aim appears to have been depopulation. And from some of the targets chosen, like Kelmendi and Agani, the activist pulled from a train and killed, it also seems clear that the Serbs set out to destroy the Albanian political class and its institutions. The offices of Rugova's Democratic League was burned down on March 24, and a guard was shot and killed by the police at the newspaper Koha Ditore, whose publisher, Veton Surroi, had been a delegate at the talks in Rambouillet, France, early this year. The next night, the warehouse of the largest Kosovar charity, the Mother Teresa Society, was burned. On March 28, the house of Rexhep Qosja, a prominent academic, head of the Albanian Democratic Movement and another member of the Rambouillet delegation, was torched. The first few days of the NATO bombing were marked in Pristina by nightly arson and bomb attacks on Albanian homes, shops and businesses, refugees recall. Police cars raced through the night, amid explosions and gunfire that terrified the Albanian residents. Some people began fleeing, mostly middle-class residents who had cars. "At first, while the telephone was working, friends were calling and telling us this house was burning, or they arrested this guy and so on," said Ali Muriqi, 34, of the engineering faculty at Pristina University. "They were talking about intellectuals. Then at 6:30 in the evening, the electricity went off. Then the movement started, the police going around with weapons." Muriqi fled Pristina by car on March 29. On March 30, in a chilling display of force, the Serbs began systematically emptying Pristina's neighborhoods -- Vranjevci, Tashlixhe, Dardania, Dragodan -- marching the Albanians along streets lined with gantlets of masked gunmen draped with weaponry, refugees said. By the tens of thousands -- in an operation that required extensive advance logistical preparations -- they were herded into the city's railroad station overnight. At dawn some were packed aboard trains -- one refugee said he was among 28 people in a compartment meant for eight -- bound for Macedonia. Others were loaded on buses and even a refrigerator truck that normally transports sides of beef and dumped near the Albanian border to leave the country on foot. "I walked out into the garden, and there were three people with black masks and big guns," said Suzana Krusniqi, collapsing in tears as she crossed the Albanian border with her elderly parents the next day. "In every house they broke the doors," she said, speaking in English. When we went out, everyone was in the street walking between men with black masks and big guns." The forced exodus of Pristina gathered momentum in April. When the Serbs marched Ramadan Osmani and his family from their home to the railroad station in early April, he said, it was so crowded they had to wait 12 hours for a train to Macedonia, where they slept in a field for six days before finding a space at the Bojane refugee camp. Some ethnic Albanians tried to stay in Pristina. Many lived a cat-and-mouse existence after eluding the first wave of Serbian looting and expulsions, hiding in other people's homes or fleeing to nearby villages. Fearing discovery, they left always by back doors, made little noise, lit candles only in rooms where heavy blankets covered the windows, and sent old people out to buy food. Hafiz Berisha and his family evaded being expelled from Pristina for two months, hiding in five homes. But last Sunday, the 70-year-old retired policeman was standing in line to buy bread when Serbian policemen walked up and pulled his cousin and a neighbor, both men under 30, out of the line and hustled them away. Berisha said he had seen two people gunned down in front of him and 40 bodies in a mass grave, but the sight of the helpless men being led away was too much. "You can't even buy bread," he said. He fled the next day. Luljeta Jarina, 19, and her father, Ramiz, who had worked in the personnel department of a mining company, were among those who went into hiding. Once when she ventured into the garden behind her home out of boredom, a Serbian sniper shot at her, she recalled. And each night, Serbian soldiers and policemen cruised the streets of the city, firing their Kalashnikovs wildly into the air. Just this Wednesday, the Serbs rounded up 18 men, including her father, at gunpoint. All but her father and two others were taken away, to an unknown fate, she said. "We waited two months, hoping something would happen," she said. On Sunday, they found a Serb cruising the city in a bus -- a new entrepreneur driving refugees to the border for 20 to 100 German marks apiece, about $10 to $55 -- and fled their native land. ------------------ May 29, 1999 How Yugoslav Military Planned and Mounted Kosovo's Ravaging By MICHAEL R. GORDON and THOM SHANKER he purge of Kosovo this spring was led by Yugoslav army officers handpicked by President Slobodan Milosevic to replace the internal security forces who had tried and failed the previous summer to wipe out the Albanian rebels, NATO officials say. Allied officials now acknowledge that they missed signs that the Yugoslav army was preparing a much more extensive operation in Kosovo than they had attempted in 1998, one that would move well beyond attacking Kosovo Liberation Army strongholds to cities and towns that had no direct ties to the rebels. The Interior Ministry's drive against the rebels last year was no half-measure. Special policemen and soldiers drove as many as 400,000 ethnic Albanians from their homes in and around rebel strongholds. Then they swept east to west across the province, sifting through the hordes of refugees in search of the elusive rebel fighters. But NATO officials say the Serbs made a tactical error in that earlier purge. They did not seal off the borders with Albania or Montenegro, allowing the rebels to mingle with civilians and escape. The Kosovo Liberation Army was battered, but not defeated, and NATO officials say the Yugoslav army concluded that an even more brutal attack would be needed to quell the rebellion. The fighting continued sporadically into the fall, when the United States brokered a cease-fire under which the Serbs agreed to pull back many of their troops. That agreement did not last long. Plainclothes intelligence operatives from the Interior Ministry filtered back into the province as the Kosovo Liberation Army renewed its attacks. Western nations convened talks at a medieval castle in Rambouillet, France, in hopes of forcing a permanent settlement. NATO officials say they failed to appreciate that the Serbs were girding for war while they talked of peace. In November, Milosevic fired the chief of staff of the Yugoslav army, Gen. Momcilo Perisic, who had made clear his distaste for ethnic cleansing. He was replaced with Gen. Dragoljub Ojdanic, a career officer who NATO officials say had close ties to Milosevic and had served previously in Kosovo. A NATO intelligence official said this appointment was ominous for another reason: reports that Ojdanic's daughter had been raped by an Albanian when he was a commander at the Yugoslav army base in Prizren in Kosovo. Milosevic also replaced the overall commander of army forces in southern Serbia, turning to a general whose wife is said by Western officials to be related to the Serbian leader's wife, Mirjana Markovic. That officer, Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic, had previously commanded the main Serb army in Kosovo. Even more sinister was the appearance in Kosovo during the winter of the notorious paramilitary groups that had played such a large part in the killing and purging of Bosnia. There were Arkan's Tigers, the private army of the indicted war criminal Zeljko Raznjatovic, a parliamentary deputy from Kosovo. Also spotted were the White Eagles of Vojislav Seselj, the pistol-waving law professor who is a Serbian deputy prime minister, and a band known as Frenki's Boys, led by Franko "Frenki" Simatovic. Such units had previously been the strong arm of Serbian ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Croatia. In Kosovo, according to U.S. officials, they were formally under Belgrade's command, reporting to Serbia's intelligence agency. The United States threatened to bomb the Serbs if they did not sign a peace deal, which the Albanians had reluctantly accepted. In February and March, Western diplomats monitoring the shaky cease-fire saw the Serbs building up their forces. The question was why. Pavkovic's predecessor as Third Army commander offered a clue early that winter, warning that his soldiers could look forward to a "hot spring." By this time, NATO officials say, Pavkovic and his colleagues had worked out a new plan for attacking the Kosovo Liberation Army that took account of the lessons from the failed attack last summer. The Yugoslav army was in charge, with the Interior Ministry taking orders from army officers. This time, the army planned to seal Serbia's border with Albania so rebel fighters could not escape. A torrent of refugees unleashed by the ethnic cleansing would be pushed across the border with Macedonia, tying down NATO troops there that were poised to enforce any peace settlement. It was, NATO officials now say, a "hammer and anvil" plan in which the army would drive the rebels against the closed border and crush them. NATO officials said they had no proof that Milosevic reviewed the specifics of the operation. But one U.S. official monitoring the situation said the military campaign "was signed off and approved at the General Staff level, and then, obviously the final go-ahead would have been given by President Milosevic, as head of state." This assessment is based on the fact that as head of the Yugoslav state, Milosevic was president of the Supreme Defense Council, with ultimate responsibility for military operations. At NATO headquarters, alliance diplomats signed off on a military plan of their own to bomb the Serbs. Both sides prepared to execute their plans in March. The Serbs moved first. On March 19, the Yugoslav army attacked key rebel strongholds and lines of communication on the periphery of Kosovo, saying it was defending itself against new rebel operations. The 1,300 Western observers pulled out of Kosovo the next day. Pavkovic made no secret of his intentions, warning publicly that his troops were poised to take care of "internal enemy" if NATO went through with its threats to bomb. On March 23, Serbian security forces began setting fire to villages that had never known rebel activity and -- even more telling -- began expelling ethnic Albanians from cities, which had never been used as bases by the rebels. NATO began bombing at nightfall. The war was on. Within days, tens of thousands of refugees would be streaming across three international borders. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list send a message to majordomo at alb-net.com In the body of the message include: UNSUBSCRIBE KCC-NEWS From kosova at justiceforall.org Thu Jun 10 12:33:45 1999 From: kosova at justiceforall.org (Kosova Task Force, USA) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 10:33:45 -0600 Subject: [kcc-news] KosovaTaskForce: Kosovars React to Serb-NATo agreementn Message-ID: <199906101528.IAA29317@newshub1-work.home.com> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ! READ & DISTRIBUTE FURTHER ! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Kosova Crisis Center (KCC) News Network: http://www.alb-net.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- Kosovapress http://www.kosovapress.com/ Kosova Information Center http://www.kosova.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- -------> Want to HELP the people of Kosova?? <-------- http://www.alb-net.com/kosovahelp/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Kosova Task Force, USA June 10, 1999 There are three parties in the Kosova situation: the Kosovar Albanians, the Serbs, and NATO. The current talks and agreements are only between the Serbs and NATO. The Kosovar Albanians, the victims of this genocide, have been left out. Here is what the Provisional Government of Kosova has to say. Mr. Dino Asanaj is the official representative of the Provisional Government of Kosova in the USA. ---------------- Dino Asanaj:: The international role must be totally clear, that after a million have been expelled from Kosova, after a million and two hundred thousand others are still in Kosova without food or shelter, that have not received any assistance from the international community for 75 days, after 75 mass graves, rape camps, concentration camps, after rivers of blood, and the use of human shields, Kosova and its legitimate leadership, the Provisional Government, led by Hashim Tha?i, and the victims have the right to choose the future of Kosova, and that right can not be taken away from them. There is no solution that can resist the demands of the people. We should organize ourselves as a united body around the Provisional Government and the KLA. The international community can stop the war with Serbia but when it comes to the future of Kosova, it is the people of Kosova who should decide. ------------------ Please call the media and ask why they are not reporting the fact that the Kosovar Albanians are not part of this agreement. Call your policy makers to tell them that there is no peace without justice for the Kosovar Albanians. The US must recognize their independence which they voted for in 1991. TALKING POINTS ? Kosova Albanians are not part of this Serb-NATO agreement. ? The agreement does not include the recognition of Kosova's independence, which is the only long term solution to ensure Kosovar dignity and security. ? The proposal leaves Milosevic in power, which is completely unacceptable as he is an indicted war criminal who must face trial. ACTION REQUESTED ? Contact the President, Secretary of State, and Senate Foreign Relations Committee and demand the following: 1) Independence for Kosova; it is the only long term solution. 2) Milosevic must not be dealt with directly in any negotiations because he is an indicted war criminal. President Bill Clinton ph: 202-456-1111 e-mail: president at whitehouse.gov Secretary of State Madeleine Albright ph:202-647-6575 e-mail: secretary at state.gov Senate Foreign Relations Committee Senator Jesse Helms ph: 202-224-4651 e-mail: jesse_helms at helms.senate.gov --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list send a message to majordomo at alb-net.com In the body of the message include: UNSUBSCRIBE KCC-NEWS From kosova at justiceforall.org Fri Jun 11 18:17:14 1999 From: kosova at justiceforall.org (Kosova Task Force, USA) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 16:17:14 -0600 Subject: [kcc-news] KosovaTaskForce: Sending Jews Back to Hitler! Message-ID: <199906112112.OAA06651@newshub1-work.home.com> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ! READ & DISTRIBUTE FURTHER ! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Kosova Crisis Center (KCC) News Network: http://www.alb-net.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- Kosovapress http://www.kosovapress.com/ Kosova Information Center http://www.kosova.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- -------> Want to HELP the people of Kosova?? <-------- http://www.alb-net.com/kosovahelp/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Kosova Task Force, USA Action Alert 6.11.1999 CAN WE ASK THE JEWS OF HITLER'S ERA TO GO BACK AND LIVE UNDER HIM? But this is exactly what the Kosovar Albanians are being told to do. Almost all refugees interviewed by the media are refusing to go back to live under Milosevic and Serbian rule. During the recent Serb-NATO agreement, questions about the long term political future of Kosova have received no attention. Yet these are the most important questions of all. "The official line of the NATO governments goes something like this: Under the protection of an international force, Kosova will develop its own autonomous administration, while remaining within the federal Yugoslav state. This means that the Kosovars will have Yugoslav passports, be liable for call-up to the Yugoslav army, pay Yugoslav taxes and pass through Yugoslav controls at the borders (the same borders where the Yugoslav police robbed them and drove them through minefields a few weeks ago)". Kosovar Albanians voted for their independence in 1991 when the Yugoslav Federation disintegrated. The world accepted Bosnian and Croats referenda and votes for independence. Why ask the Kosovar Albanians to go back and live under Serbian rule? ACTION REQUESTED: Please participate in the media discussion and raise the following questions: How long will NATO be there to protect them? Why not let Kosova be independent, defending itself. Call Your policy makers to tell them that there is no peace without justice for Kosovar Albanians. Recognize their independence which they voted for in 1991. TALKING POINTS ? Kosovar Albanians are not part of this Serb-NATO agreement. ? The agreement does not include the recognition of Kosova's independence, which is the only long term solution to ensure Kosovar dignity and security. President Bill Clinton ph: 202-456-1111 e-mail: president at whitehouse.gov Secretary of State Madeleine Albright ph:202-647-6575 e-mail: secretary at state.gov Senate Foreign Relations Committee Senator Jesse Helms ph: 202-224-4651 e-mail: jesse_helms at helms.senate.gov ==================================== Kosova Task Force, USA 730 W. Lake St., Suite 156 Chicago, IL 60661, USA Phone: 312-829-0087 Fax: 312-829-0089 Email: Kosova at justiceforall.org Internet: http://www.justiceforall.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list send a message to majordomo at alb-net.com In the body of the message include: UNSUBSCRIBE KCC-NEWS From mentor at alb-net.com Sun Jun 13 02:14:36 1999 From: mentor at alb-net.com (Mentor Cana) Date: Sun, 13 Jun 1999 02:14:36 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [kcc-news] News: Protecting Kosovo's Cultural Treasures -- ARTICLE (fwd) Message-ID: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ! READ & DISTRIBUTE FURTHER ! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Kosova Crisis Center (KCC) News Network: http://www.alb-net.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- Kosovapress http://www.kosovapress.com/ Kosova Information Center http://www.kosova.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- -------> Want to HELP the people of Kosova?? <-------- http://www.alb-net.com/kosovahelp/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- PROTECTING KOSOVO'S CULTURAL TREASURES By Michael Sells (Michael Sells is the author of "The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia," second edition, 1998. He is professor of comparative religions at Haverford College in Pennsylvania.) Members of the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Yugoslav government are making a grave allegation. They claim that NATO is bombing the great Serbian Orthodox monasteries dating to the medieval Serb kingdoms. The web site of the Belgrade government's Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments of Serbia shows pictures of monasteries allegedly damaged by NATO strikes and includes two black spaces with the word" destroyed" ominously written across them. The web page of the Serbian Orthodox Church, entitled "The Bombing of Serbian Shrines," is even more provocative. The site features a map of the major Serbian shrines in Kosovo, with icons of bomb blasts over each of them, as if NATO's bombs were falling directly upon them. The religious and historical importance of the monasteries in Kosovo -- an area called by some "the Serb Jerusalem" -- gives such claims a powerful impact, especially in countries with large Orthodox Christian populations. In addition, threats to sacred sites symbolize threats to the existence of the people who value them. Yet these web sites offer no evidence to justify the "destroyed" labels or the title "The Bombing of Serbian Shrines." The sites show pictures of the monuments before the alleged destruction, but no images of the damage they claim was inflicted by NATO -- except for items like masonry cracks that could have been caused by anything. Serbian authorities have not been shy about showing graphic details of civilian destruction wrought by misguided NATO bombs. If NATO were bombing the monasteries, images of the blasted ruins would be broadcast around the world. These new allegations against NATO are ominously similar to Serb nationalists' charges in 1986 that Kosovar Albanians were destroying the monasteries. This charge was combined with other inflammatory allegations that Kosovar Albanians were illegal immigrants who should be expelled; that Albanians were using their high birth rate as a tool to commit" demographic genocide" against Kosovo's Serb minority; and that they were carrying out widespread rapes of Serb women. In 1986, Serbian Orthodox bishops repeated these allegations and charged that genocide was being carried out against Serbs in Kosovo. The same charges were repeated in the famous "Memorandum" written by Serbian intellectuals attacking the Yugoslav constitution and the autonomy of Kosovo. In this inflamed environment, Slobodan Milosevic made his leap to power by promising he would protect the Serb people and their shrines against their enemies. What was the truth of these frightening allegations? There were genuine grievances by both Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo, and both groups felt threatened. But Serb independent journalists and human rights workers found the more inflammatory charges to be total fabrications. A study of police records in Kosovo showed only one rape of an ethnic Serb by an Albanian in an entire year. Similarly, the alleged destruction of Serb shrines turned out to involve isolated cases of vandalism, graffiti, and cutting of trees on church property -- hate crimes, perhaps, but surely not the organized, genocidal annihilation that was claimed. Yet the charge that Albanians were out to destroy Serb sacral heritage had a life independent of any evidence to the contrary. The charge fed into a mythologized history that presented the Ottoman Turks and native Balkan Muslims as obsessed with eradicating Serbs and Serbian sacred sites. Serb nationalists make this charge repeatedly -- despite the survival of this magnificent heritage through five centuries of Ottoman rule amidst Albanian neighbors and despite the Ottoman record of supporting the Serbian Orthodox patriarchate and authorizing the building and repair of Serbian churches. To understand the full power of the accusations of monastery destruction, we need to note the other symbols that were attached to the monasteries. The medieval Serb Prince Lazar was portrayed as a Christ figure and his death at the battle of Kosovo in 1389 was presented as the "Serbian Golgotha." Serb nationalists began accusing today's Balkan Muslims of having the blood of the Christ-prince Lazar on their hands. At the same time, the bones of Serbs killed by the Nazis and their Ustasha collaborators during World War II were ritually exhumed amid nationalist propaganda demonizing all Albanians, Slavic Muslims, and Croats as inherently genocidal. Mythic time (1389), historical memory (World War II), and false allegations of contemporary Albanian genocide all became symbolically attached to the monasteries. For the momentous June 28, 1989, 600th anniversary of the battle of Kosovo, Lazar's relics were solemnly transported from monastery to monastery to arrive at the Gracanica monastery (one of the shrines now claimed to be under attack by NATO). A massive crowd viewed the unveiling of the relics at the monastery and then moved to the nearby battle site. There an even larger crowd of more than a million Serbs heard Slobodan Milosevic's belligerent speech sealing his plan to revoke Kosovo's autonomy. The symbols brought together with such ritual and theatric power were then instrumentalized through the purging of the Yugoslav army, government protection of extremist paramilitary groups, and media propaganda. In a mass psychology of fear and rage, Serbian society was radicalized. Serbia's most popular celebrity today is the indicted war-criminal Arkan, and its most popular politician is Vojislav Seselj, an open advocate of the annihilation of Kosovar Albanians and all Balkan Muslims. At first the violence conceived in Kosovo was channeled into the conflicts in Croatia and Bosnia. In Bosnia, Serb militias -- urged on by the allegations of destruction of Serb monasteries -- annihilated non-Serb sacral sites. All mosques and other Muslim shrines (more than 1,400) were destroyed, including world-class masterpieces built in the 15th and 16th centuries. In some towns all the mosques were destroyed in a single night's coordinated dynamiting. The Ferhad Pasha Mosque (1583) in Banja Luka was re-dynamited three times, the rubble pulverized with jackhammers and trucked away to deny the surviving Muslim community a shard of its heritage. In the town of Foca, the 16th-century masterpiece known as the Colored Mosque and all other Muslim shrines were blown up, the sites turned into parking lots. When the new Serb nationalist mayors of Foca and Zvornik were asked why all the mosques had been destroyed, they responded that there never had been any mosques in those towns. Where the Serb army could not occupy an area, they targeted cultural sites with shelling, burning the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo -- with its priceless collection of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Slavic manuscripts -- and the National Library, with more than a million volumes -- the largest book burning in history. In three years Serb militias eradicated five centuries of Bosnian Muslim heritage and all evidence that Muslims and Serbs had shared a common civilization. Meanwhile, the Serbian monasteries of Kosovo survived intact, even as they had survived centuries of Ottoman rule and Albanian neighbors. Now we hear similarly inflammatory charges that NATO is bombing Serbian monasteries. In all the talk about the monasteries, we tend to forget that the Albanian community has its own Muslim and Catholic sites. Muslim sites include mosques, madrasas (religious schools, often with manuscript libraries), tekkes (dervish lodges), turbes (mausoleums, frequently sites of pilgrimage), hammams (bath complexes for men and women), and bazaars (often built next to a mosque to support pious endowments). Many date from the 15th and 16th centuries. Kosovar refugees interviewed on the border offer consistent reports of having witnessed the destruction of mosques and shrines. In the case of Bosnia such reports turned out to be horrifyingly true. The Belgrade regime insists that Serbian forces must remain in Kosovo in order to protect the monasteries. The Serbian monasteries survived five centuries without Milosevic's army and special police. But non-Serb peoples and monuments in the area have not fared well under Belgrade's "monument protection." Since 1986, Serb nationalists have manipulated concern for the shrines to motivate, justify, and implement "ethnic cleansing" and annihilation of centuries of non-Serb artistic and religious monuments. In exploiting Serbian monasteries and the Serbian heritage the represented to foment hate and violence, they desecrated a great Serbian heritage that deserves better. All sacral sites in Kosovo should be protected by a multinational force that includes peacekeepers from countries with large Orthodox populations. UNESCO and other organizations should monitor them and catalogue any damages. Deliberate destruction of monuments should be prosecuted as a war crime in The Hague. As for Belgrade's army, its special police, and paramilitaries -- the world has seen enough of their "protection of monuments." --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list send a message to majordomo at alb-net.com In the body of the message include: UNSUBSCRIBE KCC-NEWS From kosova at justiceforall.org Tue Jun 15 19:02:26 1999 From: kosova at justiceforall.org (Kosova Task Force, USA) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 17:02:26 -0600 Subject: [kcc-news] KosovaTaskForce: The Real Victors in Kosova Message-ID: <199906152157.OAA05927@newshub1-work.home.com> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ! READ & DISTRIBUTE FURTHER ! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Kosova Crisis Center (KCC) News Network: http://www.alb-net.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- Kosovapress http://www.kosovapress.com/ Kosova Information Center http://www.kosova.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- -------> Want to HELP the people of Kosova?? <-------- http://www.alb-net.com/kosovahelp/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Kosova Task Force, USA 6.15.1999 Eric Margolis is an international syndicated columnist & broadcaster. This analysis is being recirculated here with the permission of the author. THE REAL VICTORS IN KOSOVO Geneva - Everyone involved in the strange Kosovo conflict is claiming victory - except for its chief victims, the Albanians. Serbia's ruler, Slobodan Milosevic, has saved his own skin, evaded prosecution for war crimes, and managed, at least for now, to keep Kosovo, which was 93% Albanian until this year's ethnic terror, under Serb sovereignty. NATO's promises to the Kosovars of a future vote on independence have been forgotten in the rush to end the war. The muddled accord almost certainly assures continued violence in Kosovo and a legion of future troubles for the Balkans. Many of the one million Albanian refugees are afraid to return to Kosovo, whose borders will remain under Serb military and police control, thus cementing Milosevic's terrorism. Albanians know once NATO loses interest in Kosovo, the Serbs will be back. Milosevic, who keeps power by creating trouble, will now turn his perpetual-motion crisis machine on neighboring Montenegro, unstable Macedonia, Bosnia, and Serbia's forgotten Muslim region of Sanjak. He will emerge from the war a hero and inspiration to the growing force of racism among Balkan Slavs and the Greeks. The `peace' deal is being hailed as a triumph of sensible internationalism by the curious, ad hoc alliance of groups that opposed the war: leftists, right-wing isolationists, anti-Americans, and Muslim-haters. Far from a triumph, it is a craven surrender to expediency by NATO's weak-willed leaders. At the same time, the western democracies have not only invited Russia and China to meddle in the Balkans, they are relying on them as `partners in peace.' Misery loves company; so do repressive regimes. It was no coincidence semi-communist Russia, and fully communist China, sprang to the defense of Serbia, Europe's last communist state. Nor that Moscow and Beijing reacted furiously to NATO's half-hearted intervention in Kosovo to protect human rights. Both are major violators of human rights and persecutors of restive minorities. Five years ago, the 1.2 million Muslim Chechens rose up against 250 years of savage Russian oppression. During World War II, 80% of Chechens were massacred, starved, or deported en masse in railroad cars to concentration camps by Stalin. To crush Chechen resistance, in 1994 Russian carpet bombing and heavy artillery killed 50,000 to 100,000 Chechen civilians. Torture and executions were widespread. Virtually all Chechen cities, towns, and villages were leveled in a horrifying prelude to Kosovo. Russian parliamentarians recently accused President Boris Yeltsin of major war crimes in Chechnya. Yet this same leader, and the same army that committed these atrocities, have been invited by NATO to join the Kosovo peacekeeping force. The Russian contingent, which was said to eventually number 10,000 troops, will be the second largest military force after the British. Far from keeping peace, the Russians will promote the interests of the outlaw Serb regime and, of course, Moscow's own centuries-old strategic ambitions in the Balkans, as Russia's seizure of Pristina airport showed this weekend. China has been enlisted in the `peace process' because its support in the UN Security Council is essential for diplomatic cover. The accidental bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade presented Beijing with a golden opportunity, which the Chinese immediately seized, to put America on the psychological defensive. China's contrived rage over this trivial incident helped distract attention from China's theft of US nuclear secrets, and deflected world condemnation over the anniversary of the Tienanmen massacre. Russia and China now hold veto power over the UN operation in Kosovo. More important, China is currently waging an intensifying campaign of repression against the Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim people, the majority in China's sensitive western province, Sinkiang - formerly Eastern Turkistan. The Uighurs have rebelled against heavy-handed Chinese rule, and Bejing's campaign to swamp the region with Han Chinese settlers, repeating the process of Chinese ethnic inundation in Inner Mongolia and Tibet. China recently executed a score of Uighurs, arrested hundreds of suspected nationalists, and imposed martial law in many regions of Sinkiang. While Chinese repression in Tibet has provoked worldwide protest, its equally brutal policies in Sinkiang remain almost unknown. Not surprisingly, NATO intervention to save the Kosovars from Serb ethnic terror set off alarm bells in Beijing, which fears foreign action over its own violations of human and national rights. No wonder, then, that Russia and China, sought to be involved in Kosovo. Under the guise of peacekeeping, Moscow and Beijing will try to ensure Kosovo never gains independence from Serb rule, a precedent that would embolden and encourage their own long-oppressed Muslim colonial subjects. War and peace often make strange bedfellows. But NATO did not need to invite such violators of rights to join its councils over Kosovo. NATO troops massed on Serbia's borders before the bombing campaign would have ended this war before it began, saving Serbia and Kosovo from devastation, and the need to beg Russia and China for help. By failing to deploy sufficient military force - and being seen as ready to use it - NATO has created a quagmire it will long regret. Seeking the aid of big oppressors to curb a small oppressor makes a mockery of NATO's humanitarian mission. Russia, and to a lesser degree, China are the big winners of this botched war, and at no cost to themselves. NATO and Serbia have achieved merely Pyrrhic victories. They have made a desert, and call it peace. The Kosovar Albanians have lost everything. Copyright: Eric Margolis, 1999 ====================================== Kosova Task Force, USA 730 W. Lake St., Suite 156 Chicago, IL 60661, USA Phone: 312-829-0087 Fax: 312-829-0089 Email: Kosova at justiceforall.org Internet: http://www.justiceforall.org ====================================== To get random signatures put text files into a folder called ?Random Signatures? into your Preferences folder. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list send a message to majordomo at alb-net.com In the body of the message include: UNSUBSCRIBE KCC-NEWS From mentor at alb-net.com Tue Jun 22 14:41:34 1999 From: mentor at alb-net.com (Mentor Cana) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 14:41:34 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [kcc-news] News: Mass Graves Found All Over Kosovo Message-ID: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ! READ & DISTRIBUTE FURTHER ! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Kosova Crisis Center (KCC) News Network: http://www.alb-net.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- Kosovapress http://www.kosovapress.com/ Kosova Information Center http://www.kosova.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- -------> Want to HELP the people of Kosova?? <-------- http://www.alb-net.com/kosovahelp/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Mass Graves Found All Over Kosovo By Ellen Knickmeyer Associated Press Writer Tuesday, June 22, 1999; 2:02 p.m. EDT IZBICA, Yugoslavia (AP) -- Turn down the wrong road in Kosovo looking for a mass grave of 35 ethnic Albanians, and the men there say, no, that's the next village -- but we'll show where we buried seven of our fathers and uncles together. Ask someone for directions to a field holding the corpses of 142 people who were executed and he says, after that, if you want, I'll show you a grave holding six members of a single family. Mass graves are everywhere in Kosovo: more than outsiders can track down in their first days back in the province; enough to keep war crimes prosecutors busy for years, if they choose. Apparently fearing just such prosecution, Serb soldiers, paramilitary, police and civilians cremated many of their ethnic Albanian victims, or returned to exhume corpses for burning or reburial in single graves, survivors say. But while the 2 1/2-month war was time enough for killing untold thousands, it wasn't enough time for cleaning up afterward. The signs of slaughter abound: -- A Kosovo Liberation Army guerrilla with a bandana tied over his nose pulls on a rope snaking from the ground, lifting out the head of one of 10 people buried there. The cord that strangled the victims is still around the neck. -- Outside Djakovica, an Italian soldier points his foot at a human ribcage in a gravel pit that villagers say holds the bodies of 86 people massacred in the southwestern city. ``A boy,'' the soldier guesses. -- A woman's skull rests among the charred bones of 26 people who were shot and then had their house burned around them in the village of Cara Luka, 22 miles southwest of the capital, Pristina. Hair intact, head tilted back, her mouth is wide open. ``As if she's still screaming,'' people studying the scene tell each other. In some cases, as at Cara Luka, residents are waiting for investigators from the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, to come before they properly bury the dead. FBI investigators are to aid U.N. war-crimes prosecutors in examining the sites, NATO says. At least one investigator with the war crimes tribunal is touring mass graves by helicopter, flying into one site for a quick initial survey and pictures, then flying on to the next one. On the ground, villagers are scrupulous in telling the stories of the massacres, even -- or especially -- if traces of the killing are few. They tally the dead, providing estimates on the number of bodies buried hastily under the mounds of earth. ``The world will know about these,'' said Sadik Xhemajli, a KLA officer in the village of Izbica near the northwest city of Mitrovica. Xhemajli has painstakingly written, and laboriously reads, an account of Serb killings of 142 people at his village from March 28 to May 10. The dead include 119 people executed at once, and an 88-year-old woman and a mentally ill, paralyzed man shot because they were unable to walk to the Serb-guarded convoy that was to deport them to Albania, the ledger says. In all, seven of the victims were women. Two were children. Ninety-eight were men older than 50, up to the age of 102, Xhemajli recites. Villagers buried the bodies in a field. Serbs came back from June 1 to June 3 with a backhoe, digging up the corpses and carting them off in a truck -- villagers suspect for burning at a factory in Mitrovica. Spy cameras flying overhead caught the sight, and the Pentagon cited it June 9 as a sign of ongoing Serb atrocities in Kosovo. Serbs took away the bodies ``just to lose the evidence,'' Xhemajli said. ``To escape The Hague.'' Xhemajli, at a village a long, bumpy ride down a mud road, somehow has gotten word to authorities of the killings. He awaits The Hague. ? Copyright 1999 The Associated Press --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list send a message to majordomo at alb-net.com In the body of the message include: UNSUBSCRIBE KCC-NEWS From kosova at justiceforall.org Tue Jun 22 19:02:54 1999 From: kosova at justiceforall.org (Kosova Task Force, USA) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 17:02:54 -0600 Subject: [kcc-news] KosovaTaskForce: Serbs must release Kosovars In-Reply-To: <003c01bebcea$05e649e0$e06556d1@Ahmed> Message-ID: <199906222157.OAA15045@newshub1-work.home.com> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ! READ & DISTRIBUTE FURTHER ! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Kosova Crisis Center (KCC) News Network: http://www.alb-net.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- Kosovapress http://www.kosovapress.com/ Kosova Information Center http://www.kosova.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- -------> Want to HELP the people of Kosova?? <-------- http://www.alb-net.com/kosovahelp/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Kosova Task Force, USA Action Alert 6.22.1999 DALLAS KOSOVAR YOUTH SEEKS RELEASE OF IMPRISONED ACTIVIST MOTHER Nick Brovina of Richardson, TX worries that his mother will not survive the torture and lack of medical attention she has suffered at the hands of the Serb army. The treatment of humanitarian activist Dr. Flori Brovina is being protested by the national office of Amnesty International, the Red Cross, and Pen International (an international writer's organization). Dr. Flori Brovina was arrested in Kosova two months ago by Serb troops, was held in prison there and tortured for an extended period. When the peace talks began, she was transferred to a prison in the Serbian town of Pozharezc. Dr. Brovina is partially paralyzed and suffers from increasingly poor health as a result of her treatment. Without medical care it is feared that she will not survive. Dr. Brovina's case has received intensive coverage in the Serb and Albanian media, where rumors of a death sentence are circulated. "My mother is being held because she is a witness to countless incidents of brutality who will not be afraid to speak the truth to the media and courts of justice," says her son Nick Brovina. "We are requesting fair treatment for her according to the rules of the Geneva convention. She needs medicine and access to a physician, and to be able to communicate with her family." Dr. Flori Brovina from Pristina, an author of 4 books of poetry and a pediatrician, was president of the non-political National Women's Organization of League. She is deeply respected as one of the leading humanitarians in Kosova. Her group provided humanitarian assistance to women and children during the recent 15 year period when most Kosovars were removed from their jobs, and families lived on the charity of Albanians living abroad. When thousands of women and children were internally displaced by the military actions that began in March of 1998, she set up a Rehabilitation Center that provided emergency assistance, blankets, and food to the destitute. She also established a humanitarian Nazmi Gaffuri, a medical service for internal refugees supported by Oxfam, International and Doctors of the World provided assistance to the latter organization. During the recent invasion by Serbian troops and forced evacuation of much of the civilian population, each day Dr. Brovina led teams of women into the forests where people were living in hiding. They also canvassed the villages near Pristina, offering treatment to the wounded and traumatized. There is no doubt that her efforts saved countless lives and gave hope to others. For further information, please contact: Anne Marie Weiss-Armush Coordinator, Dallas Kosova Refugee Committee aweiss at airmail.net 972-458-7007 ACTION REQUESTED: Call your policy makers to tell them that there is no peace without justice for the Kosovar Albanians TALKING POINTS ? There have been many Kosovars arrested/detained by the Serbians as they withdraw from Kosova. This action is unacceptable, and the Serbians cannot be allowed to mistreat these innocent people. ? Dr. Brovina, and all Kosovars being held captive, should be treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention. ? War crimes must be documented. ? War criminals must be arrested and prosecuted. President Bill Clinton ph: 202-456-1111 e-mail: president at whitehouse.gov Secretary of State Madeleine Albright ph:202-647-6575 e-mail: secretary at state.gov Senate Foreign Relations Committee Senator Jesse Helms ph: 202-224-4651 e-mail: jesse_helms at helms.senate.gov ==================================== Kosova Task Force, USA 730 W. Lake St., Suite 156 Chicago, IL 60661, USA Phone: 312-829-0087 Fax: 312-829-0089 Email: Kosova at justiceforall.org Internet: http://www.justiceforall.org ==================================== --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list send a message to majordomo at alb-net.com In the body of the message include: UNSUBSCRIBE KCC-NEWS