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NewsPro Archive
March 2000
Germany deports 'murderers' back home to Kosovo
The Independent
By Christian Jennings in Pristina
31 March 2000
Germany was sharply criticised by the United Nations refugee agency yesterday for "dumping" murderers and other criminals on Kosovo as part of a drive to repatriate 170,000 refugees to their devastated homeland.
Captain Wolfgang Wagner, of the German border police, based in Pristina, said two Albanian Airlines flights arrived from Germany on Wednesday with 160 deportees aboard. "Of this number, 50 had criminal backgrounds," he said. "They were all fingerprinted on arrival and then released. The whole criminal code was well represented on these flights."
Officials are particularly worried about the prospect of thousands of hardened criminals being added to Kosovo's explosive mix.
Some Albanians who fled the province in the past decade have been linked to organised crime syndicates operating across Europe. Kosovo Albanian mafias are believed to be active in the heroin trade, weapons smuggling and prostitution rackets.
German public opinion has been outraged by crimes committed by refugees and others from Kosovo and other Balkan provinces, but the country has long been the most generous in Western Europe in giving a safe haven to those fleeing civil war and economic privation. Germany has repeatedly demanded that its EU partners agree to a formal system of "burden-sharing", with quotas of asylum-seekers allocated to each country. But these entreaties have fallen largely on deaf ears, with the principal opposition to the Germans' plan coming from Britain.
Germany accepted by far the largest number of the exodus of refugees during the Bosnian conflict.
In Pristina yesterday, Peter Kessler, spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said: "We're concerned at the deportation of these criminals without adequate police and judicial structures in place. We're also concerned ... when people are collected in the dead of night like this and we're concerned about the absorption capacity of Kosovo."
Germany says all convicted criminals from Kosovo willbe sent home as soon asthey have served their sentences. But it does not rule out the possibility that convicts might find their jail terms shortened, ostensibly for good behaviour, and flown back to Pristina.
Capt Wagner said some 300 convicts had arrived since last month, with 500 deportees without criminal records. Wednesday's returnees had been arrested in Germany between 2am and 8am that morning, flown to Kosovo, and then taken straight from the airport to the addresses of any available relatives in the province.
International organisations trying to keep the peace in Kosovo are perturbed. "These are exactly what this province doesn't need at the moment," said one European Nato official. "There's no workable justice system, no proper judges, a huge crime rate, and now they're dumping murderers on us." But Germany says it is not her problem. "Kosovo is not a German protectorate," said an Interior Ministry spokesman in Berlin. "We take the deportees back to Pristina. The rest is up to the local authorities."
These agencies are likely to be swamped because of inadequate information from Germany.
"We have no access even to the German criminal database," said First Sergeant Bernard Lux, of the the German border police in Pristina. "So we can't tell exactly what they have done."
The policy to repatriate Albanian refugees to Kosovo was agreed by European governments at a conference in the Finnish town of Taampere last October. Expelling large numbers of Kosovo Albanians from Austria, Italy, the Netherlands and Germany, and an estimated 100,000 from Switzerland, was deemed a necessary measure as part of a crackdown on organised crime and a means of returning life in Kosovo to normal.
More Troops to Kosovo
U.S. Sending 125 Extra Reconnaissance Troops to Troubled Serb Province; Tanks, Artillery to Macedonia
W A S H I N G T O N, March 30 —The United States said today it was sending extra reconnaissance troops to Kosovo and tanks to Macedonia after rising tensions following the activity of ethnic Albanian guerrillas in southern Serbia.
Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said 125 special U.S. reconnaissance troops were being sent from Germany to help patrol the border between Kosovo and the Presevo valley in Serbia, where NATO commanders fear a possible resurgence of fighting between Albanians and Serbs.
He also said 14 tanks and six artillery pieces were being sent to a U.S. armored company in Skopje, Macedonia, partly to serve as a deterrent along the border with Serbia.
The reconnaissance troops will be added to a U.S. peacekeeping contingent of about 5,900 troops now in Kosovo, all assigned to the American sector of that troubled southern Serbian province.
Bacon said the order to transfer the troops and heavy armor was signed by Defense Secretary William Cohen on Wednesday night.
Serbia spring sowing completed on 200,000 ha
BELGRADE, March 30 (Reuters) - Spring sowing in Serbia has been completed on some 200,000 hectares of a total planned area of around 2.3 million ha, despite some unstable weather spells, the state news agency reported on Thursday.
Tanjug quoted Serbian Agriculture Minister Jovan Babovic as saying that around 188,000 tonnes of nitrogen fertiliser have been secured for wheat fertilising which is in progress.
Sugar beet, planned on 70,000 ha, has been sown on some 25,000 ha so far, while contracts with producers have been secured for 57,000 ha.
Babovic said 86 percent of the planned 200,000 ha under sunflower have already been agreed.
Producers have signed contracts for 186,000 ha of soybeans, showing higher interest in the crop, Babovic said, adding it was initially planned on 110,000 ha.
The government has delivered 18.5 million litres of diesel fuel for agricultural works so far, or 65 percent of total needs, Babovic said.
Renewal and reconstruction of Azotara of Pancevo and Zorka of Sabac facilities will ensure that all domestic plants resume production of mineral fertilisers this year, he said.
Yugoslavia plans to produce some 700,000 tonnes of mineral fertilisers in 2000, of which 445,000 tonnes for spring sowing.
The goal is to employ all installed capacities in mineral fertiliser plants in the coming period, which amount to 1.32 million tonnes per year, Babovic said.
Domestic needs for mineral fertiliser are 900,000 tonnes while remaining quantities would be for export, he added.
House Averts Showdown on Kosovo
By ALAN FRAM, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - Averting a showdown with President Clinton, the House refused today to require him to withdraw U.S. peacekeepers from Kosovo unless European countries deliver more of the aid they have promised for the Yugoslav province.
By a 219-200 vote, lawmakers rejected a bipartisan effort to use the threat of withdrawal to pressure the Europeans to deliver millions of dollars more for economic, humanitarian and policing assistance. Clinton would have had to begin withdrawing troops in June.
The vote came a year after the 78-day air war against Yugoslavia began, during which the U.S. flew about three-fourths of the bombing missions. There are 37,000 NATO-led peacekeepers in Kosovo, including 5,300 Americans.
``The least they can do after we flew all those sorties ... is to simply keep their word'' and contribute more of what they promised, said Rep. John Kasich, R-Ohio.
Opponents said the provision would have ended up giving Europeans the power to make decisions on U.S. troop deployments - and would have been rejected anyway by Clinton.
Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott said Kosovo is a ``permanent dilemma'' for U.S. policy-makers. Speaking at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Talbott said the administration is seeking ``the right mixture of priorities and values.''
If the United States came out flatly for independence, that could destroy what has been accomplished in the province, which remains part of Yugoslavia, he said. And the administration could lose the support it has among European allies.
Yet, Talbott said, if the United States appeared to be against independence and for putting Kosovo back in Yugoslavia, ``we would be wrong.''
Bombing of Serbia last year forced Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw Serbian forces and special police from Kosovo, which is dominated by ethnic Albanians.
The proposal to threaten withdrawal was offered to a wide-ranging, $13 billion measure containing $2.1 billion for the costs of U.S. troops in Kosovo.
Had the restriction become law, the $2.1 billion would have been cut in half on June 2 if Clinton had not certified that the European contributions had been delivered. The remaining money could have only been used to withdraw the troops.
The bill also includes $1.7 billion to help Colombia's hard-pressed government battle drug traffickers and the leftist rebels who protect them. In several votes Wednesday, the House refused to cut those funds.
As the House worked on the spending bill, which would provide extra funds for this year, the Senate Budget Committee approved a $1.83 trillion budget for 2001 on a party-line 12-10 vote.
That Republican-written measure resembles a budget the House approved last week for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. It would cut taxes by at least $150 billion through 2005 and hold spending for many domestic programs next year to $290 billion, or 2.6 percent more than this year.
The Senate is expected to vote on the budget next week, and congressional leaders hope for final approval of a compromise version of the measure by mid-April. The fiscal plan does not need Clinton's signature and sets overall tax and spending targets, leaving details for later legislation.
House supporters of the Colombia aid package see it as a major step toward curbing drug supplies in the United States. U.S. officials say 90 percent of the cocaine and 65 percent of the heroin used in the United States comes from Colombian-grown coca.
On Wednesday, the House rejected, 239-186, an effort by Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., to delay, and perhaps eventually kill, $522 million of the Colombia aid. The roll call came after House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., who rarely joins floor debate, took to the well of the chamber to ask colleagues for the full amount of money.
Hastert said the aid ``is about our children, and whether we want our children to grow up in a society free from the scourge of drugs.''
Opponents said the package would risk involving the United States in what has been a long-running, bloody civil war that could continue for years. They also said U.S. resources should be directed more toward preventing drug use at home.
Clinton had requested $1.3 billion for Colombia, on top of $300 million already in the pipeline, but supported the House proposal.
The money is for training and equipping Colombian troops and police - including 63 helicopters - along with intelligence operations, incentives for farmers to grow other crops, and assisting neighbors Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia.
As expected, the House added $4 billion to the overall bill for the Pentagon, including funds for upgrading helicopters and AWACS radar warning planes, equipment repair, and military housing and health care.
NATO Moves Into Kosovo Boundary Zone
By DANICA KIRKA, Associated Press Writer
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (AP) - NATO peacekeepers crossed into the no man's land just outside Kosovo's boundary for the first time Wednesday - a significant move aimed at checking reports of Yugoslav military activity in the 31/2-mile zone.
About two dozen peacekeepers moved into the no man's land about 12 miles east of Pristina to search for evidence of a tank and an armored personnel sighted Saturday. The fact-finding mission, led by British Brig. Richard Shirreff, came after NATO's governing body approved the move.
Merely stepping into the zone is a significant step for NATO, which has been patrolling Kosovo's administrative boundary with Serbia proper with ever-increasing intensity in recent weeks. Western governments are worried that cross-border tensions will suck peacekeepers into another conflict.
Both Kosovo and the region right across the border are technically part of Serbia, the larger member of the Yugoslav federation led by Slobodan Milosevic. But Kosovo, which has a heavily ethnic Albanian population, has been under international control since last year's conflict between ethnic Albanians and Milosevic's Serb forces led to the NATO bombing.
The presence of Yugoslav military forces in the safety zone would break the agreement that ended NATO's 78-day bombing campaign in Yugoslavia last year.
There have been consistent reports of incursions into the zone where Kosovo and Serbia proper meet. Usually it was unclear whether those operating in the area were local police, which are permitted.
Earlier sightings of activity, however, did not involve tanks. The presence of even one would mark an escalation of tensions in an already hot region.
With a substantial contingent of peacekeepers looking on Wednesday, Shirreff's group first traveled to a Serbian police checkpoint, where they met a Serb delegation that accompanied them. The peacekeepers took photographs and looked for indications that undergrowth had been disturbed by tank tracks.
Belgrade War Crimes Tribunal Accuses the West
By Philippa Fletcher
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (Reuters) - A Russian-led tribunal sought to turn the tables on the West in Belgrade Wednesday by accusing NATO leaders of war crimes during last year's air strikes.
The tribunal, made up mainly of Communist sympathizers from the former East bloc, convened in the Yugoslav capital for a hearing on the 78-day bombing, launched over Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's repression of Kosovo's Albanians.
Its list of accused included President Clinton, NATO Secretary General Javier Solana and leaders of Britain, France and Germany.
Carla del Ponte, chief prosecutor of the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague, was asked to observe.
``We had no replies,'' Mikhail Kuznetsov, a Russian lawyer who presided over the tribunal, told the audience in the Sava congress center in Belgrade.
Opponents of Milosevic in Serbia said the composition and nature of the hearing, at which there was no cross-examination and the verdict was a foregone conclusion, only served to help NATO dismiss awkward questions about the bombing.
``Anyone who was here during the air strikes knows civilians were killed,'' Sonia Drobac an editor at the Glas Javnosti daily, told independent Belgrade radio B292. ``But this is a farce.''
Tribunal Lists Charges
After two days of debates, including witness testimony and speeches from around a dozen jurists, mainly from Russia but also from Bulgaria, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Poland and Germany, the tribunal came out with its verdict Wednesday afternoon.
It said the accused had launched the bombing without declaring war and with no legal basis, and alleged it had deliberately targeted civilians, including children.
Listing a string of United Nations conventions it said NATO had violated, it demanded a criminal investigation of the accused and added that its conclusions would be sent to the United Nations and the Hague tribunal.
It also called for the disbanding of NATO, the dismissal of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and asked the countries involved to put their military and political leaders on trial.
The jurists were not optimistic their demands would be met.
``Our tribunal may be small but it represents heartfelt support for the people of Yugoslavia,'' Kuznetsov said.
NATO insisted throughout the air strikes that it was aiming only at military targets and took all possible precautions to avoid civilian casualties.
When the Washington-based Human Rights Watch said last month that 500 civilians were killed by the air strikes, NATO said its report constituted legitimate criticism but that its actions could not be compared with Serb violence in the province.
Some of the Belgrade tribunal's charges echo those leveled by the West against Milosevic, who was indicted by the Hague tribunal last May for alleged war crimes in Kosovo along with four close aides.
EU, OSCE warn of destabilisation of Montenegro
BRUSSELS, March 29 (Reuters) - European officials rallied round Montenegro on Wednesday, pledging to help Serbia's pro-Western sister republic withstand the destabilising influence of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
The European Union's External Relations Commissioner, Chris Patten, said at the start of a two-day meeting of international donors for the Balkans "there are quite clearly attempts by Milosevic to destabilise Montenegro."
He said the EU was set on providing "adequate assistance" to Montenegro, despite the fact it is barred from receiving funds from international financial organisations such as the World Bank because it is part of Yugoslavia.
His concerns were echoed by Austrian Foreign Minister Benita Ferrero- Waldner, speaking in her capacity as current chairman of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
"...We think we have to do something, because there's really great tension and if we don't do something there quickly, there could be a greater conflict," she told a news conference.
"I had my special representative go to Montenegro a good week ago. I can only say we see many signs that social unrest is being reinforced and that of course a civil war could break out."
Montenegro's leader Milo Djukanovic said in a newspaper interview on Wednesday he believed Milosevic was sowing the seeds of a new conflict in the tiny Adriatic republic.
Djukanovic said relations with Yugoslavia were deteriorating and accused Milosevic of recruiting a special army battalion to be used to overthrow his government.
Montenegro was one of the attendees at the donors conference, at which the international community is seeking to encourage countries in the volatile Balkans region to work to overcome ethnic tensions through the promise of cash.
Opening the two-day meeting Patten reiterated the West's message that Serbia -- while included in the so-called Stability Pact -- will not benefit from substantial aid while Milosevic is in power.
"While Milosevic is still in power the serious money stays in the vault," Patten said, describing the Serb leader as "a brooding presence, locking Yugoslavia into a bleak winter."
"Montenegro has taken a different path to Serbia. We are determined to give the Montenegrin people our support," he said.
EU leaders, meeting in Lisbon last week, said substantial aid was urgently needed for Montenegro "to ensure the survival of democratic government and to avoid another serious crisis in the region."
Belgrade steps up war of words with Montenegro
BELGRADE, March 29 (Reuters) - A bitter war of words between hard-line Serbia and its pro-Western sister republic Montenegro escalated on Wednesday when Belgrade urged Serbian-based Montenegrans to stand up to "separatists and traitors."
Milovan Coguric, a secretary at the federal defence ministry and a member of Montenegro's pro-Belgrade Serbian People's Party (SNP) opposed to the tiny republic's reformist, pro-Western leaderhip, also said charges against the Yugoslav army constituted "a hostile act."
He was speaking a day after Montegrin President Milo Djukanovic reiterated accusations that special Yugoslav army units were planning to overthrow him.
"Coguric called on Montenegrins living in Serbia to freely and decisively stand up against separatists and traitors of all colours," Yugoslav state news agency Tanjug said.
"Despite attempts at separatism and treachery by Montengran leaders, most Montenegrins have a right frame of mind," it quoted Coguric as saying.
Hundreds of thousands of native Montenegrins living in Serbia are thought to be loyal to Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, himself of Montenegrin origin.
Many people living in northern Montenegro, bordering Serbia, also have strong pro-Serb sympathies, stoked by the feeling they have suffered from economic reforms introduced by Djukanovic.
DJUKANOVIC SAYS BELGRADE PLOTTING HIS OUSTER
In an interview with the New York Times, Djukanovic accused Belgrade of building up a joint army-police battalion in Montenegro to be used as a strike force to overthrow his government.
"They are in fact a paramilitary unit," Djukanovic was quoted as saying, adding that it numbered around 1,000 people.
"They are devoted to Mr Milosevic. Over 50 percent of them have criminal records. They are not being retained to protect the country but to overthrow the government."
Coguric described Djukanovic's allegations as "a hostile act to brand an army police unit a paramilitary formation."
"That unit, which our best sons are serving in, is a bulwark against separatists and traitors in Montenegro and their mentors in the West who would like to realise their aims," he told Tanjug.
Djukanovic told a news conference on Tuesday that Milosevic, who is supposed to step down next year as Yugoslav president, could extend his rule by either seizing power in Montenegro or becoming president of a Serbia shorn of its southern neighbour.
Predrag Bulatovic, deputy head of the SNP, said it was Djukanovic who was trying to stir trouble by boosting his police force to the point where they were a virtual army.
Djukanovic has been at odds with Milosevic since 1997, when the Montenegran leader started pushing for economic and political reforms which were welcomed by the West, but strongly opposed by an increasingly isolated Belgrade.
Djukanovic has threatened to hold a referendum on independence from Serbia if Milosevic does not respond to his demands for reform of the federation. However he has failed to find backing for the move in the West, which fears another Balkan war.
UNHCR says Montenegro not next Balkan flashpoint
TIRANA, March 29 (Reuters) - The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said on Wednesday she did not see Montenegro, Serbia's reluctant partner in the Yugoslav federation, becoming the next Balkan flashpoint.
Sadako Ogata, ending a two-week Balkan tour, said the UNHCR was building up emergency facilities in the restive region, but that she was cautiously optimistic the tense situation would not escalate like Kosovo last year.
Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic said on Tuesday he believed Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was sowing the seeds of a new conflict in the Yugoslav republic, which is more pro-Western than Serbia.
"There are certain tensions in Montenegro, but I do not foresee the same scale of crisis happening there," Ogata told reporters.
"Population movement is very low and...is a very good indicator to foresee crises," Ogata added. There had been no refugee flow since Montenegro last month re-opened its border with Albania after three years.
Ogata thanked impoverished Albania for bearing the brunt of last year's refugee crisis when it took in 465,000 Kosovo refugees despite its own economic difficulties.
Balkan Donors Meet, Eyeing Quick-Start Aid
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - International donors began meeting on Wednesday to pledge aid to the Balkans on condition countries in the region work to overcome their ethnic tensions.
The Regional Funding Conference organized by the World Bank and European Commission is the first since the Stability Pact for southeast Europe was set up after NATO's campaign to evict Serb forces from Kosovo last year and comes five year's after the end of Bosnia-Herzegovina's civil war.
Opening the two-day meeting, European foreign affairs commissioner Chris Patten repeated the West's message that Serbia -- while included in the Pact -- will not benefit from substantial aid while President Slobodan Milosevic is in power.
"While Milosevic is still in power the serious money stays in the vault," Patten said, describing the Serb leader as "a brooding presence, locking Yugoslavia into a bleak winter."
Montenegro's leader Milo Djukanovic said on Tuesday he believed Milosevic was sowing the seeds of a new conflict in the Yugoslav province, which is more pro-Western than Belgrade.
Patten promised Montenegro and Serbia's opposition movement, which was invited to the conference along with representatives of Stability Pact members Albania, Bulgaria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia and Romania, the West's full support.
"Montenegro has taken a different path to Serbia. We are determined to give the Montenegrin people our support," he said.
PLEDGES TO TOTAL 1.8 BLN EUROS
Donors are expected to pledge at the meeting to support a "quick start" program of infrastructure and know-how projects to start by next March.
"We are looking to put together this quick start program, a total of 1.8 billion euros ($1.72 billion)," World Bank President James Wolfensohn told delegates.
Many projects aim to improve cross-border infrastructure, such as rail and road transport and electricity networks and effectively force the countries to work together.
The program consists of 1.1 billion euros of infrastructure projects drawn up by the European Investment Bank and a 290 million euro scheme to help the private sector prepared by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
The balance is made up of support for Stability Pact initiatives in areas like education, media, human rights, justice and home affairs.
Officials said, however, the conference was being asked to find only a fraction of the total, which includes money pledged at a separate donors conference on Kosovo held last year.
The quick start program is also only part of a much bigger plan to support the region over many years.
Patten said on Wednesday that the European Union's contribution alone, including six billion euros already earmarked for EU candidates Bulgaria and Romania, would be 12 billion euros over six years. EU support for the quick start program would be 530 million euros, he said.
Wolfensohn said, however, any amount of aid would not help if the countries themselves did not carry out necessary reforms to legal, financial and governance structures.
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Milosevic has ways to extend rule - Djukanovic
PODGORICA, Yugoslavia, March 28 (Reuters) - The pro-Western president of Montenegro said on Tuesday Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic had two ways to extend his rule -- by seizing power in Montenegro or becoming president of an independent Serbia.
Milo Djukanovic, elected leader of the smaller of Yugoslavia's two remaining republics in 1997, said concern was increasing in Serbia over the future of Milosevic, who is cornered by a U.N. indictment for war crimes in Kosovo.
"As time passes, nervousness in Belgrade is rising because of growing political uncertainty over the future of the regime, that is of its main actor," Djukanovic told a news conference in the Montenegrin capital Podgorica.
"That regime...made us accustomed to bloody springs. We in Montenegro have no illusions that he would want Monetenegro to be spared," he said.
Milosevic's term as president of the two-republic Yugoslav Federation is due to end in the middle of next year. That post can only be held once and he has already served the constitutional maxiumum of two terms as president of Serbia.
If he loses power, however, he faces possible trial and imprisonment by the U.N. tribunal in The Hague.
Djukanovic, a former Milosevic ally who is now his most powerful foe, said Milosevic's only hope of extending his rule was to change the Yugoslav or Serb constitution.
DJUKANOVIC FEARS "COUP"
He said the first option would involve overthrowing him, something he has accused Milosevic of plotting ever since pro-Milosevic demonstrators in Montenegro tried to block his inauguration in early 1998.
"The Yugoslav president has two ways of remaining the head of the country: to overthrow the legal and legitimate authorities in Montenegro and bring in people loyal to him, after which he would change the Yugoslav constitution and ensure another mandate for himself, or to go back to the post of Serbian president, this time of an independent Serbia," he said.
Djukanovic, who has proposed reforms of the federation and threatened a referendum on independence if Milosevic does not respond, said the second option could be positive.
"In that case, Montenegro -- by developing democracy and a market economy and being integrated in developed European structures -- would be ready to develop the closest and best relations with Serbia," he said.
Western leaders fear Milosevic might try to destabilise Montenegro if he fears losing power. They have warned the Serb strongman not to interfere, while telling Djukanovic not to proceed with the referendum in order not to provoke him.
Djukanovic, who has moved towards autonomy step-by-step to Belgrade's dismay, said he had discussed regional stability with Western officials, but that there had been no concrete talk so far of deploying international observers in the republic.
French colonel's arrest linked to Kouchner row
The Times
FROM CHARLES BREMNER IN PARIS
FEUDING among French military and political leaders over their country's role in Kosovo was behind the jailing of a gendarme officer on charges of leaking military documents to the press, his lawyer claimed yesterday.
William Bourdon, the lawyer for Colonel Jean-Michel Méchain, was denouncing a judge's decision on Monday to hold him in the notorious Santé prison in central Paris on charges that he passed on confidential documents.
Published last month, these revealed such deep military distaste for Bernard Kouchner, the French United Nations administrator of Kosovo, that they have ignited a row about his leadership - and about the French military's behaviour in the province.
Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, is expected to offer Britain's support to the troubled UN mission when Dr Kouchner arrives for a one-day visit to London tomorrow.
The squabble has shed light on the hostility among senior officers in the French Kfor contingent towards the flamboyant politician and former humanitarian activist who has been the effective international governor of the Serbian province since last July. It has also embarrassed the Government by reinforcing the already widespread impression that the French Army, under fire for its handling of the conflict at Mitrovica, has pro-Serbian sympathies.
Dr Kouchner, a national celebrity before serving as Health Minister in the Socialist Government of the early 1990s, has been criticised by American and senior UN officials for his unorthodox ways and for what some see as his failure to impose his authority fast enough in the Serbian province. However, his standing has improved of late with the UN and Nato governments which accept that he has made the best of limited resources and what amounts to a "mission impossible".
A senior Western diplomat said yesterday: "He's being credited with making the best of a bad job." The New York Times last week attacked the international community for failing to hand over promised resources to help the French UN administrator. "Dr Kouchner began the year with insufficient funds for everything from doctors, teachers and local police to garbage collectors, water and gas workers and road repair crews. For now he is maintaining minimal service," it said.
The leaked military memos suggest that nowhere has the dynamic 60-year-old doctor as many adversaries as in his homeland. "Quite a few people would like to see him screw up in Kosovo," said one left-wing politician, commenting on Dr Kouchner's emotional, abrasive style.
The decision not to grant bail to Colonel Méchain for the relatively minor offence was a monstrous breach of normal practice, M Bourdon said. The colonel, who is denying the charges, was "hostage to a complicated settling of accounts, specifically a political-military score-settling", he said.
The murky case of the colonel became public after a street brawl in Paris last week in which the 46-year-old officer, newly returned from service with the French contingent with the Kfor, was involved in a fight with members of a surveillance team from the military security service.
The Defence Ministry suspects that the colonel, a legal specialist, leaked the documents as revenge for its refusal to let him take up an offer from Dr Kouchner to be his adviser on organised crime.
Balkan talks seen unlocking one bln euros aid
BRUSSELS, March 28 (Reuters) - International donors are expected to offer over one billion euros ($970 million) in aid to the Balkans which they hope will cement regional cooperation and make the Kosovo conflict the last of its kind.
Donors, who begin a two-day meeting in Brussels on Wednesday, will free up cash for projects stretching from Montenegro to Romania and repeat their message that Serbia could also benefit if it ditches President Slobodan Milosevic.
Many projects aim to improve cross-border infrastructure, such as rail and road transport and electricity networks.
"All are designed to help countries cooperate together and to integrate them in the European mainstream," Catherine Day, a senior European Commmission official, told a news conference.
The Regional Funding Conference organised by the World Bank and Commission is the first since the Stability Pact for southeast Europe was set up in the aftermath of NATO's campaign to evict Serb forces from Kosovo last year.
The heart of the conference is a narrow list of "quick start" projects that need funding to get off the ground, but bigger political questions over the region's future are likely to dominate declarations at the meeting.
"Declining living standards, refugees, border disputes and security concerns in the region are all conspiring to create a cauldron of instability and potential conflict in Europe," the World Bank said in a preparatory report.
The report argued that successful reform may only be possible if the countries covered by the Stability Pact -- Albania, Bulgaria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Yugoslavia, Macedonia and Romania -- were offered "a credible and predictable path to integration with European and global structures, particularly the European Union."
Walter Cernoia, European Investment Bank Director for Central and Eastern Europe, said the EIB would present a list of infrastructure projects for the coming years.
QUICK START PROJECTS
These will include quick start projects -- those which can be started within a year -- totalling 1.1 billion euros; near-term projects to start within 24 months worth 2.2 billion euros; and a further list of medium-term initiatives on which no figure had been put, Cernoia told Reuters.
The EIB said previously that longer-term rebuilding in the Balkans could cost around nine billion euros.
In a letter last week to donors, mainly the world's wealthier developed countries, the Commission and World Bank said they still needed to mobilise 400 million euros of the 1.1 billion euros quick-start programme.
The conference would also be asked to find 104 million euros for a similar 290 million euro quick-start programme for the private sector prepared by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).
The EBRD said on Monday it hoped donors would also provide 128 million euros for projects to be implemented by 2002.
Stability Pact coordinator Bodo Hombach will also seek support for programmes in areas like education, media, human rights, justice and home affairs.
Support for some projects has already started.
EU candidates Bulgaria and Romania on Monday signed an agreement for a new 190 million euro bridge over the Danube which is expected to get an initial five million euro boost from the conference.
More sensitively, the donors main website (www.seerecon.org) lists a planned road and port development in Montenegro, which is still formally part of Yugoslavia but which is being rewarded by the West for not bowing to Belgrade.
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The New York Times: Montenegrin Says Belgrade Is Using Its Army to Oust Him
By CARLOTTA GALL
ODGORICA, Montenegro, March 27 -- The leader of Montenegro today accused the president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, of using the national army to try to force him from power.
The Montenegran president, Milo Djukanovic, said in an interview that relations with Yugoslavia were deteriorating. He accused Mr. Milosevic of recruiting a special army battalion that would be used to overthrow Montenegro's government.
Montenegro is the smaller of the two republics remaining in Yugoslavia, which is dominated by the other republic, Serbia.
Mr. Djukanovic's government has been cautiously drawing away from the Yugoslav government in Belgrade and is now feeling the pressure as Mr. Milosevic moves to counter that drift.
Under a tightened trade and economic blockade imposed by Mr. Milosevic's government, Montenegro, a small mountainous territory of only 650,000 people, is facing increased economic difficulties and shortages, officials there say.
It is also feeling the weight of the military. During the weekend, under pressure from Belgrade, Mr. Djukanovic said, his government agreed to allow the Yugoslav Army to join Montenegro's police at border posts with the separatist Serbian province of Kosovo and with Albania.
Prompted by the West, Mr. Djukanovic is trying quietly to draw his republic out of the international isolation that it suffers as part of Yugoslavia while avoiding open confrontation. But it has no security or economic guarantees from the West.
Mr. Djukanovic broke with Belgrade two years ago and has pursued democratic reforms and openness to the West. His refusal to denounce the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia and his willingness to provide refuge to Serbian opposition figures defined his break with Mr. Milosevic permanently.
At home he faces opposition from the pro-Milosevic Socialist People's Party. The parties will test their strength in June in local elections in two regions of Montenegro, including the capital.
Mr. Djukanovic described the agreement over border controls as a "gesture of good will." But it was greeted with skepticism by Montenegro's leading daily, Vijesti, in an article that outlined how little say Mr. Djukanovic has in how the military conducts itself in his republic.
Mr. Djukanovic said he opposed the creation of a special military police unit within the Second Army, which is based in Podgorica and numbers about 1,000 men, Montenegrins led by Serbs loyal to Mr. Milosevic.
"They are in fact a paramilitary unit and their party association is unanimous," Mr. Djukanovic said. "They are devoted to Mr. Milosevic. Over 50 per cent of them have criminal records. They are not being retained to protect the country, but to overthrow the government."
Mr. Milosevic is using the army in Montenegro to reassert control over the republic, he said, as he did during the NATO attacks last year when the Yugoslav Army tried to seal Montenegro's borders and impose controls equivalent to martial law.
"We resisted that, and we managed," Mr. Djukanovic said. "Now it is happening a second time, but we are not in a state of war. This is peacetime. The situation is rather tense, but we are not taking any risks to lay ourselves open to Milosevic, because if we did, we would give him an alibi for a fifth war in the Balkans."
Mr. Djukanovic's political opponents dismiss his accusations. "He is attacking the army and provoking it," said Pedrag Bulatovic of the Socialist People's Party.
Jabbing his finger scathingly at a newspaper carrying Mr. Djukanovic's photo, Mr. Bulatovic contended that the Montenegrin president had built up his own police force to confront the army. "This man has 20,000 police, 10,000 more than he should have," Mr. Bulatovic said. "The danger is that this guy uses these people to create a conflict."
Much of the agitation in Montenegro may be just talk, but many little incidents are nudging the republic toward confrontation. A disagreement between the police and the military in December over the police's plan to build a helicopter hangar at the Podgorica airport led the army to close the airport, forcing the police to abandon the plan.
In November the Montenegrin government made the German mark legal tender, saying it wanted to protect its population against inflation as the Yugoslav currency plunged. Belgrade reacted by stopping transfers of money and stepping up enforcement of its trade blockade of Montenegro.
The blockade is already hurting two of Montenegro's key manufacturers, Mr. Djukanovic said, and is causing shortages of food and medicine.
In the past Montenegro lived largely off its tourist industry thanks to the extraordinary beauty of its Adriatic coastline, but that income has plummeted during 10 years of war in the Balkans.
Opinion polls indicate mixed feelings about independence. In one recent poll, 45 per cent of those surveyed favored independence, 37 per cent were opposed and the rest undecided.
Mr. Djukanovic said that he would keep trying to forge a workable relationship with Serbia, but that he might have to lead his country to independence if Mr. Milosevic stayed in power.
For the moment, the republic's government has postponed a referendum on the issue indefinitely and is ducking around the provocative swipes from Belgrade.
A recent report by the International Crisis Group, a independent research institute, advocates stronger action from the West to provide more financial support to Montenegro, more evident political support and a commitment from NATO that it will meet any attempt to overthrow the government in Montenegro with a forceful military response.
Montenegro has received some economic support from the United States, but the republic's prime minister, Filip Vujanovic, said he recognized that security guarantees from NATO or the West were not forthcoming and that Montenegro would have to defend itself. Hence the large police force, he said.
Montenegro sees joint checkpoint as positive move
PODGORICA, Yugoslavia, March 27 (Reuters) - An anti- smuggling agreement between Montenegro and the mainly Serbian Yugoslav army is an important step towards easing tensions between the country's two republics, both sides said on Monday.
The army and police announced on Saturday that they would set up a joint checkpoint to prevent smuggling and "terrorism" spilling over from Serbia's Kosovo province.
The agreement contrasted sharply with rhetoric from both sides in recent weeks which has stoked Western fears a new Yugoslav conflict could be in the making.
Montenegro, fed up with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's rule of the federation dominated by Serbia, has gradually implemented greater autonomy since pro-Western President Milo Djukanovic was elected in 1997.
This has raised tensions with Belgrade and the overwhelmingly Serb federal army, with each side accusing the other of trying to foment a conflict.
One of the parties in Djukanovic's ruling coalition said the customs agreement was a blow to Yugoslav Prime Minister Momir Bulatovic, a Milosevic protege who leads Montenegro's opposition.
Djukanovic has accused Bulatovic of trying to destabilise Montenegro ever since he took over the presidency.
"This is obviously a slap in the face to Momir Bulatovic and proof that he does not control the army," Podgorica daily Vijesti quoted People's Party leader Dragan Soc as saying.
"This agreement is also a proof that the Montenegrin government is ready to tone down tensions, work towards stability and establish normal ties between the army and civilian institutions," Soc said.
The main opposition Socialist People's Party (SNP) also welcomed the deal but claimed the credit for itself.
"SNP has been telling the Montenegrins of the intentions of the regime to embark on the path of conflict. We believe that our invitation to take the road of understanding, dialogue and compromise...have contributed to this move and the public meeting between the police and the army," SNP vice-president Predrag Bulatovic told Vijesti.
The checkpoint on the road from the eastern Montenegrin town of Rozaje over mountains to the western Kosovo city of Pec, was set up on Saturday.
A Montenegrin Interior Ministry official was quoted as saying another one would be established on the road leading to Bozaj, a recently opened border crossing between Montenegro and Albania.
The Yugoslav army is one of the last federal institutions still functioning in Montenegro, which stepped up its autonomy moves after Belgrade's conflict with NATO over Kosovo last year.
Montenegro seeks 79 mln euros from Brussels donors
BELGRADE, March 27 (Reuters) - A senior Montenegrin delegation will travel to Brussels for a donors' meeting later this week in a bid to win 79 million euros of project financing, the Montenegrin government said on Monday.
Montenegro has previously only attended donors' meetings as an observer.
"We expect to obtain financial assistance for a series of projects worth 79 million euros. These include 15 million euros worth of quick-start projects the implementation of which would begin within 12 months," Ivan Saveljic, advisor to the Montenegrin foreign minister, told Reuters by telephone.
The coastal republic, a member of the Yugoslav federation, has won some relief from international sanctions in place against Belgrade for years over its role in regional conflicts.
Increasingly looking to the West for its future development, it has been pursuing autonomy from Belgrade since its voters elected reformist President Milo Djukanovic in 1997.
Since the Kosovo conflict, pro-Western Montenegro has taken a series of steps to distance itself from leftist Serbia and obtained self-rule in monetary and foreign policy.
The most immediate programmes included the reconstruction of a jetty in the Port of Bar and urgent reconstruction works on the road between Bar and Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro.
The remaining 64 million euros would include financing of some major programmes, including a regional water supply line.
"Some of the projects have already been included in a list of projects to be offered by the European Investment Bank to donors in Brussels. The EIB agreed to finance some works at a European Union meeting in Lisbon last week. It has so far picked some projects, but funds have yet to be raised," Saveljic said.
Foreign Minister Branko Lukovac and Finance Minister Goran Ivanisevic will represent Montenegro, together with the chief of Montenegrin mission in Brussels Slavica Milacic. Saveljic, in charge of contacts with the Stability Pact, will also attend.
Lukovac told the Podgorica daily Pobjeda the republic would also submit programmes aimed at developing democracy, human and ethnic minority rights and measures to boost regional security as well as 20 million euros for small self-employment projects.
Gendarme accused of leaking K-For secrets
The Independent
By John Lichfield
28 March 2000
A bizarre series of events – including a Parisian street brawl between two kinds of police officer – ended yesterday with the accusation that a senior gendarmerie officer had leaked internal documents from the French peace-keeping force in Kosovo.
The officer, Colonel Jean-Michel Méchain, who appeared before an investigating magistrate yesterday, was involved in a fight in the 20th arrondissement of Paris last Tuesday in which he was kneed in the genitals. It emerged that his alleged assailants were seven men and one woman belonging to the military security agency, the DPSD. The DPSD agents were arrested by ordinary police.
Col Méchain had been recalled from a senior post with the French contingent of K-For, the Kosovo peace-keeping force, the week before last. He now faces a formal investigation into accusations that he leaked military memorandums which criticised his country's civilian administrator in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner.
The memos, reprinted in the national press, accused Mr Kouchner of being virulently anti-Serb and obsessed with military security. The French Defence Minister, Alain Richard, has promised a full investigation of the scandal, including the disputed events last Tuesday. Col Méchain says he was walking down the street in civilian clothes when he realised he was being followed by a group of eight people. He approached them to complain and was kneed in the genitals.
The local police crime squad arrested the "assailants" before discovering they were DPSD agents. The gendarmerie is part of the army.
Col Méchain asked to be released from his military vow of press silence and was, himself, arrested on Friday night.
The Independent : After 1,000 years, terror forces Serbs out of their Kosovo village
By Andrew Buncombe in Velika Hoca
History sits heavily in the Serb village of Velika Hoca. In this ancient community close to Prizren in south-west Kosovo, there are 13 churches – stone-built, beautiful and full of priceless treasures. The oldest, the 12th century St Nicholas's, is said to date back to before the Serb Orthodox Church was granted autonomy from Greece.
The village itself, set deep at the bottom of a sloping valley, is thought to be at least 1,000 years old. As with many things here, no one really knows for certain. But history may be about to change for ever. The Serbs of Velika Hoca fear that after a millennium during which their ancestors occupied this village and farmed the land, they will be the generation that has to abandon it. At least 600 of the original 1,400 villagers have left within the last 12 months. They are unlikely to return.
"This is the most modern prison in the world. There is nowhere else like this ," said Vidosav Cukaric, 52, principal at the village primary school. "We cannot even go 500 metres outside of our village. Nato protects us, but only in the village. We have freedom but we cannot do anything." They are trapped. Surrounded by Dutch troops, it is virtually impossible for them to leave the village without serious risk of being attacked by Albanians. Even the 40 or so children who have passed primary school age can only go to secondary school in nearby Rahovec in an armed Kfor convoy. A truck picks them up and then returns them each day.
Apart from the teachers in the village school, no one has a wage-paying job. There is just one shop and the number of fields in which the farmers feel safe to work is not large. They survive on humanitarian aid.
So instead the people of Velika Hoca – one of the largest 100 per cent Serb communities left in Kosovo – spend their days idling away the time, sitting around in the village square, feeling increasingly resentful and bitter. Unlike the high-profile Serb community of Mitrovica, the Serbs of Velika Hoca receive no support from Belgrade.
"We feel terrible," said Mr Cukaric, sitting in the school staff room while the children thundered up and down in the playground outside. "We feel as though our own government has forgotten us. We feel we have been abandoned by everyone – by the Serb government, by Nato. The local people do not care for politics, all they care about is survival."
Mr Cukaric and the other teachers believe they may last another year in such circumstances before they will be forced to leave – the majority to Serbia, some to Montenegro. Unable to sell their homes in Velika Hoca and with only the most basic personal possessions, they would find themselves on the bottom rung of Serb society.
"People are leaving from day to day," he said. "When there are only a little number of people left and we feel unsafe we will be collected from here. If the international community is unable to solve the problems and create a multi-ethnic Kosovo in a year we have no hope to stay here."
What is happening in Velika Hoca has been happening across Kosovo since the United Nations Mission In Kosovo took charge last summer. Official estimates by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the Office for Security and Co-operation in Europe suggest that two-thirds of the 300,000 Serbs that were living in Kosovo this time last year have left. The inability to offer a safe environment for minority groups is seen as Nato's biggest failure in the province.
The anger of Kosovo Albanians that has been directed towards the villagers of Velika Hoca (two young men were killed while wood-cutting on the edge of the village last October) may in part be based on the belief that these Serbs were responsible for the massacres in a number of nearby Albanian villages. The villagers here deny that, insisting they only fought to "protect the village".
Either way the reprisals continue. Father Milenko, the village's Orthodox priest, who still holds services in eight of its 13 churches, said that a fortnight ago a church in a village in which he used to celebrate the Slavic liturgy was destroyed. "When man is having problems, the church is having problems," he said.
For all this, the thickly-bearded Fr Milenko, who has worked in the village for almost 15 years, is one of the loudest voices in favour of staying. "I have never thought about it and I would like to see a man who can predict the future. I am here and I will be here," he said.
"Humanitarian groups should be doing their jobs. I think it is their job to help people, not to help people to leave. Today another family left – a grandmother and two children. I don't think they will ever come back. Their family has been here for 500 years."
There are those who agree with the priest. Sasa Goci, 26, used to work as a mechanic in Velika Hoca and the surrounding villages, importing parts from Serbia. Now, with no possibility of a job, he spends his time helping Fr Milenko and proudly showing the village's occasional visitors around its churches.
At St Nicholas's, up a track on the edge of the village, Mr Goci opened the heavy wooden door with a vast hand-made metal key that he said was the original.
Inside it was cool and silent and there were ancient fading icons hanging from the smooth stone walls. "I will never leave the village," said Mr Goci. "I cannot understand why anyone would."
The Sunday Times : Story of hope as Kosovo war girl is found
Jon Swain
FOR nearly a year Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat, the wealthiest woman in Argentina, has had a wonderful obsession. It was to find a 13-year-old ethnic Albanian girl from a Kosovan village who had been maimed in the Balkan war and to give her the best medical treatment in the world.
De Fortabat, who is involved in philanthropic causes, had wept after reading in Buenos Aires a reprint of my Sunday Times story about the terrible injury inflicted on Hyre Jasharaj by a Serbian shelling attack.
A lump of shrapnel had hit Hyre's right arm and nearly severed it above the elbow as she sheltered with her parents in a garden in the village of Vrelle, northwest Kosovo, a year ago this week. She and her parents had fled there after Serbian attackers had burnt down their house.
Blood was pouring from Hyre's wound and her distraught father, Haxhi Jasharaj, carried her for more than a mile under Serbian shellfire to a makeshift hospital behind the lines.
There Dr Naim Loxha, a general practitioner, tried to save the arm, despite having had no experience in surgery.
In the end he had no choice but to amputate above the elbow, using a pair of pliers. He was compelled to perform the operation without anaesthetic because none was available. "It was terrible to operate on the child like that," Loxha told me when I arrived in Vrelle a few days later after trekking over the mountains from Montenegro. "It is something I never want to see again. But she was very brave."
Throughout the two-hour operation, Jasharaj stroked his daughter's cheek. She screamed softly. There was nothing he could do. Only when he had buried her severed arm outside in the garden and stamped down the earth did he permit himself to break down and weep.
"When I read this story I was moved to tears," De Fortabat said last week. "It was something terribly touching and sad and I could not forget it."
The story prompted her to donate $500,000 (£313,000) to the World Food Programme. It was the biggest private donation the agency had received and it was used to feed Kosovan refugees.
De Fortabat also appealed to Argentinians for more donations. "The story had a big repercussion at the time," she said. "Everybody read it and, when I made the appeal, people asked me if it was for the little girl.
"It is a wonderful, moving story of the fight of a man for his daughter and how well the doctors did to save her in the middle of such a disaster."
De Fortabat asked the World Food Programme to try to find Hyre, but in the chaos created by hundreds of thousands of refugees on the move from Kosovo, the organisation was unable to do so.
A few days after she was operated on, Hyre had nearly died. Her mother and two brothers carried her on a stretcher through the snow over the 7,000ft mountains to Montenegro in a desperate race to save her life. The wound had become infected after Loxha had tried to protect it with a piece of cloth, which he had crudely stitched round the stump with a needle and thread.
In a hospital in Montenegro, Hyre underwent more surgery, including a skin graft. The surgeon who performed the operation remembered her as being "remarkably brave". When the war was over, she returned with her family to Kosovo.
De Fortabat hoped that the girl would be traced, but she never was, even though the fighting was over and a huge international aid operation was stabilising Kosovo. She and her family moved back to their home village of Djurakovac, where they started rebuilding their lives, unaware that anyone - least of all a billionairess on another continent - was looking for them.
De Fortabat never gave up hope, however. Last summer, at the age of 72, she fractured her hip and it looked as if she would never walk again after an operation to repair it went wrong. But she found the strength to carry on by thinking all the while of what Hyre had suffered.
"I thought I would be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. But I thought about the little girl. I thought, 'You have lived a long life, a fantastic life. What is it for you to be in a wheelchair? You must accept accidents in life and take them philosophically.' And then I began to walk again," she said.
Her search for Hyre ended two weeks ago when news of De Fortabat's quest reached The Sunday Times in London. In a matter of days I had found Hyre in Kosovo.
I pushed open the door of the two-room flat where she lived with her parents, brothers and sisters. Her father jumped to his feet in astonishment. The last time I had seen him was in Vrelle almost a year ago when he was ashen-faced and in pain. He had been lightly wounded by the same shrapnel that had hit his daughter and was sick with worry about her. Now, at once, he recognised my face and embraced me like a lost friend.
"I never thought you would come back to find us," he said. "It was very hard seeing my child suffer like that and to bury her arm, but it was war and I know that there are many worse cases of suffering in Kosovo than hers."
When I explained that I had come because Hyre's story had been so moving that it had touched a chord across the world in Argentina and a woman wanted to pay for her to go abroad for the best medical treatment and a prosthesis, he broke down in tears.
He said that various humanitarian agencies had talked last year of providing her with a prosthesis, but nothing had come of it and they had almost abandoned hope of ever seeing her fitted with an artificial limb. Then, in an emotional but otherwise solemn moment, he announced that he would like to organise a traditional ceremony involving his relatives and the elders of the village to make me his brother. I said it would be an enormous honour.
Arrangements are now being made by the World Food Programme to fulfil De Fortabat's wishes. Once visas have come through, a process expected to take another month, Hyre, accompanied by her mother and father, both teachers, will be flown first to Switzerland, where they will meet their benefactor, and then to Bologna, in Italy, to the world-famous Rizzoli Institute where she will be given a prosthesis for her right arm.
All the costs will be met by De Fortabat, who controls one of Latin America's largest business empires and whose wealth was estimated by Forbes magazine in 1997 at $1.3 billion.
Although Hyre has learnt to write with her left hand and has been going to school in Djurakovac, her life has been blighted by her injury.
In Italy, thanks to De Fortabat, Hyre's amputation will be stabilised at last and she will be fitted with an artificial limb and trained to use it. For the first time in a very long while, she said a few words last week: "I feel just wonderful."
The New York Times : French Colonel Faces Charges of Passing Kosovo Documents
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
PARIS, March 26 -- A French colonel suspected of leaking sensitive classified documents from the Kosovo peacekeeping force to the news media has been arrested, relatives said today.
Col. Jean-Michel Mechain, 46, was arrested on Friday by the French domestic intelligence service, his relatives said. He was the senior legal adviser to the French forces in Kosovo until five weeks ago.
According to press reports, he was recalled to France from Kosovo under suspicion of leaking sensitive documents that implied there was a concern among French officers that the chief of Kosovo's United Nations civilian administration, Bernard Kouchner, was biased against Serbs.
The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia last year was carried out after Serbian forces moved into Kosovo to put down a separatist rebellion by Albanians, who make up most of the province's population.
According to newspaper reports on Friday, Colonel Mechain and a Kosovo Albanian identified as his girlfriend were suspected of having leaked confidential military documents to the French press. The woman was reportedly a translator for the French commanding officer in Kosovo.
The newspapers said that Mr. Kouchner, who is French, had asked Colonel Mechain to take a job in his office, but the Ministry of Defense had refused "on security grounds."
Documents recently leaked to the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné and the news magazine Le Point suggested that many French Army officers in Kosovo were exasperated at what they saw as Mr. Kouchner's bias against Serbs.
Colonel Mechain was slightly injured on Thursday in a fight in Paris with members of the French military security service. The colonel, not in uniform, was walking alone through Paris when he spotted eight people, including a woman, following him. He approached one of them, and there was a scuffle. He was treated at a military hospital. He lodged an accusation of assault with civilian police officers.
Civilian detectives later arrested two men who were identified as officers of the military security service. The other members of the group were identified as military security operatives.
Under French law, military security is responsible "for the security and the protection of sensitive personnel, information, equipment and bases."
On Thursday, Defense Minister Alain Richard confirmed that the service had been following Colonel Mechain and that there had "been some kind of a fight, but it was difficult to say who attacked whom" and that "justice would take its course."
Mr. Richard said that Colonel Mechain had been recalled from Kosovo because "there were reasons for him not to remain there."
Yugo army, Montenegro police set joint checkpoint
BELGRADE, March 25 (Reuters) - The Yugoslav army and Montenegro police agreed on Saturday to set up a joint checkpoint between the coastal republic and Kosovo in a bid to stop smuggling and terrorism spilling over from the province.
The move came despite Montenegro's campaign for greater republican autonomy which has raised tensions with Serbia, the dominant republic in federal Yugoslavia, and with the army which is dominated by Serbs.
"The joint checkpoint has been set up to prevent possible arms and drug smuggling and uncontrolled crossing of people and possibly terrorists from Kosovo into Montenegro," the army and the police said in a joint statement issued in Podgorica.
The checkpoint was established on the road that runs from the eastern Montenegrin town of Rozaje over mountains into the western Kosovo city of Pec.
The statement said the police and army agreed on concrete cooperation with local governments "towards securing peace and safety of the people of Montenegro and Yugoslavia."
The checkpoint was part of a previous cooperation agreement between Montenegro's police and the Yugoslav army signed in December, settling a dispute over control of a military section of the airport near Podgorica, capital of the republic.
Police in Serbia tightly control its administrative border with Kosovo, which has been plagued by smuggling and gangsterism since a U.N. administration, backed by NATO peacekeepers but underfunded and understaffed, took over the province last year.
NATO waged a 78-day air war against Yugoslavia in 1999, forcing Belgrade to withdraw from Kosovo Serbian security forces which had been fighting the province's rebellious ethnic Albanian majority.
Montenegro has been pursuing autonomy from Belgrade since its voters elected reformist President Milo Djukanovic in 1997.
Since the Kosovo conflict, pro-Western Montenegro has taken a series of steps to distance itself from leftist Serbia.
It has obtained self-rule in monetary and foreign policy. Last month, the Podgorica government opened two border crossings with Albania to boost cooperation with neighbours in line with demands posed under the Stability Pact for southeastern Europe.
The pact, a European Union effort at restoring stability in the Balkans, calls for closer cooperation among the countries in the region.
The Yugoslav army is the last federal institution still functioning in Montenegro.
Sanctions to remain until Milosevic goes, EU says
The Guardian
Ian Black in Lisbon
Saturday March 25, 2000
Sanctions against the Serbian regime will remain in force as long as President Slobodan Milosevic is in power, the European Union vowed yesterday.
In their toughest message yet to Belgrade, EU leaders, meeting in Lisbon on the first anniversary of the start of last year's war in Kosovo, made clear that there could be no place for an unreformed Serbia in a democratic Europe.
Pledging to support the country's opposition, the EU appealed to the "Serbian people to take their future into their own hands and reclaim their place in the family of democratic nations".
But Kosovo's continuing problems were dramatically underlined when the Nato secretary general, Lord Robertson, and the alliance's supreme commander in Europe, General Wesley Clark, abandoned a visit to the tense, ethnically divided town of Mitrovice.
In Lisbon, EU leaders gave Javier Solana, the union's foreign policy supremo, and Chris Patten, the British commissioner for external relations, the mandate to jointly oversee Balkan policy, in an attempt to end its poor policy coordination and aid delivery.
Earlier this week, the two reported that although resources and goodwill were plentiful, there was a lack of cohesion and excessive bureaucracy hampering efforts to help Kosovo and the front-line states around it.
Diplomats freely admitted that the EU's performance in the Balkans has left it open to damaging criticism from the US, which largely paid for last year's Nato air campaign and now expects the alliance's European partners to do more to help build the peace.
Tony Blair said as the summit ended: "In my view, the problems of Kosovo today are real. The international community needs to have more vigour and focus and, since this is in our own backyard, Europe has to take the lead."
He said the appointments of Mr Solana and Mr Patten "will allow us to get a better grip on that situation".
Mr Patten, who controls billions of euros worth of EU aid to the Balkans, said later: "All that is preventing Serbia from joining in our programmes in south-eastern Europe is Milosevic."
The summit also agreed to open EU markets to products from Balkan countries, partially in response to recent criticism from Washington.
An early test of the renewed commitment will come next week when the Balkan Stability Pact meets in Brussels, with renewed US pressure to deliver cash support for quick-start and medium-term infrastructure projects.
In Pristina, meanwhile, officers in the Nato-led K-For peacekeeping force said the schedule for Gen Clark and Lord Robertson's visit had been changed at the last minute for "operational reasons".
Violence in Mitrovice has been one of the biggest thorns in K-For's side since it moved into Kosovo last June. Any visit to Mitrovice, especially the Serb-dominated north of the city, would have raised major security concerns for two of the men most publicly associated with the bombing campaign.
Earlier this week, EU foreign ministers endorsed plans to lift a ban on air links with Yugoslavia but tighten financial sanctions to increase pressure on President Milosevic.
A visa ban on pro-Milosevic officials, business partners and cronies will be extended and their financial assets abroad will be frozen.
Robin Cook, Britain's foreign secretary, defended the record so far. "We have made more progress in getting refugees returned than we have yet managed to do in Bosnia," he said.
EU leaders also pledged to provide direct financial aid to neighbouring Montenegro "to ensure the survival of democratic government" in the place which is widely considered the most likely to see the next stage in the wars of Yugoslav seccession.
•The US state department has urged its citizens living or travelling abroad to exercise appropriate caution and avoid large crowds or gatherings because of the possibility of pro-Serbian demonstrations in the run-up to first anniversary of the war in Kosovo.
EU leaders agree to rewrite their script for Kosovo
The Independent
By Stephen Castle in Lisbon and Andrew Buncombe in Pristina
25 March 2000
Europe yesterday agreed to revamp its faltering efforts to revitalise the Balkans, giving a new role to its top foreign policy supremos and offering economic enticements to countries in the region to embrace Western reforms.
"We are going to open a new page," said Javier Solana, Europe's high representative for foreign policy, who, with Chris Patten, Europe's external affairs commissioner, was given the task of increasing Europe's impact.
The promises came as the Nato secretary general, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, admitted the international community was not doing enough in Kosovo to secure a lasting peace in which ethnic minorities were safe. "I am more than ever convinced that Nato's action was not only the right thing to do but that it was the only thing to do," he said. "I also know that the job is only half done. The conflict may be over but the peace is still to be won."
Lord Robertson and General Wesley Clark, Nato's supreme commander in Europe, cancelled a planned trip to Mitrovica yesterday, the divided city in the north of Kosovo which is the province's most serious flashpoint.
Lord Robertson denied suggestions that the trip had been cancelled because of security concerns. He called on all sides to forget the years of bitterness and take the "chance to break with the past". But he admitted that Serb leaders from Kosovo had declined to meet him.
On the first anniversary of the start of Nato's bombing campaign, European leaders meeting in Lisbon moved to stave off mounting criticism of the West's efforts in the Balkans by admitting the need to bolster their efforts. Tony Blair said the new measures "will allow us to get a better grip on that situation" which is in Europe's "back yard".
EU leaders said it was up to Europe to play "the central role" in supporting Kosovo, and agreed on the need for working "in a much more co-ordinated, coherent fashion".
Yesterday's action followed a controversial report by Mr Solana and Mr Patten – both of whom have recently visited South-eastern Europe – which was highly critical of Europe's efforts. Their joint document concluded that the West is having "considerable difficulties" in Kosovo, that ethnic violence is "at high levels" and that the UN's administration is dogged by "insufficient personnel and resources".
Now Mr Solana and Mr Patten have been asked to come up with a new and concrete set of proposals including measures to increase trade concessions offered to all Balkan countries except Serbia, and to step up assistance to Montenegro.
However heads of government sidestepped a proposal by the president of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, to grant another 5.5bn euros (£3.5bn) in aid in the 2001-2006 period.
With President Slobodan Milosevic's grip over Yugoslavia seen as the fundamental obstacle to progress in the Balkans, Europe repeated its plea to the Serbian people to "take their future into their own hands", to cast off their current leadership and "join the European family".
Brussels plans to step up economic assistance to Serbia's neighbours in the hope that President Milosevic will be ringed by pro-Western countries with rising living standards.
In Mitrovica yesterday, Nato peace-keepers tacked up signs to mark out a neutral zone on the northern, Serb-controlled side of the main bridge in the heart of the city.
The Nato-declared "confidence zone" now reaches from the southern, ethnic Albanian side of the main bridge across the Ibar river, to the opposite, Serb-controlled, bank. Serbs in northern Mitrovica are meant to allow free passage and communication between areas held by Serbs and ethnic Albanians.
French feud boils over
The Times
FROM CHARLES BREMNER IN PARIS
BAD blood between the French military and Bernard Kouchner, the French United Nations administrator of Kosovo, has emerged to embarrass the Government here after a bizarre street brawl in Paris between a gendarmerie colonel and officers of the military security.
The Monday night fist-fight, involving Colonel Jean-Michel Méchain and some of the eight-strong surveillance team, exposed a feud between the gendarmerie and France's army contingent in the Kfor Kosovo UN force. The gendarmerie, a military organisation and France's provincial police force, is supervising civilian security and criminal investigation in the French zone of Kfor.
Colonel Méchain, 46, was being followed by the Defence Ministry's security force because he was suspected, with a 27-year-old French-Albanian translator, of leaking military documents critical of M Kouchner. In one published memorandum to General Louis Le Mière, the French contingent commander, army officers complained that the UN chief displayed an anti-Serbian bias. The French military have long been held to have pro-Serbian sympathies.
The colonel, acting as legal adviser to the Kfor command, had made no secret of his anger against the military after superior officers refused a request by M Kouchner in February to second him to his staff as special adviser for the fight against organised crime. He was brought back to Paris that month. Like other gendarmerie members, Colonel Méchain had been critical of the legally questionable methods used by the military when arresting suspected KosovoAlbanian criminals.
The fight broke out in the 20th arrondissement of Paris after the colonel accompanied the woman translator to her home and challenged the surveillance team, which had been on his tail all day. Police arrested two military agents.
Alain Richard, the Defence Minister, said that the case was being investigated but the military had had good reasons to refuse Colonel Méchain's posting. "He showed a certain agitation against his own service," he said. Colonel Méchain said yesterday that he was seeking permission to publicise his version of the affair.
Britain had detailed plan for ground war
The Times
BY MICHAEL EVANS, DEFENCE EDITOR
Nato's five options
1. NORTHERN OPTION
The most politically sensitive and least realistic plan was to advance from Hungary into Serbia, with maximum air support, manoeuvring round Belgrade to reach Kosovo. But this would have meant taking on the whole Yugoslav National Army (JNA) and would have required up to 600,000 troops.
2. AIRBORNE OPTION
High on the list of priorities was to get thousands of airborne troops into the heart of Kosovo by helicopter and transport aircraft, many of them possibly by parachute, landing well beyond the ambush territory of the Kacanik Pass. Their role would have been to harrass the Serb forces, backed by Apache attack helicopters, and hold ground until the main armour arrived.
3. ALBANIAN OPTION
Using the main Albanian ports to offload troops and equipment, the Americans planned to build a highway into Kosovo, beside the existing minor roads, in a huge engineering project; then advance directly into the province.
4. KACANIK PASS OPTION
Despite the formidable challenge of advancing through the mountain pass, often through narrow tunnels, much of the armour would have had to take this direct route from Macedonia into Kosovo. But the advance would have been preceded by extensive special forces operations to secure the tunnels and bridges.
5. PRESEVO VALLEY OPTION
Copying the strategy used in the 1991 Gulf War campaign, the intention was to advance into Serbia to the east from Macedonia and then carry out a left hook into Kosovo. The Serbs were aware of this possibility and began deploying troops east of Kosovo.
BRITAIN'S planning for a ground war against President Milosevic's forces in Kosovo was so far advanced that the Ministry of Defence had even worked out how many artillery shells would be required, according to military sources.
Underlining the pressures the British military were under to find resources for the potential battle, it was estimated that the division earmarked for battle in Kosovo needed to take the entire war reserve of 155mm artillery shells. The precise number of shells is classified, but it is clear that the planning of the Kosovo ground campaign forced the MoD to revise its strategy on ammunition stocks. War reserves were reduced under the previous Government's defence cuts.
One of the most alarming lessons for Nato from the Kosovo campaign, which began a year ago yesterday, was that most alliance members were not prepared or able to contemplate a high-intensity war with Yugoslavia. Senior MoD sources said yesterday that towards the end of Nato's 78-day bombing campaign, some alliance members were beginning "to come round" to the idea that a ground war might be necessary. But the Kosovo terrain and the prospect of high casualties remained key obstacles in the way of any consensus. British planners knew that a ground war against an army of about 30,000 Serb troops in defensive positions would lead to significant casualties.
Cabinet Office papers circulated to ministers reflected the fears of a high casualty toll, but Tony Blair supported the British military view that planning for a land campaign had to begin. One senior Army officer said that the ground war would have presented a greater challenge than 100,000 Russian troops faced in ejecting less than 10,000 rebels from Chechnya. The operation, he said, could have led to much higher casualties than the Russians had suffered.
One British source said the French had estimated that there could be 2,000 Nato casualties a day. Operation B Minus, as the campaign plan was codenamed, would have involved up to 175,000 troops, mostly American and British.
Britain told Washington that its maximum contribution was 54,000 troops and about 100 tanks. That would have required calling up the regular reserves and the Territorial Army. The Pentagon was confident that the US Corps of Engineers would be able to build new roads into Kosovo from Albania and the necessary infrastructure in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia to bear the weight of armoured vehicles.
The US also planned to improve port facilities in Albania. "Whenever we expressed doubts about the scale of the improvements needed, the Americans told us not to make mountains out of molehills," one British military source said.
A small team of mostly American officers, under the overall command of General Wesley Clark, the Supreme Allied Commander, came up with five options:
Airborne: sending thousands of troops by helicopter and transport aircraft over the border mountains into the heart of Kosovo.
Presevo Valley: advancing from Macedonia into Serbia to the east of Kosovo and then swinging in a "left hook" to attack the Serb troops.
Kacanik Pass: driving armour through the mountain pass from Macedonia.
Albanian: advancing from Albania into Kosovo along a route constructed by American engineers.
Northern: assembling an army in Hungary and advancing into Serbia from the north.
The aim would have been to get all the troops into theatre within 90 days and to defeat the Serbs by the end of October, using a combination of the listed options.
Robertson bypasses dangerous Mitrovica
The Times
FROM ANTHONY LOYD IN PRISTINA
A VISIT to Kosovo by Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, the Nato General Secretary, and General Wesley Clark, the Supreme Allied Commander, ended in humiliation yesterday. The planned trip to Mitrovica, to mark the first anniversary of Nato's air war against Yugoslavia, was cancelled at the last minute due to unspecified "operational reasons".
While spokesmen hurried to emphasise that the cancellation was simply down to travel delays, there was intense speculation that a deteriorating security situation led to the last-minute change in schedule.
Reacting to the allegations with characteristic indignation, Lord Robertson failed, however, to give any good reason for abandoning Mitrovica from the itinerary. "There were logistical problems in getting here," he said in Pristina, where he was taken to visit a local school. "There is no significance in not going to Mitrovica."
Privately though, there was considerable acrimony between the officialdom of Nato headquarters in Brussels and that of the Kosovo Protection Force (Kfor), as each blamed the other for the PR debacle.
"Brussels says that we suggested the Mitrovica visit be cancelled," one senior Kfor commander said. "Yet the sudden change in schedule came from them not us, and to say it originated in logistical problems just won't wash."
Mitrovica, in northern Kosovo, has been a frequent flashpoint between the divided Albanian and Serb populations this year and has become a constant thorn in Nato's credibility. The town marks the frontier of Slobodan Milosevic's continuing influence in the province, with contiguous Serb-held access routes linking it with Serbia proper.
Fighting in the city in February led to more than 1,700 people fleeing their homes. Nine months after they arrived in the area the French have managed to do little more than bolster a series of barricades keeping the communities apart.
Just three days ago, the planned trial of a Serb accused of war crimes was cancelled because Kfor was unwilling and unable to provide security for the courthouse, which lies in a Serb-held zone, to function.
The violence has seen the city become a focus of division in the international community and a scene of constant dispute between UNMIK police officers and commanders from different national Kfor contingents over how best to pacify and unify the divided populace.
The French have fared particulary badly in terms of publicity. They have been accused of operating in a method overly sympathetic to the Serbs and devolved from the control of Kfor headquarters.
Yet only two days ago Kfor had been trumpeting the plans of Lord Robertson and General Clark to visit three Albanian apartment blocks surrounded by Serbs in the northern half of the city as a symbol of control and confidence.
"There's no reason why they should not go into the northern part," Colonel Philip Anido, a Kfor spokeman, said. "The Serbs live there in large numbers, but they are not in control of the north.
"General Clark and Kfor are not going to be intimidated by people who have agendas going against the wishes of the international community and the people."
When it came down to it, however, the world's most powerful military alliance singularly failed to make it happen and the gulf between their will and power in the north of the province lay as exposed as ever.
Montenegro leadership stirs trouble-Yugoslav PM
HERCEG NOVI, Yugoslavia, March 24 (Reuters) - Yugoslav Prime Minister Momir Bulatovic accused Montenegro's western-leaning president on Friday of trying to stir fresh trouble in the country that could result in a new NATO intervention.
"Pushed against a wall of his failures and delusions, realising that he would soon be rejected by his present patrons because he proved to be incapable of playing the role given, (Milo) Djukanovic has begun his last and most dangerous game," Bulatovic told a rally in the coastal town of Herceg Novi.
"He is talking about Montenegro being threatened by the Yugoslav Army...In the interest of Montenegro he is preparing a clash between the army and the police," he said.
He claimed that a large number of new police troops were foreign mercenaries and that the police were funded from abroad.
Bulatovic, protege of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and leader of the main opposition party in the tense coastal Yugoslav republic, was addressing a protest in Serb-dominated Herceg Novi, a town of 28,000 people bordering Croatia, to mark the first anniversary of the start of NATO's bombing.
"Djukanovic's patrons from NATO have already said they would intervene militarily should his government be attacked...We will solve our problems alone, within the constitutions of Yugoslavia and Montenegro. Any military intervention will be treated as an aggression," Bulatovic said.
Montengro is the only republic left with Serbia in Yugoslavia.
In a speech in Belgrade earlier in the day, he accused the republic's pro-Western leadership of policies damaging to the people of Montenegro, who are increasingly divided into those who want to stay with Serbia in Yugoslavia and those who do not.
"These policies have not damaged Serbia or Yugoslav state institutions, but caused a total moral, political and economic catastrophe for Montenegro, whose people suffer the most, regardless of their political beliefs," he said.
Djukanovic has threatened to hold a breakaway referendum if Belgrade fails to agree to reform the Yugoslav federation dominated by Serbia and Milosevic.
Bulatovic's appearance in Herceg Novi was part of a campaign for a local ballot due in May, seen as a test of strength between his backers and Djukanovic's government, whose relations are becoming increasingly antagonistic.
Washington Post : Yugoslavia, Milosevic Keep Going After War
By Anne Swardson
BELGRADE, March 23 – Anyone who wants to know why Yugoslavia has not collapsed a year after NATO launched its intensive bombing campaign need only walk down Boulevard of the Revolution here in the capital.
For more than two miles, street vendors peddle underwear, French perfume, sweaters, lipstick, sunglasses, toilet paper, flowers, sneakers, software, diapers, toys and more. The goods are laid out on tables or the hoods of cars that are covered with dingy sheets.
Customers swarm to buy the products, not because they are good, but because they are cheap. And the sellers come not because they can prosper, but because they can survive. One vendor has sold children's socks off a automobile hood for seven years – a far cry from his days as a Serbian literature professor, but a living. "If you work, you can get by," he said.
Yugoslavia, too, is getting by. When the bombing ended June 10 after 78 days, imminent demise was widely predicted in the West: Punished by international economic sanctions, the economy would implode; discredited as a national leader, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic would be forced from power.
Neither of those things has happened. In fact, many say the bombing has changed little and the war was simply a tragic diversion from what has been going on for a decade: the steady deterioration of living standards, basic freedoms and belief in government since the old six-republic Yugoslavia began to break up and Milosevic asserted his power.
"The war was an interruption in something that was a natural social evolution," said Snjezana Milivojevic, a communications professor who recently lost her job at a university because of her anti-government views.
Yugoslavia has been under various economic sanctions for the last eight years, primarily from the United States and Europe, but they have had little impact on everyday life. Despite an oil embargo, for instance, gasoline is not only plentiful but relatively inexpensive at about $1.10 a gallon. Businesses have found ways to obtain the parts and supplies they need. A gray market serves consumers' subsistence needs.
Milosevic, meanwhile, appears little nearer to being dislodged than he was before the bombing. As the opposition has remained weak and divided, he has shored up his power through his control over much of Yugoslavia's military and police forces, communications, finance and infrastructure.
After the war, "there was a tendency to believe that Milosevic was in a desperate situation and heavy pressure would force him out. This was not the case," said a European diplomat.
If anything, people here say, the bombing of Yugoslavia and the West's united stance against Milosevic gave him a renewed hold.
"As long as the Americans attack Milosevic, he can stay in power," said fruit vendor Rode Petkovic, who said he makes more money selling apples at 25 cents a pound than he did as an economist for a major retail company. "The population doesn't like being told whom to be for. If the Americans supported Milosevic, he would be thrown out of power."
On Friday, the anniversary of the day the first bombs fell, tens of thousands of people are expected to converge on Belgrade's central square to cheer what Milosevic today called the nation's "unbeatable" military. Churches will hold services to memorialize the 3,000 Serbian soldiers and civilians killed in the conflict.
Many of the demonstrators will come in on free buses and trains, pushed to attend by their unions or employers. School will be canceled to allow children to attend. Despite the official encouragement, the rally will serve as a reminder that even Milosevic's most ardent opponents were against the bombing.
"A year later, it's obvious the intervention was a mistake. It only strengthened the regime," said Ognjen Pribicevic, a political adviser to opposition leader Vuc Draskovic, head of the Serbian Renewal Movement.
Milosevic, 59, who has rarely been seen in public in the past year, ventured out today to lay a wreath at the Grave of the Unknown Soldier on Mount Avala.
"Everlasting glory to the heroes of the fatherland who died in the defense of the freedom and dignity of the people and the state against the new fascism," Milosevic wrote in the memorial book, according to the state news agency Tanjug.
In recent weeks, Milosevic's government has cracked down on local media, particularly on television and radio stations affiliated with municipal governments opposed to him. Some have had transmission equipment confiscated over nonpayment of fees and taxes, others have been fined for objectionable content. Some here think Milosevic is testing his authority six months ahead of expected elections, others think he is operating from paranoia.
But other than the media crackdown, the public knows little about what Milosevic does. He no longer resides in his palatial official residence, which has been repaired since it was bombed last year, and it is unclear where he lives. Some here call him and his circle of advisers the "black box"; one person who met recently with some members of the group calls them "very tough, very arrogant, frightened."
Still, Milosevic appears determined to stay in power and out of custody. Indicted by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague, confined within his own borders, his country subject to sanctions, he is immune to outside pressure.
"Milosevic is not fighting a political battle, he is fighting for his life, for his sheer survival. No international pressure can change this," said Lila Radonjic, editor in chief of TVNet, an independent producer. "Today, there is no a single threat that can be used against him. They have all been deployed."
No one here can envision what could spark Milosevic's departure, either through public dissatisfaction or political action. The opposition managed this week to agree to hold a large rally April 14, but the three major parties still cannot decide whether to offer a unified slate in the next elections.
Even as they squabble, Milosevic's opponents worry that the longer he remains in power and the more people become accustomed to living on the gray market, the harder it will be remake the nation's institutions and restore a normal economy when Milosevic eventually is gone.
The average wage here has fallen from $300 a month 10 years ago to $80 today. Industrialization has been reversed; the share of agriculture in the economy has doubled. People are losing skills and hope, while the gray market allows those with influence or weapons to grab a stake in the chaos that they will subsequently be reluctant to give up.
"People in the hidden economy are getting stronger, and they know that when the transition comes they will have to go back to work in the factories," said Goran Pitic, head of economic research for the Economics Institute.
In an interview today, federal Information Secretary Goran Matic said Yugoslavia has what it takes to put its economy back together. "I think the economic effects of the bombing can be overcome," he said. "We have resources: energy, food, transport. In the economic sense we are going to overcome all our problems."
For now, the economy continues to drag along. People are devoting more time and energy to survival, but those who wait in line for milk or bread can still buy it. Others can pay on the gray market.
"People are used to suffering. Greater suffering does not necessarily spell greater rebellion," said Ivan Vejvoda, executive director of the George Soros-financed Fund for an Open Society Yugoslavia. "Capacity for endurance is infinite here, and that's not good for political change."
The Guardian :Nato chief rings Kosovo alarm
Richard Norton-Taylor
The future of Kosovo is on a "razor edge between success and failure", a year after the western allies launched their air assault on Yugoslavia to drive Serbian troops from the province, Lord Robertson, Nato's secretary general, warned yesterday.
In a grim assessment of the outcome of Nato's 78-day bombing campaign, in which he compared EU forces to a "paper army", the former British defence secretary said that while much had been achieved, there was still "too much violence, too much revenge".
His intervention reflects the increasing concern in Nato about attacks on Serbs by hardline Albanians, and growing frustration about the failure to establish a semblance of civil order, more than 10 months after K-For peacekeepers entered the province.
He said that on a visit to Kosovo today to mark the first anniversary of the start of the bombing, he would deliver a "blunt message"to the ethnic Albanian majority there: "We did not do what we did last year, risking all those lives, to see it all washed down the Ibar river." The Ibar splits the divided city of Mitrovice.
Nato's bombing campaign cost between £2bn and £3bn, yet only a fraction of this amount is being spent on rebuilding the province. Washington says the US paid for the war and the EU should meet the bill for the peace, but the EU expects to spend just £220m on Kosovo this year.
"The sad reality is that we rise to the crisis in the military context. After that people are not willing to follow it through," Lord Robertson said. There was an "enormous gap" which no one was filling. Paratroopers and Gurkhas and the French foreign legion were directing traffic."
His wake-up call - directed to the UN as well as to Nato's European allies - coincided with a stark warning about Kosovo's future by Javier Solana, Lord Robertson's predecessor and now the EU's security supremo, and Chris Patten, the European commissioner for external relations.
The UN was experiencing "considerable difficulties" in Kosovo, with ethnic violence continuing at "high levels" and the civil administration there deprived of sufficient personnel and resources, they said.
In Belgrade, the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic laid a wreath on a memorial to mark the anniversary of the bombing. His government plans rallies and demonstrations today. However, the opposition leader Zoran Djindjic said: "There is nothing to celebrate; everyone has lost, Serbia most of all."
Faced with Washington's growing impatience at having to carry the military burden of European crises, Lord Robertson also delivered a devastating attack on the state of Europe's defences. "European credibility is on the line," he said.
The problems in getting the EU allies to provide reinforcements sought by Nato commanders, from a continent that had 2m soldiers under arms, highlighted "the scandal of having so many troops and so few of them deployable", as though they were "just a paper army", he said.
"The time for the peace dividend is well and truly over, because there simply isn't any peace," Lord Robertson said. "Kosovo was the fire alarm and it's still ringing." The European allies had survived the Kosovo campaign thanks to US high technology weaponry.
"Defence is not about national prestige or honour, or flags and bands, it is an essential insurance policy for future generations. Either [Nato] goes to the crisis or the crisis comes to us," with the prospect of more refugees, he said
Nato commanders have had to cajole the allies to maintain a K-For strength of 40,000 troops, of which Britain contributes about 3,300 - down from the 10,000-plus it provided at the height of the crisis last summer. Italy supplies 6,000 troops, the largest single contingent.
Lord Robertson reflected US scepticism about the EU's ability to achieve its pledge to field 60,000 troops within 60 days and sustain them for at least a year.
"European leaders put their own credibility very much on the line. The message I have been putting over is: 'I read your lips. Now you must deliver'," he said. He expressed concern in particular about Germany's plans to cut defence spending.
He echoed the views of Nato's military commanders by calling for a "civil rapid reaction force" of armed police under the authority of the UN or the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
In Moscow, the Russian foreign ministry said it was withdrawing its agreement to send police to Kosovo, after repeated failures by the UN to respond to its offer.
The Independent : Nato mission to Kosovo's divided city of bitterness
By Andrew Buncombe in Pristina
Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, Nato's secretary general, and General Wesley Clark, the supreme commander of last year's bombing campaign against Serbia, will tour the divided city of Mitrovica today in a visit that underlines the West's failings in Kosovo.
On the first anniversary of the start of Nato's 78-day bombardment, the two men are due to visit the divided northern city during a three-stop tour of the province. K-For officials said one option being considered was to visit the northern half of Mitrovica, home of the city's Serb population.
Mitrovica remains Kosovo's flashpoint. Always a city of two halves, it is now split in the most abrupt terms with the river dividing the Serb and Kosovo Albanian communities. Bridges across the river, guarded by troops, have been the site of regular confrontations between the two groups such as the clash last month when British troops had to force back Albanian protesters.
Last night a K-For spokesman insisted it was not an issue if the Nato party did not visit the north of the city. "I do not think it is a big deal to them," he said. "They are not trying to make an issue of it. Their visit is more a statement that Kosovo remains very important to the West. Whether they pay a visit to the northern half will depend on the security assessment that is made tomorrow morning."
But whatever K-For may insist, many observers feel that if Lord Robertson and General Clark did not complete their visit it would represent the damning admission that nine months after Nato entered Kosovo there remain no-go areas in the province.
It would also underline what is widely regarded as the West's biggest failing in Kosovo since the "liberation" last summer – providing security for the province's Serb minority. Official figures suggest two-thirds of the estimated 300,000 Serbs who were living in Kosovo this time last year have now left because of fears for their safety, but the real scale of the exodus may be even greater.
"Absolutely one of the biggest failings of the West has been not to allow minority groups to continue to stay in their homes," said Paula Ghedini, spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). The most recent UNHCR report on minorities in Kosovo concluded that the situation for such groups "remains precarious". Ethnic violence, it added, "represents a serious setback to the UN's efforts to promote freedom of movement and to protect minorities".
The divided city of Mitrovica has also divided Nato on how best it should be managed. While some senior K-For figures, including General Klaus Reinhardt, the commander of the international peace-keeping force, might like to see a move to reuniting the communities, others, including the French troops who control the city, appear to keep them apart.
No one doubts Mitrovica's ability to erupt into violence and there is a growing belief that the Serb gangs on the far side of the bridge are sponsored by Belgrade. The border with Serbia proper is just 30 miles away.
The UN is also aware of the particular potential for violence on today's anniversary. An internal memo given out to its staff yesterday and marked "For the widest possible dissemination" said they should be especially security conscious.
Yesterday, in what was interpreted as timely sabre-rattling by Nato, up to 2,000 troops streamed into the province as part of Operation Dynamic Response. K-For said the training exercise involving reserve forces was designed to "demonstrate Nato's resolve to maintaining a secure environment and deter external aggression". It denied any suggestions that it was being held in response to a particular threat.
* The Russian Foreign Minister, Igor Ivanov, said in an article in the Nezavisimaya Gazeta yesterday that Nato's air war had only aggravated the situation in Kosovo. He wrote: "The Nato operation, launched under the invented pretext of protecting Albanians, only aggravated inter-ethnic tensions and most non-Albanians have [now] been purged from there."
Moscow also refused to send police officers to a UN force in Kosovo but said Serb security forces should be allowed back into the province.
Reuters : ATO Chiefs Visit Kosovo to Mark Bombing Anniversary
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (Reuters) - NATO's military and political leaders arrive in Kosovo Friday to mark the passing of one year since the alliance launched the largest military campaign of its history.
U.S. General Wesley Clark and NATO Secretary-General Lord George Robertson fly into Kosovo to fete the success of NATO's intervention to end the Serb repression of Kosovo Albanians and fend off criticism that the mission caused as many security problems as it solved.
Last year's 78-day bombardment of Yugoslavia eventually forced President Slobodan Milosevic's forces to give up their iron grip on Kosovo, where Belgrade's police and army had oppressed the ethnic Albanian majority for over a decade.
But the attacks sparked a Serb drive to empty Kosovo of Albanians, forcing more than 800,000 people to flee, and intensifying a cycle of retributive violence and intimidation NATO is still struggling to contain.
After Belgrade capitulated in June a 40,000-strong NATO-led peace force arrived to restore order. But returning Albanians took the law into their own hands, driving out some 250,000 Serbs and others in a campaign of killing, looting and burning.
Most of Kosovo's remaining Serbs now live in rural ghettos under heavy NATO guard, a predicament that is ammunition for critics who say the alliance's intervention was misguided.
Clark and Robertson are likely to point out that life for the majority of Kosovans is now safer, more predictable and economically secure, a far cry from the near-anarchy prevalent in 1998 when Serb militias were fighting rebel Albanians.
They are also likely to warn Albanians they risk forfeiting international favor if they do not show more tolerance to Serbs.
``We all agree we live in a much better situation today than when we arrived,'' NATO's commander in Kosovo, General Klaus Reinhardt, said Thursday. ``Its not ideal. Nobody ever said it would be. There is a long way in front of us.''
SECURITY RISKS REMAIN
NATO still faces serious security challenges on several fronts in Kosovo, an atmosphere of deep ethnic intolerance and the challenge of sustaining a lengthy mission, predicted to last at least a decade.
Clark and Robertson are due to visit the city of Mitrovica, Kosovo's driest tinderbox, whose new ethnic partition is a severe embarrassment to the NATO goal of fostering peaceful co-existence between communities.
There have been repeated clashes between ethnic groups, and with peacekeepers, as Serbs in the north of the city seek to block the return home of dispossessed Albanians. The Serbs fear an influx of Albanians from the south will force them to flee.
NATO is trying to create a city center security zone where both communities can mingle, breaking down mistrust. The idea faces strong Serb opposition that could easily turn violent.
Threats of instability elsewhere in Kosovo appeared to ease Thursday when a rebel Albanian group in southern Serbia said they would avoid confrontation with Serb military forces.
NATO had feared the rebels would try to drag the alliance into a conflict just across the boundary from Kosovo.
The two NATO leaders are also to visit an ethnic Albanian school, which has been rebuilt as part of the United Nations mission to revive democracy and civil society in the province.
The head of the U.N. mission, Bernard Kouchner, Thursday claimed only modest progress in rebuilding the province since the conflict ended nine months ago.
Public administration had been restarted and Kosovo largely disarmed, but intolerance and a lack of resources meant the justice system still barely functioned, he said.
The Christian Science Monitor : Kosovo’s Hard Year
By Richard Mertens
M A L A K R U S A, Yugoslavia, March 23 — The wheat sown last fall is beginning to turn green, and for the first time in two years, the women of Mala Krusa are preparing to plant the peppers and other vegetables that made this region famous throughout Kosovo.
But for this battered southern village, stripped of most of its men, spring is less a season of hope than of endurance. Today, a year after NATO began its three-month bombing campaign aimed at defending ethnic Albanians from Serbian repression and ethnic cleansing, Mala Krusa, like the rest of Kosovo, faces an uncertain future.
So far, attempts to establish law and order, cultivate a moderate civilian leadership, and heal ethnic divisions have largely failed.
When NATO airstrikes began on March 24, the alliance expected Yugoslavia to concede after a few days. Instead, the missiles only increased the fury of attacks, resulting in stepped up killings and mass expulsions.
Men and Boys Shot
Mala Krusa was among the first to suffer. On March 26, women and children were driven out of the village and, eventually, to Albania. The men and boys, witnesses say, were taken away and shot, their bodies set on fire. In all, more than 100 people disappeared.
“It’s very difficult without husbands and sons,” says Medije Shehu, who lost her husband and two sons in the attack. “Before the war, they took care of the family. Now we are only waiting to see who will help us.”
Today, among the shells of burned and ruined houses, families that have stuck through the winter are looking forward to the promise of reconstruction, to new homes and new beginnings.
“For my daughters there is a chance to have a job, to do something in the future,” Shehu says softly, her eyes reddening. But, she adds, “for me there is nothing.”
Few Say Life is Better
Like all of Kosovo, Mala Krusa has received considerable assistance with rebuilding. A German relief agency helped build roofs on some of the less-damaged houses, so that families like the Shehus had at least one warm room in which to spend the winter. Shehu also received a new wood stove, which is practically her home’s only furnishing. She has received regular supplies of food, a small amount of cash, and six chickens. This spring, the European Union begins what will likely be many years of reconstruction in Kosovo, and Mala Krusa is in the plans.
Few people in Mala Krusa can say their life today is better than it was in years past. But at least in the abstract, they can affirm the fruits of NATO’s intervention, however much it cost them.
While Kosovo technically remains a province of Serbia, it has been under de facto control of KFOR, the NATO-led protection force, and United Nations civil administrators since last June, when Yugoslav forces withdrew.
“We are free,” said Florim Hajdari, who fought with the Kosovo Liberation Army, the ethnic Albanian force that opposed the Yugoslav military in Kosovo. “We’re free to go anywhere we want. We didn’t have that before.” Hajdari lost his father and five brothers in last year’s massacre.
But the blend of newfound freedom and past suffering has proven disastrous for the province’s remaining Serbs and dismaying for Western officials. Many ethnic Albanians have returned not only to reclaim the jobs and liberties once denied them, but also to exact vengeance against non-Albanians, who continue to flee.
“It’s wrong to think the bombing campaign ended the war,” says Bernard Kouchner, the top U.N. official in Kosovo. “The confrontation between men goes on. The hatreds are stronger.”
Serb Resentment of NATO Lingers
One year after NATO began its bombing campaign against Yugoslavia over spiraling violence against Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians, Serbia appears terrified that the alliance will take similar action again.
A destitute, elderly peasant woman waiting for spaghetti and bread at a Belgrade Red Cross soup kitchen is desperately worried. “Will NATO bomb? Will there be another war?” she frets.
Even the middle class is affected by memories of the airstrikes. “On Friday — the bombing’s anniversary — I will definitely look up into the sky,” says journalist Biljana Vasic, who works for the nongovernment magazine Vreme.
Resentment burns in the eyes of many here, even those who do not necessarily support Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. “Tony Blair!” exclaims a taxi driver, holding up his hands in disgust. “[British Prime Minister] Tony Blair and [Foreign Secretary] Robin Cook are as crazy as Slobodan Milosevic.”
U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is also a target of popular hatred. Some pro-government propaganda posters seek to link her with the opposition.
The struggle and poverty of many is evident along the capital’s longest road, Bulevar Revolucije, as it winds past the federal parliament to the center of town. Decrepit trams, crammed with passengers, ply the rutted thoroughfare. Black-market money dealers, with a wary eye out for police, exchange the local currency, the dinar, at 21 to the popular German mark; the official rate is 6.
Pensioners living on as little as 320 dinars a month (about $26) try to buy basic necessities.
But many have not received their pensions from the government for several months. On the side of the crumbling pavement, a host of stalls have sprung up. Workers whose state jobs have collapsed are selling alarm clocks, batteries, pens, notebooks, socks, T-shirts — anything that will earn them enough to get by.
The biggest draw along the boulevard is a cinema showing Sky Hook — a film about the NATO bombings. Ten out of the capital’s 30 cinemas are screening the film, which tells the tale of a bunch of fractious young Serbs who decide to rebuild a neighborhood basketball court after NATO missiles reduce it to rubble.
In the end they succeed in clearing the court and playing together, when another NATO strike reduces their effort to ruins and kills their star player.
The film shows Serbs as victims of an attack they are helpless to stop.
Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty : Yugoslavia: Group Urges NATO To Block Serbs In Montenegro
By Andrew F. Tully
A new report by the International Crisis Group, an independent group of political analysts, warns that Serbia is planning a military takeover of Montenegro, its junior partner in the Yugoslav federation. The organization says the NATO must increase its military presence in the Balkans to keep Serbia in check. But as RFE/RL's Andrew F. Tully reports, there is little hope that NATO can act quickly -- if at all.
Washington, 22 March 2000 (RFE/RL) -- A private group of political analysts is recommending that NATO build up its military presence in the Balkans to prevent a Serbian takeover of Montenegro.
But Gareth Evans, the president of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG), says he does not believe the member nations of the NATO can agree to act quickly or forcefully enough to prevent another war in the truncated Yugoslavia, which now includes only Serbia and Montenegro.
Evans, a former foreign minister of Australia, says the thrust of his report -- and the mission of the ICG -- is to prevent a crisis, rather than to react after the fact. He issued his report in Washington Tuesday.
And he says the West must act quickly, because there are signs that Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, the president of the Yugoslav federation, is preparing to move against Montenegro.
He cites recent Yugoslav army movements in and around Montenegro, and Serbia's economic embargo against its junior partner in the federation. And he notes that Milosevic has been cracking down on independent news media in Serbia.
Evans concedes that Milo Djukanovic, Montenegro's president, is not necessarily a perfect democratic leader. But he stresses that he has carefully kept his country's policies independent of Serbia, and for that deserves the world's support.
The ICG president says Djukanovic faces difficult choices. He says Djukanovic can proceed with a threatened referendum on independence, but that would only provoke Milosevic. He says he can keep relations with Serbia as they are, but that would put Montenegro in what he called "limbo." Or, Evans says, he can wait for Milosevic's successor and seek better relations. But he adds that Montenegrins may be too restive for compromise.
Evans president says Montenegro would be quickly defeated if Milosevic decided on a military takeover. Rather, Evans says it is time for the West to intervene. He says Western nations and institutions must give as much economic aid as possible to Montenegro to make it less dependent on Serbia. He also says Europe and the U.S. must increase their governmental and non-governmental presence in Montenegro to show Serbia that Montenegro is important on its own, not just as a part of the Yugoslav federation.
But he says the most important thing the West can do to prevent a fifth Balkan war in a decade is for NATO to increase its military presence in the region to make sure that Milosevic does not make war on Montenegro.
But Evans says he doubts NATO will act before yet another Balkan crisis breaks out.
"This is the dilemma, and this is the one [dilemma] that's shrieking out at us at the moment. It's only some form of catastrophe -- you know, full, frontal challenge, blood in the streets somewhere -- that will generate the response, which if it were generated now could avoid that reoccurrence occurring."
Evans attributes this problem to a variety of factors: a general election in the U.S., an American Congress that is at odds with the president, Bill Clinton, and the large number of governments in Europe that must agree to increasing NATO's military presence in the Balkans.
Jim Goldgeier is a professor of political science at George Washington University in Washington who specializes in NATO. He agrees in an RFE/RL interview that it will be difficult to get the alliance to act militarily to prevent a war in Montenegro.
"The problem right now is that NATO's already having enough trouble getting commitments from allies to put the forces that need to be put in Kosovo. And now to say, 'And now we need to do -- you know, have additional forces available to deal with a potential problem in Montenegro' is going to be -- you know, is going to make the situation that much more difficult."
Evans says NATO should not be concerned about being prepared to intervene militarily in what Milosevic would call an internal affair. He notes that this argument did not stop the alliance from attacking Yugoslavia last year over Kosovo. And he adds that Montenegro looks more like an independent state today than Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina did a few years ago. Goldgeier agreed.
"NATO has basically decided after last year that nothing's simply an internal affair in the Balkans. It already shattered that principle, and it can't go back -- it can't undo what it did and say, 'Well, it's not something we're going to worry about because this is part of Yugoslavia."
But Evans and Goldgeier agree that if the Western alliance does not act quickly, its air war against Yugoslavia last year over Kosovo -- and the peacekeeping efforts it is still conducting in the Serbian province -- will lose credibility with the rest of the world.
The Guardian : Serb lawyers get ransom for freeing Albanians
Jonathan Steele in Pristina
Serbian lawyers are reaping exorbitant sums to arrange for the release of Albanians from prisons in Serbia, in what appears to be a ransom racket supported by the government of the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic.
Albanian families are making contact with the Serbian lawyers at a makeshift "prisoners' bazaar", which is held on Saturdays on the open road near one of Kosovo's borders with Serbia.
The lawyers take the names of the Albanian detainees, most of whom where hurriedly transferred to Serbia after the Kosovo war, in exchange for a telephone number in Serbia that the families can later ring to find out the price and an approximate release date.
The money, which the families hand over at the bazaar during a subsequent visit, far exceeds normal lawyers' fees: it is assumed that most of the fees go to judges and other Belgrade nominees. In a system as centralised as Serbia's, business on this scale must be pre-approved by the ruling Socialist party, which Mr Milosevic heads.
When the Yugoslav army and Serb police pulled out of Kosovo in June after 78 days of Nato bombing, they took thousands of Albanians with them. Most were being held for "terrorist" crimes. Their families call them hostages, but if Mr Milosevic originally intended to use them as a political bargaining chip, they now appear to be up for sale. Forty-two men were released from Serb jails in the first week of March.
"We collected DM105,000 [£33,000] to get seven men from our village out," said Isuf Berisha, 37, outside the offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Pristina this week. His brother, Idriz, was in a group of 25 men who had been released from jail in Pozarevac, 40 miles south-east of Belgrade.
When the ICRC vehicles arrived shortly afterwards, wives, mothers and other family friends merged into a throng of hugs and kisses. They then set off to their villages in a noisy cavalcade of honking cars and buses. Some waved the Albanian flag, as though it were the end of a victorious football match.
Joy is rare in Kosovo now that the euphoria of the liberation from Serb rule has faded, but the prisoners' homecoming provided a brief fillip.
"Until midday yesterday, we didn't know we were going to be freed," Idriz said the next day. "We were taken from prison to the courthouse in Pozarevac. The trial only took five minutes. We continued to deny we were terrorists, but the judge gave us a 15-month sentence. As we had already spent 18 months in detention, he then released us."
Isuf interrupted his brother's story with a chuckle: "Actually, I was the one who was a fighter in the Kosovo Liberation Army. Idriz never was."
"We got out because of the money. If the money hadn't been paid, the trial wouldn't have happened and we would still be in prison. Three other men from the village haven't been released. They have already been sentenced, and if their families could find the money they would probably be released too," Idriz said.
Further down Dejne's muddy main street, Samedin and Myhedin Bytyqi, two brothers in their late 40s, were inspecting the damage caused to their home while they were in prison.
"I never expected it to be so bad," said Samedin, as he showed the storehouse that the family had converted into living quarters after their house was burnt down. "Our main problem now is getting used to the light," he said. "We were held in a dimly lit room all day and only had exercise for 15 minutes a week."
The exact number of Albanian detainees in Serbia is unclear.
The Serbian ministry of justice has published a list of almost 2,300 names and the ICRC has registered about 1,700 detainees. But Albanian human rights groups in Pristina claim there may be secret prisons and the number could be as high as 7,000.
Nato has been accused of failing to insist on prisoner releases when it negotiated the "military technical agreement" which led to the end of the bombing.
An unnamed Pentagon official was quoted recently as saying that Washington had decided to drop any mention of prisoners because it knew the alliance was desperate to stop the bombing. "It was a bare-bones document that we were confident the Serbs would accept," he said.
While the strategy may explain the omission to the west, in Kosovo it is of little solace.
"There is some realisation that this is not a statistical side bar - it is an open wound in Albanian society," said Nic Sommer, the ICRC press officer in Kosovo. "[But] a lot of trafficking is going on."
The Independent : Europe's leaders warned of new crisis in Kosovo
Ethnic violence, economic paralysis and poor organisation threaten province's future, EU report asserts
By Stephen Castle in Brussels
Almost a year to the day since the beginning of Nato's air war to liberate Kosovo, Europe's leaders face a grim warning that the international community is failing to secure the province's future.
A starkly written paper by the European Union's most senior foreign policy officials argues that the United Nations is having "considerable difficulties" in Kosovo, that ethnic violence is "at high levels" and that the UN administration has "insufficient personnel and resources".
The document, prepared by Javier Solana, the EU's foreign policy high representative, and Chris Patten, the commissioner for external relations, is to be presented to EU heads of government at today's Lisbon summit. It claims that a plethora of decision-making bodies involved with the Balkans means duplication, delay and ad hoc procedures. "The time has come", it says, "to take a fresh look at the situation and to develop a coherent strategy."
This unprecedented exercise in soul-searching is designed as a wake-up call for the EU's leaders as the Balkans slips down their list of priorities. Money is going into Kosovo – this year the EU expects to spend 360m euros (£221m) – and the international community can claim credit for averting a winter crisis, returning around one million refugees to their homes and reopening most hospitals and schools. So what is going wrong?
Ten minutes north of Pristina, Kosovo A is a coal-fired power station built in the Sixties with Russian technology. When in service, it belches out 1,000 tons of ash each day but for much of the time it does not work. The immediate problem is not the planned renovation of Kosovo A, but keeping it going. When, earlier this month, a technical fault stopped generation Kosovo A had two days' worth of coal left to burn. Western officials planned to recoup costs of power generation from consumers but in January, when bills were sent out for the first time since the war, only 3 per cent were paid.
The lack of a real economy is a familiar theme in Kosovo which, well before the 78-day bombing campaign began, was being reduced to near-collapse by Belgrade. Joly Dixon, the UN's deputy special representative in Kosovo, said: "From the economic point of view, we thought that we were coming into a society damaged by a relatively short war. What we found was an economy weakened over 10 years and with no administrative structure."
The big international presence has become the primary source of income. As well as those who have found work with the EU or the UN, many Kosovars have moved out of their homes to rent them to foreigners at exorbitant prices.
Meanwhile, lawlessness provides a fertile breeding ground for ethnic violence and a mafia-backed black market. A new chain of petrol stations, Kosovo Petrol, is springing up through the province and no one seems quite sure who owns it. One EU official said: "Perhaps its the mafia, [or it] may be linked to the old KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army]."
The Solana/Patten paper does not duck these issues. It says: "We must ensure that Unmik [the UN Mission in Kosovo] receives the necessary resources, in particular adequate financing, police officers, judges and prosecutors. Early progress on economic reconstruction and the development of a market economy is vital for continued Kosovar support for the international presence."
The paper calls for a streamlining of the West's Balkans initiatives and it argues that technical problems which have stopped Kosovo and Montenegro being eligible for international funding (because they are not independent countries) must be overcome.
All this could be a race against time, as the support of Kosovo's Albanians appears to be evaporating, which could make the province ungovernable. When Mr Patten met the Kosovo Transitional Council earlier this month, local politicians asked where the cash was going. One council member was blunter still: "The West was happy to pay for bombing this place", Ylber Hysa said, "but there is not the same willingness to rebuild it."
The Christian Science Monitor : Eye-to-eye with a new kind of war
Dave Moniz
Special to The Christian Science Monitor
Maj. Tony Mattox was certain he would die. On a night as black as obsidian, the young fighter pilot was maneuvering his F-16 on an attack run over Belgrade, Yugoslavia.
He was supposed to launch a preemptive strike against a Serb defense battery. Instead, just before firing his missile, he noticed a defender had fired back. Within seconds, Major Mattox was pinwheeling through the darkness to dodge a fusillade of enemy missiles - not fully realizing the depth of his predicament until, at one point, he was flying upside down.
"This missile was so close, I thought, 'There's no way it's going to miss me,' " he recalls. "I waited for it to impact and remember thinking, 'So this is what it feels like to get shot down.' "
Mattox's recollections are among the memories of a group of fighter pilots who flew in the air war over Kosovo that began one year ago this week.
Speaking publicly for the first time, the pilots from South Carolina's Shaw Air Force Base tell a tale of death and derring-do, bravado and anxiety, that offers insight into what the Pentagon calls the "most-effective air operation in history."
The 78-day "war" was also one of the most unusual. It was a fight without ground troops or the grim aura of military funerals. The meaning of casualty-free warfare, carried out from the skies, will no doubt be debated for years to come at war colleges and policy seminars.
Is this the way all future wars will be fought? Or should the public know Kosovo was likely an aberration?
During the operation over Kosovo, America and its European allies lost just two planes. And not a single pilot.
A share of the credit goes to packs of missile-hunting Air Force F-16s and pilots like Mattox, who cleared a path for the waves of NATO jets that bombed strategic locations. And 24 of those jets were deployed from Shaw. In all, 40 pilots flew more than 1,000 sorties protecting NATO airplanes from deadly missile batteries.
The squadron from Shaw is, in fact, critical to the Pentagon's new style of warfare. The air war in Kosovo literally waited for the arrival of the South Carolina jets to swing into around-the-clock operations.
That's because no big air war commences without these fighters, which are specially equipped to take out enemy air-defense systems. Specifically, they have a high-tech targeting system that allows them to home in on enemy radar sites. If the enemy uses radar to target the plane, it locks on to the source of the signal and fires a missile.
Shaw's pilots fired more than 100 anti-air-defense missiles, but their mere presence often deterred Serb outposts from even turning on their tracking radars.
Still, the Serbs are believed to have fired about 700 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) at NATO planes. And Shaw's F-16 pilots describe a battlefield that was at times eerily calm and at other times crammed full of flak and missiles.
During the rougher times, Lt. Col. Steve Searcy, commander of the Shaw-based 78th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron, says he was sure he would lose some of his F-16s.
But "no matter how bad it gets, we have to deal with it," Colonel Searcy says. "We're going to put our football helmets and snap our chin strap on tight."
The US military has gained a lot of experience in waging air wars during recent years. The successful 1995 Balkans air campaign over Bosnia was a prelude to last year's longer air war.
Moreover, Air Force planes have been able to perfect missile-hunting tactics over Iraq during the past nine years by enforcing United Nations sanctions.
Pilots also have an armada of different aircraft to respond to every situation. In addition to the missile-hunters, the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps bring aircraft to jam enemy radar, shoot down enemy fighters in the air, refuel other planes, and track the movement of enemy aircraft and troops.
During Vietnam, the US paid a dear price for its lack of sophistication. The Air Force and Navy lost more planes in a few hours than NATO lost during the entire Kosovo operation.
The mission of protecting US fighters and bombers in the 1960s and '70s fell to a group of dare-devil F-4 pilots known as "Wild Weasels."
Today, Air Force pilots perform these mission in fast, mobile F-16CJ models. Equipped with one of the largest engines in any fighter, the CJs can cruise at twice the speed of sound. The engine from one CJ model is more powerful than the entire Indy 500 field, and the F-16 is widely considered the world's most maneuverable fighter.
Nonetheless, it still can't outrun a SAM, which can fly up to three times the speed of sound.
While pilots don't like to talk about evasive-maneuver tactics - and some of it is classified - they have tricks to defeat SAMs. By pulling multiple G-force turns, they often can "defeat the missile's energy" and force it to explode a safe distance away.
To perfect the art of dodging missiles, pilots from Shaw train on a nearby bombing range that can simulate the electronic signatures of many missiles. Air Force pilots also undergo highly choreographed war games in the Nevada desert to learn to fight together.
That training paid off for Capt. Tom "Hatchet" Littleton on April 20 over Belgrade. Noticing a mesmerizing streak of white light below him, Captain Littleton knew he was in trouble. The Serbs had launched six SAMs at him and three other F-16s protecting US planes.
Quick evasive action spared Littleton from capture or death.
"The missile blew up near my airplane," Littleton says. "The big engine in my F-16 saved my life."
The training to make maneuvers like that - and NATO's enormous technological advantage - helped keep the casualty toll so low. Had some planes been shot down, the sight of dead and captured Americans could easily have eroded support for the war.
Since Somali rebels killed 18 Americans in 1993, the American populace has shown that it is unwilling to absorb high casualties in relatively small-scale wars.
Despite a number of near-misses in Yugoslavia, US planes did not fall from the sky.
Brig. Gen. Dan Leaf, who commanded Aviano Air Base during the war, never expected to be able to fly so many missions without losing any pilots. Says General Leaf, who flew frequent missions with lower-ranking pilots: "There is nothing that can describe the feeling of having your people plucked from the jaws of the enemy."
Washington Post: Insurgents May Halt Attacks Into Serbia
By Peter Finn and Roberto Suro
Under pressure from U.S. diplomats and peacekeeping troops, ethnic Albanian militias are close to an agreement to suspend attacks against Belgrade security forces in Serbia, just beyond the U.S.-patrolled sector of Kosovo, according to U.S., NATO and Kosovo Albanian sources.
In exchange, the officials said, U.S. peacekeepers will agree to refrain from cracking down on militia members as forcefully as they did last Wednesday when more than 300 U.S. troops descended on five militia staging areas and arms caches, arresting nine alleged insurgents.
The NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo already has authority to disarm and disband any nascent quasi-military groups. The agreement under discussion would for the first time extend the peacekeepers' influence to ethnic Albanians who are operating beyond Kosovo's borders, hitting targets in other parts of Serbia and threatening the peace there. Kosovo is a province of Serbia, the dominant republic of Yugoslavia.
U.S. officials said they hope the agreement will produce additional goodwill gestures, such as the surrender of some arms by ethnic Albanians. Also, the insurgents would be required not to appear in uniform, end recruitment and training activities and halt the movement of arms between Kosovo and the rest of Serbia, sources said.
Last week's raids came after armed bands of ethnic Albanians stepped up attacks against Serbian police forces around the town of Presevo, just across the boundary between the U.S.-patrolled sector of Kosovo and the rest of Serbia. The insurgents are seeking to extend Kosovo's boundaries to include the Presevo Valley, which is in Serbia proper but is populated primarily by ethnic Albanians.
U.S. and NATO officials fear that the ethnic Albanian forays would give Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic an excuse to take military action in the Presevo area, which could draw U.S. forces into a new conflict.
U.S. and ethnic Albanian sources said they hope to have an agreement in place by Friday, the first anniversary of the start of NATO's 78-day air campaign against Yugoslavia that came in response to Yugoslavia's repression of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority. The campaign ended when Milosevic agreed to withdraw his security forces and to allow a NATO-led peacekeeping force to take administrative control of Kosovo.
To mark the anniversary, NATO Secretary General George Robertson and U.S. Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark, who led the NATO campaign last year, are to visit Kosovo. Plans for $1.2 billion in reconstruction aid for Kosovo are to be discussed at a conference of donor nations in Brussels.
"Clearly, it would be very beneficial to mark the anniversary with an announcement that dispels the fear Kosovo is in for a hot spring and that the Presevo Valley is about to blow up," said a senior NATO official.
To secure an accord, the United States is simultaneously holding talks with Hashim Thaqi, the former leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the disbanded ethnic Albanian paramilitary force; Ramush Hajradinaj, a former KLA commander; and leading ethnic Albanian figures from the Presevo Valley, U.S. and NATO sources said.
Thaqi and Hajradinaj reportedly are telling the insurgents and their sponsors in Kosovo that they need to suspend operations for tactical reasons so they are not perceived as aggressors. The potential agreement recognizes that the insurgents will likely resurface if Milosevic launches a major offensive in the valley.
"Milosevic has to be seen as the aggressor," said one ethnic Albanian source familiar with the discussions. He said the insurgents may try to keep their arms for "local defense" purposes but would have to retire the idea of forming a military force to "liberate" the Presevo Valley.
U.S. and NATO officials said peacekeeping troops would retain the right to seize arms in Kosovo, but that they would not pursue that goal with actions as aggressive as the raids last week if the ethnic Albanians suspend their activities. Moreover, if militia members turned in weapons voluntarily they would not face arrest, the officials said, but added that routine patrols and reconnaissance will intensify.
Just before last week's raids, State Department spokesman James P. Rubin met with ethnic Albanian leaders to warn them that continued activity in Presevo endangered international support for peacekeeping and reconstruction efforts in Kosovo. In parallel talks, U.S. officials began negotiations with local ethnic Albanian leaders on both sides of the border to seek an agreement to defuse the situation.
A senior figure in the former Kosovo Liberation Army familiar with the talks warned, however, that "this is the Balkans," and no agreement is final until it is sealed, and even then some of the highly factionalized ethnic Albanian forces may choose to ignore it.
In recent weeks, the village of Dobrosin, which lies in a valley below a U.S. military observation point on the Kosovo-Serbia border, has been used as a kind of boot camp by a militia group calling itself the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac, which is known locally by its Albanian initials, UCPMB.
According to Capt. Eric McFadden, commander of the observation post, new recruits rotate in and out of the village. U.S. forces have observed them undergoing what appears to be basic training, including land navigation techniques, drill and ceremony, and physical fitness. There have been a number of clashes between Serbian and UCPMB forces, leading to a handful of deaths. Ethnic Albanians also said Serbian forces have killed 10 civilians, mostly businessmen, since January.
At the entrance to Dobrosin, which lies in a buffer zone between NATO and Yugoslav forces, two uniformed ethnic Albanians, carrying automatic weapons, guard a dirt lane that leads to a house that acts as the group's headquarters. U.S forces have seen armed guerrillas in uniform and an hour later saw the same people in civilian clothes cross the border back into Kosovo. McFadden said they question insurgents for 15 or 20 minutes, but are otherwise powerless to hold them even though they have visual evidence of their involvement with the UCPMB.
One morning this week about a dozen armed and uniformed men could be seen in the village. Some wore mismatched uniforms while other, more senior guerrillas wore all black uniforms, carrying automatic weapons, sidearms and hand grenades. U.S. forces said they have seen no heavy weapons in the area.
Finn reported from Pristina, Yugoslavia.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS : Near-panic grips Serbs over fear of renewed air strikes
By DUSAN STOJANOVIC
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- "They'll bomb us again!"
A year after the start of the NATO bombing campaign, those words are on nearly everyone's lips in Yugoslavia.
It is a sign of the near-panic gripping the Serbs, faced with the threat of civil war, likely clashes in secessionist Montenegro and signs the country is sliding toward dictatorship.
NATO officials have repeatedly denied any plans to renew the air strikes -- unless Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic makes an overtly aggressive move, such as attacking allied troops stationed in Serbia's troubled Kosovo province.
But Milosevic -- who has started four wars in the Balkans and lost all of them -- has a history of such actions, especially when he seeks to divert public attention away from the country's economic collapse and social decline, which threaten his grip on power.
"Where Milosevic is concerned, whenever one imagines the worst possible scenario, that's the one that happens," says Andrej Marjanovic, a psychologist.
He described the Serbs as "on the verge of collective paranoia," brought on by the tremendous fear engendered by the NATO air strikes and the bleak and uncertain future they now face.
Fearing more air strikes, people are stocking up on food, and men are planning escape routes over the border or hiding places to avoid the draft. Lines for visas in front of Western embassies are longer than ever. Authorities last week ran out of passport booklets because of the demand.
"There is no hope in this country," said a man in his early 20s who gave only his first name, Milan, as he waited in line for a visa outside the Austrian Embassy. "I don't want to live through another bombing hell, or let Milosevic send me to another senseless war."
Adding to the disquiet, air raid sirens have been tested in several Serbian towns and, according to opposition claims, the army recently issued over 100,000 draft notices for reservists, mostly in rural areas. Unconfirmed reports that the borders were closed for men of military age sent shock waves through Belgrade.
"The fact that a simple test of air raid sirens is enough to trigger general panic is a true sign that the psychological warfare against this nation has been waged successfully," said Ljubodrag Stojadinovic, a prominent independent media columnist.
The NATO bombing, begun one year ago Friday to force an end to Milosevic's crackdown against Kosovo Albanians, failed to bring his downfall or shake his grip on power.
Coming on top of international sanctions, the 78-day allied bombing campaign -- which destroyed oil refineries and much of Yugoslavia's other infrastructure -- has given Milosevic a perfect scapegoat for the country's overall decay.
For Milosevic, the war against NATO and the United States is still being waged, and the enemies are all those who oppose his policies.
At a recent congress of his ruling Socialist Party, Milosevic launched one of his fiercest attacks on political opponents, calling them pro-Western "weaklings," "thieves," "colonizers," "toadies" and "cowards."
There are widespread fears in Serbia that Milosevic might start a civil war to preserve power, after being weakened by the country's deep economic and social crisis and the virtual loss of Kosovo.
"The regime is prepared to send police and other 'death squads' against Serbian citizens," said opposition leader Vuk Draskovic. "But a fierce response is being prepared by this impoverished nation."
Tensions in pro-independence Montenegro, Serbia's junior partner in the Yugoslav federation, have grown so high that a clash between the Serb-led Yugoslav army and Montenegrin police seems inevitable.
A government crackdown against dissent in Serbia is in full swing, with independent media outlets heavily fined or banned and independent journalists threatened. Police have arrested and beaten up anti-Milosevic student activists and protesters, and opposition leaders are facing trials for speaking against the regime.
ABCNEWS: NATO admits it used depleted uranium in Kosovo
GENEVA, March 21 (Reuters) - NATO has admitted using depleted uranium weapons in Kosovo, exposing civilians, its own troops and aid workers to health hazards, a U.N. expert said on Tuesday.
But Pekka Haavisto, head of the U.N. Balkan environment task force investigating the use of munitions during the 70-day war, said NATO was still holding back crucial data on where and how it used depleted uranium weapons, which can contaminate land and water sources with radioactive and toxic particles.
The former Finnish environment minister said NATO's confirmation of its use of depleted uranium came in a letter from the Western military alliance's Secretary-General George Robertson to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
In its letter, Haavisto said NATO disclosed having used 31,000 rounds of depleted uranium ammunition during some 100 missions throughout Kosovo by U.S. A-10 aircraft.
"It was really the Americans who were using depleted uranium in NATO," Haavisto said. "The question we now have today is whether it was also used in Serbia and Montenegro and other areas."
Haavisto accused the alliance of obstructing his team's work late last year by refusing to cooperate to help determine the extent of pollution caused by such weapons.
Accompanying the letter was a NATO map with areas marked where NATO said it had used depleted uranium weapons. Shells are tipped with depleted uranium to help them penetrate the thick armour of military vehicles or underground bunkers.
The marked areas were concentrated in Kosovo's west and southwest, close to the zones where Italian as well as German, Turkish and Dutch KFOR troops are based.
Depleted uranium-tipped weapons were used west of the Pec-Dakovica-Prizren highway, around the town of Klina, around Prizren and north of Suva Reka and Urosevac, Haavisto said.
"We can see from the map that depleted uranium was widely used in Kosovo. These were populated areas so the risks are greater," Haavisto said.
"Many missions using depleted uranium also took place outside these areas," he added. "If these types of weapons were used, people should have been protected and warned against the risks of toxication, especially children."
U.N. DEMANDS MORE INFORMATION FROM NATO
Haavisto said NATO information was not detailed enough for experts to do field assessment on health effects and measurements on possible contamination of land and ground water.
"The information provided by NATO and the map is not precise enough for a field assessment. We were not given the information we needed from NATO. We are in need of precise information on exact locations where depleted uranium was used," he said.
NATO officials were not immediately available for comment.
Haavisto said the use of depleted uranium in Kosovo was only one-tenth of that in the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq -- after which there was an epidemic of cancers among Iraqis living near battlefields.
U.S. and British veterans of the Gulf War with Iraq have also blamed serious health problems among them on the use of such weapons. The link is denied by U.S. and British military authorities.
Haavisto said the World Health Organisation had promised to report on the effects on health of medium and long-term exposure to depleted uranium in Kosovo in May.
But the U.N. health agency has yet to produce a similar and equally controversial report demanded by Iraq over two years ago on health effects of depleted uranium used during the Gulf War.
The Irish Times : Milosevic prepares for fight of his life
President Slobodan Milosevic is making a remarkable political comeback. Now his regime is being tipped to win vital elections, reports Gillian Sandford, from Belgrade
KOSOVO: When NATO aircraft blasted the chemical industry in Pancevo, a town 12 miles from Belgrade, Zarije Kornel, a local opposition politician, remembers watching a terrified mother run from a sheet of toxic smoke. Cradling a child in her arms, the young women fled into woods, but the poisonous cloud followed her.
"How can I explain to her that the West, which caused this, is on her side?" Kornel asks.
It's a question that is not easy to answer, and yet it is crucial to both Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and Serbian opposition leaders as vital elections approach. These polls must be held by October, according to the Yugoslav constitution, and could take place as early as May. The results may determine Milosevic's fate.
After 78 days of NATO airstrikes, and a winter made harder by Western sanctions, there is little support for the West in Serbia. "If the West had wanted to make Milosevic suffer, it has failed," says Zivko Tornjanski (53), a quiet, hard-working metal worker who makes drain pipes in his garage.
"Milosevic is not struggling. He lives well and has money. We are the ones who suffer," says Zivko, who lost his job at Pancevo's aircraft factory three years ago when Western sanctions imposed in the early 1990s began to bite. His wife, Jelena (52) an economist, has been without work for eight months.
Nationalist sentiment thrives in this environment. Immediately after the bombing of Yugoslavia, many people began to say openly they blamed Milosevic for 10 years of suffering and for the NATO air strikes. But the difficult winter appears to have reversed some of these sentiments.
President Milosevic is playing on this. His speech at the Socialist Party Congress last month talked of local governments that are "branch offices of some Western governments that took part in the bombing of Serbia". His words strike a chord in an already fearful population, for in cafes and street corners across the country, against the background of radio reports of NATO's Kosovo exercises, the only conversation is how long it will be before NATO bombs again. The turnaround in President Milosevic's fortunes is remarkable. By the end of June last year he had surrendered Serbia's religious heartland of Kosovo, lost the war and looked a defeated man. Roads, railway lines and bridges lay in ruins, discontent was rife and demonstrations rocked the provinces.
The collapse of his regime seemed inevitable - but it did not happen. "I believe the regime will win the elections," says one Belgrade taxi driver. "I have always been anti-communist, but I do not see this government being defeated now."
As the local poll deadline approaches, repression increases - all part of a deliberate strategy. In the last two weeks, seven opposition-owned local television or radio stations have been attacked, reducing the access of people in Serbia's heartland to non-government information.
"Independent media are being shut down. Mobilisation is in progress. Voter registration lists are being forged. Local elections will be called under these conditions," warns Vladan Batic, coordinator of the opposition umbrella grouping, Alliance for Change.
Legislation put in place over recent years has strengthened President Milosevic's hand. A university law has made appointment of academics dependent more on party loyalty than intellectual merit. The aim is to undermine a natural centre of revolt.
Dissenting judges have been reined in, newspapers are subject to escalating printing and paper costs, and a rigorous information law is used to levy punitive fines.
But President Milosevic's survival is also due to the failure of opposition leaders. After months of fighting, they finally agreed a January 10th pact on unity - but they have spent the last month squabbling over the date of a planned Belgrade rally and who will have the chance to speak.
Prof Vladmimir Goati, from the Belgrade Institute for Social Studies, criticises them for poor leadership. "There is a conflict between the regime and civil society going on in Serbia at the moment - and the opposition is acting as an observer," he says.
Last winter, against all odds, Serbia did not fall to its knees. In the cold months that followed the bombing, the country's skilled engineers repaired the electricity transmission system and most people had heat, light and power, virtually without a break. Serbia was backed by a new ally, China. Beijing reportedly provided Milosevic with $300 million in December and the Yugoslav Chamber of Commerce says Yugoslavia's oil debt to China, up to January, was $195 million. The Milosevic regime is embattled but is continuing the fightback it started last autumn. Before that, a European Union list of party stalwarts issued last summer blocked visas to Milosevic cronies. Analysts began to talk of a possible palace coup. Long-time loyalists were whispered to be talking to the West.
Businessman Boguljub Karic, owner of a Belgrade-based, proMilosevic TV station, moved to pro-West Mongenegro. Even Serbian President Milan Milutinovic was reported to be under house arrest. But then Milosevic reasserted his grip.
The public announcement of Milosevic's indictment for war crimes has dramatically sharpened the lines of conflict. It has ratcheted the pressure higher and curtailed his ability to travel - now he dare not set foot in Kosovo or Montenegro for fear of arrest.
But announcing the Hague charges carries a major risk. Prof Gaso Knezevic, an antiMilosevic lawyer and a member of the opposition Civic Alliance, says it has left Milosevic with no escape.
"Milosevic knows that if the opposition gains power, he will be sent to the Hague. So he can't stay here and he can't go abroad. He has nowhere to go. And because of this, I think there is a possibility of civil war."
Now spring is arriving, bringing with it border tension. The southern boundary with Kosovo and the border with Serbia's sister state, Montenegro, are both heating up. The atmosphere in Belgrade is uneasy and tense, an unruly chaos theatens.
In southern Serbia, armed Albanian extremists from Kosovo are moving onto Serbian territory from NATO-controlled Kosovo, threatening a new conflict that could draw NATO into war.
Within the federation, Serbia is tightening the screw on Montenegro, blocking cross-border trade and squeezing the economy of its sister republic, because of the desire for independence of its proWestern president, Milo Djukanovic.
One Western diplomat suggests President Milosevic may try to fudge the elections, for if these elections are scheduled, the stand-off between Serbia and Montenegro will be forced into the open, threatening a new war.
So, one year after the bombing, Slobodan Milosevic is dug in for the fight of his life. The price of power for him has, for 10 years, been the blood of Yugoslavia's people and the loss of territory. The elections will be telling, for in these desperate times, Milsoevic has less and less to lose.
A year after start of NATO airstrikes, Serbia still waging war
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP) _ "They'll bomb us again!"
A year after the start of the NATO bombing campaign, those words are on nearly everyone's lips in Yugoslavia.
It is a sign of the near-panic gripping the Serbs, faced with the threat of civil war, likely clashes in secessionist Montenegro and signs the country is sliding toward dictatorship.
NATO officials have repeatedly denied any plans to renew the airstrikes _ unless Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic makes an overtly aggressive move, such as attacking allied troops stationed in Serbia's troubled Kosovo province.
But Milosevic _ who has started four wars in the Balkans and lost all of them _ has a history of such actions, especially when he seeks to divert public attention away from the country's economic collapse and social decline, which threaten his grip on power.
"Where Milosevic is concerned, whenever one imagines the worst possible scenario, that's the one that happens," says Andrej Marjanovic, a psychologist.
He described the Serbs as "on the verge of collective paranoia," brought on by the tremendous fear engendered by the NATO airstrikes and the bleak and uncertain future they now face.
Fearing more airstrikes, people are stocking up on food, and men are planning escape routes over the border or hiding places to avoid the draft. Lines for visas in front of Western embassies are longer than ever. Authorities last week ran out of passport booklets because of the demand.
"There is no hope in this country," said a man in his early 20s who gave only his first name, Milan, as he waited in line for a visa outside the Austrian Embassy. "I don't want to live through another bombing hell, or let Milosevic send me to another senseless war."
Adding to the disquiet, air raid sirens have been tested in several Serbian towns and, according to opposition claims, the army recently issued over 100,000 draft notices for reservists, mostly in rural areas. Unconfirmed reports that the borders were closed for men of military age sent shock waves through Belgrade.
"The fact that a simple test of air raid sirens is enough to trigger general panic is a true sign that the psychological warfare against this nation has been waged successfully," said Ljubodrag Stojadinovic, a prominent independent media columnist.
The NATO airstrikes, begun one year ago Friday to force an end to Milosevic's crackdown against Kosovo Albanians, have failed to bring his downfall or shake his grip on power.
Coming on top of international sanctions, the 78-day allied bombing campaign _ which destroyed oil refineries and much of Yugoslavia's other infrastructure _ has given Milosevic a perfect scapegoat for the country's overall decay.
For Milosevic, the war against NATO and the United States is still being waged, and the enemies are all those who oppose his policies.
At a recent congress of his ruling Socialist Party, Milosevic launched one of his fiercest attacks on political opponents, calling them pro-Western "weaklings," "thieves," "colonizers," "toadies" and "cowards."
There are widespread fears in Serbia that Milosevic might start a civil war to preserve power, after being weakened by the country's deep economic and social crisis and the virtual loss of Kosovo.
"The regime is prepared to send police and other 'death squads' against Serbian citizens," said opposition leader Vuk Draskovic. "But a fierce response is being prepared by this impoverished nation."
Tensions in pro-independence Montenegro, Serbia's junior partner in the Yugoslav federation, have grown so high that a clash between the Serb-led Yugoslav army and Montenegrin police seems inevitable.
A government crackdown against dissent in Serbia is in full swing, with independent media outlets heavily fined or banned and independent journalists threatened. Police have arrested and beaten up anti-Milosevic student activists and protesters, and opposition leaders are facing trials for speaking against the regime.
"All these are minor scuffles in comparison to what awaits us in the near future," said opposition leader Vuk Obradovic.
Bosnian Serb Trial Opens; First on Wartime Sex Crimes
New York Times
By MARLISE SIMONS
HE HAGUE, March 20 -- The war crimes tribunal in The Hague took an important step in legal history today as it opened the first United Nations trial focusing exclusively on widespread sexual crimes against women during wartime.
The trial is based on accusations that during the war in Bosnia, soldiers committed gang rape and forced women to act as prostitutes and individual domestic and sexual slaves.
The women involved lived in Foca, a small town in southeastern Bosnia that was stormed by Bosnian Serb soldiers in the spring of 1992. No one has precise numbers on how many women were abused among Foca's 40,000 or so inhabitants, half of whom were Muslims.
But in the coming weeks, 10 Muslim women from Foca are expected to testify on the atrocities they suffered while held captive during the summer and fall of 1992.
The witnesses will come face to face with the three Bosnian Serb defendants, who have been charged with for crimes against humanity as well as violating the laws or customs of war.
As the trial opened today, the three defendants, Dragoljub Kunarac, Radomir Kovac and Zoran Vukovic, stared blankly ahead or sometimes looked at their video terminals while maps of the area and photographs of places identified as "rape camps" and "quasi-brothels" were shown.
All three defendants have denied the charges. Although none of the victims were present, an unusually large number of women were in court today. The president of the three-judge panel is a woman, Florence Mumba. Both the prosecution and the defense attorney teams include women. And behind the thick glass wall of the public gallery, female lawyers and representatives of women's groups listened attentively.
"What happens here is tremendous progress," said Kelly Askin, an American legal scholar and author of the book, "War Crimes Against Women." "Some 200,000 women who were forced into sexual servitude by the Japanese in World War II never had any redress. Now we are seeing tremendous improvement in the jurisprudence for women."
Presenting the case, Dirk Ryneveld, a prosecutor, said, "This is a case about rape camps in Eastern Bosnia, whose uncovering in 1992 shocked the world. This is a case about the women and girls -- some as young as 12 or 15 years old --who endured unimaginable horrors as their worlds collapsed around them."
The crimes, he said, were an intrinsic part of the Serbian "ethnic cleansing campaign" against the Muslims of Bosnia, and he said that some of the soldiers told their victims that they would now bear Serbian babies. In his 38-page statement the prosecutor cited many examples of abuse.
The lowest estimates made by research groups hold that during the conflicts that followed the breakup of the Communist-era Yugoslavia, 20,000 women were raped, most of them Muslims.
Foe of the Warlord Arkan Slain in Belgrade
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
ELGRADE, Serbia, March 20 -- A Serbian businessman and former militia leader who was a well-known enemy of the assassinated warlord known as Arkan, was himself shot dead yesterday, witnesses said.
Branislav Lainovic, who had led Serb militiamen during the war in Croatia, was hit by two bullets, including one in the head, shortly after 4 p.m. near the Hotel Srbija, in southeast Belgrade, a doctor who was at the scene said.
Mr. Lainovic had been questioned by the police following the killing of Arkan, an ally of President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia with links to organized crime whose real name was Zeljko Raznatovic, on Jan. 15 in Belgrade's Hotel Intercontinental.
Witnesses to the shooting were quoted by the Beta news agency as saying that they had heard gunfire and saw a young man in a red jacket running away from the scene.
Mr. Lainovic was a commander of the Serb Guard, a militia organized and financed during the war in Croatia by the Serbian Renewal Movement of the opposition leader Vuk Draskovic. He fought in Krajina, a region of Croatia where local Serbs created a renegade state in 1991.
Kosovo Albanians Close to Suspending Attacks
The Washington Post
By Peter Finn and Roberto Suro
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, March 21, 2000; Page A17
Under pressure from U.S. diplomats and peacekeeping troops, Kosovo Albanian militias are close to an agreement to suspend attacks against Belgrade security forces in Serbia, just beyond the U.S.-patrolled sector of Kosovo, according to U.S., NATO and Kosovo Albanian sources.
In exchange, the officials said, U.S. peacekeepers will agree to refrain from cracking down on ethnic Albanian fighters as forcefully as they did last Wednesday when more than 300 U.S. troops descended on five militia staging areas and arms caches, arresting nine alleged insurgents.
The NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo already has authority to disarm and disband any nascent quasi-military groups. The agreement under discussion would for the first time extend the peacekeepers' influence to ethnic Albanians who are operating beyond Kosovo's borders, hitting targets in other parts of Serbia and threatening the peace there. Kosovo is a province of Serbia, the dominant republic of Yugoslavia.
U.S. officials said they hope the agreement will produce additional goodwill gestures, such as the surrender of some arms by ethnic Albanians. Also, the insurgents would be required not to appear in uniform, end recruitment and training activities and halt the movement of arms between Kosovo and the rest of Serbia, sources said.
Last week's raids came after armed bands of ethnic Albanians stepped up attacks against Serbian police forces around the town of Presevo, just across the boundary between the U.S.-patrolled sector of Kosovo and the rest of Serbia. The insurgents are seeking to extend Kosovo's boundaries to include the Presevo Valley, which is in Serbia proper but is populated primarily by ethnic Albanians.
U.S. and NATO officials fear that the ethnic Albanian forays would give Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic an excuse to take military action in the Presevo area, which could draw U.S. forces into a new conflict.
U.S. and ethnic Albanian sources said they hope to have an agreement in place by Friday, the first anniversary of the start of NATO's 78-day air campaign against Yugoslavia that came in response to Yugoslavia's repression of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority. The campaign ended when Milosevic agreed to withdraw his security forces and to allow a NATO-led peacekeeping force to take administrative control of Kosovo.
To mark the anniversary, NATO Secretary General George Robertson and U.S. Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark, who led the NATO campaign last year, are to visit Kosovo. Plans for $1.2 billion in reconstruction aid for Kosovo are to be discussed at a conference of donor nations in Brussels.
"Clearly, it would be very beneficial to mark the anniversary with an announcement that dispels the fear Kosovo is in for a hot spring and that the Presevo Valley is about to blow up," said a senior NATO official.
To secure an accord, the United States is simultaneously holding talks with Hashim Thaqi, the former leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the disbanded ethnic Albanian paramilitary force; Ramush Hajradinaj, a former KLA commander; and leading ethnic Albanian figures from the Presevo Valley, U.S. and NATO sources said.
Thaqi and Hajradinaj reportedly are telling the insurgents and their sponsors in Kosovo that they need to suspend operations for tactical reasons so they are not perceived as aggressors. The potential agreement recognizes that the insurgents will likely resurface if Milosevic launches a major offensive in the valley.
"Milosevic has to be seen as the aggressor," said one ethnic Albanian source familiar with the discussions. He said the insurgents may try to keep their arms for "local defense" purposes but would have to retire the idea of forming a military force to "liberate" the Presevo Valley.
U.S. and NATO officials said peacekeeping troops would retain the right to seize arms in Kosovo, but that they would not pursue that goal with actions as aggressive as the raids last week if the ethnic Albanians suspend their activities. Moreover, if militia members turned in weapons voluntarily they would not face arrest, the officials said, but added that routine patrols and reconnaissance will intensify.
Just before last week's raids, State Department spokesman James P. Rubin met with ethnic Albanian leaders to warn them that continued activity in Presevo endangered international support for peacekeeping and reconstruction efforts in Kosovo. In parallel talks, U.S. officials began negotiations with local ethnic Albanian leaders on both sides of the border to seek an agreement to defuse the situation.
A senior figure in the former Kosovo Liberation Army familiar with the talks warned, however, that "this is the Balkans," and no agreement is final until it is sealed, and even then some of the highly factionalized ethnic Albanian forces may choose to ignore it.
In recent weeks, the village of Dobrosin, which lies in a valley below a U.S. military observation point on the Kosovo-Serbia border, has been used as a kind of boot camp by a militia group calling itself the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac, which is known locally by its Albanian initials, UCPMB.
According to Capt. Eric McFadden, commander of the observation post, new recruits rotate in and out of the village. U.S. forces have observed them undergoing what appears to be basic training, including land navigation techniques, drill and ceremony, and physical fitness. There have been a number of clashes between Serbian and UCPMB forces, leading to a handful of deaths. Ethnic Albanians also said Serbian forces have killed 10 civilians, mostly businessmen, since January.
At the entrance to Dobrosin, which lies in a buffer zone between NATO and Yugoslav forces, two uniformed ethnic Albanians, carrying automatic weapons, guard a dirt lane that leads to a house that acts as the group's headquarters. U.S forces have seen armed guerrillas in uniform and an hour later saw the same people in civilian clothes cross the border back into Kosovo. McFadden said they question insurgents for 15 or 20 minutes, but are otherwise powerless to hold them even though they have visual evidence of their involvement with the UCPMB.
One morning this week about a dozen armed and uniformed men could be seen in the village. Some wore mismatched uniforms while other, more senior guerrillas wore all black uniforms, carrying automatic weapons, sidearms and hand grenades. U.S. forces said they have seen no heavy weapons in the area.
Finn reported from Pristina, Yugoslavia, and Suro from Washington.
The Sunday Times : SAS is ordered to guard Britons in Montenegro
SAS troops have moved into Montenegro as western fears grow about the possible disintegration of what remains of Yugoslavia, writes Tom Walker.
The elite unit is preparing contingency plans for the removal of British nationals, and is learning the lie of the land in case there is a confrontation between forces loyal to pro-western President Milo Djukanovic and Slobodan Milosevic, his adversary in Belgrade.
Civil war in Montenegro, Serbia's tiny sister state in the Yugoslav federation, would almost certainly involve the West. Djukanovic has been told not to provoke the Yugoslav president. However, Madeleine Albright, the American secretary of state, has warned Belgrade that Nato would back Djukanovic in any showdown.
As Britain and America prepare the largest naval exercise since Nato's air strikes against the former Yugoslavia last year, Milosevic has tightened the economic blockade around Montenegro. The action is apparently intended to discourage Djukanovic from going for independence.
Military sources said it was "entirely natural" in such circumstances that the SAS would be relaying intelligence back to Britain. They added that four SAS officers entered Montenegro two weeks ago.
One diplomat said the sabre-rattling in the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, along with the SAS presence in Montenegro, showed that western governments favoured pre-emptive action to avoid another conflict in the Balkans.
The Sunday Times : Filthy UK-aid hospital puts lives at risk
A HOSPITAL in Kosovo funded with British aid money has been accused of appalling standards of hygiene. The 2,000-bed University hospital in Pristina has almost no working showers, no hot water and lavatories that are blocked or overflowing, though millions of pounds have been spent on sophisticated technology.
Boxes of rubbish litter some stairs and corridors, a dangerous source of infection for patients because many contain blood-contaminated items such as used syringes.
In one of the most unhygienic wards lies Nagjije Bylykbashi, a 16-year-old girl suffering from leukaemia. Her pain-racked body is rigid. She is beyond hope and will be dead within a few days. The terrible hygiene in her part of the hospital is comparable with that of the overcrowded refugee camp where she endured the Kosovo war.
The hospital is the apex of health care in Kosovo. The Department for International Development (DfID) arrived eight months ago when the war ended to take over its administration and to fund supplies.
Tony Redmond, a retired National Health Service accident and emergency specialist, was appointed interim medical director. A team of British medical experts in paediatrics, surgery, medicine, obstetrics and gynaecology provide the administrative core.
DfID has spent £15m on health projects in Kosovo. Much of it has been directed at the hospital. The team is now preparing to move out, leaving the hospital in the control of ethnic Albanian doctors.
Redmond, who was appointed by the United Nations, acknowledged last week that there was a hygiene problem. He said he had provided cleaning equipment and cleaners to Albanian departmental heads. It was their responsibility to keep their departments clean, he said.
However, a senior Albanian member of the medical staff said: "We are doctors, not engineers and we do not have a budget to repair the bathrooms. It is the responsibility of the hospital administration to make such facilities work. Then we could keep them clean."
For all the British input, many parts of the hospital are a monument to indifference and neglect. In one room last week I saw three women's breasts from mastectomies that had been stored for days in empty plastic Coca-Cola bottles, which had been cut in two and filled with formaldehyde while they waited to go to pathology.
The lack of hygiene was the biggest complaint I heard from patients and Albanian staff. One told me of a cancer patient, a young man, who had died in his bed, smeared with his own excrement.
Others said it was impossible to wash babies in the paediatric unit except by pouring a bottle of water over them: the taps were broken and the basins filled with rubbish. Some patients even said they regularly discharged themselves to go home and wash, then returned to continue their treatment.
Albanian staff say they cannot accept that lack of money explains the wretched conditions.
This month more than £1.2m worth of high-technology equipment for the gynaecology, obstetrics and neonatal department began arriving. To many it did not seem to make much sense when patients in those departments could not wash themselves or their babies.
Redmond said running the hospital had been the toughest job of a career that had also taken him to Bosnia.
"When I arrived at the end of June the grass was waist high outside, nothing had been done, the dirt and filth were ingrained everywhere," he said. "It was appalling. There were liquefied corpses in the mortuary. We had to get rid of the packs of wild dogs roaming the grounds eating amputated limbs."
He said the Serbs had wrecked the place as they left, plundered it of equipment and dumped the contents of the hospital pharmacy down the sewerage system.
Meanwhile, Bylykbashi stares out at the world through eyes that are swollen as her retinas bleed. Her mother and her young husband are around her bed. The room is often filled with the sound of them weeping.
The kindest solution, everyone agrees, would be for her to be allowed to die free of pain and in dignity.
She cannot have dignity in a hospital whose ancient squat toilets are broken. She often screams in agony, as she did on Friday when I saw her, because morphine that could have alleviated her pain was locked in a pharmacy downstairs, for which nobody seemed to have a key.
A day or two ago she felt feminine and well enough to varnish her nails. Yesterday, her fists clenched, her face contorted by spasms, she waited bravely for the end.
Kosovo rebuilds among ruins of the war that never ends
IN THE muddy streets of Pustasel, the villagers have little to celebrate as Nato marks the first anniversary of the start of its war in Kosovo. People are rebuilding, but it is hard to contemplate the aftermath of the campaign that gave ethnic Albanians freedom from Serbian rule without thinking back to the horror of the conflict, writes Jon Swain.
A year ago, as the warplanes of the world's most powerful military alliance streaked overhead, Serbian forces rounded up 106 men in a field at Pustasel and murdered them. The killers put out some of their eyes and cut off their ears. The youngest was a boy of 14 and the oldest was nearly 90. One of their victims was Fadil Krasniqi, a father of eight.
His wife, Nakije, was pregnant with their ninth child when he died. Her gaunt face looks out of the doorway of their shattered home in utter despair. "My mother has not spoken much since that day," said Fatmire, her eldest daughter.
Nakije, 42, who is having to cope with five daughters and four sons on her own, is still stricken with grief and scarcely comes out of her house. She has named her youngest, born six months ago, Fadil in memory of her murdered husband.
Next door, in a house with a broken roof, Shelqi Krasniqi is struggling to bring up three boys and seven girls. Her husband was also killed. "We want to rebuild our lives, but how can we?" she said. The echoes and images of the massacre replay constantly in her head.
Many of the men are buried in the centre of the village, an enduring reminder of the tragedy. Some were found on a rubbish dump miles away.
But others are still missing and the villagers plead tearfully to be told what has happened to their menfolk. Until they know the truth, there is a vain hope the men might be in Serbia, where hundreds of Albanians are still held in jail.
Kosovo is the focus of one of the largest humanitarian relief efforts per capita in recent history. The UN has brought in 60,000 home-repair kits, which have given shelter to an estimated 500,000 people.
The World Food Programme fed the entire population for a while and is still helping 900,000, about half of it. Some 60,000 stoves have been provided and 250,000 items of children's clothing.
But some vulnerable families seem to have fallen through the aid net, receiving no more than a few German marks a month and some flour and oil. "This is no life. This is like death," said one woman. "But we have to carry on for the children."
Many of the houses in Pustasel were burnt by the Serbs or badly damaged. Serving ice cream and soft drinks in the only shop, Verhan Krasniqi, 59, one of 13 survivors of the massacre, said the village had yet to come to terms with its grief.
"Forty of my friends are buried there," he said, gesturing towards their graves. "It is very hard for me to go outside to see them every day."
He nevertheless thought the sacrifice had been worthwhile, and pointed to children at a playground set up in the field where his friends were slaughtered as a sign of life renewed.
If the peace has been hard for the widows of Pustasel, it has been better for Imer Bakar. I last saw him a year ago, a gaunt figure hiding in the hills of northern Kosovo from the Serbs, who had driven him out of his village, Studenica, set it on fire and killed 35 people, including eight women they stuffed down a well.
Bakar has rebuilt his house and has recovered one of his three cows. He said that, without Nato, he could never have expected to return.
At Glina, where 101 men are still missing after a Serbian round-up, 22-year-old Hissene Krasniqi recognises that he is one of the luckiest to be alive. A year ago he was lined up and shot with 15 others. Four bullets hit him in the back, arms and legs. But when the executioners had left, he crawled out from the pile of corpses. He now wants to be a footballer.
International aid workers marvel at the resilience and enterprise of people who, a year ago, were refugees fleeing over the mountains to escape the forces of Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav president.
But as the struggle to rebuild lives goes on, another conflict has erupted, one that Nato and the UN do not have the means or stomach to fight. To do so would mean confronting members of the disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).
The KLA, led by Hashim Thaci, has been the predominant political beneficiary of the Nato occupation. The UN police picked up Thaci's brother in a nightclub recently with an illegal weapon, raided his apartment and found nearly DM1m under the bed. The family is allegedly deeply involved in petrol smuggling.
While Kosovo has no judicial system worthy of the name and virtually no police, the province has become a centre of criminality often linked to former members of the rebel group. There are rarely any witnesses, even to attacks in public.
About 400 Serbs have been murdered, tens of thousands have left and many of those left are living under siege or under Nato guard. Drug-dealing, prostitution and smuggling are rampant. The old criminal links between the Serbs and Albanians have been revived. Kosovo is Europe's gritty new hotbed of intrigue.
Underworld Albanian gangs and some Serbian war criminals rub shoulders even as western businessmen vie for a slice of post-war Kosovo's economic pie, and off-duty Nato soldiers try their luck with the girls in the pavement cafes.
"Business is business and the Kosovar Albanians are good business people, regardless of their hatred for us," said Dragan Kurvic, a paramilitary who served with the notorious Arkan, the warlord murdered recently in Belgrade.
Kurvic has teamed up with several powerful KLA members to smuggle scores of girls recruited from Moldova and the Ukraine into Kosovo to work in brothels that have sprung up since Nato's occupation.
In a rare interview given in Montenegro last week, the powerfully built paramilitary said that, in the past three months, he had spent 10 days in Kosovo organising shipments of girls.
His Kosovar Albanian contact had given him a "besa", or unbreakable promise, that he would be untouched. Kurvic named two former KLA members, a Czech, an Italian and two American soldiers who he said were involved in the prostitution racket.
"We are selling the girls to the Albanians for DM1,500 (£470) to DM4,500 each," he said. "First the Albanians tell me how many girls they need and for which military area. The Italians like tall and blonde girls, so I get them Ukranian and Russian girls. The Russian soldiers like dark girls. I assign Bulgarian and Moldovan girls to the Russians."
The UN police force in Kosovo, short on manpower, is aware of the sordid trade but does not regard it as a priority. "We hear the stories but we have no facts," said one officer in Pristina. "It is very dangerous. I want to finish my tour here and go home alive."
Trying to administer the still-traumatised and upended territory has proved harder and more complex than fighting the war a year ago. "The international community is bound to fail in Kosovo if it is not prepared to invest in the peace," a western diplomat said.
In Pustasel they say the future cannot be worse than the past. But diplomats warn that Kosovo may be sliding towards warlordism.
"There is one overriding philosophy - make what you can out of it as fast as you can," said one. "Imagine a spot of water and lots of crocodiles - that is what Kosovo is like today."
The Observer : US faces war with ex-KLA
Pentagon braced for bloodshed after raids on guerrillas
Ed Vulliamy in New York and Helena Smith in Pristina
US troops should prepare for battle with the former soldiers of the Kosovo Liberation Army, officials in Washington are warning.
A year after Nato launched a bombing campaign to rescue the KLA, Pentagon commanders have formally alerted the US military that it expects to have to engage its former allies 'this spring'.
This comes as senior officials in the Defence Department continue to fight plans to send further reinforcements into what many consider a potential war zone.
The grim prognosis for the restive province has emerged days before the first anniversary of Nato's bombing raids against Yugoslavia after Slobodan Milosevic's refusal to negotiate over Kosovo.
It arises amid increasing tension between Washington and Nato commanders in Brussels over the peacekeeping operation in Kosovo.
US military officials and Western diplomats based in Pristina, Kosovo's edgy capital, say there is evidence that Albanian insurgents are bent on stirring trouble in southern Serbia, on the province's eastern boundary. They say they must be stopped now if bloodshed across the entire region is to be averted - not least in Macedonia, where conflict could easily trigger a much wider conflagration.
Diplomatic sources in Pristina warn that the extremists, who call themselves the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac (UCPMB) - named after the three Albanian-inhabited towns in southern Serbia's Presevo valley - should expect more US raids on strongholds of ethnic Albanian guerrillas of the sort conducted last week.
Weapons, ammunition and a supply cache were seized in the raids, aimed at stopping guerrillas from using Kosovo's US-controlled sector as a launching pad for cross-border strikes on Serbia. Analysts believe some 800 men have enrolled with the well-armed UCPMB, formed to 'protect' an estimated 70,000 Albanians living in Serbia within 15 kilometres of the Kosovo border.
'There is scope for great trouble. The next three months will be crucial in determining whether Kosovo is going to be a short-term success or a millstone around the neck of the international community,' said one European Union diplomat. 'We should expect to see more operations by US troops against guerrilla camps in the coming weeks. Frankly Nato is very frustrated that it can't go into Presevo and ensure the peace, that all it can do is seal the border.'
Talking to The Observer on Friday, a Pentagon official said the 'personal security' of US troops would be among 'elements that need looking at' before any manpower boost. The official said the Defence Department is operating on the premise that 'an armed conflict situation with the KLA is much more likely now than has been the case'. One official just returned from Kosovo told US Defence Secretary William Cohen on Wednesday that the intervention was at a 'decisive moment' and back at 'ground zero' a year after it began.
The situation of US troops was 'precarious', said the official. 'This has got to cease and desist, and if not, ultimately it is going to lead to confrontation between ethnic Albanians and K-For.'
Other officials told the New York Times that 'troops could not keep the peace between Serbs and Albanians within Kosovo and seal Kosovo's borders'. They added that last week's raid by the US military on KLA command posts and arms caches was a 'first step' to rein in the Kosovo Albanians. 'This was the first time,' said one official, 'that we went after something like an organised military infrastructure as opposed to searching houses where we suspected someone was holding a rifle or two.'
'There is an old American saying that "when the wood creaks, out come the freaks", but there is no way we are going to tolerate any trouble this spring,' said a US officer. 'We are very serious.'
In Washington, however, the tough Pentagon talk is at odds with the cautious optimism of James Rubin, the US Under-Secretary of State who returned from Kosovo to say: 'We do not believe we are drifting towards a conflict with Kosovo Albanian insurgents.' Rubin believed there was a 'deep reservoir of respect, thanks and goodwill towards the United States' among ethnic Albanians.
Rubin did, however, qualify his words with a warning that 'it would be a grave mistake to challenge American troops'.
A senior Pentagon officer countered: 'We have now fired the first shot at the Albanian insurgents and insurgents have a tendency to carry a grudge. If they come to see us as an enemy then [the raid] will be seen as a turning point.
The Independent : Revival hopes are dashed by Milosevic
A year after Nato's blitz began, his hold on power still blights economies across the Balkans
By Stephen Castle in Skopje, Macedonia
19 March 2000
He lost the war, surrendered Kosovo and lives the life of an international pariah, but almost one year after Nato's bombing blitz began there is little doubt who remains the key political figure in the Balkans. Despite continued diplomatic and economic isolation, President Slobodan Milosevic still pulls many of the strings in the region.
Even his adversaries admit it. Returning from a visit to the region, Chris Patten, European Commissioner for Foreign Affairs, was in realistic mood as he gave his impressions of five days of travel through south-eastern Europe. One of the things that had struck him most was, he said, "the extent to which Milosevic is a malign influence from one end of the region to the other".
That fact is seen most starkly in Kosovo where Serbia's abilities to stoke ethnic tension in the divided northern city of Mitrovica became apparent during the past month. But Mr Milosevic's influence extends to the economic domain, even in the territory he was forced to abandon to the occupying forces of Nato. For example, EU experts in Pristina estimate that around 20 per cent of Kosovo's faltering electricity supply comes from the Yugoslav grid. Belgrade's historical role as the regional electricity network nexus means it can pull the plug on Kosovo, although – so far – that has happened only once, and briefly, through technical error.
But if Kosovo is the front line with Belgrade, the Milosevic factor applies much more widely throughout the region. After the Nato campaign the allies hoped his regime would be swept away, as demonstrations took hold. That hope has evaporated as Mr Milosevic's opponents have bickered and fallen victim to intimidation.
So the strategy has switched, with the West now devoting more of its efforts to promoting reconciliation and economic prosperity in neighbouring countries. The scope for progress varies and Bosnia-Herzegovina remains scarred by the ethnic meltdown of the 1990s and economically dependent on international aid. But the idea is to foster trade between countries within the region and to use positive examples – nations with pro-market, reforming governments such as Macedonia and Croatia –- as what Mr Patten calls "a beacon" to the others. In this way Serbia will be ringed with democratic, tolerant and multi-ethnic states boasting rising living standards and providing an invitation to the Serbs to throw off their yoke.
But can it work? To the south of Serbia, Slav-dominated Macedonia is the West's showcase success story, a country which, 10 days ago, became the first Balkan nation to sign a Stabilisation and Association Agreement with Brussels, bringing with it the promise of a free trade relationship with the EU.
But even here the policy has its limitations, imposed by that man in Belgrade. In the Macedonian capital, Skopje, the office of the president lies at one end of a grand, ante-chamber of Soviet-style proportions. Inside Boris Trajkovski explains how Macedonia's development has been stunted by the war which cut its links with Yugoslavia, traditionally accounting for 60 per cent of trade. Worse, when the conflict erupted last year Western investors fled, never to return. The mere threat of more instability in the region deters outside investment and Mr Trajkovski concedes that renewed ethnic unrest in southern Serbia could easily spill over into his territory.
Even the EU's ambition to promote trade between countries in the region looks rather lame. Albania has backed away from a free trade agreement and, as Mr Trajkovski put it "only Greece and Bulgaria are real partners".
In Montenegro, which remains technically part of Yugoslavia, the situation is worse still. The government in Podgorica has tried hard to follow the Western route, even though the country traditionally relies on Serbia for 60 per cent of its food. The opening of Montenegro's border with Albania produced a swift response from Belgrade, which placed police check-points on all routes between Serbia and Montenegro, effectively blocking imports.
Montenegro has a spectacular coastline but Mr Milosevic holds the key to the success of the country's tourist industry, a traditional big earner but vulnerable to instability. As the country's Prime Minister, Filip Vujanovic, put it, "by producing tension he prevents tourism and reduces the interest of foreign investors". As part of Yugoslavia (albeit a stubbornly independent one) Montenegro's ability to attract support from the outside world is compromised. Most lenders are forbidden by their own rules from advancing cash to anything but a sovereign state. Montenegro has been discouraged by the West from declaring independence for fear that this would give Belgrade a pretext to invade.
None of which suggests that President Milosevic's position is unassailable or that the West's strategy is wrong. But it does point to the fact that, as long as he stays in office, President Milosevic will be an obstacle to progress.
An indicted war criminal, the Yugoslav president must calculate that his best way of foiling his adversaries is through the de-stabilising use of violence or the threat of it. The result, says President Trajkovski, is a "domino" effect. "As long as Milosevic is in charge in Serbia, there will be no stability in the region".
Yugoslav Opposition Leader in Russian TV Interview
The New York Times
By Reuters
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Serb opposition politician Zoran Djindjic said in a Russian television interview broadcast Friday that opponents of President Slobodan Milosevic would proceed with mass protests later this month.
``We are indeed starting a serious civil campaign to secure new elections and change in Serbia. The authorities are not allowing the necessary changes to go ahead,'' Djinjic said in an interview broadcast on ORT public television.
``We are one of the most isolated countries in the world. Our government cannot rule the territory it has...We want faster change and we can help speed it up with protests and demonstrations.''
ORT said the interview, with Djindjic speaking by mobile telephone from Belgrade, had been conducted several days ago.
It said Yugoslav authorities had tried to prevent the tape from being taken out of the country and that it could not reveal how and through whom the video material had reached Moscow.
Russian authorities have publicly supported Yugoslavia and defended Belgrade during the 11-week-long NATO air campaign against Yugoslav targets last year.
Russia's lower house of parliament earlier in the day agreed to lobby the government to take a more active stand in helping Yugoslavia recover from the bombings.
Though Moscow contributed more than 3,000 peacekeepers to the NATO-led KFOR operation in Kosovo, it has expressed anger at KFOR's alleged failure to protect Kosovo's Serb minority from attacks by majority ethnic Albanians.
Djindjic's interview was broadcast as Serbian opposition politicians debated what action to take against the Belgrade government's shutdown of four local radio stations and three television channels in the past 10 days. Leaders are due to meet next week to decide on concrete days for planned protests.
Djindjic, leader of the Democratic Party, said the opposition was opposed to resorting to violence of any sort. ''As the opposition, we are used to repression, but in the interests of the country we reject violence,'' he told ORT.
``We believe that anyone coming to power should do so peacefully and not engage in reprisals. If we are given the chance to take power, we believe we will be supported by the army and police and no blood will be spilled on the streets.''
Albanian lawyer is beaten in Belgrade
The Guardian
Guardian staff and agencies
An ethnic Albanian lawyer and his wife were brutally beaten in their flat in the Yugoslav capital Belgrade by four masked intruders, a humanitarian worker said yesterday.
Husnija Bitici, who defends Albanians held in Serbian jails, and his wife were attacked at their Belgrade home late on Thursday, said Natasa Kandic, head of the locally-based Humanitarian Law Fund. Mr Bitici's wife let the men in when they said they were neighbours.
Mr Bitici sustained serious head injuries and was operated on overnight, but doctors said his life was not in danger. His wife, with lesser injuries, is in intensive care.
Ms Kandic, who went to the Bitici flat as soon as she heard of the incident, said that there was blood all over the room and even human tissue on the floor.
Mr Bitici defended ethnic Albanians from Kosovo who were detained in Serbia, mostly on charges of terrorism or conspiracy against the state.
Most of them were arrested between March and June 1999, during Nato's air campaign over Yugoslavia's repression of the ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo.
Ms Kandic said that Mr Bitici had been threatened by some Serb lawyers from Kosovo in an effort to stop him accusing them of taking huge bribes from the families of ethnic Albanian prisoners to secure their release.
Mr Bitici also defended a prominent Kosovo Albanian poet and humanitarian worker, Flora Brovina, who was sentenced to 12 years in prison last December, and one of five ethnic Albanian students in Belgrade who were charged with terrorism.
Ms Kandic's organisation estimates that 1,400 ethnic Albanians are still being held in Serbian jails.
Why devoted couple Slobo and Mira prefer to stay in
The Independent
By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
18 March 2000
"My husband is a perfect man... I love him because he loves me... Everything that hurt me in the past, hurt less when I was with him," Mira Markovic, wife of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, wrote in one of the more syrupy of her regular outpourings in a women's magazine in Serbia.
A year after the country they run was brought to its knees by Nato bombing, President Milosevic and his wife must rank as one of the most reclusive first couples in the world.
They never walk the streets of Belgrade, go to the theatreor movies. Former associates say that they "feel at their best when they are together or in a close circle of few dearest friends". The "friends"are usually chosen by Ms Markovic, who says that "all the others would let him down, except for those I choose for him".
The Milosevics' lifestyle reflects both their paranoia and their provincialism. The Serbian public never learned where the pair moved to after their residence in the salubrious Dedinje suburb of Belgrade was hit by Nato rockets last April. People who fell from their grace say that neither of them ever showed much interest in cosmopolitan Belgrade, although they moved to the capital in their student days in the early Sixties.
In return, Belgrade has little sympathy for them. Mira's shapeless, dark suits and her old-fashioned hair style are the butt of jokes. Malicious tongues say that the Italian surgeons who performed a face-lift and liposuction on Ms Markovic should be struck off.
Slobo and Mira were married 35 years ago, joined not only in matrimony but in the burning ambition of provincial communist cadres. Back in 1968, when she saw a portrait of then Yugoslav President Tito in a shop window in the Adriatic town of Zadar, Mira Markovic told a friend: "One day, Slobo's picture will be placed like this." Nowadays the unscrupulous rule of Yugoslavia's first couple is felt in all walks of life. In the last 10 years, Mr Milosevic has led the country into wars, economic collapse and international isolation. Ms Markovic's Yugoslav Left (Jul) party controls the remaining financial resources with an iron grip.
Both Slobo and Mira come from the provincial Serbian town of Pozarevac, 85 kilometres east of Belgrade. High-school sweethearts, both had isolated and unhappy childhoods, probably the basis for their strong devotion to each other. Pozarevac remains the only town they are attached to. Closest friends are invited there for weekends.
Belgraders sometimes compare the couple to the former Romanian dictator and his wife, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu. Many predict that their rulemight end in the "Romanian scenario" – a chaotic uprising of a people who could stomach them no longer.
G.I.'s in Kosovo Hold 9 Suspected Anti-Serb Rebels
The New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL
STUBLINA, Kosovo, March 16 -- American peacekeeping troops were holding nine men in detention today,
suspected of involvement in an insurgency across the border against the Serbian police.
The men were detained on Wednesday during the peacekeepers' raids on ethnic Albanian villages and strongholds along Kosovo's border with Serbia proper. Helicopters and about 350 infantry soldiers took part in the operation, which was reported to have gone smoothly, with no resistance by residents and no casualties.
The troops discovered 22 crates of ammunition and weapons, as well as uniforms and equipment for a sizable number of guerrillas in several locations.
The raids followed an intensive diplomatic effort by American officials to warn Kosovo Albanians against stirring up trouble in the border region and provoking a conflict with Serbian forces that could spill back into Kosovo itself.
The State Department spokesman, James P. Rubin, met this week with former Kosovo guerrilla leaders and political leaders from both Kosovo and the Presevo region in Serbia, telling them that the West would not come to their aid if violence escalated. Last year, NATO waged a 78-day bombing campaign to force Serbian forces out of Kosovo to end the repression of ethnic Albanians there.
Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and the NATO Supreme Commander, Gen. Wesley K. Clark, have also warned Albanians not to start an insurgency in southern Serbia, home to some 70,000 Albanians. The raids on Wednesday were clearly intended to reinforce that message and break up the incipient guerrilla network.
People in this border village, one of those that was searched extensively on Wednesday, took the treatment fairly meekly. They complained only of being made to stand out in the cold all day while the troops went through their houses and farm buildings. There were no complaints of rough treatment or about the purpose of the operation itself.
"It is their duty to check for weapons," said Rahman Osmani, 60, whose house was searched while his family was made to stand in the field. "We have nothing against that."
Only one villager, Zeqir Zeqiri, 36, was detained when a machine gun was found in a storeroom in the family compound. His brother said the weapon belonged to a cousin who did not live in the village.
Some Albanians have vowed to fight to defend Albanian villages in southern Serbia, and have until now been moving relatively freely across the long, porous border. Peacekeeping troops search cars and people moving along the main roads, but insurgents can also pass easily through the wooded hills.
Recently, armed guerrillas appeared in the village of Dobrosin, just 500 yards into Serbia from an American checkpoint on the border and close to Stublina. Wednesday's raids were aimed to cut off the guerrillas' supply and staging posts.
United States officials fear that an insurgency in the border region would give the Serbian police reason to attack the Albanians in Serbia, and start a conflict that could draw in NATO-led peacekeepers. Increased instability on the border and a flood of refugees into Kosovo would also aggravate the already volatile situation in the province.
Wednesday's haul of weapons and equipment provided evidence that the handful of guerrillas seen in Dobrosin have a larger backup organization. All raided sites were within a mile of the Serbian border. American military officials said that in addition to the crates of ammunition, they had found more than 200 uniforms, mortar tubes, hand grenades, a few rifles, mines, rucksacks, field rations, medical supplies, sleeping bags, explosives and fuses.
One location was on a remote hill top, where several buildings were protected by a minefield and appeared to be a staging post for fighters, an American military spokeswoman said. Four men were caught while trying to get away as troops closed in on the area.
The nine detained men are being held at the Camp Bondsteel, an American base in eastern Kosovo, and will appear before a magistrate who will decide whether they should stand trial, the spokeswoman said.
Macedonia Prepares
ABCNEWS
S K O P J E, Macedonia, March 16 - Macedonia is bracing for yet another influx of ethnic Albanian refugees from Serbia.
In Macedonia and Kosovo, which border Serbia to the south, preparations have been made to receive a flood of up to 80,000 ethnic Albanian refugees from Serbia, within the next few weeks if necessary, according to security and aid officials in the region.
Officials in Macedonia, a landlocked country that borders Serbia and Kosovo, believe a new conflict between Serbs and Albanians in Serbia near Kosovo will explode very soon, resulting in a new exodus.
But this time, unlike during the exodus hundreds of thousands during the Kosovo conflict, they plan to be prepared.
In case they're needed, the vital ingredients of refugee camps - tents, blankets, water purification plants, generators and latrines - have already been assembled, ready for immediate use.
High-Level Visits
Macedonia did its reputation no good last year when the world saw on TV tens of thousands of refugees stranded on its borders for days in the pouring rain, deprived of food and medical aid.
International organizations are working overtime to ensure this does not happen again.
Austria's Foreign Minister Benita Ferrero-Waldner, current chair of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, visited Macedonia on Monday, the latest in a series of prominent guests including U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
"We have to support Macedonia, a country which is struggling for stability in fragile surroundings, at different levels and in different ways," Ferrero-Waldner said after meetings with representatives of all the government and opposition parties.
Those ways include OSCE hands-on help to defuse potentially explosive ethnic problems, encouraging multilingual higher education, and making sure Macedonia's shattered economy gets help.
Early Warning, Early Help
The OSCE has also been working hard to get nations to promise help if Macedonia is confronted with another influx.
"The Macedonians learned their lesson last time. This time they will be prepared," said Robin Seaword, a British Foreign Office specialist who is deputy head of the Skopje mission.
An OSCE team is under a mandate from the organization to keep an eye on all of Macedonia's borders - to Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania and Kosovo - and warn when trouble threatens. Only eight strong, the international team is staffed by experts, some with intelligence backgrounds, delegated by their countries.
The Macedonian government is also keeping a close watch on the Serb border.
And close by, a new branch of fighters from what used to be the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army, the UCPMB, is attacking Serb police and military around two small Serb towns, Medveda and Bujanovic, mainly populated by ethnic Albanians. The attacks follow months of harassment by Serb police.
NATO's KFOR mission, confined by its mandate inside Kosovo, is also watching closely - convinced Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic will clamp down on the region soon, driving ethnic Albanians out.
"Some of them have already moved their families to Macedonia. That's a bad sign," said a visiting Irish military specialist from Kosovo who came in for the talks with the OSCE and the Macedonian government.
Delicate Ethnic Balance
Macedonia's delicate ethnic balance - around two-thirds Macedonian, one-third ethnic Albanian - makes the government extremely wary of taking in any more ethnic Albanians. Last time, it allowed them in from Kosovo only after third countries, including Britain, pledged to take some of them off their hands.
A corridor has been set up to sluice the refugees as quickly as possible through Macedonia to either Albania or Kosovo.
For that reason, the OSCE has about 20,000 tents prepared, figuring that even if there are four times that many refugees, they will be quickly moved elsewhere. Food, say experts, can be moved in quickly, as needed.
Macedonia wants to avoid too many refugees staying in their country, although they know that they cannot stop family members joining extended clans. Poor as they are, Macedonia's ethnic Albanians have a higher standard of living than those in Kosovo or Albania itself.
Currently, of the hundreds of thousands who fled to Macedonia last year, there are only around 13,000 left. They are in temporary housing, some staying with families.
The camps are gone - but they could be full again soon.
How the SAS was going to assassinate Milosevic
The Independent
By Paul Lashmar
17 March 2000
British security agents plotted to assassinate Yugoslavia's President, Slobodan Milosevic, in the early Nineties using an SAS hit squad, the intelligence historian Stephen Dorrill claims.
Mr Dorrill says that a secret MI6 file explored three options in which the Serbian leader could be killed during the Bosnian war. His book quotes claims by a former MI6 officer, who worked in the Balkans in the early Nineties, that an ambitious colleague who was responsible for developing and targeting operations in the Balkans had produced the file.
"It was approximately two pages long, and had a yellow card attached to it which signified that it was an accountable document rather than a draft proposal," the unnamed source claims. "It was entitled 'The need to assassinate President Milosevic of Serbia', and was distributed to senior MI6 officers, including the head of Balkan operations, the controller of East European operations, the security officer responsible for eastern European operations and the service's SAS liaison officer.
"The targeting officer justified the assassinating of Milosevic on the grounds that the 'Butcher of Belgrade' was supplying weapons to [Radovan] Karadzic, who was wanted for war crimes, including genocide," says the source.
Mr Dorrill claims in his book that United States and French intelligence agencies were considering assassinating Karadzic. Three scenarios were suggested by MI6. The first was to train a Serbian paramilitary opposition group to carry out the attack. This, the targeting officer argued, had the advantage of deniability but the disadvantage that control of the operation would be difficult and the chance of success low.
The second plan was to use the small cell of SAS/SBS personnel which conducts operations exclusively for MI6 and MI5. This team would kill Mr Milosevic with a bomb or sniper's bullet. The targeting officer thought that this would be the most reliable option, but would be impossible to deny if it went wrong.
The third plot was to kill Mr Milosevic in a staged road accident. In the end, no action was taken by MI6.
Nato fears Kosovo flare-up
The Times
BY RICHARD BEESTON, DIPLOMATIC EDITOR
BRITAIN and the United States fear a "hot spring" in Kosovo this year, with the threat that Nato forces will be sucked into a new round of fighting between Albanian guerrillas and Serb military.
The area of greatest danger is the Presevo valley, called "Eastern Kosovo" by some because of its large ethnic Albanian population estimated at 70,000. A new guerrilla force - the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medveda and Bujanovac, known as the UCPMB - has begun deploying in the area, drawing on former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army and their weaponry.
While the offensive was at first dismissed as the action of a few extremists, the US military is convinced that the force represents a serious threat to Kosovo's stability. A senior Pentagon official was quoted in the American press as saying: "This has got to cease and desist and, if not, ultimately it is going to lead to confrontation between the Albanians and Kfor."
There are suspicions that the ethnic Albanian fighters were sent into action by senior figures in the KLA for two reasons. First, the area could become a useful territorial bargaining chip to offset the loss of the area of Kosovo north of the city of Mitrovica, where some 50,000 Serbs loyal to Belgrade are concentrated. Second, by flexing their muscles on Belgrade's ground, the Kosovo Albanians hope to provoke a military response from the Serbs and ultimately a Nato intervention.
The authorities in Belgrade have already sent troops to the area, supposedly for regular spring exercises. The build-up has persuaded some 15,000 Albanian civilians to flee.
A senior British source said yesterday that Nato was determined to prevent further fragmentation and would not just "sit on its hands" if fresh atrocities were committed.
A senior US commander echoed the warning, saying that, while Nato did not have a mandate outside Kosovo, it would not simply stand by if President Milosevic allowed his forces to go on the rampage. He predicted that the Serb leader was probably planning an unpleasant surprise for Kfor to coincide with the anniversary of the air campaign against Yugoslavia which began on March 24 last year.
As French-led forces struggle to maintain order in Mitrovica, and other troops are used to protect the pockets of Serbs elsewhere in Kosovo, the Nato forces in the east could be too thinly spread on the ground to prevent an escalation. Kfor currently has some 37,000 troops in Kosovo, with 1,000 reinforcements on their way.
But the vulnerable eastern sector, which includes a rugged administrative border that stretches for more than 100 miles, is patrolled by fewer than 6,000 US soldiers. To make matters worse, under last year's agreement on Kosovo, neither Kfor nor the Serbs can deploy in a three-mile-wide strip along the division.
The Pentagon estimates it would need three times as many soldiers to patrol the area properly, but further deployment of US troops is unlikely because of opposition in Washington to putting its soldiers' lives at risk.
"We're going to have to get through a long hot period in Kosovo," said a Nato officer. "But we are determined to stay there as long as necessary to see peace restored."
Crime initiative: Britain is to send 20 police and Customs officers to Kosovo to establish a criminal intelligence unit aimed at combating the powerful regional mafia. Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, said: "Without the rule of law and a firm signal of intent from the international community, we will not be able to put Kosovo back on its feet."
Evils of Milosevic beat psychiatrists
BY MICHAEL EVANS DEFENCE EDITOR
NATO hired psychiatrists to fathom the mind of President Milosevic during last year's Kosovo crisis but were unable to do it, General Sir Charles Guthrie, the Chief of the Defence Staff, said yesterday.
The admission came during a meeting of the Commons Defence Committee when General Guthrie, attended by Kevin Tebbit, the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence, and Air Marshal Sir John Day, revealed some of the lessons learnt from the 78-day air raid campaign. General Guthrie told the MPs: "It was very difficult to get into the mind of Milosevic. I don't think anyone foresaw the brutality of the man." The MPs appeared to be aghast at this, in view of Belgrade's wars in Croatia and Bosnia. But Mr Tebbit said that the Yugoslav leader had been "relatively responsible" in seeking a peace deal in Bosnia - signed in Dayton, Ohio, in 1995, and the MoD had been surprised by his ethnic cleansing atrocities in Kosovo. General Guthrie added: "We didn't have to bomb Belgrade to achieve Dayton."
Mr Tebbit said that Nato had not fully anticipated the bad weather which had hampered its raids, or that laser-guided bombs used by the RAF would be ineffective through thick cloud. General Guthrie added that Tony Blair had been "within a month" of mobilising reserve troops for a forced entry of Kosovo when Mr Milosevic had conceded to Nato's demands last June.
French peace-keepers are stoned by Serb crowds in new clashes at Mitrovica bridge
By Christian Jennings in Mitrovica
The Independent
Nato Peace-keepers came under a hail of stones, rocks and bricks from hardline Serbs yesterday as they mounted an operation to break the deadlock in the racially divided city of Mitrovica.
French soldiers and policemen fired dozens of rounds of tear-gas as well as stun-grenades at an estimated 500 Serbs who had gathered to protest against French moves to block Serb access to an ethnically mixed area of Mitrovica known as Little Bosnia. At least six Serbs were injured, two seriously, as well as one French soldier and two journalists, one British and one German.
The operation began at 6am, when 250 French troops, accompanied by Italian and French police, stormed over the main eastern bridge in Mitrovica in armoured vehicles. Four "bridgekeepers" – as the unofficial Serbian security network in northern Mitrovica is known – were removed peaceably from their positions by the French, who then erected barbed-wire barricades outside Little Bosnia.
The Serbian response was not slow in coming. Led by a wave of women hurling stones and bricks, some carrying iron bars, a mob stormed the French troops, who responded by firing tear-gas and stun-grenades into the crowd.
"I will not let my children be used as targets," screamed one Serbian woman, while another claimed Nato peacekeepers had been deployed "to drive us from our homes". Oliver Ivanovic, the self-styled Serbian mayor of northern Mitrovica, shouted that Nato's K-For troops were intent on allowing "Albanian terrorists" into northern Mitrovica.
Two Serbs hit by French stun-grenades were taken to a Serbian hospital for "major surgery", according to hospital sources. The injured British journalist was named as Andrew Gray, from Lanark, Strathclyde, a correspondent for the Reuters news agency. He was taken to hospital with a broken nose and bruising.
Yesterday's operation followed assurances from senior Nato officials that they would not allow Serb-dominated northern Mitrovica to become a enclave where Albanians could not venture without risk of major injury or death.
Twelve Serbs and Albanians have been killed, and nearly 110 people injured, including Nato peace-keepers, in clashes in Mitrovica since the beginning of February.
U.S. Troops Seize Weapons From Albanians in Kosovo
By PHILIP SHENON
The New York Times
WASHINGTON, Thursday, March 16 -- American troops in Kosovo carried out raids on the strongholds of ethnic Albanian guerrillas on Wednesday, capturing bombs and other weapons in the largest effort to date by American forces there to end the guerrillas' threat to the NATO-led peacekeeping mission, American officials said.
No one was reported injured in the raids, which were conducted in villages and guerrilla posts in the eastern sector of Kosovo, where the bulk of the nearly 6,000 American troops in the territory are stationed. It was unclear if the American troops fired their weapons.
The raids came a day after a senior Pentagon official told reporters here that the situation in Kosovo was deteriorating quickly and that American troops in Kosovo might end up in armed conflict with the Albanian guerrillas, who were supposed to have disarmed under terms of a cease-fire.
American officials said the raids were an effort to stop the guerrillas from using the American-patrolled sector of Kosovo as a launching area for cross-border strikes on Serbia, which in turn threaten to provoke clashes between the United States and well-armed Serbian forces under the control of President Slobodan Milosevic.
Fresh violence was also reported on Wednesday in the divided northern Kosovo town of Mitrovica, where Serbs have called for a campaign of civil disobedience against the embattled United Nations and NATO administration. French peacekeepers in the city clashed with Serbian protesters, with at least 15 Serbs reported injured.
The capture of Albanian bombs and other weapons by the American troops will likely provide fresh rhetorical ammunition to President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia, who has accused the United Nations and NATO of aiding Albanian terrorists.
"Instead of using their authority and impartiality to restrain terrorist gangs of Albanian extremists, we face the situation in which the terrorism is taking place under their auspices, and even being financed by United Nations means," Agence France-Presse quoted Mr. Milosevic as saying on Wednesday.
NATO announced the addition today of 1,100 troops in Kosovo to buttress its forces there.
The new troops -- -- 700 French and 400 Italian soldiers -- would beef up security forces in Mitrovica, scene of the most serious violence in recent weeks, NATO officials said.
On Wednesday, French troops tried to set up a secure zone around one of the bridges that divide the city and ordered the self-styled Serbian guardians of the bridge to leave their positions.
The Serbs, who sit outside a shop to prevent Albanians from crossing the bridge, left. But a crowd of 300 rapidly formed and began an angry jostling protest.
The troops dispersed the crowd with tear gas and percussion grenades. Pushed back, the Serbs attacked Western journalists and were barely prevented from lynching an old Albanian man in his apartment. French paratroopers in armored vehicles rescued him, struggling to bring him out bleeding through a lunging, pushing crowd.
The Associated Press quoted the chief surgeon at the Serb-controlled hospital there as saying that two Serbs, one of them a mother of three, each had a foot amputated as a result of injuries suffered when stun grenades fired by the French soldiers exploded near them.
The anger in the streets of the town was palpable on Wednesday. The so-called bridge guardians are tough young Serb men with walkie-talkies who prevent Albanians from crossing into the northern Serbian-dominated part of the city. Serbs say the force is necessary to prevent Albanians who are intent on attacking the Serbs and forcing them to flee the city, as they have elsewhere in Kosovo.
The French command has tolerated the guards because they are not armed. But Albanians and foreign-aid groups have complained that the men prevent the free movement of Albanians who live on the northern side of the bridge.
United Nations officials and the NATO-led security force are trying to form a secure zone around the bridges where both Serbian and Albanian residents can move freely and where outsiders are kept out. They proposed that one Serb and one Albanian assist French troops to check people who want to pass, but the Serbs refused.
In Washington, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright sternly warned ethnic Albanian leaders that the United States and other NATO peacekeepers were determined to defend the border against crossborder attacks on Serbian police. She told a Congressional panel on Wednesday that if the provocations continued, the Albanians would be "in danger of losing our support" .
The United States is especially concerned about armed bands of Albanians roaming the rugged Presevo Valley, seeking to launch strikes against Serb forces just across the nearby border.
While condemning the actions of the Albanian guerrilla leaders, Ms. Albright said that "the large majority of Kosovar Albanians are trying to put their lives together."
Kosovo Attacks Stir U.S. Concern
The New York Times
By Roberto Suro
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 15, 2000; Page A01
A senior Pentagon official warned yesterday that U.S. troops in Kosovo this spring may have to fight their former allies, ethnic Albanian guerrillas who are rearming themselves and threatening cross-border attacks against Serbia.
"This has got to cease and desist, and if not, ultimately it is going to lead to confrontation between the Albanians and KFOR," said the official, referring to the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo, which has dwindled to about 37,000 troops.
The stern warning came as State Department envoy James P. Rubin ended three days of talks in which he urged ethnic Albanian leaders to halt a rising tide of violence against Serbs, but apparently failed to win any concessions.
Worries that Kosovo might explode this spring were sounded yesterday in European capitals as well. "Today, we put the extremists on both sides on notice: We will not allow them to destroy the process of restoring stability and bringing reconciliation," said British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook.
With increasing frequency in recent weeks, ethnic Albanian fighters have raked Serbian villages and homesteads with gunfire and have assaulted Serbs on the way to work or to marketplaces in an apparent effort to drive the remaining Serbs out of Kosovo. This marks a stark reversal of the situation a year ago, when Serbian forces conducted a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Kosovo Albanians, driving more than 850,000 out of the province.
Responding to the ethnic Albanians' plight, NATO launched a bombing campaign on March 24 that lasted 78 days, eventually obliging Serbian forces to withdraw and allow about 50,000 NATO peacekeepers to move into Kosovo. While the province technically remains part of Serbia and the Serb-dominated Yugoslav federation, the United Nations has promised to help Kosovo build an autonomous judicial and administrative system. That has fueled hopes of independence among many ethnic Albanians, and U.S. officials now worry that those hopes are translating into an escalation of anti-Serb violence.
The senior military official who warned of possible combat between NATO and ethnic Albanians had recently returned from meetings with U.S. commanders in Kosovo. He said the Pentagon is particularly concerned about Kosovo Albanian guerrillas marshaling in a no-man's land in southeastern Serbia, just outside the U.S.-patrolled sector of Kosovo. The 5,300 U.S. troops in Kosovo have a "pretty slim" ability to police the 115 miles of border assigned to them, the official said.
In recent weeks, ethnic Albanian militants near the Serbian town of Presevo have skirmished with Serbian police. In response, the Yugoslav army has reinforced its presence in the region, and U.S. military leaders are increasingly worried about all-out violence on their doorstep.
More than 500 well-armed ethnic Albanians are active in the rugged hills of the no-man's land around Presevo, and their numbers are growing rapidly thanks to a well-financed recruiting campaign throughout Kosovo, U.S. military officials said. The guerrillas include elements of the now-disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army, which conducted attacks on Serbian police in 1998 and 1999.
U.S. commanders in Kosovo are now assessing whether more troops will be needed to prevent a resumption of large-scale conflict between the ethnic Albanians and the Serbs, Pentagon officials said. In the meantime, as many as six unmanned surveillance aircraft are being dispatched to the U.S. peacekeeping contingent to help monitor guerrilla activities in the "ground safety zone," a three-mile wide buffer strip where neither the U.S. military nor Serbian forces are supposed to operate.
Pessimism over the situation in Kosovo is not universally shared within the Clinton administration. On a visit to Eastern Europe last week, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, the chief architect of the U.S.-led intervention on behalf of the Kosovo Albanians, insisted that conditions are improving in Kosovo.
"After all that has happened, we do not expect the rival communities in Kosovo to immediately join hands and start singing folk songs," Albright said in Prague. Nonetheless, she added, "those in the ethnic Albanian community who perpetrate crimes against Serbs and other minorities deserve strong condemnation and are doing a profound disservice to the aspirations of their people."
Last weekend, Albright dispatched Rubin, her spokesman and trusted aide, to seek cooperation from ethnic Albanian leaders in restraining the newly resurgent guerrilla forces. He reminded the Kosovo Albanians that the United States had come to their rescue after Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic launched a scorched-earth campaign against them. But as his visit ended yesterday, he had made no breakthroughs.
"First, there has to be a decision to recognize that there is a problem," Rubin said, citing his hope that ethnic Albanians will realize that they risk alienating their American defenders if they continue to conduct revenge attacks against Serbs in Kosovo and to launch raids into Serbia.
"Over time, as [ethnic Albanians] examine their choices here, they'll realize that their best friends are troubled," Rubin said at a U.S. Army base in the eastern Kosovo city of Gnjilane, according to the Associated Press.
U.S. officials remain hopeful that a majority of Kosovo Albanians will balk at the prospect of renewed violence, even if they desire independence. While the former fighters of the KLA were widely viewed as heroes at the end of last year's war, their popularity has since declined. A poll conducted for NATO last month by the Gallup organization found that less than 13 percent of the populace intends to vote for a political party formed by ex-KLA members, while roughly 45 percent plans to vote for the party of Ibrahim Rugova, a pacifist leader despised by the guerrilla army.
Kosovo Albanian Unit Is Accused Of Abuses
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, March 15, 2000; Page A24
FLORENCE, Italy, March 14 –– Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo's new national guard engaged in illegal activities and human rights abuses during the force's first five weeks of operation this year, an internal U.N. report says.
The report by the U.N. human rights unit in Kosovo says the United Nations, NATO and ethnic Albanian leaders have failed to adequately supervise the Kosovo Protection Corps. The corps, established in January to provide humanitarian assistance and help clear land mines, is made up almost entirely of guerrillas from the disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army.
The report says several members allegedly tortured or killed local citizens and illegally detained others; illegally attempted to conduct law enforcement activities; illegally forced local businesses to pay taxes; and threatened U.N. police who attempted to intervene and stop the wrongdoing. But there was no indication in the report that such actions were organized or ordered by the corps leadership.
The report, obtained by The Washington Post, was based on interviews with U.N. police officers, regional U.N. administrators and local residents. "Many said that the greatest human rights challenge looming in Kosovo" is whether corps members will abide by U.N. regulations and whether those "who violate the law will be punished," the report says.
The report was sent to the top U.N. administrator in Kosovo, French diplomat Bernard Kouchner. Susan Manuel, a spokeswoman for his office, said today that while "no one is denying the essence of the report, they are saying [the corps is] . . . raw material and the essence of the organization is just taking shape now."
Among the incidents cited in the report is the Feb. 11 arrest of two corps members suspected of killing an ethnic Gorani, a Slav who follows Islam, in the town of Dragas. It also cited the Feb. 16 detention of a corps member in Prizren for mistreating another Slav, and the suspension of two corps members in February for torturing several ethnic Albanians suspected of car theft.
Several ethnic groups in the region are Slavic, including Serbs, who are seen as enemies by ethnic Albanians.
In February, an ethnic Albanian man who sought to rebut an accusatory newspaper article written by a former Kosovo Liberation Army rebel was beaten by corps members in Djakovica, the report says. And other corps members in the towns of Istok, Pristina, Prizren, Dragas and Vucitrn have illegally demanded protection fees or tax payments, the report states. In three other cities, U.N. or NATO officials said they suspected corps members had participated in or helped organize public demonstrations--activities that are off-limits for corps members.
Since the report was completed at the end of February, U.N. police have said that corps members were involved in at least three assaults. During the arrest of one of these members by police based in Prizren, "the officers were surrounded by a mob attempting to drag them out of the patrol vehicle," a police report said.
The U.N. report covers the corps' activities during a five-week period in which the force grew from 45 to more than 500 members. By next month, the corps should reach full strength with 3,000 full-time members and 2,000 part-timers. Although the United Nations has issued a broad fund-raising appeal to support the corps, its operations have been sustained largely by U.S. and British contributions.
The protection corps was formed after the Kosovo Liberation Army agreed to disband last fall on condition that key members be transferred to a national guard-type force. While its official task is humanitarian, ethnic Albanian leaders have said the group is meant to serve as the nucleus of a future army should Kosovo gain its independence from Serbia. Kosovo remains a province of Serbia, the dominant republic in the Yugoslav federation, but has been under U.N. administration since June, when NATO's 78-day air war against Yugoslavia ended.
U.N. officials have praised some corps leaders for helping calm ethnically charged protests in the province that have threatened to turn violent. But they also said some ex-rebels who have joined the corps have been implicated in violent attacks on Serbs and other ethnic minorities and in the province's flourishing crime.
Many of the corps members are readily identifiable by their solid green uniforms, adorned with a patch in the Albanian national colors; a limited number are allowed to carry handguns. But the group's charter explicitly prohibits its members' involvement in law enforcement, a task the U.N. has reserved for trained police officers--both foreign and local--under U.N. supervision.
An oath of office and a new code of conduct effective this week for corps members require "the highest possible standards of discipline and conduct . . . without any ethnic, religious, gender or racial bias." Members also are barred from involvement in politics or political parties.
The report notes that corps commander Agim Ceku said in November that he would not tolerate criminal behavior and that offenders would be expelled. But "the time has come," it says, to hold corps leaders to this promise.
Peacekeepers Are Overwhelmed in Kosovo, Pentagon Envoy Says
The New York Times
By JANE PERLEZ
ASHINGTON, March 14 -- In a sobering assessment of the deteriorating situation in Kosovo, a senior Pentagon official said today that the NATO-led peacekeeping operation, which includes American troops, had reached a "decisive moment."
The official, who just returned from a visit to the American sector in Kosovo, did not say that more American troops would be sent to Kosovo. But the situation is so precarious that "we're at ground zero," even though NATO-led troops have been in Kosovo since June, the official said.
By this, the official meant that the United Nations effort to restart civilian life was so weak in Kosovo that the American troops were still involved in chores that should be done by the police and the courts.
At the same time, an insurgency outside Kosovo's border in southern Serbia had sprung up, causing new problems. The official warned that the situation was so dangerous that American troops in Kosovo could end up in armed conflict with the ethnic Albanian guerrillas, this spring.
"This has got to cease and desist, and if not, ultimately it is going to lead to confrontation between the Albanians and KFOR," he said, referring to the NATO force. The official said troops could not keep peace between Serbs and Albanians within Kosovo and seal Kosovo's borders.
In order to seal just the 125-mile rugged border of Kosovo that the American troops are in charge of, "two to three times" more troops would be required, the official said. About 6,000 American troops are now stationed in Kosovo.
To get a better handle on what was happening in the Presevo Valley, just over Kosovo's border in southern Serbia, the official said the Pentagon was planning to send unmanned aerial vehicles, known as drones, for surveillance.
The official, who briefed reporters today, said he believed that about 500 Albanian insurgents organized into "8 to 10 elements" were in the "no-man's land" between eastern Kosovo and Serbia and in the Presevo Valley.
NATO military officials are concerned that the Albanians are making targets of Serbian policemen there, which could provoke a crackdown against the Albanians from the Yugoslav President, Slobodan Milosevic. This, they fear, could cause a possible repeat of circumstances that caused NATO's war last year over Kosovo: Serbian repression of ethnic Albanian civilians.
'Everyone knows there is going to be a civil war in Serbia now. We can smell it'
Dead city: Everyone is scared of Milosevic. They have lost everything - except hope
Maggie O'Kane in Belgrade
Tuesday March 14, 2000
His mobile phone plays the Serbian national anthem when it rings; he presses the receiver with a hand the size of a T-bone steak. A Serb paramilitary, one of the feared "Tigers" who killed in Kosovo, he smothers the bay-blue handset with massive fingers.
"I'd like to find a nice girl and get married, but we have to wait until this is over and [Yugoslav President Slobodan] Milosevic has gone," he says.
There is a sense in Belgrade that civil war may come to Serbia - Mr Milosevic and his praetorian guard of police and military against the people. Everyone is scared.
In this city, where random political assassinations are the norm, police consolidate their grip on power by breaking up protests, smashing TV transmitters and silencing the dissenters with fear.
"The crackdown started three weeks ago after he addressed the party congress. The message was clear: Don't start or else," says Natasha Kandic, a lawyer and director of the humanitarian law centre in Belgrade. She one of the few people prepared to speak out. "They have started arresting people. A young lawyer from my office was taken for an 'information talk' for two days, now he has resigned. I don't blame him - he has a young family."
A former police chief who claims to have been the head of internal security and a confidant of Mr Milosevic's wife, Mira Markovic, confirms that the crackdown has started. "But it's going to get much worse. The elections may be coming, maybe not. He is cornered and he will fight to the end - his end or ours."
Even those hardened by years on the frontlines of the war under the Tigers' assassinated paramilitary leader, Zeljko "Arkan" Raznatovic, are wary of the country's changing political climate. "When Arkan was alive, I felt some safety," says the former paramilitary soldier. "I didn't cry when my mother died, but when Arkan was shot, I felt it deep in my soul."
He joined Arkan when he was 19 after the army kicked him out for breaking his commanding officer's chin. In the pizza parlour in Republica Square, he dips into the waistband of his tracksuit and pulls out his gun; the handle is engraved with the Serbian crest. "Arkan didn't think it could happen to him. In Serbia, anybody could be killed. Some body could come and kill me right now."
Arkan, Mr Milosevic's protege who carried out the president's dirty work in Croatia and Bosnia, is just one of a number who died when the regime began to implode.
"Arkan had about 400 people working for him. He was making his money mostly from stealing cars in Germany and then selling them to the Middle East," the former police chief said. "Cars and cigarette smuggling, but he was killed because of the protection business and because the regime was nervous of him. He couldn't be controlled by them any more. He wanted too much protection money from too many. Four, or was it five, of them got together. It got sanctioned at the top and that was it."
He adds: "You in the west don't understand how it works. After 10 years [of war], crime, business and politics are webbed together in Serbia. They are intermingled in the grey zone. A hit like that doesn't happen unless it is approved from the top."
Belgrade is a place where even the Tigers are tired and scared. Last week, five armed men broke into the opposition's TV station and beat up a technician and a guard; the gang took the station's transmitters. It was the fifth station to be closed in Serbia recently, as the government attempts to stifle any voice of opposition.
The mention of the president's name draws fury everywhere. "Milosevic stole 10 years of my life with wars and all this shit," a taxi driver says.
Zoran, who also fought for Arkan in the Croatian and Bosnia wars, sits in the Stupida bar, near Belgrade's national theatre. "I will not fight again until I am fighting this regime," he says. "I can't live in my own country, everything is controlled by 200 people."
Milena Joksimovic, a 21-year-old student and activist echoes similar sentiments: "Everybody thinks it's going to end soon and we are all afraid of what is coming. But we are determined to fight. Now the only thing that is left in Pandora's box is hope."
Ms Joksimovic and her mother marched in protest against Mr Milosevic for 170 days in the southern town of Nis. "Everyone knows there is going to be a civil war now," she says. "We can smell it."
But in Belgrade people seem too worn out by poverty and sanctions to fight. "Milosevic's secret weapons have been sanctions from the west," says the police chief. "People are so tired out just trying to make a living that they can't think about organising against him."
On the third floor of a tiny street behind Republica Square, a weary gold merchant opens the door of his shop to another day of business. "Business is terrible," he says. "After nine years of sanctions, the people have nothing left to sell. I get women taking off their wedding rings and handing them to me. I tell them to think about it, but if they insist."
He takes out tiny black scales. "Your wedding ring, let me see - 18 carats, 2.3 grams - I'd give you DM24 [£12] for it. But it was your grandmother's? He smiles a practised smile. "There's a lot of sad stories out there, but I'm a businessman," he says.
On a Saturday night in Belgrade, a city of 2m people, having fun takes energy and money - two commodities that are in short supply.
Sasha Jortjevic spent £1m on his XL nightclub in Sarevejska Street, where he created a disco the size of a barn. A former captain of the Yugoslav basketball team, he made the money playing for three years in Barcelona. Last Saturday it closed down; the area that surrounds it is now dead.
"We are dead people in a dead city," said Alex Stenovic, 28. He knows that elections should be held this spring, but he, like almost everyone, does not expect them to happen. The opposition parties are so discredited that the mention of their leaders brings a snort.
"The opposition is slow," he says. "They have meetings on humanitarian aid and elections with representatives of the European countries, but people expect more."
Serbia's most famous journalist, Aleksander Tijanic, a government minister sacked by Mr Milosevic, wrote recently: "Serbia is now a great morgue in which the barely alive bewail the recent dead. Damned and despairing we stand in line and behind all success, wealth and power, the henchman is there. His judgment awaits."
"It could take another year," the ex-police chief says. "Milosevic still has the money he got from China and Panama and can keep things going for a while and pay off his police force. Then, there will be blood for 10 or 20 days and it will be over."
Death lurks in the fields
The Guardian
Unexploded bombs: Kosovo tries to clean up after air strikes
Jonathan Steele in Pristina
Tuesday March 14, 2000
The US is refusing to allow American troops to remove the thousands of unexploded cluster bombs dropped by Nato planes on Kosovo last year.
As the snows melt and the first planting season since the Nato air strikes approaches, Albanian and international officials fear that the death toll from bomb casualties will rise as farmers start to plough, children play in the fields and people go into the woods to collect timber for cooking.
Cluster bombs are far more deadly than landmines and around 10% failed to explode. But for fear of the "bodybag syndrome", whereby the bodies of US casualties are returned home in bags, the Pentagon has ruled that it will not order its professional disposal experts to defuse them. The job is being dumped on underfunded civilian teams, largely staffed by Albanians.
Each cluster bomb unit contains up to 200 weapons the size of a tennis ball canister. The unit opens up at about 2,000ft, unleashing a hail of the bomb canisters that swamp an area the size of four football pitches with lethal shrapnel. Designed as an anti-tank weapon, each bomb can also penetrate five inches of steel.
During the Kosovo war, US and British pilots were under orders to drop them from above 15,000ft to keep their aircraft safe from enemy fire. Hundreds of the bombs missed their targets.
"Nato gave us information about where they thought they dropped them. These were detailed grid references, but many turned out not to be correct," says John Flanagan, a colonel from New Zealand, who heads the UN's mine action coordination centre in Kosovo. "They may have intended to drop six bombs on one target and four go off somewhere else, as much as one kilometre from the intended spot."
The UN coordinates the work of several civilian demining teams. As well as falling wide, about 28,000 of the deadly canisters failed to explode. If they stay on the surface and can be seen, they can be detonated by putting an explosive charge beside them. But most go through the soil and are lying between 10cm and 20cm underground, ready to blast a tractor or a person who steps on one. When hidden, they are far harder to detect and dispose of than ordinary landmines.
"Nato doesn't want to create a precedent for cleaning up in post-conflict situations. They first made this clear in the Gulf war. [The Gulf war cleanup] cost $700m, but luckily the Kuwaitis could pay," Col Flanagan says. Kosovo, by contrast, is poor and much more heavily populated than the Kuwaiti desert.
"My personal opinion is that if they're going to use these kinds of weapons, they have to recognise there is a postwar environmental effect," he adds.
Traditional landmines are mainly used to defend fixed sites, and armies usually keep records of where they are laid so that they can be lifted later. Cluster bombs are attack weapons and inaccurate.
Since June, 54 people have already been killed by mines or cluster bombs in Kosovo; another 250 have been maimed. In the worst cluster-bomb accident, four children died near Gnjilane and one was seriously hurt when they threw a stone at the yellow canister lying in a field. Only 30% of Kosovo's arable land was used last year because most refugees came back too late to plough. This year, however, mine casualties are expected to rise in spite of efforts to make people aware of the dangers lurking in their fields.
K-For, the Nato-led international peace force, says it will lift mines and unexploded cluster bombs only if they obstruct its mission to provide security; in practice, this means those found on main roads or near K-For bases and buildings.
The non-governmental organisations' (NGO) disposal teams have destroyed 2,743 bombs so far, but that still leaves over 25,000. The US government and other Nato partners are paying for some of the NGO work, but every contract requires time-consuming lobbying and pleading for funds. It would be easier to use the Pentagon's trained weapons disposal teams, but cowardice among politicians and the consequences of casualties even in a volunteer army appear to preclude it.
'Mastermind of Srebrenica genocide' goes on trial
The Independent
Serb general stands accused of planning the deaths of 7,000 Bosnians in the worst atrocity in Europe since the Second World War
By Stephen Castle in Brussels
14 March 2000
A Bosnian Serb general charged with masterminding the murder of more than 7,000 people at Srebrenica in 1995 went on trial yesterday, accused of responsibility for Europe's worst atrocity since the Second World War.
The opening of the trial of General Radislav Krstic, the highest- ranking Bosnian Serb officer in UN custody, marks a significant new phase for war crimes prosecutors who aim to prove that the ethnic cleansing of the Balkans constituted genocide. Dressed in a grey jacket, black shirt and tie, Gen Krstic, 52, listened impassively as the case against him was outlined at the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia in The Hague.
The trial centres on one of the most notorious acts of savagery during the conflict – one that exposed the impotence of Dutch peace-keepers who had declared Srebrenica a UN designated safe area.
Prosecutors told of how the entry of Bosnian Serb forces led by Gen Krstic and commander-in-chief Gen Ratko Mladic into the enclave became the prelude to a pre-meditated massacre and the deportation of up to 30,000 Muslims. "The victors abandoned all sense of humanity and committed atrocities on a scale not seen since the Second World War," said the prosecutor, Mark Harmon, adding that 7,574 people were still listed as missing, presumed dead.
The victims were not combatants, he added, but unarmed men, many of whom were murdered with their arms tied behind their backs and their eyes hidden by blindfolds. "The manner in which these people perished is incomprehensible by all standards known to mankind."
The case is an important test for the tribunal, which has yet to secure a genocide conviction. It also puts the UN under the spotlight for allowing the massacre to take place. In recent weeks the tribunal has concentrated its efforts on senior officers deemed to be most responsible for the atrocities. Gen Krstic, the commander of the Bosnian Serb army's Drina Wolves, reported to Gen Mladic, and through him to Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb political leader at the time, the indictment says. Mr Karadzic and Gen Mladic have been indicted for genocide, but remain at large.
Gen Krstic denies genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the Geneva Convention. His defence, which argues that he was unaware of his soldiers' crimes because the chain of command was split, is expected to try to exploit the fact that few witnesses survived.
But yesterday the prosecutor argued that Gen Krstic was fully aware of the activities of immediate subordinates. The prosecutor described a phone call between him and one officer who "complained that he had 3,500 parcels to distribute and he had no solution, and he asked Gen Krstic for more men for the job". Mr Harmon added that "parcels" was code for Muslim men and "distribute" for murder. The prosecution painted a picture of a well-orchestrated massacre that required 50 to 60 buses, detention centres and digging equipment.
Patten warns of transatlantic feud over Kosovo cash
The Independent
By Stephen Castle in Brussels
13 March 2000
Strains over the funding of Kosovo's reconstruction could poison relations between Europe and America and lead to a serious transatlantic rift, according to Chris Patten, the European commissioner for external affairs.
Mr Patten defended Europe's record but warned that a continuing dispute with the United States about the EU's role in rebuilding the province could "contribute to a serious problem for our relationship".
Mr Patten pointed to some signs of progress in south-east Europe, particularly in Croatia and Macedonia, where reforming governments are in place. But five hectic days of travelling underlined the fact that Kosovo's fate is again testing the resolve and unity of the Western alliance.
Tensions over Kosovo surfaced in Sarajevo on Thursday when the US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, referred to the "need for pledges to be fulfilled", apparently reflecting a widespread view in the Congress that the EU is being sluggish in releasing its promised cash.
Mr Patten, speaking on his flight home, said Europe was the biggest donor for reconstruction in Kosovo, with 360 million euros (£220m) allocated for this year. "There was an implicit bargain that, because of their military might, the Americans would [bear] the largest cost of the war and [Europe would bear] the largest share of the cost of the peace. I believe we are doing that but it's important to convince the Congress.
"We have to point out to the Americans that they are not always comparing like with like. Very often the figures that they present in the Balkans aggregate their economic assistance, their diplomatic representation, the cost of their military efforts. And that is compared with our development assistance. It's not fair."
EU-US ties are already tense, with several trade disputes pending and America increasingly suspicious about Europe's new defence initiative. Mr Patten warned against opening another front that could "contribute to a serious problem for our relationship".
"The EU and the US are still the principal champions of civilised values and it would be deeply damaging for the rest of the world, as well as for our individual interests, if we allow the debate about these issues to get out of hand and to poison or warp our overall relationship," he said.
European officials concede the complexity of EU procedures have hampered support for the UN administration in Kosovo and Mr Patten said his task was "to make clear that we are running our external assistance programmes as well as we can". This would, he said, help close the gap between Europe's ambitions and its delivery. "We are big players, we have big assistance programmes but we have even longer communiqués of good intentions."
Mr Patten said it remained "important" to talk to the Serbian opposition, "but the best thing we can do for the opponents of [President Slobodan] Milosevic is to demonstrate, by what happens elsewhere in their region, just how much he represents the forces of darkness".
Rebuilding the Balkans: Too soon to forgive
In a week-long series Guardian writers examine how Nato won the war but may now be losing the peace
Kosovo: special report
Jonathan Steele in Pristina
Monday March 13, 2000
The Zabeli family sits in their barn, warming themselves by a woodstove. Their makeshift home is comfortable compared with the tent where all 10 of them - grandparents, two grown-up children, one spouse and several toddlers - huddled through the winter.
"It was not until January, seven months after the end of the war, that we got timbers from a foreign charity and enough tiles to roof the damaged barn," says Sandik Zabeli, 63, the family's hardy patriarch. His handshake feels as though it could crush one of those timbers like a matchstick.
In the hierarchy of suffering around the Kosovan capital, Pristina, the Zabelis are above the bottom rung. "We're all healthy. No one in our family was killed," Mr Zabeli says.
Even tent life was better than the three months they spent in the woods last year after Serb forces burnt their home three weeks before Nato's air strikes began. "At least we don't have to run into the woods with the children any more," he says.
As the March 24 anniversary of the air strikes approaches, peacetime reconstruction remains pitifully slow. When international aid agencies poured into Kosovo with the tide of returning refugees, they found 50,000 houses totally destroyed, leaving close to half a million people without shelter. But after the billions of pounds spent on bombing, the tough message was that no one could expect rapid help for rebuilding. Families would get aid to make ready for winter only one room.
So all over Kosovo residents put transparent plastic across the windows of their barns and cow sheds, and blue tarpaulin on the concrete floors to keep out the damp. Kosovo's Albanians would be freezing but free.
Twenty miles away, a death notice with the faces of 14 Serb victims hangs on the kitchen wall like an icon, a perpetual reminder of loss. No postwar atrocity in Kosovo caused as much outrage as the slaughter of this group of Serb farmers heading for their fields near the village of Gracko last July. It exposed the weakness of K-For, the international peacekeeping force that entered Kosovo with the goal of providing security for all ethnic groups.
No one was hit harder by the massacre than Lyubica Zivic, who lost her two sons, leaving her daughters-in-law widows and their seven children fatherless. Dressed in black every day, the three Zivic women are prisoners in their village, like almost every other Serb in Kosovo. Once in total control, the Serbs have been reduced to a few dozen enclaves which they leave at their peril. Two-thirds of the 150,000 who lived in Kosovo a year ago have gone.
Gracko's horizons have shrunk. It is too dangerous for secondary school children to go to the nearest big town any more. Instead, they have their classes in the village primary school. A doctor makes a weekly visit, and those taken ill in an emergency have to be escorted in ambulances by K-For.
"We have only left here once since the tragedy," says a tearful Vesna Zivic. "To mark the half-year since they died, we went to the cathedral in Gracanica to light a candle."
Yet isolation and bereavement have brought no sense of reflection. They refuse to accept any wrongdoing to Albanians during the offensives by the Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, and with their new fear has come hatred.
"I hate now. I didn't hate before," says Ms Zivic. "I hate every single Albanian thing; everyone, even a little Albanian child." Like a symbol of almost every group of Serbs still in Kosovo, the Zivic women are trapped but unrepentant.
A year after the Nato intervention, the question that recurs in almost every conversation is whether Nato won the war but is losing the peace.
"We will be facing two sets of critics," Nato's spokesman, Jamie Shea, told a conference in Pristina recently. "There are the revisionists who say that because Nato was unable to avoid causing some civilian casualties, and because only 2,000 Albanian bodies have been discovered in mass graves so far, the Nato campaign was not justified. The second group are the perfectionists, who complain that we haven't produced a multi-ethnic, democratic Kosovo."
His argument, of course, ignores the larger group of people who supported intervention but feel Nato governments' postwar efforts should have been more generous and efficient, just as the military campaign should have been conducted differently.
In the bluntest terms, the intervention achieved its goal of ending President Milosevic's ethnic cleansing and securing a Yugoslav military withdrawal.
"For the first time in their history Kosovars see soldiers who do not threaten them," says Veton Surroi, the publisher of the newspaper Koha Ditore. Like most Albanians, he is angry that the international community has failed to do more to improve their physical conditions.
As hundreds of thousands struggled through winter in the countryside in tents and cowsheds, others moved to Pristina to find shelter. But even there they shivered through repeated cuts in power and water, which had never affected the city under Serb rule.
At the mercy of criminals
Foreign governments have supplied fewer than half the 4,500 police they promised, leaving both Albanians and Serbs at the mercy of criminals. Even if UN police or K-For troops manage to arrest suspects, they tend to be released within hours.
"There are only 50 detention places in Pristina," complains a British officer. "If we find someone with illegal weapons, he's usually let out the next day. All we keep is the name and photo."
Of the 4,000 people arrested by K-For since June 3, 750 have been released. In hundreds of cases defendants are freed because Albanian prosecutors and judges are bribed or intimidated. Although the UN appointed some Serbs as prosecutors, none dared to take up the post. The obvious solution of appointing foreign judges was delayed for months.
The Albanians are in no mood to forgive the Serbs. Before the war, the two communities walked the same streets and used the same shops, although they went to different schools. Now the apartheid is total. Serbs and Albanians are split into separate areas and rarely see each other - few want to.
"The oppression is too recent. Hatred is much worse than a year ago," said a young translator. His father stayed in Pristina when half the city's population was expelled by Serb forces. What shocked him was the way one of their Serb neighbours changed overnight after Nato started its air strikes - he put on paramilitary fatigues and shot at their house.
Few Serbs admit that more Albanians suffered injustice or lost family members before K-For arrived than the Serbs have done since. "An equivalent number of people died on each side," says Aca Nikolic, a headmaster in Vrbovac. "We need someone to calm things down for us. I trust the international community to do it, but there will be a lot more casualties on both sides. It is the good people who will suffer."
• Police used force to shut down a radio and television station in south-eastern Serbia yesterday in what an opposition politician said was part of the authorities' heavy-handed preparations for elections.
About 30 officers raided the station in Pozega, 110 miles from Belgrade. "Every television, every radio station and every newspaper must be protected," the politician, Vladan Batic, said. "If we do not do so, tomorrow it will be too late."
Kosovo drug mafia supply heroin to Europe
The Guardian
Maggie O'Kane in Belgrade
Monday March 13, 2000
International agencies fighting the drug trade are warning that Kosovo has become a "smugglers' paradise" supplying up to 40% of the heroin sold in Europe and North America.
Nato-led forces, struggling to keep peace in the province a year after the war, have no mandate to fight drug traffickers; and - with the expulsion from Kosovo of the Serb police, including the "4th unit" narcotics squad - the smugglers are running the "Balkan route" with complete freedom.
The peacekeepers of K-For "may as well be coming from another planet when it comes to tackling these guys," said Marko Nicovic, a lawyer and vice-president of the international narcotics enforcement officers association, based in New York.
"It's the hardest narcotics ring to crack because it is all run by families and they even have their own language. Kosovo is set to become the cancer centre of Europe, as western Europe will soon discover," he said.
He estimates that the province's traffickers are now handling between 4.5 and five tonnes of heroin a month and growing fast, compared to the two tonnes they were shifting before the Kosovo war of March-June last year, when Nato bombing forced Serbia's regime to pull out of the largely ethnic-Albanian province.
"It's coming through easier and cheaper - and there's much more of it. The price is going down and if this goes on we are predicting a heroin boom in western Europe as there was in the early 80s."
A heroin trafficker in Belgrade confirmed to the Guardian that since the war the Kosovo heroin dealers, most of them from four main families, are concentrating on the western Europe and US markets.
A kilo of heroin that is worth £10,000 in Kosovo or £20,000 in Belgrade can make £40,000 on the British, Italian or Swiss markets, said that 24-year-old heroin middleman. He expected the Kosovo route to grow: "There's nobody to stop them."
Only half the promised 5,000 policemen have arrived to join the peace operation in the province, which is now the main route for heroin flowing through some of the world's most troubled countries, Afghanisatan, northern Iran, the southern states of the Russian Federation, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Kosovo and into western Europe and the US
"It is the Colombia of Europe," said Mr Nikovic, who was the chief of the Yugoslav narcotics force until 1996. "When Serb police were burning houses in Kosovo they were finding it [heroin] stuffed in the roof. As far as I know there has not been a single report in the last year of K-For seizing heroin. They are soldiers not criminal investigators."
Echoing this, an official at Nato in Brussels said: "Generals do not want to turn their troops into cops ... They don't want their troops to get shot pursuing black marketeers."
There is no evidence that the ethnic Albanians' Kosovo Liberation Army is involved directly in drug smuggling, but according to the British-based International Police Review published by Jane's they may be dependent on the drug families who, the Review says, partly funded the KLA's operations in Kosovo last year.
When drug squad chiefs from northern and eastern Europe met in Sweden 10 days ago, the Balkan route was the main issue, according to the head of the Czech narcotics agency, Jiri Komorous: "There are four paths of drug trafficking through the Balkans to western Europe and we have to improve our attempts to control the Kosovo Albanians."
The Kosovo mafia has been smuggling heroin since the mid-80s - but since the Kosovo war they have come into their own, according to Mr Nicovic: "You have an entire country without a police force that knows what is going on."
The Kosovo Albanian mafia is almost untouchable. "Everything is worked out on the basis of the family or clan structure, the Fic (brotherhood), so it is impossible to plant informers," said Mr Nicovic.
"Their diaspora have been in Turkey and Germany since Tito's communist purges so the whole route is set up. Now they have found the one country between Asia and Europe which is not a member of Interpol."
To Britain, he said, there are two routes: "By truck through Germany, Belgium and France and then via Dover - and also through Budapest, Poland, the Netherlands, then to Britain."
Responsibility for organising police work in Kosovo "is a grey area", said the Nato official, but "if organised crime goes on thriving it will have intenational ramifications".
Allies divided as Milosevic fans flames of unrest
The Sunday Telegraf
by Julius Strauss in Pristina
SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC, the Yugoslav president, is planning a spring offensive against Nato by using three Balkan flashpoints to divide the alliance, according to intelligence experts.
This way, they believe, he hopes to avoid open military confrontation with the West and cause just enough internal mayhem to divide Nato to the point that it cannot offer a unified response.
By stoking Albanian-Serb violence in the divided city of Mitrovica in northern Kosovo, causing friction with the renegade government in Montenegro and using a resurgent neo-Kosovo Liberation Army movement in southern Serbia as excuses for further violence, Milosevic can expect to widen existing rifts in the alliance.
"He [Milosevic] knows that Nato will launch air strikes against him only if he directly attacks Kosovo. Any lesser escalation he is likely to get away with. I'm afraid he's brewing up a whole pot of trouble for Nato," said one intelligence officer.
It is now a year since Nato began its air campaign against Serbia but it has not proved effective in calming the Balkan flashpoints. In Mitrovica, violence is almost a daily event as Serbs and ethnic Albanians clash over control of the northern half of the city. French peacekeepers struggling to reintegrate it are coming under attack. Last week, more than a dozen were injured when Albanians threw grenades at them.
Television broadcasts depicting the alliance struggling to maintain control over three tower blocks there serve only to underline the frailty of the mission. Nato fears that the city is alive with Milosevic's agents. "No intelligence service in the world would walk out of a place like Mitrovica without leaving agents in place. Until they are activated nobody will even notice them," said the intelligence officer.
If Nato is in a muddle over Mitrovica, offering support for Montenegro is an even more divisive issue Milosevic has the infrastructure for a putsch. The Yugoslav army contains special forces units capable of seizing border crossings and important buildings, and loyalist cells in the republic are ready to be activated. A vociferous pro-Belgrade media campaign combined with the economic cost of a Belgrade-imposed trade blockade. are sapping support for Milo Djukanovic, the pro-independence leader.
After a meeting with the United States Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, last week, Mr Djukanovic said the West would come to his help if Belgrade attacked. That appeared to be wishful thinking. A defence analyst in London said: "There is no support at all for Nato intervention in Montenegro even if Milosevic does try to take over." Diplomats say only a fresh round of atrocities would bring the alliance in.
The thorniest issue for Nato, however, is the southern Serbian territory bordering Kosovo, which is dominated by Albanian-populated villages. In recent weeks ethnic Albanians have waged a small war of independence to "liberate" these areas. Parts of the Presevo valley are virtual no-go areas for Serbian forces.
So far, the Serb response to attacks on their police units has been muted. Belgrade has chosen instead to milk the incidents for propaganda value, accusing US forces who control the border area inside Kosovo of tacitly supporting Albanian extremists. Some of the disputed villages, however, are inside the three-mile demilitarised zone established by the UN. Diplomats fear that Milosevic's first move will be to breach this in the name of "clearing out the terrorists" - a move that would have widespread support at home and some sympathy abroad.
"The beauty for Milosevic is that in both Mitrovica and southern Serbia, the Serbs, to a degree, have right on their side. The Albanians are behaving terribly and Milosevic will cash in on that," said a Belgrade-based opposition journalist.
Nato already is fiercely divided, something that will not be missed in Belgrade. Most national contingencies in the peacekeeping force, Kfor, have placed restrictions on use of their forces. National governments are taking over more day-to-day control of their soldiers and the role of Gen Klaus Reinhardt, the Kfor commander, is being steadily eroded.
The most serious breach is between the Americans, who control eastern Kosovo, and the continental Europeans. With the approaching presidential elections, analysts believe that America is desperate to avoid confrontation and is searching for some form of exit strategy.
The divisions are likely to worsen next month when Eurocorps takes over Kfor command from Nato. "I cannot see the logic of sending in Eurocorps now. Nato is already divided and this will make it worse. America may simply want to bail out," said one Western diplomat. However, Nato may still have a little time. Milosevic is putting his own house in order, with a purge of independent media and a clampdown on opponents.
Montenegro says West will help if Belgrade attacks
SARAJEVO, March 9 (Reuters) - The West is willing to help Montenegro in the event of aggression from Yugoslav rulers in Belgrade, Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic said after talks with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on Thursday.
The tiny republic is Serbia's junior partner in the Yugoslav federation, but has been pulling away from Belgrade in frustration with the lack of economic or democratic reforms under Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
"Mrs Albright reiterated the readiness of the Western democratic world to offer Montenegro help in efforts to preserve peace and to defend itself in the event of possible aggression," Djukanovic told reporters without elaborating.
The West has imposed sanctions on Belgrade for its role in a decade of Balkan wars, and NATO fought an air war last year to force Yugoslav troops out of the province of Kosovo to end oppression of the ethnic Albanian majority.
Djukanovic said his republic was in no hurry to secede from Yugoslavia. But if it could not reach a deal with Belgrade about equal status in the federation and an opening to the West, he said, "Montenegro will continue on that road alone."
The president said he and Albright, on a two day-visit to Bosnia, shared concerns about the presence in Montenegro of Yugoslav troops loyal to Milosevic.
BORDER ISSUE
Last month the Montenegrin government reopened the border with Albania, but within days the army had set up checkpoints, saying its 1997 decision to close the frontier was still in force -- although it continued to let traffic through.
Djukanovic said the army was also contributing to Belgrade's increasing media pressure on Montenegro by letting its air waves be used for the transmission of illegal broadcasts from Serbia.
NATO's military chief, U.S. General Wesley Clark, said last month the situation in Montenegro was very tense and the alliance was closely watching developments there.
"We are hoping that after all the lessons (Milosevic) should have drawn from previous defeats in former Yugoslavia he will not be ready to start another war adventure," Djukanovic said.
"But we are not relying only on his rationality because we don't have a reason to believe in it."
If the Yugoslav army did try to act against Montenegro, he said "we will have the potential to protect ourselves."
"Of course, we don't think it is only a question for Montenegro," he said, adding that the West's security arrangements for southeastern Europe could be endangered.
"In this sense, I believe that the interests of Montenegro match those of the international community...and that we will succeed, with preventive diplomacy, in discouraging all those bent on destruction in the Balkans."
The Western-sponsored Stability Pact offers the region political and economic assistance in exchange for cooperation and reforms.
Russian general questions NATO tactics in Kosovo
MOSCOW, March 9 (Reuters) - A senior Russian general said on Thursday ethnic Albanian separatists had started a cycle of tension in Yugoslavia that could end with NATO-led KFOR troops moving into areas outside Kosovo.
Speaking at a news conference, Colonel-General Leonid Ivashov also sharply criticised the U.N. administrator in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, saying the Frenchman's decisions were aimed at accelerating the break-up of the Yugoslav federation.
"We are watching with alarm the strengthening of the separatist tendency, not just in the southern region of Serbia," said Ivashov, who heads the Defence Ministry's international relations department.
He said ethnic Albanian extremists wanted to annex a number of settlements in southern Serbia outside Kosovo.
Ivashov said some NATO countries, particularly the United States, were conniving in such attempts to stir up tensions in southern Serbia. He said there were similar moves in Montenegro -- Serbia's junior partner in the Yugoslav federation -- and the northern province of Vojvodina.
"Again we see the possible scenario of provoking disorder, police activity, concern on the faces of NATO politicians and generals and the deployment of KFOR, above all NATO, forces with the aim of strengthening the falling apart of the Yugoslav federation," he said.
"We see the NATO contingent preparing for such action in a concerted fashion," Ivashov added, noting NATO planned a major exercise -- "Dynamic Response 2000" -- later this month.
"It is becoming more tense and we do not rule out that as April approaches these tensions will manifest themselves."
Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic told reporters on Thursday afters talks with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright the West was willing to help Montenegro in the event of aggression from Belgrade. He did not elaborate.
Ivashov, who was one of the most outspoken critics of NATO's bombing campaign last year against Yugoslavia, said Russian troops cooperated well with NATO forces in KFOR on the ground.
But the general was less complimentary about Kouchner, head of the U.N. Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo.
"Artificial attempts are being made, particularly by the head of the U.N. mission, Mr Kouchner, to establish a situation in which de facto Kosovo province leaves the Yugoslav federation," Ivashov said.
Ivashov's comments echoed some remarks by Yugoslavia's envoy to the United Nations on Tuesday. Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov has also expressed his concern about rising tensions in the Balkans and the fate of ethnic Serbs in Kosovo.
Ivashov declined to comment on report in Britain's Guardian newspaper that a spy leaked secrets to Belgrade last year and that a Swedish businessman helped forge a peace deal.
Nearly a year on, Serbs fear new NATO air strikes
BELGRADE (Reuters) - As the anniversary of NATO's 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia approaches, rumors are swirling here that more air strikes are imminent.
No one is sure where they come from, and few people have any clear idea why the alliance would bomb again, but the talk is widespread.
"There's not a conversation between friends and neighbors without mention of the possibility of new NATO bombs and missiles on our land," the popular daily Nedeljni Telegraf wrote this week under the headline "Will they bomb us on March 23?"
The paper said those "in the know" had decided on that date, the day before the start of last year's bombing, but did not explain why.
Fears of more air strikes have surfaced now and then throughout the nine months since last year's bombing ended.
In the past few weeks, however, they have been fueled by inter-ethnic tensions both within and near Kosovo, NATO's plans to hold military exercises in the province in March, and militaristic talk from the Yugoslav government.
Last week a new ripple spread through the capital when a local civil defense official said the air raid sirens would be tested, even though he added it would be done in "silent mode."
GOVERNMENT, OPPOSITION BLAME EACH OTHER
The pro-government Politika newspaper seized on the comments, saying the fact that the official was a member of an opposition party proved the West was spreading the rumorsthrough its "lackeys" in Serbia to try to spread fear.
"The closer we are to the one-year anniversary of the start of the NATO aggression against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the more aggressive its creator's psychological propaganda offensive becomes," it said.
"Western specialists in this field are endeavoring to create a psychosis of fear and panic, to increase the apathy and anxiety of the population, in short, to create an atmosphere similar to that of last spring," it said.
Alliance officials say they have no plan to bomb and are perplexed by where the rumors have come from.
Opposition politicians say the government is spreading them, to set people against the West and prevent them blaming their leaders for growing economic hardships and joining a new protest campaign due to start this month.
"The regime is deliberately stirring up those rumours," Vladan Batic, coordinator of the opposition umbrella grouping Alliance for Change, told a local television station in the central Serbian town of Cacak Wednesday evening.
"It is using a Cold War policy to spread fear and manipulate with threats. It is creating new hot spots, thus keeping people thinking only about that."
MOBILIZATION FUELS FEARS
Natasa Kandic, director of a leading human rights group, the Humanitarian Law Fund, said the mobilization of army reservists in southern Serbia was adding to concern.
"Many people from Nis and Novi Pazar have been called up, but many people have refused," she said by telephone.
"In Kosovo everyone is speculating about a new war, here it is paranoia that NATO will bomb again," she said.
Army officials have denied any special call-up, saying reservists were being called for regular exercises.
NATO says it is concerned by the recent clashes between Albanians and Serbs, both in Kosovo and in Albanian-populated villages just inside government-controlled Serbia.
But while it says it is determined to prevent further violence within majority Albanian Kosovo, where it took over from Yugoslav security forces last June, it says it has no plans to intervene beyond the borders of the province.
The Alliance also regularly warns Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic against causing trouble in Montenegro, but the pro-Western republic, though tense, has seen no conflict.
"It is Serbs now who are being attacked in Kosovo," Sasa Mirkonic, general director of independent Belgrade radio B292, said in an interview. "So where would they bomb, Kosovo?"
Many minds in Serbia are fevered by 10 years of state media telling them the West is against them. For them the fact there is no evidence to back up the latest rumors is no obstacle.
Yugoslavia never showed off the dozens of NATO warplanes and captured pilots it said it had downed during the air strikes, but many people believe they were secretly given back in return for NATO promising not to bomb bridges in Belgrade.
Some have picked up even stranger stories.
"Surely you know why the Dutch hate us?" a Belgrade taxi driver said recently, stunned by his passenger's surprise.
"Because our bombers flew secretly to the Netherlands during the air strikes and destroyed their air force."
Albright to see EU, NATO, discuss Yugoslavia
BRUSSELS, March 10 (Reuters) - Tension in and around Kosovo will be a top priority item for U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and NATO and European Union officials during a series of meetings in Brussels on Friday.
No clear picture has emerged during Albright's nine-day trip to Europe of how the Clinton administration, which backed NATO's 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslav forces a year ago, will act if violence simmering on the line between Kosovo province and the rest of Serbia blows up into a new conflict.
"We are watching the situation very closely," a U.S. official said, echoing words of NATO's military chief, U.S. General Wesley Clark, though he was talking about the situation in Montenegro which is also giving cause for concern.
Worrying the officials were a blockade of Montenegro's border by Serbian police, arms finds which suggested Serb and Albanian illegal activity in Kosovo's boundary region and a build-up of forces on President Slobodan Milosevic's side of that area.
DODGED QUESTION ON PEACEKEEPER INTERVENTION
Albright, who meets Clark, NATO Secretary-General George Robertson and EU officials in Brussels before returning to Washington, dodged the question when asked whether NATO-led peacekeepers should intervene to defend ethnic Albanians who have come under pressure in areas under Milosevic's control.
While saying extremists on both the Albanian and Serb sides are to blame for the tensions, she has repeatedly said that the only government stoking them is the one in Belgrade.
A series of clashes just outside Kosovo in Serbia proper has prompted some diplomats to see similarities with the pattern of violence that spurred NATO to intervene last March.
Montenegro, Serbia's junior partner in the Yugoslav federation, is also facing problems as its pro-Western President Milo Djukanovic told Albright when he met her in Sarajevo on Thursday.
He said after the meeting that the West was willing to help in the event of aggression from Yugoslav rulers in Belgrade but gave no details. So far, the United States and Europe have offered financial assistance including food aid.
Albright, who left for the Serb half of Bosnia immediately after the meeting, told reporters beforehand that she was concerned about the security of the whole region and supported Montenegro's bid for a democracy within Yugoslavia, adding: "Hopefully, at some stage, the rest of it will be democratic."
The U.S. official said the situation would be discussed at all of Friday's meetings, "Everybody's concerned," he said.
He would not be drawn on whether one possible explanation for the renewed tension was that Milosevic was trying to create an excuse to cancel elections which are supposed to be held this year. "I'm sure it's on people's minds," he said.
While offering financial support in return for reforms and privatisation such as that carried out by Bosnian Serbs in their half of Bosnia, Albright's message has been for opponents of Milosevic to stop fighting, for ethnic Albanians to stop killing Serbs in revenge in Kosovo and for political leaders to reform.
In frank comments about the state of Serbia's opposition, which recently failed to agree an anti-Milosevic protest plan, she said: "It's important to have an opposition leader, not four of them that disagree with each other."
A U.S. official said she was responding to the pessimism of her audience, a group of independent journalists in the Bosnian Serb city of Banja Luka who told her they did not see how the opposition could sort itself out.
The West slapped a fuel embargo on Belgrade for its role in conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo and had hopes that discontent with Milosevic's rule this winter would touch off widespread protests which would remove him from power.
Albright said people in Serbia had to act, saying: "Somehow there has to be a critical mass and a call for revolt."
Officials admit Nato headquarters was open house for Serb eavesdropping
The Times
BY MICHAEL EVANS
DEFENCE EDITOR
SECURITY at Nato's political and military headquarters during the early stages of last year's air campaign over Yugoslavia was so relaxed that it was open house for Serb eavesdropping operations, alliance officials have admitted.
Convinced that the bombing campaign would last only a few days before President Milosevic caved in, hundreds of officials from all the Nato countries had access to the top-secret target plans, and insecure telephone lines were being used to pass on sensitive information. The inadequate security precautions were admitted yesterday as Nato officials denied that an alliance spy had been leaking details of air campaign target orders to the Serbs during the 78-day operation.
The claim in a BBC documentary about the Kosovo crisis, to be shown at the weekend, was dismissed by Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, the Nato Secretary-General, and also by General Wesley Clark, the Supreme Allied Commander, who was in charge of the operation. The BBC referred to an "after action report", by General James McCarthy of the US Air Force, which said there must have been a leak in the first days of bombing because the Serbs appeared to know where raids would occur.
However, a spokesman for General Clark said there had never been any evidence that there was a spy in Nato. The problem, he said, was that, in the early stages of the campaign, there was a lot of sensitive information being passed around over insecure lines that could have been intercepted by the Serbs. He also said that people with cellphones were spotted standing outside Nato air bases in Italy and could have been sending back details of take-offs to Belgrade.
After a few days, he said, when it became clear that the bombing campaign was going to be a longer affair, security was tightened. The 600 people who had security clearance to read the "air tasking orders" were reduced to 100, he said.
Previous stories about a Nato spy, published in newspapers last August, claimed that Serb air defence units had been tipped off about the flight path of a F117 Stealth fighter that was hit by a surface-to-air missile. However, it was later confirmed that none of the flight plans involving American Stealth fighters and the B2 Stealth bomber was included in the Nato air tasking orders.
Jamie Shea, Nato spokesman, said the fact that only two Nato aircraft were lost in the campaign indicated that the Serbs had no warnings of imminent raids.
Patten's visit to Montenegro raises tension between EU and Milosevic
The Independent
By Stephen Castle in Zagreb
10 March 2000
The European Union will risk a confrontation with President Slobodan Milosevic today by giving an audacious display of support for Montenegro, the most independent element of the Yugoslav Republic.
Chris Patten, the European commissioner for external relations, plans to cross the Yugoslav border and go to Podgorica, the Montenegrin capital, for a series of high-level political meetings. While air space over Montenegro is controlled by Belgrade, its land borders are usually controlled by Montenegrin police, making a visit possible, although there was uncertainty last night about whether they would be kept open.
No Western politician has travelled to Montenegro since the Kosovo conflict erupted last year, and Mr Patten will couple his planned visit with the announcement of new aid.
The move came as the West offered assurances that it would help Serbia's junior partner if it came under attack. After a meeting with the United States Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, in Sarajevo yesterday, the Montenegrin President, Milo Djukanovic, said Ms Albright "reiterated the readiness of the Western democratic world to offer Montenegro help in its efforts to preserve peace and to defend itself".
The Western initiative comes amid concern that President Milosevic is seeking to destabilise Montenegro and fuel ethnic divisions both there and in southern Serbia. In response, the international community is determined to step up its support for Mr Djukanovic, while not encouraging him to try to break away from Yugoslavia – which it is feared would provoke another crisis.
"We believe Djukanovic deserves support for his desire to have a democratic Montenegro within Yugoslavia," Ms Albright said, admitting that his economy is under attack.
Brussels acknowledges that the Montenegrin government has been left in a catch-22 situation, as the West discourages it from breaking away from Belgrade for fear of the political consequences. But the lack of independence makes it technically impossible for Western institutions to give substantial macroeconomic aid. Today's announcement will therefore be centred on specific projects funded directly by Brussels, avoiding the need for governments to be directly involved.
On a five-day tour of south- east Europe, including Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo, Bosnia Herzegovina and Croatia, Mr Patten has adopted a carrot-and-stick approach. Countries with failing economies and ineffective government have been urged to change before they can gain greater ties to Europe, while those making progress have been encouraged. Brussels argues that the most successful, such as Croatia, can act as "beacons".
Croatia hopes to open talks quickly on the first step for closer ties with Europe, a stabilisation and association agreement that will eventually lead to a free-trade area relationship. On Tuesday, Macedonia became the first Balkan country to start talks on this type of agreement.
NATO Denies Mole Alerted Serbs to Air Raid Plans
The New York Times
By Reuters
LONDON (Reuters) - NATO said Thursday it had no evidence that a spy in the alliance provided the Serbs with top secret details of the alliance's bombing raids against Yugoslavia during the Kosovo conflict last year.
The Guardian newspaper, citing unidentified high-level U.S. sources, said the spy had given Belgrade details of targets to be hit and precise flight paths.
NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said the fact that Yugoslavia had managed to bring down only two NATO aircraft during a 78-day bombing campaign suggested that the Serbs did not have access to secret information.
``There is absolutely no evidence that Yugoslavia had any kind of information to allow them to be more effective in shooting our planes down,'' Shea said.
``This is a rumor,'' he told BBC television. ``There is no beef (substance).''
Shea said that if the United States really did have evidence of a spy within NATO during the bombing campaign that ended nearly a year ago, the alliance would have heard about it by now.
NATO was not actively looking for a spy because there was no evidence that one existed. ``We don't have anything to go on.''
Shea said there was no evidence the alliance's operational planning had been compromised.
``NATO took extreme measures to make sure that its operational planning remained secret. Every couple of weeks the procedures were reviewed, we tightened up the distribution list ... to make sure that only those who really had a need to know were in the picture. We took great care.''
The Guardian said an internal classified report drawn up for senior U.S. defense officials concluded the Serbs had access to NATO's daily orders for air raids and reconnaissance flights during the first two weeks of the bombing campaign which began last March.
It quoted the report as saying that by the end of the second week of the campaign, NATO started to change the way the orders about bombing raids were distributed.
The effect on what the Serbs appeared to know about NATO's bombing plans was immediate, the report said.
The Guardian quoted a senior NATO source as saying the alliance's supreme commander, General Wesley Clark, suspected early in the bombing campaign that Belgrade had a spy in the organization's Brussels headquarters.
``I know I've got a spy, I want to find him,'' Clark was quoted as telling colleagues.
The Guardian said the classified U.S. report would feature in a BBC television program to be broadcast Sunday.
Yugoslavia: Military Presence Increases In Montenegro
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
By Jolyon Naegele
Montenegro is edging itself out of the Yugoslav federation. RFE/RL correspondent Jolyon Naegele reports from the Montenegrin capital Podgorica that Western-oriented Montenegrins fear a crackdown by Belgrade may be imminent.
Podgorica, 8 March 2000 (RFE/RL) -- An eerie sense of foreboding is palpable in Montenegro's capital, Podgorica.
Yugoslav military police are an increasingly obvious presence. They drive by in vehicular patrols, and they have occupied most hotels on the road toward the ethnically Muslim Sandzak, a potentially explosive region that straddles the border with Serbia. Just as visible are Montenegrin police, zooming around Podgorica in a fleet of shiny new Land Rovers, and occupying those hotels in the Moraca valley and beyond not occupied by the army.
Serbian police imposed a blockade on the flow of goods between the two Yugoslav republics on Monday. Today (Wednesday), Montenegrin pharmacists say Serbia has cut off supplies of medicines. Montenegro has been moving ever farther from its larger partner in Yugoslavia since November, when it adopted the German mark as its currency.
Banner headlines in local newspapers in recent days allege that the Montenegro-based Yugoslav Second Army (under General Milorad Obradovic) is preparing for war, having heightened its battle-readiness and brought in more than 100 officers from Serbia.
The Yugoslav army has set up roadblocks near Montenegro's only border crossing with Albania at Bozaj, just southeast of Podgorica, and is conducting identity checks on travelers. The Yugoslav army has denied as "baseless and tendentious" allegations that its activities have anything to do with a Montenegrin-Albanian agreement two weeks ago (Feb. 24) to reopen the border crossing, which the federal government had kept closed for three years.
Montenegro's ethnic Albanian community has felt the heaviest impact of the Yugoslav army's heightened state of readiness. For the past week, the army has been patrolling Tuzi, a large town of ethnic Albanians between the Bozaj border crossing and Podgorica. One Tuzi resident told RFE/RL that soldiers have been stopping them to conduct identity checks whenever they leave their homes.
Montenegrin Justice Minister Dragan Soc dismisses the army's tactics as provocations.
"We want peace for our citizens and will protect them from attempts to unleash internal conflict. These are our primary goals. We have experience with these games. I see no special reason to be nervous."
Despite the justice minister's confidence, it remains unclear whether the Montenegrin government and police would be in a position to resist if the Yugoslav regime were to try to seize control in Montenegro -- perhaps through a coup or a declaration of martial law. Montenegrin news media say the Yugoslav army estimates that half the Montenegrin police force favors the Belgrade regime.
Equally uncertain is how the international community would respond, beyond the traditional statements of outrage and the inevitable tightening of sanctions. Several Western military analysts have predicted that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic would try to seize control this month to oust the pro-Western Montenegrin government of Milo Djukanovic.
But those predictions came before a new hotspot flared in the past two weeks in near Serbia's southernmost border with Kosovo, an area ethnic Albanians call "Eastern Kosovo."
A cartoon over the weekend in the Kosovo Albanian daily "Zeri" shows Milosevic using one hand to twist the ear of an Albanian from "Eastern Kosovo" while lighting the fuse of a huge bomb labeled Montenegro behind his back with the other hand. The cartoon neatly sums up the present situation: The conflict on Serbia's border with Kosovo is merely a sideshow to the next Balkan powder keg Milosevic is expected to ignite -- Montenegro.
The head of one of Montenegro's ruling pro-democracy parties, Social Democrat Zarko Rakcevic, says Montenegro is being held hostage.
"We are prisoners on the one hand of international politics, and on the other of Kosovo and Serbia. Montenegro's position is extremely unenviable. In this situation we risk giving the pro-Milosevic forces in Montenegro the opportunity, since Montenegro is closed off, to defeat us with arguments full of demagogy and populism about bravery to reject a democratic pro-reform Montenegro."
The deputy speaker of Montenegro's parliament, Predrag Popovic, spoke to a gathering of pro-democracy activists from Montenegro and Serbia in Podgorica last week. In his words: "Relations between Montenegro and Serbia have never been worse in their entire history." Popovic says that what he terms "the dictatorship in Serbia" is the main obstacle to reforming the Yugoslav federation and establishing stability throughout southeastern Europe. In Popovic's words, "Montenegro wants integration and a joint state with Serbia, but neither with a Serbia in its current guise nor under the regime personified by Milosevic."
Popovic accuses the Milosevic regime of denying Montenegro its constitutional rights as an equal partner with Serbia and of forcing Montenegro out of the Yugoslav federation. He also accuses Milosevic of seeking to fabricate a conflict, saying Milosevic will blame the conflict on Montenegro and use force to suppress pro-democratic forces in Montenegro while claiming to save Yugoslavia.
The head of the European Movement in Serbia, a Belgrade-based NGO, describes the situation in Serbia as very tense. Jelica Minic says democratic forces in both republics are aware that, in her words, "it would be much better if Serbia and Montenegro meet in the EU as independent states rather than part in bloodshed." She says Yugoslavia is a house with rotten foundations.
Minic says that as Serbian opposition parties and NGOs try to consolidate their control at the local level in Novi Sad, Nis, Cacak and elsewhere, the result is a new federalization of Serbia, with local leaders acting increasingly independently of the government in Belgrade.
But Minic tells RFE/RL Serbs should not oppose independence for Montenegro if no other mutually acceptable solution can be found.
"If it is the will of Montenegrin citizens to have an independent state, that is something that Serbia should respect. If it is not the case, then new mechanisms should be provided, new institutional mechanisms, that would make citizens of Montenegro and citizens of Serbia satisfied with the new institutional setting of the future state or of the existing state."
Introducing such institutional mechanisms, however, is unlikely as long as Milosevic remains in power.
Chinese entrepreneurs flock to Serbia
Nando Media
By KATARINA KRATOVAC
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (March 7, 2000 8:15 a.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com) - Many Serbs want to leave Serbia, and, in the wake of the Kosovo war, Yugoslavia's main republic is ostracized by most of the world. Still, Chinese entrepreneurs are flocking to Belgrade.
For some, it is more than random migration.
The recent invasion of Chinese entrepreneurs seems to be instigated by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's influential Communist wife, Mirjana Markovic. On a 1997 trip to China, she reportedly was smitten by Communism there and was instrumental in prompting the influx of Chinese into Yugoslavia.
Undeterred by Serbia's ruined economy, Chinese tradesmen peddle everything from trinkets and toys to cheap clothes and rice noodles. Their efforts are resulting in Serbia's only business boom, producing a flurry of open-air markets, makeshift shopping malls and popular Chinese restaurants.
Sitting at his crowded stall in one of Belgrade's suburbs, Xiang Pin Rong's "boutique" - an ill-lit cardboard and glass cubicle - is legal. But most Chinese work without permits and are exposed to frequent police raids.
In the smoke-filled mall, Chinese vendors sip tea, talk on mobile phones and do their best to convince Belgrade residents to buy their merchandise.
Rong, 38, arrived here last September from Zhe Jian, 900 miles south of Beijing. With a wife and baby daughter in tow, Rong works six days a week selling bright-colored pajamas for $10 each and men's silk ties for $1.50.
His profit, a couple of hundred dollars a month, is a fortune in Serbia, where the average paycheck is less than $50 a month.
No statistics exist on how many Chinese have come to Serbia in the past year, prodded by Chinese television broadcasts about a "country of great potential." Belgrade police have registered 4,000, but estimates go as high as 40,000.
Visas are obtained easily in China. The main glitch, however, comes once a prospective tradesman arrives and aspires, for example, to own a shop, a notch above a street peddler.
Serbian law bars foreign nationals from real estate or commercial ownership. Therefore, the newcomer must strike a partnership with a local resident, including a sizable down payment.
Once that is established, families and relatives follow.
Myn Ce, 18, came last fall to study Serbian at Belgrade University, but spends five hours a day helping his uncle sell sneakers and wristwatches - Nike and Seiko knockoffs.
"I know it's poorer quality, but Serbs buy our gym shoes for only $15," Ce says. With a small Chinese-Serb dictionary in hand and almost-fluent Serbian, he interprets when nearby merchants and buyers get stuck on the language barrier.
"The only thing I cannot get used to is local white bread," he said.
Unlike Ce, other Chinese don't seem to object to Serbia's traditional pastry, baker Vica Sreckovic said.
"I was asleep on the job before they came. Now I can't stop working," Sreckovic said, smiling and greeting a crowd of Chinese customers. Business in his bakery, squeezed between two high-rises next to the Chinese market, has never been better.
Sreckovic says he owes it all to Milosevic's wife: "Thank her for bringing them!"
The Serb-Chinese friendship was sealed when NATO bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the alliance's campaign last year. The bombing set off a flood of pro-Chinese sentiment and drew promises of aid from Beijing.
In mid-December, Serbia announced that the Chinese had granted the republic a $300 million loan. Also, the governments agreed to an additional $10 million worth of Chinese humanitarian aid, including medical supplies.
Perhaps the brightest example of Chinese success here is the "Great Chinese," a floating restaurant on the Danube a mile from the bombed embassy. Above its entrance, the pagoda-style culinary temple flies both countries' flags and a portrait of Chairman Mao Tse-tung.
Owners Yang Zhanjun, 38, and his wife, Wang Weiying, stuck it out during the NATO bombing - and have no plans to go back anytime soon.
"As a child in China, I learned a lot about Yugoslavia," Zhanjun says. "Now I want to give something back to a culture I like so much."
How the Serb army escaped Nato
'They came out to burn villages when they wanted to, they hid when the weather was good'
The Guardian
Richard Norton-Taylor
Thursday March 9, 2000
The conclusion in a secret US defence department report that Belgrade had a spy in Nato in the early days of the Kosovo conflict backs up suspicions raised at the time by other military sources and raises the question of how much it affected allied operations and the conduct of the war.
Nato commanders, not to say political leaders, became increasingly frustrated by their inability to destroy Serb units carrying out atrocities on ethnic Albanians, precisely the activity Nato's military action was designed to prevent.
Nato's initial targets - those which Belgrade knew about in advance, according to the US reports - were mainly fixed sites, including anti-aircaft missile emplacements and military barracks.
The Serbs were reluctant to "lock-on" their missiles to Nato aircraft since this would make them vulnerable to counter-attack by Nato pilots. However, allied pilots throughout the 78-day bombing campaign reported attacks from surface-to-air missiles, fired, it seems, without their base being identified.
The first phase of the Nato campaign did not include targets over Kosovo - indeed, it was assumed that Slobodan Milosevic would put up his hands before new targeting plans would need to be agreed.
It was known that Yugoslavia had built an extensive system of underground shelters for its troops, guns and aircraft - a relic of President Tito's era, in preparation for a possible invasion by the Soviet Union. Many of its camouflage techniques, including the use of dummy weapons emplacements, the Serbs had learned from the Russians.
General Nebojsa Pavkovic, commander of the Yugoslav army in Kosovo, tells the BBC's Moral Combat programme this Sunday: "We used other measures, too: camouflage, decoys, and it was mainly these that Nato aircraft destroyed."
Nato pilots found small mobile targets so hard to find that on some days they dropped half their bombs on so-called "dump sites" known to be empty.
General Mike Short, commander of the allied air forces, said: "The Serbs dictated the pace of events, they dictated the battle rhythm. They came out to burn villages when they wanted to, they hid when the weather was good."
The question is how much did access to Nato intelligence give the Serbs warnings of allied attacks on specific targets - possibly even enabling them to place Albanians in military buildings and military vehicles in civilian convoys in areas they knew were going to be attacked.
But Nato did not start to strike targets in Kosovo until later in the war. In the first weeks of the conflict Nato commanders were frustrated by something the Serbs could do nothing about. Bad weather persistently prevented British laser-guided "smart" bombs from identifying targets.
And Nato's mistakes - killing civilians in urban areas and on Kosovan roads and railways - occurred mainly in good weather. Critics of the bombing campaign also said mistakes were the inevitable result of Nato's policy of restricting its pilots to bombing from 15,000 feet or above - a policy dictated not least by political considerations, notably Washington's determination to avoid horrified public reaction to the sight of "bodybags" coming home.
Failure to identify targets on the ground in Kosovo led Nato commanders - after fierce arguments between member governments - to strike economic and industrial targets, including power stations and the Serbian television headquarters in Belgrade.
Military commanders, in the first few weeks of the war, were cautious about what their bombers had achieved. Swept on by the rhetoric of their political masters, however, they began to make claims which they were to regret.
By early May, Nato was claiming that its aircraft had destroyed more than 200 tanks and had cut off Serb forces in Kosovo from their supply bases. It portrayed a Serb army whose morale was crumbling from mounting casualties, shortages of food and fuel and lack of sleep, as it dispersed into smaller and weaker units to escape the relentless bombing.
After conceding that the initial war aims - which were to avert a human disaster, as George Robertson, then defence secretary, put it - had failed, Nato claimed it was progressively destroying the Albanians' tormentors.
Yet when the western media saw the Serb military withdraw from Kosovo in early June, they saw convoys of Serb tanks, armoured cars, guns, trucks and military equipment untouched by Nato's air assault.
Nato's bombing campaign, with thousand of sorties and the dropping of tens of thousands of bombs, including sophisticated precision weapons, succeeded in damaging just 13 of the Serbs' 300 battle tanks in Kosovo.
A Nato spy could have provided Belgrade with crucial information, but the implication of the secret US reports is that two weeks into the conflict he or she no longer had access to allied targeting secrets.
His or her presence would certainly have hit the morale of Nato's commanders. But he or she is unlikely to have had any impact on the later conduct of Nato's campaign. This was determined by broad political necessities and military shortcomings.
Nato's final tally of hits and misses
•Nato planes flew more than 3,000 bombing missions, for the loss of one plane to enemy fire, during the 79-day war from late March to June last year
•After 1,955 of those missions, pilots reported hitting their targets (some claims were duplicates)
•93 Yugoslav tanks were hit (out of a rough total of 600) - 26 of them "catastrophically" destroyed and 67 severely damaged
•153 armoured personnel carriers were hit (out of an estimated 600)
•389 artillery and mortar pieces were struck
Swedish role in Kosovo peace
The Times
BY MICHAEL EVANS DEFENCE EDITOR
THE Russian security and intelligence hierarchy used the services of a trusted Swedish financier to act as a secret go-between to persuade President Milosevic to end the conflict in Kosovo.
Peter Castenfelt, a financier with an investment company in London who had the trust of both the Russian Government and the security powerbase in Moscow, was considered to be the only man capable of making the Yugoslav leader understand that the Russians were not going to come to his aid.
Four days of secret meetings between Mr Castenfelt and Mr Milosevic took place in Belgrade before the official envoys, Victor Chernomyrdin, the former Russian Prime Minister, and President Ahtisaari of Finland, took over the negotiations to broker an agreement with the Yugoslav leader.
The crucial role played by the influential Swedish financier in the days leading up to Belgrade's capitulation to Nato's demands was kept in the background, as the focus fell on the peace mission of the two official envoys.
However, the significance of Mr Castenfelt's success in laying the foundations of the subsequent peace deal is highlighted in a documentary, Moral Combat: Nato at War, to be shown on BBC2 on Sunday, almost a year after the start of Nato's bombing campaign.
Mr Castenfelt, who was in the United States yesterday and was unavailable to comment, was selected for his mission after an arrangement between Germany and the Russian security forces. He was well known to all the powerbrokers in Moscow, having been appointed an official adviser on economic affairs to the Russian Government in 1993. He worked with Mr Chernomyrdin and also President Yeltsin.
The BBC documentary says Mr Milosevic believed that he had potential allies among the Russian military and intelligence services. The peace deal which the Russian security forces had accepted included two concesssions from Nato: that the United Nations would administer Kosovo and that the province would remain a part of Yugoslavia. On June 3, the Yugoslav leader backed down and agreed the deal, after the visit from the Swedish go-between.
Albright calls democracy key to Balkan peace
PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) — Seeking to promote stability in the Balkans, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright announced plans Tuesday to open U.S. markets to imports from southeastern Europe and said democracy was key to resolving ethnic tensions in the region.
Albright also blamed many of the region's problems on Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who she said had "betrayed the best interests of the Serbian people by starting and losing four wars" in the past decade.
"Certainly there is no future for Serbia under Milosevic," Albright said in a speech. "Democracy is the key to our strategy throughout southeastern Europe. Democratic governments are more stable internally, more likely to encourage ethnic tolerance and more interested in establishing closer economic and political ties with their neighbors and the West."
In hopes of promoting democracy, Albright, who is visiting the land of her birth, expressed hope that the European Union would honor pledges for billions of dollars in aid to the region.
"Meanwhile, the United States is implementing its own commitments," she said. "We are submitting legislation to Congress that would provide southeastern Europe with five years of duty-free access to U.S. markets."
She also said the Clinton Administration had made a $200 million investment credit line available to companies in the region and the U.S. government's Overseas Private Investment Corp. is forming a $150 million regional investment fund to encourage economic growth.
On Kosovo, Albright acknowledged that progress in reconciling Serbs and ethnic Albanians has been painfully slow.
"After all that has happened, we do not expect the rival communities in Kosovo to immediately join hands singing folk songs," she said. "We do insist they stop killing each other."
Thousands of ethnic Albanians were killed by Serb forces during Milosevic's 18-month crackdown against Kosovo separatists. Since NATO bombing forced the Serb troops to withdraw last spring, ethnic attacks and killings have been regular occurrences in the province.
She criticized extremists on both sides, including those among the ethnic Albanians "who perpetrate crimes against Serbs and other minorities." She said ethnic Albanian extremists "deserve strong condemnation and are doing a profound disservice to the aspirations of their people."
"There's also one government in Belgrade which is promoting confrontation and trying to undermine the prospects for ethnic coexistence," she said. "The policies of that government over the past decade have sparked the rise of extremism on both sides of the ethnic divide."
Albright said she was convinced that if given the choice, Serbs would follow the democratic path of other countries such as Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia, which broke away from Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
"We cannot impose a democratic solution on Serbia but we can encourage democratic change by helping the opposition to unite, assisting independent media and making clear that a democratic Serbia would be warmly welcomed and generously assisted by the international community," she said.
Following the speech, Albright was to meet with Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman and Foreign Minister Jan Kavan. She will also host a roundtable on women in politics before leaving early Wednesday for Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Since arriving Sunday, Albright has called for Eastern Europeans to play a stronger role in spreading democracy to Serbia, arguing that former Communist countries can offer insights into promoting liberty in corners of Europe where authoritarianism prevails.
Albright's father, Josef Korbel, was a Czech diplomat who fled with his wife and children to London as Germany took control of Czechoslovakia at the onset of World War II.
When the communists took over Czechoslovakia in 1948, the family migrated to the United States.
After the fall of communism here, the Czech and Slovak republics split into two countries in 1993.
Yugoslavia: Attack On Studio-B Aims At Serbia's Electronic Media
By Ron Synovitz
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
In the latest attack against Belgrade's independent Studio-B television, five masked men in police uniforms yesterday (Monday) sabotaged the station's transmission facilities. RFE/RL correspondent Ron Synovitz examines Belgrade's increasing efforts to silence Serbia's independent electronic media.
Prague, 7 March 2000 (RFE/RL) -- Belgrade's political opposition is warning that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is trying to shut down independent broadcasters across Serbia.
The warnings follow a violent attack Monday on the transmitter of Belgrade's largest independent television station -- Studio-B -- by a group of men wearing masks and Interior Ministry police uniforms. A security guard and a Studio-B technician were seriously injured in the attack, and broadcasts were interrupted for several hours.
The Belgrade-based Association of Independent Electronic Media, known as ANEM, blames the attack on the Yugoslav government. ANEM says it is the first time since NATO air strikes last year that "blood has been spilled" because of Belgrade's repression of media.
Milorad Savicevic, deputy chief of the opposition Demo-Christian Party of Serbia, says the incident shows that Milosevic is determined to clamp down on independent media ahead of local and federal elections scheduled for later this year.
"It's clear that it is now the time for [a crackdown] against the electronic media. Until now, [Milosevic's government] has interpreted [last year's information] law as only pertaining to printed media. [But now] a dark cloud is moving over all the independent electronic media -- especially members of ANEM and others."
Belgrade's efforts to censor independent journalists have so far been based on a three-pronged strategy. Last year's restrictive information law gave authorities the legal power to silence press criticisms of Milosevic. Opposition transmissions have been jammed by the Milosevic regime for months. And recently, economic pressure increasingly has been employed as a tool of censorship -- including excessive taxes and licensing fees.
After Monday's attack, a Belgrade magistrate fined Studio-B about $10,000 for breaching the information law in a statement made during a live broadcast. Also yesterday, the Yugoslav minister of telecommunications threatened legal action against Studio-B if the station fails to pay $850,000 in licensing fees by next Tuesday (13 March).
Studio-B's editor-in-chief, Dragan Kojadinovic, says his station does not recognize the debt. He predicts that Belgrade's next step will be the closing of Studio-B's television and radio channels. Kojadinovic also alleges that yesterday's attack on the transmitter was the result of direct orders from the Milosevic government:
"It's obvious that one of the attackers was very well informed about the arrangement of the rooms and also the technical equipment. [After beating the security guard,] when they entered the transmitter room, they were surprised to find another man -- our technician -- and they started to beat him. Then they tied their hands and covered their heads with blankets so that they couldn't see what happened next [or recognize] who was the technical expert and who was disassembling the equipment."
Kojadinovic noted that the attackers only damaged and stole equipment used for broadcasts by opposition media. The attackers left intact all of the equipment used by pro-Milosevic state media.
Mirko Slavkovic, the Studio-B technician who sustained severe head injuries in the attack, told RFE/RL that he thinks the assailants were agents of the Yugoslav government:
"It all happened very quickly and it was very professionally done. It appeared that these men had been trained for something like this. So, they could be either ex-police, or active police, or simply people trained for such operations."
The Yugoslav Interior Ministry has denied that any of its officers were involved. The ministry says Studio-B chief Kojadinovic has fabricated a "malicious lie." The ministry has launched an investigation.
Studio-B is owned by the Belgrade city council and controlled by the opposition Serbian Renewal Movement led by Vuk Draskovic. The attack temporarily halted broadcasts to some 400,000 television viewers and 1 million radio listeners. Also cut off the air was another independent Belgrade broadcaster, B2-92 radio.
The incident has succeeded -- at least for now -- in bringing together members of Serbia's fragmented opposition. Draskovic's key opposition rival, Zoran Djindjic, appeared at a meeting with other opposition leaders at Studio-B headquarters Monday night. His presence was a rare conciliatory gesture emphasizing the concern that opposition parties share over the attack.
Latest Balkan hot spot: 'eastern Kosovo'
The emergence of a KLA offshoot in Serbia sparks concerns of new instability.
Emma Daly
The Christian Science Monitor
DOBROSIN, YUGOSLAVIA
A red car, no plates, screeches to a halt and discharges three men, armed, uniformed and angry - which is not unusual in Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia, save for the fact that these fighters are ethnic Albanians, members of the newest "liberation army" in the Balkans.
They are swift and determined as they relieve us of passports, press cards, notebooks, cameras - even a colleague, who offers to make the trip to their headquarters to explain our journalistic quest in this hamlet only 200 yards inside the boundary separating Kosovo from the rest of southern Serbia.
After an anxious couple of hours guarded by a uniformed soldier wearing the unsnappy patch of the "Presevo, Medvedje, and Bujanovc Liberation Army," the men return. "I am very sorry about what we just did," says Trimi, the commander. "But 1,000 [yards] away from us there is a Serbian position."
His anxiety, even paranoia, is understandable. His men have shot and wounded a United Nations aid worker who made the mistake of approaching Dobrosin from the direction of a Serb police checkpoint. The road had not been used since Jan. 26, when Serbian forces shot and killed two ethnic Albanian brothers.
The PMBLA fighters, panicked by the appearance of a white car with no markings, tried to halt the vehicle and then fired - only to find two foreign aid workers. They apologized, applied first aid, and ferried them to a nearby American base on the Kosovo border.
"We feel really bad about what happened," says Rrufeja, another PMBLA commander, two days later, by which time Dobrosin has become a mini-media mecca with dozens of hacks tramping through, seeking interviews with the new guerrilla group. "The car didn't stop, and the soldiers were scared, so they fired."
Such mistakes seem unavoidable when men with Kalashnikovs face one another across a narrow, undefined no-man's-land. Rrufeja, whose nom de guerre means "lightning," describes a recent shootout with Serbian police (one dead on either side) as another unfortunate mistake. "Our soldiers were monitoring the Serb forces, and by accident there was a confrontation," he says. But accidents, especially when fatal, can trigger dangerous reactions.
Although the PMBLA might be easily dismissed as no real threat to the Serb military machine - its very name an indication of the lack of a coherent geographical identity - the simmering tensions present a serious threat to the stability of Kosovo and by extension to the NATO and UN mission here.
Presevo, Medvedje, and Bujanovc, with an ethnic Albanian population of around 80,000, were once part of Kosovo - but swapped in 1950 for the Serbian-dominated town of Leposavic, now in northern Kosovo.
Which in turn is near another flash point: the divided city of Mitrovica, where French and Italian police on Friday fired tear-gas at a Serbian mob trying to block the return home of ethnic Albanian refugees.
Add the threat of possible secession by Montenegro, Serbia's junior partner in what remains of Yugoslavia, stir it up with Mr. Milosevic's practice of consolidating power by fomenting conflict, and stand well back. These three fronts offer "the potential for Milosevic to make a fair amount of mischief for the international community," according to an experienced foreign observer in Kosovo.
Several thousand ethnic Albanian refugees from Serbia have already fled what they call "eastern Kosovo" for shelter in the international protectorate next door. More than 1,300 have registered with aid officials in Gnjilane so far this year and the past few days have seen a "dramatic increase," according to one foreign worker in the area, who declined to be identified.
Bekim Dauti of the International Rescue Committee, responsible for refugees in the Gnjilane area, says the agency finds new arrivals waiting outside the office every morning. They say Serbian forces are threatening ethnic Albanians and burning houses. "As some people say, it is going to be a hot spring," says Mr Dauti. "We need to be prepared."
Qefsere Xhemaili fled her home in a village near Bujanovc on Saturday and is now living with her husband and two children in a squalid collective center in Gnjilane, along with 325 other ethnic Albanians from Serbia. "One month ago, lots of soldiers came with tanks and they are still in the village, in the center. They are based there," she explains. "More than half the villagers have left.... Of course we are scared of a war, that's why we are here."
An influx of refugees from this narrow strip of Serbia is not going to spark a humanitarian disaster by Kosovo standards, says the foreign observer. But television pictures of US soldiers standing by and watching as civilians flee a scorched-earth campaign may not sit easily with Americans in an election year.
The PMBLA fighters wear US and German camouflage and new red-and-yellow patches with their logo and the Albanian black eagle. Many are veterans of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), the rebel group that opposed federal Yugoslav forces during the killings and mass expulsions of majority ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, which led to NATO airstrikes last spring. It is clear they have received logistical aid from KLA comrades. The question is, how institutionalized has such support become in the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC), which replaced the KLA?
Shaban Shala, a former KLA fighter, is the KPC commander in Gnjilane. Asked if the group is assisting comrades across the border, he replies: "Not legally."
Mr. Shala says he opposes any new conflict. "The Albanians there are not ready for a war," he says. "It is not in our interest. It is not in the interest of the international community, and they have urged us not to fall into the trap of Serbian provocations."
He adds, "We need free people who live freely wherever they are, Serbs in Kosovo and Albanians in Presevo." In Pristina, the Kosovar capital, there is concern that a new round of fighting could jeopardize the international effort in Kosovo. The line here is that locals in the border region do not support PMBLA fighters, since they fear a Serbian backlash.
In Dobrosin, civilians and soldiers argue over who is allowed to talk to visiting journalists, with the military trying (and failing) to exclude villagers. However, the constant refrain is: We will not leave our homes, we will defend our villages, by whatever means available.
In the rolling, wooded hills of the Presevo Valley, where small groups of refugees pick their way across the mountains to safety in Kosovo, there is a horrible sense of déjà vu. Our PMBLA guard is chatting about his family, his three brothers and one sister, all former KLA fighters. His sister, featured on a KLA sticker staring down the sights of a sniper rifle, is away finishing her university studies. But, he says, "I am afraid she will be back here very soon."
Annan calls for clartiy on Kosovo political future
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan Tuesday called for clarity on the future political status of Kosovo, saying he and the Security Council would take up the contentious issue shortly.
"We are operating in a very ambiguous operation, in a limbo, because the future, the political outline has not been defined," he told a news conference.
Bernard Kouchner, the U.N. administrator in Kosovo raised the controversy with the Security Council on Monday. Annan said he would touch on the question in a report next month that sought to define Kosovo's role in the Balkans.
"You can't deal with situation in Kosovo in isolation from the region," Annan said.
Kouchner, who plans municipal elections in Kosovo late this year, said the "substantial autonomy " promised for Kosovo had never been defined the Security Council's June 1999 resolution that created the U.N. civilian administration in the Serbian province
With no vision of the future, the Serb minority in Kosovo feared it would be pushed out by ethnic Albanians, who in turn feared NATO troops would leave and put them under Belgrade's control again.
U.N. officials said Kouchner's office planned to draft the proposals on where his mission is headed rather than wait for the council to do so.
Kouchner, however, made clear, that the U.N. would not advocate independence as some Kosovo Albanians are demanding, saying the "final status" of the province was not a matter for discussion at this time. But he said an interim constitution had to be drafted to define the future.
The council in June 1999 authorized a U.N.-led civilian mission and the NATO-led military, known as KFOR, to take over Kosovo after an 11-week NATO bombing campaign that forced Belgrade to halt repression of ethnic Albanians.
Yugoslavia, backed by Russia, has objected to many measures Kouchner has initiated, from a separate currency to collecting taxes, saying they impinged on Belgrade's sovereignty and represented a drift towards independence.
In a separate news conference on Tuesday, Yugoslav's U.N. envoy, Vladislav Jovanovic, who attended Security Council consultations with Kouchner, said the 15-member body ignored the main issues in the province.
Jovanovic said there had been no mention during the briefings of "ethnic cleansing, no mention of genocide, no invitation by Dr Kouchner to visit the camps of the 350,000 exiled Serbs, Romas and others...who are now displaced persons throughout Serbia and Montenegro."
Instead of addressing these issues, he said, Kouchner and NATO General Klaus Reinhardt had discussed such matters as the need for judges, financial resources, additional police, schools and hospitals.
Montenegro protests as Serb police block border
KOLOVRAT, Yugoslavia, March 6 (Reuters) - Huge queues of trucks formed on Serbia's border with Montenegro on Monday after Serbian police imposed a total blockade on the flow of goods between the two Yugoslav republics.
Montenegro's pro-West government said the blockade was designed to destabilise the smaller republic, which is gradually edging away from Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's Serbian-dominated federation in protest at his policies.
About 50 trucks lined up at Kolovrat, which marks the administrative border line, and many more assembled in the town of Prijepolje four km (three miles) away.
Police set up a checkpoint nearly two years ago to control people and goods on their way to Montenegro but the first signs of a total trade blockade were reported at the weekend.
Officers searched all trucks, private cars and passenger buses on Monday. Trucks carrying consumer goods were not allowed through and any large quantities of merchandise were being confiscated from private car owners or bus passengers.
Montenegro's Pobjeda daily said over the weekend the police also stopped Yugoslav army trucks carrying food for troops based in Montenegro, sparking angry exchanges.
RESIDENTS REPORT SCUFFLE
Police were unavailable for comment but local residents reported they had heard of a scuffle breaking out on Friday when police refused to let through two fuel trucks for the army.
A bus driver carrying fruit to the Bosnian Serb republic via Montenegro said on Monday no produce was allowed to Montenegro.
"I've been here for 48 hours. The customs procedure was completed 72 hours ago, the deadline for shipping the goods out of the country has expired," the driver told Reuters.
The Montenegrin newspaper Pobjeda quoted the republic's trade minister, Ramo Bralic, as saying Belgrade's behaviour was politically motivated to provoke dissatisfaction in Montenegro and "discipline" its authorities for their links with the West.
"Raising political tensions and destabilising Montenegro is a permanent task of the Belgrade regime," he said.
Montenegro, the last republic left with Serbia in Yugoslavia, has distanced itself from Milosevic's government since President Milo Djukanovic was elected in 1997.
It legalised the German mark as a parallel currency last year to escape inflationary trends in Serbia. Serb police retaliated by stopping certain goods from entering Montenegro.
Montenegrin Economy Minister Vojin Djukanovic said a full economic blockade on Montenegro was "another show of madness of the Belgrade regime, which is deliberately harming Montenegro."
He told Pobjeda that Montenegro would not retaliate by closing its border to Serbia but would find alternative markets to secure its needs.
U.N. official calls for talks on Kosovo's future
The Financial Times
By Evelyn Leopold - 7 Mar 2000 09:26GMT
UNITED NATIONS, March 6 (Reuters) - Bernard Kouchner, the chief U.N. administrator for Kosovo, said it was time for talks on political autonomy and a draft interim constitution so all ethnic communities knew what their future would hold.
Kouchner said he asked the 15 council members to define what they meant by substantial autonomy for the Serbian province.
Until such a discussion begins, the Serb minority in Kosovo fears it is going to be pushed out of the province by ethnic Albanians, who in turn fear NATO will leave and they will be under Belgrade's control.
We need to start a very clear discussion about the future of all communities, Kouchner said. He said local elections -- to be held, it is hoped, in November -- needed to fit into an overall structure.
The council in June 1999 authorized a U.N.-led civilian mission and directed the NATO-led military, known as KFOR, to take over Kosovo after an 11-week NATO bombing campaign that forced Belgrade to halt the repression of ethnic Albanians.
Reinhardt, the commander in Kosovo, stressed that the relationship between ethnic groups throughout the province was intolerable and exacerbated by the continuing ambiguity over Kosovo's future.
He said efforts by his forces had been thwarted by a climate of impunity that allowed murders, looting, arson and assault. Both Reinhardt and Kouchner called again for more international police, of whom there has been a chronic shortage in Kosovo.
Judges and prosecutors have been added to the want list after the intimidation of local judges, many of whom have failed to sentence anyone.
One question that needed to be answered, Reinhardt said, was whether it was possible for a territory to function as an autonomous part of a sovereign state whose armed forces have just tried to oust 90 percent of the population.
U.N. officials said his office was expected to draw up an outline of what autonomy in Kosovo would look like and present it to the council for discussion. The body took no decisions during its consultations with Kouchner and Reinhardt.
Raid Temporarily Cuts Off Anti-Milosevic TV Station in Belgrade
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
BELGRADE, Serbia, March 6 -- Men in camouflage uniforms today raided the transmission center of the main nongovernment television station here, Studio B. Senior government officials intensified legal action against it.
Two employees were badly beaten in the morning raid on the Torlak transmission station, Studio B executives said.
Five assailants who were wearing police uniforms stormed the compound, tied up and beat the two workers and tore transmitter cables, causing Studio B to go off the air temporarily. Hours after the raid, Telecommunications Minister Ivan Markovic ordered Studio B to pay in eight days $850,000 for the use of its frequencies or face legal action.
This evening, a court fined the station $40,000 in a libel suit filed by a police officer.
The City Council owns the station, and it is controlled by the Serbian Renewal Movement of an opposition leader, Vuk Draskovic.
"The latest attack on Studio B is the attack on all free, independent and alternative media in Serbia," said the chief of the station, Dragan Kojadinovic. "This is the action that is meant to leave all of us without Studio B."
Mr. Kojadinovic said the station did not have the money to pay for using its frequencies.
Mr. Kojadinovic was fined $20,000 in the case.
The police officer, Branko Djuric, was accused on a Studio B program of involvement in a vehicular accident in October in which Mr. Draskovic was injured.
Mr. Draskovic has said the crash was an assassination attempt disguised as an accident.
The judge rejected Studio B's defense that it could not be held responsible for comments made by guests on live programs.
Mr. Kojadinovic met tonight with major opposition leaders in Serbia, accusing President Slobodan Milosevic's government of the "most brutal action" in its crackdown against the station.
A statement issued after the meeting called for an end to all pressure and threatened street protests if it continued.
In their own statement, the police denied that they had been involved in the raid and accused Studio B of "another malicious and incorrect report fabricated in that media house."
Pictures from the Torlak center, broadcast on the Studio B evening news, showed bloodstains on the floor of the transmission station.
The two workers who were attacked were taken to a hospital for treatment. One had his head bandaged.
Mr. Kojadinovic said: "The five attackers arrived in a police jeep with the siren howling. The workers believed that they came for an inspection and opened the gate, after which the beating began."
The transmissions were temporarily interrupted to 400,000 viewers and one million radio listeners. Another independent outlet, B2-92 radio, which broadcasts on a Studio B frequency, was also cut off. Some equipment also was confiscated.
The chief technician of Studio B, Dusan Markovic, said the attackers were obviously extremely skilled and able to distinguish which "cables belonged to independent media." Several state-run stations also have equipment and transmitters at the site.
The government may be trying to crack down on major independent news media ahead of local and federal elections this year. Studio B has broadcast programs that criticized Mr. Milosevic.
Dini says reprisals on Kosovo Serbs intolerable
ROME, March 4 (Reuters) - Italian Foreign Minister Lamberto Dini said in an interview on Saturday reprisals by Kosovo Albanians against Serbs were intolerable and Albanians were doing little to set up a civil administration in the province.
"Violations in Kosovo are not only being committed by the Serbs. No. Since the United Nations is in Kosovo, all the reprisals have been against the Serb population," Dini told Rome daily la Repubblica. "This is intolerable."
He said allied forces had won the war in Kosovo but had not yet managed to ensure security in the province and that would not happen without a civil administration which could take action against criminals.
"In this respect, I have to say there has been no great help by the Kosovo Albanians, from political figures (of the former Kosovo Liberation Army), even from (Albanian representative Ibrahim) Rugova or from those who speak of independence without actually knowing what it means to run a country," Dini said.
"They should be getting involved in constructing a civil administration instead of thinking about weapons, the struggle, the Albanians living in Serbia," he added.
Tensions between Albanians, who now comprise 95 percent of the population of some two million in Kosovo, and the remaining Serb community have caused several deaths and injuries in the past few weeks.
On Montenegro, Dini said Italy's view was in line with that of its allies that the Montenegrin government should be given economic and financial support.
"This is to prevent the internal situation from becoming disastrous and Montenegro taking a decision (to secede from the Yugoslav federation) which would be hugely destabilising for the region," he said.
Serbian doctor dies in Albanian 'cleansing'
The Sunday Times
Tom Walker, Gornje Kusce
THE grave of Dr Josef Vasic is in the middle of a cemetery on a steep hill beneath the Orthodox church in Gornje Kusce. Heavy rains that washed away much of Kosovo's winter snow have reduced the flowers, cigarettes and apples left to comfort the doctor on his heavenly journey to a sodden mess.
For the beleaguered Serbs of Kosovo, the province has again become the grim land of eternal sacrifice celebrated in the epic poetry they hand down from generation to generation.
Six centuries ago it was the Turks who were rampant. Now, as Nato and the United Nations look on bewildered, it is the Albanians. Ethnic cleansing continues unabated and Vasic, a gynaecologist with three young children, was its latest victim.
One of two remaining Serbian doctors in eastern Kosovo's main city of Gnjilane, Vasic, 37, who had spent most of his professional life treating Albanian women, was gunned down in the street at 9.30am just over a week ago.
"I heard four shots," said his widow, Dragana. "He had already been beaten up once and had a grenade thrown at him. I didn't think it could happen a third time."
A few minutes later she knew the worst. Vencislav Grozdanovic, a biochemist who had been walking with Vasic from the clinic where they both worked, described how a dark-haired man in his thirties had shouted at them to lie down.
Grozdanovic instinctively ran. Behind him, Vasic shouted in fear before the shots rang out.
Apart from Nato-led Kfor peacekeepers, the only organisation fighting the losing battle to contain Kosovo's anarchy is the UN international police force. Their two commanders in Gnjilane, an American and a Russian, have admitted that little can be done to halt such cold-blooded assassinations.
If an Albanian wants to murder a Serb, UN sources say, he can do so with virtual impunity. Any attempt to find the perpetrator is lost in the conspiracy of silence that casts a depressing pall over a province in the grip of a powerful Albanian mafia.
Valeri Korotenko, Gnjilane's deputy UN police commander and a member of the elite Russian Spetznaz special force, has done what he can for the Vasic family.
Such was the fear of further attacks that the doctor could not be buried in Gnjilane. Under heavy Kfor protection, Dragana Vasic and the couple's daughters - Andriana, 3, Jovana, 5, and Jelena, 8 - along with the dead man's mother Ruzica and a few other relatives, were taken to Gornje Kusce, two miles to the north.
This is one of several villages that serve as havens for the Serbs. All have an Orthodox church or monastery, ringed by barbed wire and surrounded by a few hundred families.
After the funeral the Vasics returned under guard to their apartment block, where American soldiers are on permanent duty and UN police occupy the more vulnerable flats.
"There used to be 11,000 Serbs in Gnjilane, now there are about 1,000," said Korotenko's colleague, Commander Gary Carrell from Montana. "Quite frankly it's a very dangerous place right now."
Much of the UN organisation in Kosovo appears apathetic, but Carrell and Korotenko provide an uplifting example of international co-operation, their strength as a team drawn from serving together in Bosnia.
Carrell believes the "vast majority" of Albanians do not approve of the continuing murders, but are scared of speaking out because the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) extends its intelligence network through Gnjilane's chaotic and litter-strewn alleyways.
The UN had pinned much hope on training a local police force, which was supposed to have been multi-ethnic and conformed to international standards. The backbone of the force should have been former Albanian policemen sacked in 1989 by Slobodan Milosevic when, as Serbian president, he rescinded Kosovo's autonomy.
Carrell and Korotenko found the KLA deeply suspicious of such a force. Many former policemen, now in their forties and fifties, knew too much about the KLA for comfort.
Under the political leadership of Hashim Thaci, a man described by Madeleine Albright, the US secretary of state, as "Kosovo's Gerry Adams", the KLA made sure that its own men took the bulk of the new police posts.
It also created the so-called Kosovo Protection Corps (TMK) as a form of home guard. Carrell and Korotenko have little doubt that the TMK, which gave out 15,000 uniforms despite being limited to a maximum strength of 5,000, is merely the KLA under a different name.
They find some members arrogant and troublesome. "We suggested they could help clear the rubbish from the streets," said Carrell. "They said they were war heroes.",
About 20 Serbs have been killed in Gnjilane since Kfor entered Kosovo last June, and there are four or five attacks a week on those who remain.
Two weeks ago the UN police believed they had made a breakthrough when they arrested three teenagers with a stock of grenades. But one of Kosovo's newly appointed Albanian judges released them pending trial, even though they had failed lie detector tests.
The Serbs have not been the only victims of the anarchy: several Albanians who legitimately bought houses from fleeing Serbs have been shot by KLA fighters who believe they have a divine right to the spoils of ethnic cleansing.
With Pristina, the capital, in the grip of the criminals, there seems to be little hope for towns such as Gnjilane. The inhabitants of Gornje Kusce are escorted by Kfor on shopping trips two or three times a week. UN sources have criticised American troops for running weapons searches in the village. "They all have guns, otherwise they wouldn't still be there," said one official.
Last week there was a near-riot as the Americans ploughed through the narrow roads of the village. Groups of men shouted "Nato terror". The irony, however, was that without Nato protection the village would have emptied months ago.
Some diplomats have predicted that the few remaining Serbs in Kosovo's large towns will soon move north to Mitrovica, the one urban centre under Serbian control in the province.
Dragana Vasic is not interested. "Why swap one nightmare for another?" she said. "I have lost a beautiful and brave husband. I have nowhere to go."
Serb police tighten trade blockade with Montenegro
BELGRADE, Feb 5 (Reuters) - Serb police have tightened a blockade on trade between Serbia and the western-leaning Yugoslav republic of Montenegro, newspapers said on Sunday.
One of the papers, the Montengro-based Pobjeda, said police were even stopping Yugoslav army trucks carrying food for troops based in Montenegro from crossing, sparking angry exchanges.
Belgrade-based independent media said more goods were being blocked than before, but did not mention the army.
"Since the day before yesterday, according to unofficial information, procedures for the passage of trucks with goods through the control point at the border between Serbia and Montenegro became stricter," the Glas Javnosti daily said.
Montenegro, the last republic left with Serbia in Yugoslavia, has been inching away from the influence of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's government in Belgrade since pro-Western President Milo Djukanovic was elected in 1997.
Montenengro legalised the German mark last year to try to escape inflationary trends in Serbia and Serb police retaliated by stopping certain goods, especially fuel, crossing the border.
Glas said that since mid-February only a certain type of wood, building material and sweets were allowed from Serbia to Montenegro. Since Friday even those were blocked, although aluminium and iron are still allowed into Serbia, it said.
Pobjeda said goods in private cars were also blocked.
"Pobjeda learned that not even army trucks carrying food for Yugoslav army units in Montenegro were allowed through. That's why, the source said, there were some unpleasant situations between the border police and army police at the crossing during an attempt to transport army rations to Montenegro," it said.
The Montenegrin government offered to pay troops based in the republic in German marks after its move to legalise them drove most Yugoslav dinars out of circulation there.
The condition was that the troops help overcome the trade blockade by bringing goods purchased in Serbia into Montenegro.
The military, whose leaders are thought to be loyal to Milosevic, publicly rejected the move, and it was not immediately possible to confirm whether any trucks had tried to cross the border with extra goods, or had indeed been stopped.
The blockade was the latest sign of tensions between the two republics, which recently flared over the Montenegrin government's decision to open a border crossing with Albania.
Belgrade said the decision was illegal and the army set up checkpoints at the crossing, checking travellers' documents but allowing traffic to flow through the crossing.
Montenegrin Prime Minister Filip Vujanovic told Saturday's Vijesti newspaper he had had several meetings with the commander of the Montenegrin-based Second Army to try to ease tensions but declined to say when or what was discussed.
FOCUS-NATO arrests Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect
Financial Times
6 Mar 2000 09:26GMT
In Brussels, NATO Secretary-General George Robertson said in a statement that the arrest, the fourth in three months, was a warning to other suspects still at large that it is time to turn yourself in.
The Belgrade-based Beta news agency said the NATO Stabilisation Force in Bosnia (SFOR) arrested Prcac, 62, while he was driving with his wife and a neighbour.
According to the report, three SFOR vehicles surrounded Prcac's car, broke windows and pulled him out. Both he and the neighbour, Rado Mikanovic, were then driven to the SFOR base near the Bosnian Serb capital Banja Luka, Beta reported.
A spokesman for the SFOR peacekeeping force could not confirm the details of the arrest.
Prcac is one of a group of 19 Bosnian Serbs publicly indicted by The Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for atrocities committed in mid-1992 against civilian prisoners held at Omarska camp.
Prcac was the deputy commander of the camp near Prijedor in northwestern Bosnia.
Dragoljub Prcac is accused of being criminally responsible for the acts of his subordinates in committing crimes against humanity, including murder, torture, rape, inhumane acts and unlawful detention in violation of the laws and customs of war, NATO said in a statement.
The trial began last week in The Hague of four other Bosnian Serbs accused of crimes against Moslems and Croats in three Serb-run camps in Prijedor.
NATO said Prcac was being held pending transfer to The Hague, where a Tribunal spokesman said he was expected to arrive late on Sunday.
This detention shows that the international community has not forgotten one of the most gruesome episodes of the war, and is determined that those responsible should be brought to justice in The Hague where they will receive a fair trial, Cook and Hoon said in a joint statement.
Of the 79 known indictees, 29 remain at large. We call on all those who know they are indicated to surrender themselves to the Tribunal, they said.
U.N.'s Kosovo Chief Warns That Mission Is 'Barely Alive'
The New York Times
By STEVEN ERLANGER
RISTINA, Kosovo, March 2 -- At the end of January, the director of the United Nations government in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, suddenly rushed off to Paris and Brussels. The reason, he explained in an interview here, was insolvency.
"We had 0.00 German marks in our bank account," Mr. Kouchner said, exaggerating only slightly. The entire United Nations mission established to administer Kosovo after the war last year was to run out of money on Feb. 3 -- it requires $325 million this year to pay workers, teachers and doctors, manage utilities and traffic lights, and pay police officers and prosecutors.
The French came up with an emergency transfusion of $3 million, and the Americans helped, and the deadline was extended to Feb. 23, officials say. Two weeks ago, at a Western meeting in Berlin, the bankruptcy date was March 3.
Now, with some $16 million in the bank, it is March 23. The same Western governments that belong to NATO and fought the war to drive the Serbs out of Kosovo are clearly reluctant to finance the day-to-day operations of the Western protectorate they installed to govern until local authority can be re-established.
"This is an absurd, humiliating and self-defeating way to run anything, let alone a project that embodies the prestige of NATO and the West," said a senior United Nations official who works for Mr. Kouchner. "Running Kosovo is hard enough without running around the world with a begging bowl."
Mr. Kouchner himself is livid on the point. "It's like being on a drip, a resuscitation bottle for the whole society," said Mr. Kouchner, a medical doctor who started Doctors Without Borders. "It keeps us barely alive month to month, but only if we reduce the dosage to the minimum for survival, so we don't collapse."
On Monday, Mr. Kouchner and Gen. Klaus Reinhardt, the military commander of the NATO-led peacekeeping forces, will report together on the state of Kosovo to the United Nations Security Council.
It is not expected to be an easy ride. Moscow and Beijing are particularly critical of NATO's management of Kosovo and its inability to prevent continuing ethnic violence and attempts at ethnic purging of the remaining Serb, Gypsy and Muslim Slav populations.
General Reinhardt is annoyed almost as much as Mr. Kouchner over such criticism and the ongoing problems with the mission. The difficulties of the United Nations-led civilian side -- its inability to pay people, find enough international police and prosecutors and jailers and judges -- means an added burden on his troops, who are already tired of playing cop on the beat.
"The problem for Bernard Kouchner is that he doesn't get the money to pay for what he knows he needs and wants for Kosovo," General Reinhardt said. "But the international community -- the same governments that decided to get us here -- doesn't give him what we know he needs, and it has a direct impact on my soldiers."
Officials here explain that governments seem happier to fund projects like post-war reconstruction. But governments do not like to fund other governments. "There's no glory in paying salaries," an official said. "The defense and foreign ministers who backed the war are not the finance and treasury ministers who have to fund the peace or the interior ministers who have to provide the police. They say, 'Not my money. Not my policemen.' "
The European Union in particular is very slow to get its pledged money through the bureaucracy and into United Nations bank accounts, the officials say. The Europeans have promised about $45 million for the budget this year, but it hasn't arrived. They have also promised about $340 million for reconstruction, a European commitment, but that money and the approval process for projects have also been extremely slow, officials say.
The total budget for the United Nations government here, excluding state enterprises like the electrical company and telephone service, which should one day earn money when they start charging citizens again, is about $240 million for this year. Including these state enterprises, the budget is about $325 million. Earnings this year from new customs duties, license fees and taxes that are being progressively introduced are expected to total $100 million.
But there will be an estimated budget gap this year of about $120 million that must be filled, and so far, governments have pledged about $90 million, still $30 million short. But they have delivered only a tiny fraction of what they've pledged, causing Mr. Kouchner to run around the world begging for cash.
Ironically, the sudden ethnic violence that began a month ago in the divided town of Mitrovica has shaken Western governments and allowed Mr. Kouchner to argue that the status quo is a recipe for disaster. It has also allowed him to ask more urgently for the promised international police and for more international prosecutors and judges -- at least 26 -- given the clear intimidation of local legal authorities by accused criminals and their apparent difficulty, in the current climate, of delivering ethnically unbiased decisions.
Mr. Kouchner, stung by criticism that there is no real system of justice or deterrence in Kosovo, plans a new court, to be headed by international judges with local participation, to deal with crimes stemming from ethnic hatred and the war. Local judges and prosecutors will deal with less sensitive, more ordinary crimes.
But even in Mitrovica, one international judge quit because of difficult living and working conditions, while another quit but has been convinced to stay.
The United Nations resolution authorizing the Western presence in Kosovo, No. 1244, comes up for renewal in June, and while Moscow and Beijing are unlikely to veto continuing the mission, they are expected to use the debate to urge closer consultation with Belgrade, which still maintains formal sovereignty over Kosovo.
Even the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, recently called the situation in Kosovo "very worrying," saying: "Bernard Kouchner and his team have done an admirable job. The situation is difficult. I know there has been some criticism. But I believe that, given what we inherited, he has done quite well."
In fact, Washington and London did not want the United Nations, but rather the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, to run Kosovo. United Nations officials here now complain that they had barely 10 days' notice that they would run the province, a compromise worked out at the end of the war in the Security Council with Russia and China, which were negotiating, in effect, for President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia.
The Anglo-Saxon dislike of the United Nations is one problem, officials here concede, a dislike somewhat confirmed by Mr. Kouchner's slow start. At the same time, one of his senior aides said, "there was no way to make a fast start without money or personnel, and money covers over a lot of mistakes, but we didn't have that luxury."
Mr. Kouchner has also been criticized for spending too much time negotiating with local politicians to win their cooperation in a form of shared executive. But the aide said: "With one-quarter the authorized staff and one-tenth the necessary money, there was no alternative" to cooperation with the powers on the ground.
Governments that promised officials, money and police officers -- and now promise judges -- were very slow to respond. And until recently, Mr. Kouchner was unable to pay salaries or pensions here -- simply low stipends, not even monthly ones, that barely kept people alive.
Even so, while local judges and lawyers are being paid about 300 German marks (about $165) a month by the United Nations, international agencies like the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and aid agencies are able to pay local translators at least 1,000 marks a month, or $555, more than three times more.
There is also little money for needed garbage pickup, road repair and all the other services that the Serbian state once provided, however inefficiently.
Money is crucial, Mr. Kouchner said, then gave a weary sigh. "But unfortunately we can't buy tolerance."
US puts a $5m price on heads of Serb leaders
The Independent
By Stephen Castle
4 March 2000
The United States is to post 10,000 "wanted" posters across Bosnia, offering rewards of up to $5m (£3.1m) for information leading to the arrest of the Yugoslav President and two other indicted war criminals.
To step up pressure on the Serb leaders, posters will be displayed in public buildings; alongside Slobodan Milosevic, the former Bosnian Serb political leader, Radovan Karadzic, and his military chief, Ratko Mladic, will be pictured.
All three have been accused by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia of genocide in the Bosnia war.
The reward has been on offer since May, when the Yugoslav President was indicted and the US said it would use unspecified means to publicise the offer in Serbia. It also applies to the other 27 people accused of war crimes.
Whether the US expects results or is simply trying to discomfort the accused remained unclear.
"We are putting a sharp focus on these three indictees because it is is time they should face justice for the heinous crimes for which they are charged," said David Scheffer, US ambassador-at-large for war-crime issues.
The rewards programme was launched 11 years ago and focused until now on the arrest of terrorists who had killed Americans.
Yesterday's plans coincide with a shift in emphasis at the tribunal in The Hague, which is trying to focus on bringing to justice those who ordered atrocities rather then the foot-soldiers who carried them out.
Messrs Milosevic and Mladic are in Belgrade and thus beyond the reach of Nato's Stabilisation Force (S-For), though Mr Karadzic is in the Pale area, capital of the Bosnian Serb republic in the 1992-95 war. That could make him more vulnerable to arrest by S-For.
Bosnian Croat jailed for 45 years by war crimes court
The Times
BY RICHARD BEESTON, DIPLOMATIC EDITOR
A BOSNIAN Croat commander responsible for ordering the mass murder of Muslim villagers was sentenced to 45 years in prison yesterday, the longest term ever handed down by the international tribunal at The Hague.
General Tihomir Blaskic, 39, the most senior officer to be convicted of war crimes arising from the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, sat impassively as the sentence was read out. His wife, Rartka, collapsed in the public gallery and was led away sobbing.
"The crimes you committed are extremely serious," Claude Jorda, the French presiding judge, told Blaskic. "The acts of war carried out with disregard for international humanitarian law and in hatred of other people, the villages reduced to rubble, the houses and stables set on fire and destroyed, the people forced to abandon their homes, the lost and broken lives are unacceptable."
The single worst atrocity perpetrated under Blaskic's orders occurred at the village of Ahmici, where about 100 men, women and children were killed and their homes set alight by Croat forces rampaging through the Lasva Valley in the spring of 1993.
British troops then serving as United Nations peacekeepers in central Bosnia arrived on the scene shortly afterwards with British journalists, and documented the atrocities.
Eyewitness testimony provided by Lieutenant-Colonel Bob Stewart, commander of The Cheshire Regiment, and Martin Bell, who was then a BBC correspondent in Bosnia and is now an Independent MP, helped to win yesterday's conviction.
Colonel Stewart said yesterday: "I told Blaskic when I left Bosnia that I believed he would one day be tried for the crimes, and that has happened. It is not a closure of the whole episode. It is a start to going after everyone else who was responsible for the atrocities."
Russell Hayman, Blaskic's American lawyer, said that his client planned to appeal. Nevertheless, Carla Del Ponte, the UN war crimes prosecutor, is hopeful that the length of the sentence and the seniority of the convicted war criminal will send an important message to other commanders who have evaded the courts.
"It is a critical day for the tribunal," a spokesman for the UN prosecutor's office said. "This sentence promises to be the beginning of a phase at the tribunal where the sentences are taken very seriously."
The ruling at The Hague coincided with Washington's decision to issue "wanted" posters of Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav President, offering a $5 million (£3 million) reward for information leading to his capture.
Germany's Fischer worried by Montenegro tensions
BERLIN, March 2 (Reuters) - German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said on Thursday he was concerned about indications of increasing tensions in the Yugoslav republic of Montenegro.
The Yugoslav army said on Monday a 1997 decision to close the small West-leaning coastal republic's border with Albania remained in force, in effect declaring last week's reopening of a Montenegrin border crossing illegal.
"We are very concerned about the situation but on the other hand I think our position is to be firm but calm and not to react to provocations," Fischer said after a meeting in Berlin with Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic.
The Yugoslav army has denied it had raised its combat readiness in the region after the Montenegrin pro-government daily Pobjeda said soldiers and heavy weaponry had been deployed near the crossing. A Reuters reporter who visited the crossing on Monday said there was no sign of an increased presence.
Montenegro, which with the larger Republic of Serbia now forms Yugoslavia, has distanced itself from Belgrade's policies since NATO's 11-week bombing of Yugoslavia last year over Serbia's repression of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
Last week, NATO's supreme commander, U.S. Army General Wesley Clark, described the situation in Montenegro as very tense and said the alliance was closely watching developments there.
Croatia, US to hold joint airborne exercise
ZAGREB, Croatia (Reuters) - Croatian and U.S. armed forces will carry out joint airborne maneuvers next week in a show of support by Washington for Croatia's new center-left government, officials said Friday.
The exercise, planned in the two months since a broad coalition led by Prime Minister Ivica Racan defeated the nationalist government of late President Franjo Tudjman, has clear political overtones in addition to military significance.
"The United States fully supports the new government ... and its move toward the Euro-Atlantic integrations," said U.S. Ambassador to Croatia William Montgomery.
The exercise comes after a series of moves -- including two visits by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright -- to demonstrate Washington's readiness to work with the new government whose proclaimed goal is joining the European Union and NATO.
It will include three to four days of combined flying operations during which groups of four to eight Croatian Air Force and U.S. Navy jets will fly low over rocky areas of central Croatia, said Cmdr. Pete Smith, U.S. Navy attache.
There will also be an exchange of crews with possibly a chance for American pilots to "ride behind" in Croatia's two-seat Russian-made MiG-21s and for Croats to do the same in the American aircraft, Smith told reporters.
Americans will take off from the aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower, the U.S. Sixth Fleet's command ship, off Croatia's southernmost port of Dubrovnik.
They will join Croatian jets above the northern port of Pula and fly inland toward the capital, Zagreb, at low altitude.
NO MONTENEGRO LINK
Asked if the exercise had anything to do with the crisis in neighboring Montenegro, where new rifts have opened between the Belgrade government and the tiny republic's independent-minded government, Montgomery said: "This operation is designed totally and only to show our support, our desire to work closely with Croatia.
"In absolutely no way is it directed at any one country. These planes will be armed only with good will and nothing more."
Croatian Defense Minister Jozo Rados said the exercise had a great political but also military significance.
"We will demonstrate our readiness to carry out complicated tasks and acquire new experience," he said.
He said Croatia would seek to reduce radically its military personnel in the next four years, cutting the number of professional brigades and soldiers by 25 to 30 percent.
It will also reduce regular military service to four to six months from the current 12 months, to cut overall spending and redirect funds to modernize the army as necessary for joining NATO.
Montenegro: Pro-Democracy Politicians Address Pros And Cons Of
International Monitors
By Jolyon Naegele
Yugoslavia's smaller republic of Montenegro continues to face challenges in its bid to achieve sovereignty and self-determination. This week the Yugoslav army established control points and barricades near the recently reopened sole border crossing with Albania. RFE/RL correspondent Jolyon Naegele reports from Podgorica on the possibility of deploying international observers in Montenegro.
Podgorica, 2 March 2000 (RFE/RL) -- The idea of deploying several hundred international monitors in Montenegro came up on the sidelines of an international conference in Podgorica this week. The conference was convened as a dialogue between Montenegrin and Serbian pro-democracy politicians and activists to address constitutional differences.
Montenegro has been Serbia's increasingly unwilling partner in the Yugoslav Federal Republic, founded eight years ago after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. Montenegro is now on the road to sovereignty, with an increasingly democratic legislature, new reform laws and its own Western-oriented foreign policy. But Montenegro is rump Yugoslavia's sole outlet to the sea, and a potential hard currency earner through tourism and maritime trade. Those industries brought in some $320 million a year a decade ago, but now are virtually nonexistent.
The head of one of Montenegro's three ruling pro-democracy parties, Social Democrat Zarko Rakcevic, says that as long as Montenegro fails to gain international recognition as a sovereign state, it will be unable to borrow on int. financial markets to rebuild its industry. Western support for Montenegro, he says, has been laudatory but devoid of investment.
"As far as we are concerned, by establishing its basic rights, Montenegro is not provoking Milosevic since this is our right to self-determination. Part of [our] society may want to live in a close community with Serbia. We have to do what is in our fundamental interest. But Montenegro cannot accept the task of democratizing Serbia."
Rakcevic says he hopes the international community changes its position toward Montenegro and accepts Montenegro's basic right to national self -determination -- the right to separate its fate from Serbia, as he puts it. That, he believes, would prevent a repetition of recent tragic experiences in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. He says Montenegro is the best example that Orthodox, Catholics, and Muslims can live together in harmony.
Rakcevic, a Montenegrin parliamentarian, says the solution is to take preventive action in the field of security by deploying observers before trouble starts:
"We want to say that if the international community really recognizes Montenegro as a positive example, please help us now. Please understand us now. We think that, for example, with 200 [international] monitors here, [Yugoslav President Slobodan] Milosevic will decide completely differently."
Rakcevic says deploying monitors would be a clear sign to Milosevic to cease his destabilization of Montenegro, which has included an economic blockade and the setting up of Yugoslav TV transmitters on Yugoslav military bases. But Rakcevic warned that if the international community waits until after Milosevic puts military and paramilitary pressure on Montenegro, it will be too late.
A senior official with the international community's Stability Pact for Southeastern Europe, Finnish diplomat Alpo Rusi, told RFE/RL the international community is coming around to the idea that deploying monitors in Montenegro would make sense.
"I think, yes, it cannot be ruled out, and I would like to see this type of monitoring to be set up through the OSCE or otherwise in case it is commonly accepted. But it is in my own thinking a clear-cut view that this country should have now this type of instrument, like a monitoring mission. And we should discuss this matter further."
Rusi notes that although Yugoslavia is barred from the Stability Pact for now, Montenegro is in practice functioning as a member state of the pact. But he says that putting together a monitoring mission for Montenegro is not yet a part of the pact's official brief.
The UN deployed observers along Macedonia's border with Kosovo and Serbia more than six years ago, and their presence -- including that of several hundred U.S. soldiers -- is one of the reasons Milosevic never started trouble with Macedonia.
In contrast, however, the EU's deployment in 1991 of a European military monitoring mission in Croatia after the fighting and ethnic cleansing had begun -- while providing the West with military intelligence -- had little effect. Serbian forces soon shot down a mission helicopter. and the mission did little if anything to hold back the fighting.
Similarly, the presence of UN peacekeepers from UNPROFOR in Bosnia did not prevent the systematic destruction by Serbian forces of the areas that the UN had designated safe havens. Nor did it deter Serbian forces from carrying out the massacres of some 7,000 men near one of the so-called "safe havens," Srebrenica, in 1995.
Later, an unarmed OSCE mission in Kosovo was slow in deploying, never reached full capacity and was soon forced to withdraw after Serbian forces made its job impossible and the launching of NATO air strikes on Yugoslavia last Spring inevitable. Since the Serbian capitulation and withdrawal from Kosovo last June, the international community has failed to deploy anywhere near the agreed-upon number of NATO-led peacekeepers and UN civilian police in Kosovo. That is true despite the worsening situation in Mitrovica and along Kosovo's eastern border with Serbia.
So it is far from clear whether sufficient willingness can be developed to deploy observers in Montenegro. The issue poses many questions: Would the observers be armed? Would they stand firm or flee in the event of the likely Serbian provocation? And what would the justification for deployment be? Do humanitarian aid convoys bound for Kosovo really require the security of observers in Montenegro when their main obstacles are Kosovo customs agents just over the border. And what would the reaction be of the Yugoslav Second Army based in Montenegro, already in a heightened state of alert, and now manning fresh barricades along Montenegro's sole border crossing with Albania.
Based on the international community's record to date, a deployment of monitors in Montenegro is unlikely to be agreed upon before it is too late.
U.S. Issues 'Wanted' Poster for Milosevic
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON, March 2 -- The State Department said today that it was issuing a "wanted" poster of the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, and two other men indicted on charges of war crimes.
Officials said the poster was part of an effort to arrest the men and hasten their trial by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
Europe, especially Serbia, will be saturated with copies of the poster, in the hope that publicizing the prospect of up to $5 million in reward money will result in the men's apprehension. The reward itself has been on offer since June.
The two other men, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, former Bosnian Serb leaders, are wanted for their part in the massacre of 6,000 Bosnian Muslims in 1995. Dr. Karadzic is also wanted under a separate indictment for crimes that occurred earlier, in the Bosnian war.
Mr. Milosevic was indicted by the tribunal in May, a few days before he accepted the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's terms for halting the alliance's air war over Yugoslavia.
Kosovo Rebels Regrouping Nearby in Serbia
The New York Times
By STEVEN ERLANGER
OBROSIN, Serbia, March 1 -- Just across the boundary line from Kosovo, guarded more visibly now by American troops in watchtowers, armed Albanians wearing uniforms of a new branch of the Kosovo Liberation Army are training for a battle the West does not want them to have.
Their numbers and leadership are a mystery, but today fewer than 20 men, wearing a mixture of German and American fatigues, did exercises in a muddy field with their weapons, including a heavy machine gun.
On their arms they wear a cloth badge of red, black and yellow that looks exactly like that of the supposedly disbanded and disarmed Kosovo Liberation Army. The only difference is their name: the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac, all towns in Serbia itself, although their populations are largely ethnic Albanian.
Their commander here would not give his name, but said he had been wanted by the Serbs since the mid-1980's. The men said they were all former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the guerrilla army of Kosovo Albanians that fought for independence from Serbia, and villagers said they were local people.
They are acting "to defend their country, their village and their land," said Zymer Zajidi, 30, a farmer.
Senior officials of the United Nations and the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo, known as KFOR, say the men appear to be members of the Albanian rebel group who refused to turn in their weapons and now want to "liberate" what they call "Eastern Kosovo," where at least 70,000 Albanians live in the arc from Medvedja in the north to Presevo in the south.
By ordering the ambushing of Serbian police officers and sometimes the intimidation of Serbian farmers, the leaders of this new army "are hoping that the Serbs will retaliate with excessive force against civilian populations and create a wave of outrage and pressure on KFOR to respond," said a United Nations official. "It's explosive and dangerous, and we hope KFOR uses restraint."
Gen. Klaus Reinhardt, the German who commands the peacekeepers, said in an interview that he had pushed the Americans hard to seal the boundary between Kosovo and the rest of Serbia. And in fact, less than two weeks ago, the Americans moved checkpoints and built observation towers on the boundary line.
One overlooks this village from a hill, while listening equipment and American tanks line the ridge above Dobrosin. The Americans are now at the edge of a three-mile demilitarized zone in which the Serbian police can operate, but not Serbian troops with heavy weapons, a zone in which Dobrosin sits.
General Reinhardt is adamant in saying his troops will not support any new insurgency in Serbia. Still, the situation is not always so clear on the ground. An American sergeant first class, commanding this checkpoint, said, "We're just here to make sure the locals are O.K." But when asked what he could do if the Serbian police returned and the locals were not O.K., he shrugged and said, "There ain't much we can do, unless they shoot at us."
The soldiers can return fire, he said. Wouldn't that encourage the Albanians to fire on the Americans if the Serbs came, to make it seem as if the Serbs were shooting? He shrugged again.
The Americans now have serious checkpoints and towers along the three main roads into the area from Kosovo, officials said. But despite those, it was a simple matter to drive over primitive country roads of mud, ice and snow in the demilitarized zone in a four-wheel-drive vehicle and avoid any checkpoint, in a region that has for centuries been used by smugglers and drug runners.
The fighters were nervous today, even brusque, and would not give their names or allow photographs of their faces.
On Tuesday they shot up a car belonging to the office of the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, which had come from Belgrade and apparently did not stop at one of their checkpoints. An Irish man was wounded in the leg, and the fighters, embarrassed and worried about a possible Serbian response, took the man and his Serbian interpreter to the Americans near the watchtower for medical help.
The fighters say their organization was born on Jan. 26, when two local farmers here, brothers named Isa and Shaip Saqipi, 36 and 32, were killed by the Serbian police as they were returning to the village from cutting wood in the hills.
The villagers say the Serbs of the militarized police were on an operation, with full uniforms, flak jackets and heavy weapons, including a tank. Some seven Serbian policemen were in the village and 40 more in the hills.
That was the last time the Serbian police have shown up here, but this village of about 1,500 now has fewer than 30 families living in it, the rest having fled into Kosovo, staying with friends and relatives in Gnjilane, Malisevo and Podgradje, where the Americans have another checkpoint.
"We live here with one eye open," said Halim Hasani, a teacher in the village. "We're always ready to flee." He said people were afraid now even to go shopping in Bujanovac, because the Serbian police had checkpoints along the road and sometimes turned the villagers back.
Asked if he thought the presence of the fighters might bring the Serbian police back to Dobrosin, he went silent, then said, "Possibly." He stopped, then added hopefully: "But they attack no one. They are only working to defend our land."
But sometimes these fighters do attack, and they are being disingenuous when they say their group was born with the deaths of the Saqipi brothers a month ago. The Serbian police have been complaining of attacks on Serbian villagers around Medvedja since the late summer, and United Nations officials in Pristina say the group has been active in Dobrosin at least since November.
In mid-January three Serbs were killed in nearby Mucibaba, closer to Presevo, and the Serbs moved in at least four units of the Interior Ministry's militarized police to the area.
Ambushes of policemen have intensified, with one killed and three wounded last weekend. One Albanian fighter was also killed in a shootout. And the Serbs say they found a bomb over the weekend in a courthouse in Bujanovac, which they blamed on "armed Albanian terrorists."
Attacks on more moderate or loyal Albanian politicians in Serbia have also increased, including the murder last month of Zemail Mustafi, the Albanian vice president of the Bujanovac branch of President Slobodan Milosevic's ruling Socialist Party.
And more Albanian civilians -- nearly 300, according to the United Nations -- have gone into Kosovo from Serbia proper since Friday.
"KFOR is being played with by these guys," said a senior United Nations official, who is assuming that their leadership is based in Kosovo and tied to parts of the supposedly disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army. In particular, the official says he believes that the leaders are associated with Rexhep Selimi, who headed the rebel group's ministry for public order and security. But no one seems to know for sure.
Lt. Col. James Shufelt, in an interview at the American military headquarters at Camp Bondsteel, said: "The concern here isn't that the Serbian police will come across, but that Albanian attacks on Serb police and army will inspire a response great enough to cause public clamor for a KFOR response."
His commander, Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, said: "I don't believe we can ever fully seal the border between Serbia and Kosovo. But we have sent a clear message that any cross-border insurgency will not be tolerated or supported."
At the same time, he said, "we've gotten some very good feedback that the people of Dobrosin feel better because of our presence."
But perhaps emboldened, too. The fighters are carrying out exercises within sight of the American watchtowers, and say that once, when the Serbian police were near the village, American helicopters flew overhead and the Serbs withdrew.
Vahid Sylejman, 39, a villager, said he was sure the Americans would come to their rescue if the Serbs came again. "Why else are they there?" he asked, pointing to the tanks on the ridge.
Mr. Zajidi said: "We have a kind of protection from the Americans. If they were not on the hill, no one would be left in this village at all."
Yugo army checkpoint by Montenegrin-Albanian border
PODGORICA, Yugoslavia, Feb 29 (Reuters) - The Yugoslav army set up checkpoints near the Montenegro-Albania frontier on Tuesday, checking travellers' documents but allowing traffic to flow through a reopened border crossing.
The army declared on Monday that a 1997 decision to close the border was still in force, meaning, in effect, that last Thursday's reopening of the crossing point by the governments of Albania and Western-leaning Montenegro was illegal.
But the crossing itself remained open for traffic on Tuesday evening.
A Reuters reporter found that the Second Army, whose area of responsibility includes Montenegro, had set up two separate checkpoints near each other about two km (1.25 miles) from the Bozaje border crossing.
A few military policemen in bullet-proof vests and armed with automatic rifles manned the checkpoints, letting vehicles through after writing down the licence plate numbers.
Montenegrin police, seen as loyal to the republic's independence-minded leadership, were manning the crossing itself, checking luggage of those entering from Albania.
Around 300 people and 50 vehicles pass the Bozaje crossing daily.
On Monday, the army also denied Montenegrin media reports that it had raised its combat readiness in the republic following the reopening of the border.
The Montenegrin pro-government daily Pobjeda said on Sunday that soldiers and heavy weaponry had been deployed near the crossing, which the Yugoslav supreme defence council closed three years ago when Albania plunged into anarchy.
Montenegro, which is Serbia's last remaining partner in the Ygoslav federation, has distanced itself from Belgrade's policies since NATO's 11-week bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 over Serbia's repression of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
It has increased its autonomy in finance and foreign policy, leaving the Yugoslav army as the last joint institution still functioning in both republics.
Last week, NATO's military chief, U.S. Army General Wesley Clark, described the situation in Montenegro as very tense and said the alliance was closely watching developments there.
RAF air controller blamed for Kosovo death crash
The Times
FROM CHARLES BREMNER IN PARIS
AN RAF air traffic controller has been blamed by French investigators for "forgetting" an airliner under his control and allowing it to plough into a mountain in Kosovo, killing all 24 aboard.
The alleged negligence of the RAF non-commissioned officer (NCO) was cited by the Accident Investigation Bureau as one of two main causes for the crash of the ATR-42 turbo-prop aircraft north of Pristina in November. The two-man Italian crew were also criticised for slipshod procedures.
Three Britons were among those aboard the French-registered aircraft. It was chartered by the World Food Programme from the Italian SI-Fly airline, and was carrying aid workers from Rome to Kosovo. Nicholas Evens, 34, a builder from Birmingham, and Kevin Lay, 36, a building supervisor from Winchester, who both worked for Tear Fund, and Andrea Curry, 23, a construction engineer from Armagh, who was on her first aid mission for Goal, died.
The investigators complained that Britain had refused permission to interview the NCO who was on duty - a claim that the RAF denied. The NCO, who was the sole approach control officer at the RAF-run airport, was not named, but the report said that he was aged 40, had qualified in 1990 and had had only five hours' training on the radar used at Pristina, and no experience in directing air traffic in areas of high terrain.
Yesterday the RAF denied that its air controller was to blame, and said that it was still investigating the crash. A spokesman added: "We allowed the French every opportunity to speak to him and have offered to help in their investigation."
Mitrovica On a Downhill Road
Radio Netherlands
By our correspondent James Kliphuis, Budapest, 29 February 2000
Almost a year after NATO planes first started dropping bombs on Serbia and Kosovo, and eight months after the international community sent a peace force into Kosovo, ethnic tension - between Serbs and ethnic Albanians - has once again flared up in the region. Ethnic clashes in Mitrovica have been hitting the headlines. Especially when Serbs started pelting stones at KFOR troops wanting to search Serb homes for weapons. So far, there's been little interest in another conflict that's boiling over in three predominantly Albanian municipalities, just across Kosovo's eastern border - in Serbia proper, where KFOR has no mandate to proceed.
Recently, tension has been on the increase in southern Serbia near the eastern internal border with Kosovo. Over the weekend, a Serb policeman and an Albanian guerrilla fighter were killed in that area. KFOR, the international peace force, has no mandate there since it's just outside Kosovo. In the same region, but inside Kosovo - on the other side of the border - a Serb doctor was gunned down by an unidentified gunman on Saturday in the nearby town of Gnjilane. In this south-Serb border area, the towns of Bujanovac, Preševo and Medvedja have - like Kosovo - an ethnic-Albanian majority.
Spiral of violence
With the upsurge in tension, a sizeable number of Albanians have been moving from their homes in Serbia-proper into Kosovo: they don't feel adequately protected by Serbian police in the border region. There are reports that members of special Serb police units are active in the area on either side of the border. Also, there are claims that special forces left behind as `sleepers´ in the province when Serb police and Yugoslav army units pulled out of Kosovo last year, have been involved in the recent violence in Mitrovica.
On the other hand, there are reports that Kosovo Albanians, former members of the (disbanded) Kosovo Liberation Army, now belonging to the Kosovo Protection Corps, have been driving across the border into Serbia dressed in civilian clothes. To sum up, current developments in and near Kosovo are beginning to display an uncomfortable resemblance to the spiral of violence of early last year.
International presence
However, the big difference with last year is that the international community is now massively present on the ground in Kosovo with adequately trained and equipped military and civilian forces to enforce peace between Serbs and Kosovo Albanians. Alas, so far, representatives of the international community show little or no sign of really understanding what is going on under their very noses.
Speculation
The recent ethnic violence in Mitrovica - further west in Kosovo - which left at least eleven people dead, led to Western speculation that the tension had all been orchestrated by Slobodan Milosevic. While there is every reason to believe that Serb agents provocateurs are more or less permanently active in Kosovo, that is by no means the whole story. The Kosovo Albanians are just as adept in provoking ethnic clashes: a demonstrative march of tens of thousands of Albanians on the flashpoint Mitrovica can hardly be described as an effort to defuse the tension.
Slobodan Milosevic is still counting on the West getting tired of the Kosovo Albanians' lack of readiness to co-operate in building a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society in Kosovo. So far, the official line of the Western allies is simply to adopt an ever-harsher tone of voice when addressing either side. The question is how long this can go on.
Patience running out
In June, KFOR's mandate comes up for renewal. Then, the question will be asked whether there are any signs yet of a more durable peace in Kosovo, or whether the international peace force and the UN administration only serve to keep Serbs and Albanians apart. There are indications that here and there, patience is beginning to run out. It's already been noticed that the language of NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson, when he recently admonished Serbs and Albanians, bore an uncanny resemblance to the language NATO used in the runup to the air raids - now nearly a year ago
American Troops in Kosovo Restricted to U.S. Sector
The Washington Post
By Roberto Suro
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 1, 2000; Page A18
U.S. troops in Kosovo will stick to their own turf under orders announced by the Pentagon yesterday that sharply limit missions to assist the peacekeepers of other nationalities.
The new restrictions reflect concerns in the Defense Department and the White House over a violent encounter last week between a Serbian mob and American soldiers who had been sent to help French peacekeepers with a police action in the French sector, according to a senior military official.
"The issue here is, how often do we get dragged into a situation where we have to perform out-of-sector operations that can diminish our ability to operate within our own sector?" Pentagon spokesman Kenneth H. Bacon said.
About 5,300 U.S. troops patrol the southeastern sector of Kosovo. French, Italian, German and British forces are in charge of their own sectors of the troubled Serbian province. The extent to which troops of various nationalities are available to reinforce each other has become a matter of both military and diplomatic dispute, as NATO peacekeepers contend with rising unrest while their own numbers decline.
The new orders came in a letter from Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to NATO's top military commander, U.S. Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark.
"The chairman made it clear that he doesn't think it's appropriate for American troops to go to out-of-sector operations on a regular basis to take up police work that should be done by the forces in those other sectors," Bacon said.
The still-classified letter was dated Feb. 20, Bacon said. That was the day when a battalion of 350 U.S. soldiers helped conduct a house-to-house search for illegal weapons in Mitrovica, a town in the French sector where Serbs and the ethnic Albanians who dominate Kosovo have frequently clashed. The Americans encountered a rock-throwing mob of protesting Serbs; and although no U.S. soldier was seriously injured, senior civilian and military policymakers felt the mission was risky and unnecessary, senior officials said.
Clark informed Washington about the mission but ordered it on his own authority, just as he had on two previous occasions when U.S forces went to the aid of peacekeepers in other sectors. Appearing before a congressional hearing yesterday, Clark defended cross-sector operations as essential in Kosovo.
Under the terms of Shelton's letter, however, U.S. troops will operate in other sectors only "on an extraordinary emergency basis," Bacon said.
Nato derails UN scheme for Mitrovice
The Guardian
Kosovo: special report
Jonathan Steele in Pristina
Wednesday March 1, 2000
An ambitious UN plan to reunite ethnically divided Mitrovice, in part by arresting paramilitaries and ringing the Kosovan city with checkpoints to control access by hardliners, has been scuttled because key Nato governments are not ready to mount foot patrols for fear of suffering casualties.
According to well placed sources, the French commander who runs the northern sector of Kosovo that includes Mitrovice, General Pierre de Saquis de Sannes, has not yet complied with an urgent request from General Klaus Reinhardt, the commander of the international peacekeeping force, K-For, to start "robust, dismounted, community-based operations".
Instead, Gen De Saquis de Sannes is continuing the less risky option of armoured vehicle patrols and static guard positions.
The damaging dispute has highlighted the chaotic chain of command within K-For, whose commanders prefer to take final orders from their national governments.
The glaring inadequacies in K-For's continuity have become such a sore spot for the force's command that General Silvio Mazzarolli, the Italian deputy commander of K-For, was hastily withdrawn to Italy a few days ago when he criticised it publicly.
Bernard Kouchner, the French former minister who heads the UN mission in Kosovo, has had frequent arguments with Paris.
Shocked by the violence of the past few weeks in Mitrovice, and determined to prevent the city's postwar division hardening into a partition, he has completed a four-stage plan which was shown yesterday to senior ethnic Albanian politicians in the joint administrative council. The plan has also been given to Oliver Ivanovic, the leader of the Serb national council in northern Mitrovice.
It aims to seal off the city with a few well controlled access points on the north and south sides to stop gun running by Serbs and Albanians.
Extra international police and troops would patrol regularly and conduct "intrusive" weapons searches in people's homes.
Street demonstrations would be restricted, and known extremists such as the Serbs who patrol the main bridge with walkie-talkies would be expelled from the city. The cafe Dolce Vita, where Serb hardliners gather at the northern edge of the main bridge, would be shut down.
The UN would assign several foreign judges under high security to convict and sentence trouble-makers and an extra detention centre would be set up. The later stages of the plan foresee a joint Serb-Albanian council for the reunited city.
UN officials feel the plan must be put into action fast and are angry with K-For's hesitation. "[Kosovo Liberation Army] pressure on K-For is very strong. It is making veiled threats for another march on the north, and this time to force their way through. K-For is not prepared to stop them properly," said one senior UN official.
The US has also not yet complied with the K-For commander's request for foot patrols in northern Mitrovice. Germany, too, is unwilling to supply police for the city.
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