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NewsPro Archive
April 2000
Financial Times: Yugoslav airlines boss shot dead in Belgrade
By Amra Kevic - 26 Apr 2000 08:26GMT
BELGRADE, April 25 (Reuters) - The head of Yugoslav Airlines was shot dead on Tuesday by unidentified assailants, the latest in a series of high profile assassinations in the politically charged Yugoslav capital.
The body of Zika Petrovic, director of the airline since 1992 and a loyal ally of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, lay in the street after the shooting, which nearby residents said happened at around 9:30 p.m. (1930 GMT).
"I heard three or four dull thuds and a few minutes later my son ran in to say someone had been shot. When we came out four or five minutes later the police were already there," a middle-aged man from the building opposite told Reuters.
A man in his 20s said he had seen blood on the forehead and shoulder of the body, and had seen about eight bullet casings lying nearby. Another eyewitness said two men had opened fire on Petrovic and run away immediately afterwards.
"This is how they settle accounts among themselves. All it takes is one bullet. This is disgusting, this is terrible," said a young woman at the scene who gave her name as Milica.
Petrovic was the second top official to be shot dead in Belgrade in the past two months. In February, unknown assassins killed Yugoslav Defence Minister Pavle Bulatovic.
A few weeks earlier, Serbia's most notorious paramilitary leader, Zeljko "Arkan" Raznatovic, was shot down in a Belgrade hotel. Several other underworld figures had been killed before then and others have been killed since. None of the killers have been found.
Born in 1939 in Milosevic's home town of Pozarevac in eastern Serbia, Petrovic trained as an engineer and joined Yugoslav Airlines (Jugoslovenski aerotransport or JAT) in 1968. He became director in 1992.
Like Bulatovic, he was known as a quietly spoken man who was loyal to Milosevic and kept a low profile.
The European Union last month lifted a year-long embargo against the airline imposed over Milosevic's repression of the ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo province.
"This is very sad, he was a very nice man and was working hard to lift sanctions on JAT," said the middle-aged wife of a film director who said she knew Petrovic.
The Independent: Milosevic accused of waging war on student activists
By Vesna Peric Zimonjic in Belgrade
26 April 2000
A human rights report today accuses the government of the Yugoslav President, Slobodan Milosevic, of intensifying a crackdown on dissent, singling out student activists among the latest targets.
Human Rights Watch identifies several methods of repression by the Serbian government since the Nato war a year ago. One is the so-called informative talk, actually a form of interrogation, used by police to intimidate student activists from the Otpor (Resistance) group.
Otpor, born in 1998 in reaction to repressive laws curbing media freedom and university autonomy, operates between the traditional Serbian opposition and Mr Milosevic's autocratic regime. Kristina Peric, a student at the Academy of Arts, told The Independent Otpor is "an alternative to the regime and the opposition, because people trust no one any more. The regime is notorious, the opposition barely united".
She added: "People trust us because we are an authentic generation that does not remember Tito's communism. We grew up in the times of Milosevic. This generation can bring something new."
Otpor calls for resistance – to the regime, to stupidity, violence, civil war or poverty. Children sport Otpor T-shirts. Actors of the National Theatre recently ended a play by taking off their costumes to show their Otpor T-shirts. The group claims 20,000 registered activists, aged 16 to 70. They distribute leaflets or badges and stage actions that mock the official picture of Serbia. Its platform includes a demand that Mr Milosevic step down, free elections, the rule of law and democracy, and co-operation with the United Nations war crimes court which has indicted the Yugoslav President.
With the opposition calling for early elections, 480,000 young voters have come of age since 1997. "We'll organise a 'get out and vote' campaign, because so many can turn the tide in favour of the opposition" said an activist, Milan Samardzic.
Since 1991, 300,000 young and educated Serbs have emigrated to the West. "They support and finance us," Ms Peric said. "They want to return to a different Serbia."
Milena Stevanovic, walking in Belgrade with her granddaughter, said: "Resistance? They are irresistible."
Montenegro president to visit Albania
PODGORICA, April 25 (Reuters) - Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic on Tuesday accepted an invitation to visit Albania, a sign of the coastal republic's growing diplomatic independence from the Yugoslav government in Belgrade.
The announcement was made shortly after the Montenegrin and Albanian foreign ministers signed two agreements aimed at boosting bilateral relations, an added snub to Belgrade which last year broke off diplomatic ties with Albania.
The invitation from Albanian President Rexhep Meidani to Djukanovic, a fierce opponent of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, was brought by Albanian Foreign Minister Paskal Milo during a two-day visit that ended on Tuesday.
Belgrade broke off relations with Tirana at the start of NATO's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in March last year, intended to end Serb repression of Kosovo Albanians. Montenegro is Serbia's uneasy junior partner in Yugoslavia.
A Montenegrin cabinet statement said Djukanovic and Milo had agreed that a new age was opening in bilateral relations which would have broader positive effects in the region.
Montenegro, whose population of around 650,000 includes some 45,000 ethnic Albanians, has distanced itself from Belgrade since pro-western Djukanovic was elected president in 1997.
It has been trying to establish independent ties with countries in the region and to circumvent the international blockade of Yugoslavia under Milosevic.
The two accords signed on Tuesday, marking the end of 50 years of strained relations, were an economic, trade and cultural cooperation accord and a protocol on cooperation between the two foreign ministries.
"We have opened a new era in relations between our two countries and created the institutional basis for future cooperation," said Milo, the first Albanian foreign minister to visit Montenegro in 50 years.
Milo's reference to Montenegro as a country underlined Albanian support for the coastal republic's growing independence from Belgrade.
MONTENEGRO, ALBANIA PLAN PROJECTS
The two sides said they would work on joint projects as part of the European Union-sponsored Stability Pact for southeast Europe, including road, railroad and power projects.
"We rightly expect European countries, especially those behind the pact, to offer full support to programmes that we initiate," said Montenegrin Foreign Minister Branko Lukovac. Cooperation would expand to include tourism, education and health.
Another border crossing opening was also planned in the future. In February, Montenegro reopened its border with Albania, closed in 1997 after Albania plunged into anarchy, and earlier this month the republic's police agreed to cooperate with their Albanian counterparts on fighting crime.
The long history of strained relations between Yugoslavia and Albania centres on Serbia's treatment of its majority ethnic Albanian province of Kosovo.
Milo said Kosovo's future status remained to be resolved, while Lukovac said the province was part of Serbia and Yugoslavia.
"But a long time will pass during which the presence of international forces will be necessary in Kosovo," Lukovac said.
Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, now controlled by NATO-led international peacekeepers and U.N. administrators, want full independence from Yugoslavia.
Trial of Serbs Accused of Bid to Kill Milosevic
By Dragan Stankovic
NIS, Yugoslavia (Reuters) - Seven members of a group calling itself the Serb Liberation Army went on trial Monday accused of planning an armed uprising in Serbia and plotting to kill Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
Members of the group were arrested last December and charged with forming a terrorist organization in a village near the central Serbian town of Krusevac in July 1999 with the aim of toppling the constitutional order by force.
They have also been accused of plotting to kill Yugoslav Army Chief of Staff Nebojsa Pavkovic and seeking to restore the monarchy in Serbia.
At the opening of the trial in the southern Serbian city of Nis, one of the defendants, 27-year-old Yugoslav army lieutenant Boban Gajic, denied that the group had ever made any such plans.
``The only aim of the OSA is to defend Serb territories in Kosovo and protect the Serbian people,'' he told the court.
``As an officer, I know that any kind of uprising would never see the light of day, it would be quelled by the army and police overnight,'' said Gajic.
``I also know it is impossible to get anywhere near President Milosevic, let alone carry out an assassination attempt, especially not by a small group like ours,'' he said.
Mysterious Car Crash
The Serb Liberation Army, whose initials OSA mean wasp in Serbian, was first heard of in October when it claimed responsibility for the murder of four members of the opposition Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO) in a mysterious car crash.
SPO leader Vuk Draskovic, who was lightly injured in the crash, said the authorities had ordered a truck driver to swerve into his convoy of cars and charged Milosevic's government with ``state terror,'' a charge it has hotly denied.
Yugoslav Information Minister Goran Matic hinted late last year that another group, called PAUK, or Spider, made up of Serb paramilitaries might have been responsible for the crash.
Matic said PAUK, which he accused of being sponsored by French intelligence, had also tried to assassinate Milosevic.
At Monday's trial in the town of Nis, Gojic admitted that he had written promotional texts for the Serb Liberation Army, including the one claiming responsibility for the car crash.
But he said they were written for marketing purposes only.
A second defendant, Milutin Pavlovic, admitted organizing the infiltration of small groups of armed Serbs into Kosovo after last year's NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia as a member of the group.
But he joined it only because of its aim to protect Serbs in Kosovo, which is now under de facto international rule following the NATO campaign.
After that ended hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians driven from Kosovo by Serb repression returned to the province, many seeking revenge against members of the ethnic Serb minority.
Many hard-line Serb nationalists were dismayed by Belgrade's handling of the war and its eventual loss of control over Kosovo, regarded by Serbs as the cradle of their culture and religion.
If found guilty, the defendants face 15 years imprisonment.
The New York Times: Serbs Call Imprisonment of Relatives `Unbalanced'
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
ITROVICA, Kosovo, April 24 -- Relatives of 37 Serbs jailed in Kosovo protested outside a prison today, demanding that trials be held immediately for their family members.
The imprisoned Serbs began a hunger strike on April 12, protesting what they call "unbalanced prisoner treatment" at the hands of Western officials who are providing security forces here and trying to form a new civilian administration.
About 100 prisoners' relatives complained about the men being held indefinitely with little or no prospect of court action.
The prisoners reportedly began refusing food after having heard that a Kosovo Albanian prisoner was released this month. The man had been implicated in hurling a grenade, an incident that led to a battle between Serbs and Albanians in March that left 16 French peacekeeping troops and 24 civilians wounded.
Three Serbian doctors from Kosovo examined the hunger strikers today and said some displayed symptoms of extreme exhaustion. Two were hospitalized on Saturday in connection with their fast, said Ivan Soyois, a spokesman for the United Nations police.
One Serbian doctor, Dr. Stevan Baljosevic, said a prisoner was in critical condition. Mr. Soyois confirmed that he was ill.
Another spokesman, Bruce Loy, said on Sunday that the prisoners were eating biscuits and drinking coffee, tea and juice delivered by their families.
The prison is in Mitrovica, one of the tensest cities in Kosovo. It is divided by the Ibar River into the predominantly Serbian north and the Albanian south.
The security forces arrived in Kosovo after a 78-day NATO bombing campaign to force Yugoslavia to withdraw troops from Kosovo, a Serbian province where the overwhelming majority of residents are Albanians and where a separatist rebel movement had begun. The campaign was aimed at forcing President Slobodan Milosevic to end repression against the Albanians.
Serbs who remain in the province repeatedly accuse the security forces of bias for the Albanians.
Today, the NATO forces destroyed weapons and ammunition that had been confiscated or handed in since NATO arrived in June. The forces counted 13,000 rifles, 2,500 pistols, 500 antitank missiles, 30,000 explosive devices and 7.5 million rounds of ammunition to be turned into scrap metal.
The tension and violence continues, however. Four bodies were found on Sunday in a well in western Kosovo. On Saturday, a man was hospitalized with a gunshot wound in the Presevo Valley.
Western officials who are supervising operations here repeatedly express concerns about rising tensions in the Presevo Valley, an area along the Kosovo boundary with Serbia proper that has a predominantly ethnic Albanian population. The region lies just outside the territory involved in the NATO-led mission.
Albanian foreign minister visits Montenegro
PODGORICA, Montenegro (Reuters) - The Yugoslav republic of Montenegro on Monday welcomed Albanian Foreign Minister Paskal Milo for a visit underlining its efforts to establish independent links with countries in the region.
Albania and Montenegro are due to sign a memorandum of understanding Tuesday. Montenegro has taken an increasingly independent line from Serbia, its much larger partner in the Yugoslav federation, since Milo Djukanovic was elected its president in 1997.
Milo met Montenegrin Prime Minister Filip Vujanovic and Foreign Minister Branko Lukovac for talks on joint initiatives and infrastructure projects as part of the EU-sponsored Stability Pact program for southeastern Europe.
Priorities in expanding economic cooperation would be in management of water resources, the power industry, ferrous metallurgy, trade, ecology and tourism, a government statement said.
In February, Montenegro reopened its border with Albania, shut down in 1997 after Albania plunged into anarchy.
Earlier this month, police in Montenegro agreed to cooperate with their Albanian counterparts in fighting crime.
Montenegro has expanded its network of trade and diplomatic missions abroad even as Serbia has imposed a trade ban to prevent Montenegro from reexporting cheap Serbian products to third countries.
Relations between Albania and the government in Belgrade remain strained over Kosovo, Serbia's ethnic Albanian-majority southern province, now under international administration.
Belgrade broke off diplomatic relations with Albania at the start of NATO's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in March, intended to end Serb repression of Kosovo Albanians.
The Independent: Kosovo forces almost ran out of ammo
24 April 2000
British soldiers almost ran out of weapons and ammunition during the 78–day NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, according to a government report obtained by the BBC on Monday.
The shortage of precision–guided munitions was described as "critical" in the National Audit Office draft report, the BBC said. Had the 1999 air war continued much longer, auditors said Britain would have run out of munitions.
The Ministry of Defense refused to comment on the draft report, which was due to be released in May.
The 97–page audit also criticised Britain for shipping outdated equipment and medical supplies to soldiers, the BBC said. Supplies of morphine, for example, were received months after their expiration dates.
Auditors noted that requests for secure radios during the operation were dismissed as "not relevant."
Overall however, auditors found improvements in the organization of food supplies, accommodation and financial administration, and the 3–month operation was deemed a success.
The audit office, the government's spending watchdog, reviews every British military campaign.
The Guardian : 'Milosevic is trying to provoke a civil war'
Montenegrin president lashes out at Serbia's covert agenda.
Jonathan Steele in Bijelo Polje
Calling Slobodan Milosevic "evil" and "the worst leader in Serbia's history", the Montenegrin president, Milo Djukanovic, told a crowd of supporters here that Yugoslavia's strong man wanted a civil war in Montenegro.
"He knows he cannot mount direct aggression, so he wants to provoke clashes and have us shooting against each other, but we are trying to prevent that," Mr Djukanovic declared.
It was no coincidence that he chose a rare visit to this town on the border with Serbia for some of his toughest language yet in the three-year dispute between the two partners of the moribund Yugoslav federation. The town of Bijelo Polje is on the frontline in several ways.
While railing against international economic sanctions as unfair, Mr Milosevic recently slapped an embargo on virtually all trade with Montenegro. Bored police officers control a checkpoint just north of the town where the traditionally busy road is now almost empty.
Local shopkeepers complain that they have had to make strenuous and expensive efforts to find new supplies from Bosnia, Croatia or further afield.
The town has also become a potential military flash point since the Yugoslav army started to recruit Montenegrins from the pro-Belgrade Socialist People's Party (SNP) into a new paramilitary force, called the Seventh Battalion, headquartered in Bijelo Polje.
"It's a classic security police model of a paramilitary force," Mr Djukanovic said. "We know SNP activists check volunteers for their party loyalty so that they can have party troops who are not trained to defend the state but to overthrow democracy in Montenegro."
Many of the town's residents, half of whom are Muslim, are quietly slipping away to other places because they fear the force's potential for violence.
Vukoman Medojevic, the SNP chairman in Bijelo Polje, admits that the recruits to the Seventh Battalion come from his party's membership. "That's normal, because they support Yugoslavia and the federal army, while Djukanovic's supporters join the police," he says. "But the officers are not party members. The army belongs to the people."
Nevertheless, economic decline remains the main reason why people leave: employment opportunities have plummeted with the general collapse of the Balkan economies.
A picture of Tito, the wartime partisan leader who held Yugoslavia together for 35 years, hangs in the office of Dzemal Crnovrsanin, 51, the manager of a local supermarket. "People used to ask why I bothered to keep a dead man's portrait, but more of them now tell me they understand," he says.
Mr Crnovrsanin blames Serbia for the embargo. "I hope they realise it's useless. It's hurting them hard too. Countries at war often keep trading. Serbia slapped this embargo on, even when we are not at war. Milosevic and the SNP leader are punishing us because they lost the elections."
Despite the embargo, some of his fresh dairy produce, such as yogurt, has labels from Serbia. He admits that goods are smuggled across the border on back roads by pedestrians, or by bribing the Serb customs. But other products have to be driven round via the Serb-run entity in Bosnia.
The embargo was provoked by the Montenegrin govern ment's decision last autumn to bring in the German mark as a second currency alongside the dinar, Mr Medojevic says."If we are one country, we should have one currency. Now it's chaos."
But most Montenegrins favour the change, saying it has reduced instability. Salaries are usually paid in marks and the Yugoslav dinar has quickly become the currency of last resort; the federal army is the only major institution which pays its salaries and expenses in dinars.
The embargo surprised the Montenegrin government, which thought it could pay for its imports from Serbia with the dinars the army distributes. Now about 10% of the country's revenue is in dinars, which cannot be spent.
"We expected them to stop the clearing system but not the traffic in goods," said Dimitrije Vesovic, director of settlement operations at Montenegro's central bank. "It was the worst scenario, since it goes against their interest. If they have lost Kosovo, we thought it would be too much for them to go on to lose Montenegro as a market."
Despite the obstacles, Mr Djukanovic's officials claim to be optimistic that their gradual drive for independence is gathering strength. The next step will be the local elections in June, when they hope the SNP will lose more support, reducing Mr Milosevic's options still further.
The Irish Times : Rights lawyer pays price in Belgrade
Husnija Bitic, an ethnic-Albanian human rights lawyer living in Serbia, was almost beaten to death recently. He speaks to Gillian Sandford.
For more than 10 years, Husnija Bitic spoke out: defending Kosovar Albanians in controversial court cases, lambasting the regime of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and arguing in Serbian courts on behalf of Kosovars charged with terrorism.
A lawyer, he fought for the rights of Albanians in Yugoslavia but always through legal, constitutional and peaceful means.
In 1989, he wrote an open letter to Slobodan Milosevic that was published in the Croatian newspaper Danas. He accused the President of fulfilling promises given to Serbs and Montenegrins but breaking promises given to Albanians.
The following year, he pressed criminal charges against Lazar Mojsov - a member of the presidency of what was then Yugoslavia - because Mojsov had proclaimed a state of emergency in Kosovo in 1990. Bitic's case was rejected by the local court and on appeal.
The death threats began in 1992: "in the post, in the mail, it was never the same voice," says Bitic.
Then last month, in the early evening, the knock on the door of his Belgrade flat finally came.
"Who is it?" asked his wife Sanija (51). "Your neighbour Vlada," came the response. She opened the door and was struck on the head as three masked men brandishing handguns barged in.
They went on attacking her. They hit her and pushed her several times against the wall. Then the men charged into the adjacent room where Husnija (60), was watching television.
"I saw two very big and strong men enter. They had leather jackets, black trousers and masks. They wore black gloves and had guns in their hands. `Lay down you son of a bitch', yelled one.
"I felt a kick in my head and then two or three of them jumped on me. I wasn't even able to see them because they covered my head. I tried to shout, `Help me! Help me!', but my head was smothered with a blanket and a pillow. My arms and legs were bound with a cord.
"I was beaten on my head with something really hard. I was beaten all the time and pushed from one wall to another wall.
"Then they broke my skull. I could feel it. I could feel the exact moment. Something warm began to seep down my body and then every resistance of mine was stopped. I was no longer able to do anything more. I think they thought that I was dead, and they left."
By the time he gained consciousness, Bitic was in hospital. Serbian surgeons had laboured for hours to save his life that night, Friday March 17th.
By the time the thugs had gone, he had a fractured skull, broken ribs and widespread bruising. For several days he could not feel sensations in his limbs.
His wife had several stitches to her head and was in deep shock. The walls of their apartment were covered with their blood.
Neither husband nor wife knew who attacked them, only that the motive was political.
A wallet containing 300 deutschmarks lay on the table untouched. And the men came prepared, with masks to conceal their identity and cord to bind their victim.
Three weeks after the attack, the injured couple are living in the flat of their children and Bitic is going to the hospital every other day for check-ups. He should still be in hospital, but medical facilities in Serbia are so bad that his doctors said he would be better at home.
Bitic says he does not know the motive for the assassination attempt. "It could be because of my political opinions - the biggest numbers of threats I have received are because of political issues," he says. "They were an attempt to keep me quiet.
"But I also think the attackers wanted to send a message threatening all Albanians through what they did to me."
Bitic was born in a tiny Kosovan village near the town of Suha Reka, but he came to study law at Belgrade University. He made his home in the cosmopolitan capital of Yugoslavia aged 23, and has stayed ever since.
The majority of his clients are Albanians, but Bitic stresses that he defends clients of all ethnic groups. "I am first and foremost a lawyer. It doesn't matter who is knocking on my door."
This year, however, much of his work has been dealing with cases of alleged terrorism against Albanians immediately before and during the bombing of Yugoslavia.
So there is another possible reason for the attempted killing. Many Serb lawyers have in recent months begun to represent Albanians taken into custody during the bombing and held in Serb jails. These lawyers are reported to have been paid very large fees by desperate Kosovar families who appear to believe that in this way they could secure release of their loved ones.
Whether the fees do oil the wheels of justice in Serbia is impossible to say. But the presence of an Albanian lawyer charging modest costs would be an encumbrance to those negotiating big deals.
Bitic has already handled about 60 cases of imprisoned Albanians in the year since the NATO attack. He has several ongoing cases that colleagues are currently conducting for him.
One of these is the defence of several Albanians who were among a group of students arrested during the bombing and charged with conspiring to commit a terrorist act.
The trial started in November and is ongoing. But, says Bitic, there is no physical evidence in this case against the group of students - and they don't even know each other. Bitic believes it is simply a trial to allow police to prove that they did something useful during the war.
Bitic vows that he will continue to speak his mind. But he is not sure how long he will remain in Belgrade.
The attack has left him more sombre about the dangerous road he travels and its consequences for his wife and children.
"My first priority is now my recuperation and the safety of my family," he says.
The Sunday Times : Serbian prison boss held over war crimes
Stephen Grey, Brussels
THE commander of a notorious Serbian prison camp in Bosnia was flown to the United Nations war crimes tribunal in the Hague yesterday to face trial over his alleged involvement in murder and torture.
Dragan Nikolic, the first suspect ever indicted by the court, was detained on Friday by members of Nato's 20,000-strong Stabilisation Force in Bosnia (Sfor). He is expected to appear before the court this week.
As the commander of the Susica camp for Bosnian Muslims near Vlasenica, Nikolic was indicted in November 1994 for allegedly killing eight detainees and torturing seven others. He is also accused of imprisoning 500 Bosnians and of orchestrating deportation in the summer of 1992.
The seizure of Nikolic, who was apparently living freely in the American sector of Bosnia, was expected to help stem criticism that Nato troops were failing to act strongly enough in arresting war crimes suspects.
It followed the arrest on April 3 of Momcilo Krajisnik, an ally of the former Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, by French Nato troops at his home in eastern Bosnia. Krajisnik is the most senior Bosnian Serb arrested and has been charged with every war crime on the tribunal's statute.
Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, his military chief, remain at large. Karadzic is believed to be in Bosnia, but Mladic lives in Belgrade, protected by President Slobodan Milosevic.
Lord Robertson, the Nato secretary-general, said yesterday the arrests showed the organisation's determination to play its role in helping bring indicted war criminals to justice. "Those indicted war criminals who remain at large have no permanent hiding place," he said.
In a 1995 hearing at the Hague tribunal which confirmed Nikolic's indictment, one survivor of his camp described how two dozen Muslim women and girls disappeared without trace after conquering Serbs took them away.
One man was said to have been beaten so viciously his eye burst out of its socket. Guards threw him into an empty storage warehouse at the camp, where he died.
Washington Post : Sex Slavery Flourishes in Kosovo
By Peter Finn
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia – The sex-slave traffic in East European women, one of the major criminal scourges of post-communist Europe, is becoming a serious problem in Kosovo, where porous borders, the presence of international troops and aid workers and the lack of a working criminal justice system have created almost perfect conditions for the trade, U.N. police officials, NATO-led peacekeepers and humanitarian workers say.
In the past six months, U.N. police and troops here have rescued 50 women – Moldovan, Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Romanian – from brothels that have begun to appear in cities and towns in Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the dominant republic of Yugoslavia. Police and aid workers say they fear that hundreds more, lured from their impoverished homelands with the promise of riches, may also be living in sexual servitude.
"These women have been reduced to slavery," said Col. Vincenzo Coppola, commander of a special unit of the Italian carabinieri, or national police, in Kosovo that has rescued 23 women on raids of brothels in Pristina, the provincial capital, and Prizren.
According to police sources and aid workers, the women – and some girls as young as 15 – were transported along a well-established organized crime network from their East European homelands to Macedonia, which borders Kosovo to the south. There, they were held in motels and sold at auction to ethnic Albanian pimps for $1,000 to $2,500. The pimps work under the protection of major crime figures in Kosovo, officials said, including some with links to the former anti-Serbian rebel force, the Kosovo Liberation Army.
The women, who had been stripped of their passports, as then were frequently held in unheated rooms with primitive sanitary conditions in Kosovo and forced to engage in unprotected sex, sometimes up to 16 times a night for no payment, according U.N. police officers who requested anonymity because of U.N. regulations limiting their ability to speak with reporters.
The undermanned U.N. police force here is hard-pressed to cope with a variety of criminal activities in this war-scarred province, and authorities and aid workers here have been slow to respond to the burgeoning sex-slave trade. Moreover, there are limited humanitarian resources available to protect those women who are able to seek sanctuary.
In addition, officials here said, the trade has flourished because of a lack of applicable law on both trafficking and prostitution and because some countries with military forces here have tended to dismiss the activity as simple prostitution. German peacekeepers in southern Kosovo, for instance, have taken a benign view of the phenomenon in part because prostitution is tolerated in Germany.
International aid workers are trying to convince them that these women are victims. "It's not classic prostitution," said one aid worker who has interviewed rescued women and is working on a draft U.N. regulation to punish people involved in the sex-slave trade. "They are not paid. They are never paid. Of the 50 women we have seen, not one has received a single deutsche mark, and they are often held in horrendous conditions."
According to authorities, the women were told that before they could keep any of their earnings, they first had to pay off the pimps for their purchase price. Often, however, they found themselves fined for such infractions as not smiling at customers, so there was no way they would ever have enough money to make the payoff. If they protested, the women said, they were beaten.
A number of the women appear to have contracted sexually transmitted diseases, officials said, and international groups here are attempting to obtain treatment for them either in Kosovo or as soon as they can return to their homelands. "This is a major problem, and it is going further underground because of police raids," said one international aid worker. "At first, it was very out in the open, and so-called nightclubs were popping up. But now it's moving into private dwellings, and I expect if we get a reliable phone network we'll soon see call-girl services."
International organizations here recently established a safe house to protect women who escape from the brothels until they can be returned home. But it is now full, with 21 women, and police have had to suspend raids on other brothels until they can repatriate some of the former captives.
International officials declined to allow a reporter to speak to any of the rescued women. But in bars in Pristina, Gnjilane and Urosevac, there are young Moldovan and Ukrainian women who describe themselves as "waitresses" seeking economic opportunity in Kosovo. "I can earn 400 deutsche marks [$200] a month," said a Moldovan woman at a cafe in Gnjilane, where beds are set up behind a dank front bar. Asked how much cash she had on her possession, the woman said only, "I'm okay," as an ethnic Albanian bar manager looked on.
According to the rescued women, the clientele varies from brothel to brothel, officials said. Some serve mostly ethnic Albanians; others cater to a mixture of ethnic Albanians and international workers. Peacekeeping troops – including Americans – also were customers, the women said. U.S. officials deny that American troops visit the brothels, pointing out that soldiers are confined to base when they are off duty.
The first case of sex-slave trafficking came to light in October – four months after NATO-led peacekeepers entered the province – when French police officers raided a brothel in Kosovska Mitrovica and found two Ukrainian women, ages 21 and 22, and two Serbian women, including a minor. The establishment was closed and the Serbs were released, but the French did not know what to do with the two Ukrainians, who had no travel documents, officials said.
According to sources familiar with the case, the French policemen detained the women at a military camp while they appealed, without success, to humanitarian organizations for assistance. After two weeks, fearful of a public relations disaster because of the presence of "prostitutes" at a military facility, The French policemen took the two women to the administrative boundary between Kosovo and Serbia proper and essentially expelled them. It is unclear what happened to them after that.
In November and December, further cases of enforced prostitution came to light when U.N. policemen visited a number of bars in Pristina – bars with such names as Totos and the Miami Beach Club – and removed women who appealed to them for help.
On Jan. 22, officers with the Italian police unit entered an establishment on the outskirts of Pristina called the International Club, where they were approached by women asking for help. The club, now closed, was a crude structure with a small bar and barren rooms in the back that were equipped with just a bed and a red light bulb. Some women were kept in an attic. The following night, the Italians raided the club and rescued 12 women, mostly Moldovans and Ukrainians, who appealed for sanctuary.
The Italians were criticized for conducting the raid without coordinating with the U.N. police and humanitarian organizations who then had to assume care of the women. But their efforts did lead to official recognition of the problem and the creation of the safe house in early February.
That has allowed international workers to interview the women and understand the process by which they were brought into the sex industry. In the last 10 years, according to women's advocacy groups, hundreds of thousands of women from the former Soviet republics and satellites have been trafficked to Western Europe, Asia and the United States. Kosovo, which had some local prostitution but no trafficking problem before the peacekeepers arrived after the Kosovo war ended last June, is just another new market, officials said.
Most of the women interviewed here responded to newspaper ads seeking "attractive women" to work in the West and, in fact, knew they would work in the sex industry. A small minority told police they had been kidnapped or were completely deceived when they applied for jobs in the West, including one Moldovan teenager who got pregnant in Kosovo, police officials said.
"The women we've spoken to left their countries of their own volition and basically knew they would work as prostitutes," said a U.N. police officer in Gnjilane. "But they thought they could earn thousands of dollars in some exotic location like Italy or Spain and then go home rich. Instead, they end up imprisoned here without a dime.
BBC : Yugoslavia bans chemical weapons
By defence correspondent Jonathan Marcus
The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia has agreed to accede to the international convention banning the production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons.
According to a spokesman for the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, that oversees the treaty, Belgrade deposited its instruments of accession with the UN Secretary General on Thursday.
The Yugoslav army is widely believed in the West to have a significant chemical warfare capability and now all stocks of such weapons will have to be destroyed.
The Yugoslav Government's decision to accede to the convention is a significant step.
It is the last country in Europe to do so and in due course, it will have to open up its chemical facilities - both military and many civil plants - to international inspection.
Nerve agents
Before the break-up of Yugoslavia, its armed forces had developed a significant chemical warfare capability with stocks of nerve agents and mustard gas, along with various other incapacitating chemicals.
The army of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia inherited the bulk of this programme, including production facilities and stocks of chemical munitions.
Yugoslavia's membership of the arms control regime will enter into force in mid-May, after which it will have some 30 days to submit a detailed declaration of its holdings.
Constructive relationship
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the watchdog body that oversees the convention, will then organise the first base-line inspections.
The Yugoslav Government's decision will be broadly welcomed, not least by other south-east European countries.
It also represents a clear signal that at least in this area, Belgrade wants a more open and constructive relationship with the outside world.
IWPR : Putin's Victory is Bad News for Belgrade
There are signs the Kremlin is distancing itself from Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic who has, once again, backed the wrong horse.
By Daniel Sunter in Belgrade (BCR No. 134, 20-Apr-00)
A shift in Russian policy towards Serbia is becoming increasingly apparent since Vladimir Putin took over the helm at the Kremlin last month.
Even in the run-up to the presidential elections, observers in Belgrade and Moscow noticed that Putin never once mentioned the Balkans or Serbia during his campaign.
Goran Svilanovic, president of the Civic Alliance of Serbia (GSS), commented, "Shortly before the start of the election, the Russian embassy distributed Putin's electoral manifesto to all the political parties in Serbia. It was quite clear from this document that Moscow has no intention of abandoning its policy of co-operation with the West. Putin's victory is bad news for the Belgrade regime."
The Milosevic regime, on the other hand, invited the ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky for an official visit to Belgrade on the eve of the March 26 election. According to all the polls, Zhirinovsky -- who openly styled himself as a would-be dictator -- had no chance of winning the presidential race.
The Serbian opposition criticised Belgrade's decision to invite Zhirinovsky, stressing that Serbia should woo parties and leaders who represent mainstream Russian politics and not extremists or communists.
The Russian daily newspaper Kommersant wrote at the beginning of April that Moscow had taken a conscious decision to distance itself from the "hated" Yugoslav president. Russia, according to Kommersant, "has no wish to support the regime in Belgrade".
According to a well-informed source close to the highest echelons of the Yugoslav Army, Russia has also broken off its military and technical agreement with Serbia.
Aimed at restructuring and modernising the Yugoslav forces, the agreement was signed by Marshal Igor Sergeev, the Russian defense minister, and his Yugoslav counterpart, Pavle Bulatovic.
Although the source refused to comment further about the details of the agreement, he stressed that Russia had unilaterally put the project on ice.
He added, "The signal is crystal-clear. Putin's administration is sending out a clear message to the political and military leaders in Belgrade."
The move was also prompted by new controls on the Russian defence ministry which mean that it can no longer act as a separate entity. In future, it will be obliged to co-ordinate its activities with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
A gas supply agreement between Russia and Serbia has also run into troubled waters. The Russian company Gasprom has decreased supplies threefold without informing Belgrade.
The latest developments have taken Belgrade officials by surprise. An anonymous official from the Oil Industry of Serbia (NIS) told Belgrade media, "I don't know why this has happened, we have not been informed by Russia. There have been no problems up until now."
The change in mood is all the more surprising because Russia is currently supplying gas to Serbia on credit, despite existing debts totalling more than $300 million.
Shortly after the gas crisis, Russian foreign minister Igor Ivanov met with the Yugoslav ambassador in Moscow, Borislav Milosevic, the brother of President Slobodan Milosevic. He called upon the Yugoslav Federation to show greater flexibility towards the international community in solving the Kosovo problem.
Ivanov added that Russia supports UN proposals to give Kosovo greater autonomy within the federation and that Belgrade should play a leading role in the process of stabilising the Balkan region.
Sources in Moscow claim that, during the Contact Group summit at the beginning of April, Russia expressed solidarity with Western states over Serbian attempts to destabilise Montenegro. Russia took the side of the Montenegrin president, Milo Djukanovic.
Moscow roundly condemned the Serbian blockade of Montenegro, commenting that Belgrade's policies had served to aggravate an already complicated situation.
A Serbian government spokesman told IWPR, "Igor Ivanov's behaviour at the meeting with Bora Milosevic, compounded by problems with the gas supply and Russia's support of Montenegro have come as a real shock to Belgrade. Draskovic's invitation to Moscow was an even bigger surprise."
Vuk Draskovic, leader of the Serbian Renewal Movement, SPO, opposition party, was the first Serbian politician to visit the Russian Federation following Putin's election victory on March 26.
A SPO spokesman said Draskovic met with officials from the Russian foreign ministry to discuss early elections in Serbia, Kosovo and Montenegro as well as the lifting of sanctions against the Yugoslav Federation.
Draskovic later said that he had gained Russian support for plans to hold early elections at all levels. Ivanov stressed that Russia stands firmly behind the democratisation of Serbia and opposes any policies of terror and repression.
Belgrade was quick to react to Moscow's diplomatic manoeuvrings.
Milutin Stojkovic, defence committee president and a senior member of the ruling Socialist Party of Serbia, SPS, accused the Russian foreign minister of pandering to the United States government.
"If Ivanov's diplomacy represents nothing more than attempts to appease America, then Russian interests," Stojkovic told a Russian Duma delegation in Belgrade.
Some of Milosevic's more reckless ventures may have cost him Russian support. In the past, his policy towards Russia has been littered with misjudgments.
During the attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, Belgrade voiced open support for the rebels who wanted to rebuild the Soviet Empire.
Then Milosevic decided to throw his weight behind Zhirinovsky, hoping that a nationalist regime in Russia would guarantee Serbia a nuclear arsenal of her own. At the time, the Serbian media buzzed with rumours of a secret weapon which Zhirinovsky had allegedly presented to the government.
After Zhirinovsky, Belgrade championed the Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, who showed every sign of posing a real challenge to Boris Yeltsin in the 1996 presidential elections.
But there may be more pragmatic motives behind the shift in Russian foreign policy towards Serbia. Putin may be attempting to show the West that his relationship with Serbia is based on sound economic judgments rather than emotional and ethnic ties.
The Milosevic regime would therefore be forced to turn to the Far East and China in search of new allies.
NATO used depleted uranium rounds Yugoslavia, government says
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP) _ NATO warplanes used depleted uranium rounds on eight sites in Yugoslavia during the alliance's 78-day bombing campaign last year, a government report Friday said.
A team of Yugoslav experts made the study on the environmental effects of the NATO air strikes launched to stop President Slobodan Milosevic's crackdown on ethnic Albanians in the province of Kosovo.
The report comes a few months after NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson confirmed that U.S. jets operating in Kosovo last year fired the armor-piercing depleted uranium rounds on numerous missions.
Robertson said the rounds were used when American A-10 ground attack aircraft engaged armored vehicles _ on about 100 missions in Kosovo. The military says depleted uranium is a dense metal that provides enhanced armor-piercing capability.
Some specialists believe the uranium rounds are environmentally harmful. But the U.S. Defense Department has defended the use of the uranium, saying the rounds contained no more health risk that conventional weapons.
The Belgrade study aimed to give specifics on all environmental impacts of the airstrikes.
The locations contaminated by the depleted uranium and described in the 75-page document include six sites in Serbia and one in Montenegro, Serbia's smaller partner in the Yugoslav federation, said Gen. Slobodan Petkovic, who presented the report for the Defense Ministry.
The eighth location is in Kosovo, Serbia's southern province. The region is now run by U.N. and NATO peacekeepers, preventing examination of the contamination by a Yugoslav team, he said.
Los Angeles Times : Accusations of Cronyism in Yugoslavia's Other Republic
Balkans: Critics say West turns a blind eye to corruption in Montenegro because of leader's anti-Milosevic stance.
By PAUL WATSON, Times Staff Writer
PODGORICA, Yugoslavia--Montenegrins often quote the old saying that you can't choose your relatives but you can certainly pick your friends, and President Milo Djukanovic has done well with his choice of Dragan Brkovic.
Djukanovic, the West's closest ally in its campaign to topple Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, can't pay pensioners, civil servants and a growing police force in Montenegro--Yugoslavia's secondary republic--without tens of millions of dollars provided by the U.S. and European nations each year.
But thanks to a multimillion-dollar favor from Brkovic, a wealthy importer-exporter who just a decade ago was eking out a living selling auto parts for a state-run firm, Djukanovic has made sure that some of his most important supporters here live and work in luxury.
In the process, critics say, Brkovic and his foreign partners may end up controlling Montenegro's major industry: the state-run aluminum plant.
Djukanovic's opponents see that prospect as another sign of the spreading corruption and "crony capitalism" that have already resulted in allegations against the foreign minister and others--corruption they say Western governments have chosen to disregard because Montenegro is central to their strategy for containing Milosevic.
"But that behavior makes our people subservient," said Mirjana Vujanovic, a business economics professor who advises Montenegro's pro-independence Liberal Alliance. "Milo is a god now because he has the support of Western countries, and people are ready to accept him as a god. They think: 'Money will come. We don't have to work.' "
Djukanovic insists that he runs a clean government in Montenegro, which makes up, together with the larger republic of Serbia, what is left of Yugoslavia after a decade of war. A corrupt president couldn't survive politically as long as he has in a republic with only 630,000 people, he says.
"In such a society, everything easily and quickly gets found out," Djukanovic said. "And as you can see, in this society I have managed to survive for 10 years, and to win the elections."
In October, government ministers, judges, officials and academics moved into 54 apartments appointed with marble corridors, oak parquet floors, climate-control systems, intercoms and built-in closets. These are comforts rarely seen in a republic where the average worker takes home $85 a month.
One of Tiny Republic's Most Powerful Firms
The civil servants' rent-free units are in a complex built by Brkovic's Vektra, one of the most powerful companies in Montenegro. The complex also contains government offices furnished to what Brkovic calls "the most modern European standards." The ministers' proximity to work led opposition politician Dusan Jovanovic to ask in parliament whether they planned to show up in their bathrobes.
Brkovic insists that he is the one taking the bath on the 1996 deal. He received $1.6 million in cash and the right to collect $22 million in debt from the government-owned KAP aluminum mill, which hasn't paid its creditors for years. In exchange, he gave the government most of the new building, which he says is worth more than $50 million.
Brkovic founded Vektra in 1990, importing 1,000 Peugeot cars per year until 1992. His company also worked with the KAP plant, which soon became his main concern after the U.N. imposed sanctions on Yugoslavia in May 1992.
Brkovic said that because he helped the plant import raw materials and export its aluminum in violation of the sanctions, the plant owed him millions of dollars even before the 1996 deal. But after the deal, its debt to Vektra swelled to $57 million, Brkovic claims, making his company the plant's largest creditor. An audit by a French bank has put the firm's total debt at $201 million.
Brkovic says he saved the aluminum plant--which accounts for 53% of the republic's official economy, excluding government jobs and services--because he is a patriot. If Montenegro's biggest industry collapsed, Djukanovic's pro-West government would too, he says.
But so far, Brkovic says, he has received no money and no aluminum from the plant.
Nebojsa Medojevic, Montenegro's leading anti-corruption crusader, suspects that Vektra may be secretly cooperating with a foreign partner in a bid to take over the plant, where Brkovic was a janitor while a student in 1974.
In October 1998, the government signed a five-year contract with one of Brkovic's biggest foreign partners--Swiss commodities-trading giant Glencore International--to manage KAP. Three months later, Glencore hired the government's chief negotiator on the contract, a close friend of Brkovic, to be the plant's general manager, Medojevic says.
"Officially, the government is saying it will privatize KAP," Medojevic said. "But I'm afraid that the privatization has already happened. It's Vektra's privatization."
The sell-off to Djukanovic friends and their partners of other state-owned properties--such as seaside hotels, the renowned Niksic brewery and a profitable health spa--has prompted allegations of "crony capitalism."
Critics charge that people close to the president have used state-owned firms, such as freight shipper Zetatrans and tobacco company Duvanski Kombinat Podgorica, in a multimillion-dollar cigarette smuggling racket tied to the Italian Mafia.
In another case, Montenegrin Foreign Minister Branko Perovic was forced to resign in December after an Italian court summoned him and 26 others, including suspected members of the Mafia, to answer allegations of cigarette smuggling. Perovic insists that he will prove his innocence when the trial begins later this year.
Medojevic, the anti-corruption crusader, belongs to the G-17 group of independent economists, which is backing efforts to remove Milosevic. He thinks Djukanovic is weakening Montenegro at a time when it faces a possible war of secession against Yugoslavia by giving power to a new oligarchy instead of building a real democracy.
"In the Montenegrin case, transition means corruption," Medojevic said. "Montenegro today is very close to repeating the Russian scenario of 1992--unfortunately, under the instructions of the international community, especially from the United States."
With its mountain tracks and long coastline, Montenegro has always been well suited to trafficking in contraband. After the U.N. imposed economic sanctions against Yugoslavia and smuggling became a matter of survival, the republic became one big black market.
Analysts estimate that at least 40% of Montenegro's economy is based on smuggling goods such as stolen cars, tax-free cigarettes and drugs, with help from organized crime in Italy and Albania.
Black Market Cuts Into Tax Revenues
In part because smugglers and black marketeers don't pay taxes, Djukanovic relies heavily on foreign aid to pay the 58% of the population that depends on his government for salaries and pensions.
The U.S. government gave $55 million in financial aid to Montenegro last year, has approved another $55 million for this year and will add $35 million if Congress approves, said Vinka Jovovic, a media aide to Djukanovic. The European Union has donated $100 million since 1998, she added.
Medojevic says Montenegrins learned about breaking sanctions from Milosevic's circle.
"In the first days of the sanctions, the Montenegrin government was very confused, and guys from Serbia came and taught our guys about sanctions-busting--how to extract the hard currency savings from the citizens, how to organize big banks and so on," Medojevic said. "Around Milosevic there were experts; around Djukanovic there were just friends. It's a dramatic difference."
Brkovic, who describes himself and Montenegro's president as "just close family friends," insists that he met Djukanovic in 1993, long after Vektra got into the aluminum trade.
During a recent two-hour interview, Djukanovic dismissed the corruption allegations as chatter from evil people with too much time on their hands.
"I consider these to be provincial small talk and rumors," Djukanovic said. "There is a clear way for everybody to become rich: to be clever and willing to work. Unfortunately, these criticisms come from those who are not prepared to work but just to watch others work."
Most Montenegrins are paid in German marks as the government, on the advice of Johns Hopkins University economist Steve Hanke, tries to wean the republic from the Yugoslav dinar, which is practically worthless outside Serbia.
The "parallel currency" policy is fueling inflation, increasing the demand for foreign money to keep Montenegro stable enough to challenge Milosevic. Prices rose 45.6% in the last two months of 1999 alone, the parliament was told in February.
Foreign aid also is essential for Djukanovic's buildup of a police force needed, he says, to counter 14,000 Yugoslav troops based in the republic and about 900 Milosevic loyalists in the 7th Military Police Battalion.
In the three years since Djukanovic first split from Milosevic, the ranks of the Montenegrin police force have swelled sixfold to more than 15,000.
Opposition politician Jovanovic, a former financial police chief and director of public funds, says Djukanovic fired him in July 1997 because he insisted on investigating allegations of police links to tax evasion by a company called ASI.
The company, which Jovanovic claims was set up by men close to Djukanovic and the police, did a cash business in scarce imported goods, he said. Most of the buyers were in Kosovo, which is a province of Serbia.
"It was a sign that other similar companies could be formed. I was personally offered 3% of the trade of one of them [a cut of almost $50,000 a month] just to guarantee that they would not face the financial police," Jovanovic said.
The president's critics also claim that Aco Djukanovic, the older brother of the president, has profited from family ties.
Aco has a two-story villa with creamy white walls of marble in the village of Bijela. A camera watches over the front door, and a Doberman pinscher guards the private beach.
Milo Djukanovic's opponents claim the brother got rich from the cigarette smuggling trade by, for instance, requiring traffickers to fuel their speedboats--for double the market price--at one of two gas stations that he leased after the businesses were privatized.
Despite calls from the president's office, Aco Djukanovic was not available for comment. Milo Djukanovic said he had no doubt that his brother gained the gas station concessions through legal bids.
"I am not informed that he has achieved a significant wealth, or maybe he is hiding it from me," the president said. "And I know very well that he has been out of this [gas] business for the last seven or eight years.
"Everything else is a matter of his business operations that I am not involved in, and I am not interfering with, just like he's not interfering with mine.
The Guardian : 145 Kosovans in mass trial for terrorism
Jacky Rowland in Belgrade
The biggest mass trial so far of suspected former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army began in the southern Serbian city of Nis yesterday.
Traffic was halted in the city as the 145 Albanian defendants, who are charged with terrorist activities, were driven in three buses to the heavily guarded court.
The Albanians, from the Kosovan town of Djakovica, are accused of "organising and participating in terrorist and enemy activities" - including the killing of police officers - against Serbian security forces stationed in Kosovo last year.
The use of the words "terrorist activities" in the indictment indicates that the authorities consider the defendants - mainly young men - to be former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which has since been officially disbanded.
Yesterday's proceedings were dominated by the taking of personal details from all 145 defendants: a task defence lawyers said would normally be carried out before the trial. Proceedings are expected to start in earnest today, with verdicts likely later this week.
The defendants were arrested in Djakovica, near the Albanian border, during Nato air strikes a year ago. They were among hundreds of Albanian prisoners held by the Serbian authorities in Kosovo until Belgrade ceded control of the province to Nato last June.
When the Yugoslav army and Serb police withdraw from Kosovo, they took with them more than 2,000 prisoners, mainly Kosovo Albanians charged with terrorism, and moved them to jails elsewhere in Serbia.
A number of prominent Albanians, including the paediatrician and women's activist Flora Brovina, and the student leader Albin Kurti have already been convicted of terrorism and sentenced to long prison terms at trials which drew criticism both locally and abroad.
The UN mission in Kosovo estimates that about 1,500 Kosovo Albanians remain in Serbian jails. International officials have called for them to be returned to Kosovo.
More than 20 lawyers are taking part in the defence of this latest group of Albanians, whose trial is being monitored by human rights activists. The lawyers say that the defendants were held from May to December without being informed of the reasons for their detention.
"This is a political trial through which the Belgrade regime is attempting to cover up the great tragedy it has provoked in Kosovo," said Natasa Kandic of the Humanitarian Law Centre in Belgrade. "These Albanians are innocent civilians who were not involved in armed actions and who were kidnapped on the streets of Djakovica."
The trial comes as Belgrade pursues a creeping clampdown on its opponents in politics and the media. The campaign is likely to be stepped up following an opposition protest rally last Friday for which more than 100,000 people turned out to demand an end to the regime of President Slobodan Milosevic.
The authorities are making full use of the malleable Serbian legal system to try to neutralise voices of dissent.
Opposition activists, former police officers and newspaper editors have all been brought to trial.
The criminal charges are intended to discredit opposition politicians, while heavy fines imposed on newspapers and broadcasters threaten to cripple financially the non-government press.
The control of public opinion in Serbia is vital, since local elections are due to be held by the end of the year.
The authorities have used telecommunications legislation to seize the equipment of a number of radio and television stations, and they are jamming the signal of the influential Studio B television channel in Belgrade, which is controlled by the opposition leader Vuk Draskovic.
Analysts in Belgrade suspect that President Milosevic may try to offer enticements to either Mr Draskovic or another opposition figure to break the newly established but fragile unity of the Serbian opposition.
The Christian Science Monitor : Raising women's role in Kosovo
As the province rebuilds, some see a rare chance to improve women's rights in a male-dominated society.
Richard Mertens
Igballe Rogova makes her way down a cold stairwell in Kosovo's capital, Pristina, carrying a box of food to a basement apartment.
She braces herself for a difficult meeting.
An elderly woman answers her knock. Behind her, a young woman holding a child appears, then quickly retreats. The old woman leads Ms. Rogova into a room where her husband sits in the glow of an electric heater. There, the couple pours forth a stream of angry grievances against the young woman.
Their story is not uncommon. Serbs burned down their house in central Kosovo last spring and killed one of their sons, a fighter for the Kosovo Liberation Army, the ethnic Albanian rebel force that opposed Serbian rule. The young woman is his widow, the child his two-year-old daughter.
The grandparents see their daughter-in-law as a burden and want her to leave. But they insist on keeping the child. What sounds unreasonable to Western ears is no more than tradition here allows. Albanian custom frees a widow to remarry, but gives any children to the father's family. The young woman refuses to go, however. She has all but barricaded herself in her room.
It is a wrenching predicament, not only for the family but also for Rogova, a women's-rights activist who spent much of the 1990s helping rural women in a mountain district of southern Kosovo. Today, she confronts a whole new set of problems.
"Every time, I say to people, 'This is temporary. We're going through bad times,' " she says after the visit. She can do little except try to calm the elderly couple.
Rogova is one of a small but growing number of local activists trying to improve the status of women in postwar Kosovo, as the devastated province rebuilds. Unlike much of the rest of Europe, Kosovo is still a mainly rural, peasant society that places heavy burdens on women but gives them few rights and privileges. A decade of Serb oppression and two years of armed conflict only made conditions worse.
At the same time, Kosovar women see this is as a moment of opportunity. Since the Yugoslav Army withdrew last June after three months of NATO airstrikes, Kosovo has been under the administration of the United Nations and KFOR, the NATO-led protection force. The end of rule from Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital, marked the beginning of a new order in the province, with the UN struggling to build a liberal democracy on the ruins of the old Communist system. Whether the new order will turn out any better is far from certain, but many women aspire to a greater role in it.
"There are so many things to do here, so many things to fight for!" exclaims Sevdie Ahmeti, director of the Center for the Protection of Women and Children, one of Kosovo's oldest and largest women's organizations. "I'm very optimistic. The younger generation has enough with suffering and pain. We have to energize them and proceed."
It's a big challenge. Jobs are scarce, especially among women, some of whom now find themselves in the unfamiliar role of breadwinner. Women's education has suffered, too. In recent years, many parents kept their daughters at home, worried for their safety but also feeling little need to educate girls. Meanwhile, domestic violence has increased, and Kosovo's feeble legal system can do little to curb it.
Kosovo is still largely a man's world, where men dominate both public and private life. Nowhere is this truer than in the countryside, where 60 percent of Kosovars live, many of them following a way of life that has all but disappeared in the rest of Europe. Here, the clan and the extended family remain the main units of social organization. Women are expected to stay at home, bear children - preferably sons - and obey.
And yet Kosovo also has many educated, professional women, including teachers, doctors, lawyers, and journalists. Women from this largely urban class are working to increase women's rights, to help girls catch up in school, and to teach women employable skills. Even villages produce exceptional women. Shpresa Shehu, a schoolteacher, helps run a women's center in Mala Krusa, where more than 100 men and boys died last spring, including one of her brothers.
"For me there is nothing, just to help people to start to live in normal conditions," says Ms. Shehu.
Kosovar women have a history of activism. Beginning 10 years ago, when Serb authorities fired ethnic Albanians from their jobs and shut them out of state institutions, women helped ethnic Albanian political leaders - mostly men - organize a parallel system of schools and health clinics. Some went further and started small projects that sought to teach women reproductive health, to protect them from violence, and in other ways improve their lives. It was guerrilla humanitarian work, and it took courage.
Rogova was one of them. In 1989, she was fired from her job as a foreign-film editor for state television. Together with her sister Safeta, an actress, she started an organization called Motrat Qiriazi (Sisters Qiriazi), named after two women who pioneered education for girls in Albania.
"In this way, we kept ourselves from getting depressed," Rogova recalls. "We thought that women, especially rural women, needed us. And we needed them, too.
In southern Kosovo she found women living "like 50 years ago." She started libraries, encouraged girls to go to high school, and helped set up health clinics.
Since then, Sisters Qiriazi has expanded to other parts of Kosovo. Rogova also spends time helping displaced women in Pristina, where she lives, bringing them food, blankets, yarn, and often a kind word.
Western organizations are trying to help too, funding centers where women can learn to sew, to use computers, or to speak English. They are setting up loan funds to help women start small businesses. The Kosovo Women's Initiative, with $10 million from the US government, is promoting organizational skills.
Elaine McKay, a consultant for the Women's Initiative, has also worked on behalf of women in South Africa and Southeast Asia. She says that Kosovar women lag behind their counterparts in such places. Moreover, she says, Kosovo's UN administration has until now "not shown more than a token interest in women."
But in some corners, the desire for change is powerful.
"I have this idea that is boiling in me," Rogova says, sitting in a popular cafe. "I can't wait to start - what do you call it? Cooperatives? Between village women, selling milk products, vegetable products, fruit products. They can do that. So many ideas I've got! I can't wait to go to a village and discuss them."
Balkan War in Domain Attacks?
by Chris Oakes
3:00 a.m. Apr. 15, 2000 PDT
Domain-name hijackers are taking over hundreds of websites in a campaign that may be rooted in tensions among Balkan states, site owners and monitors say.
Individuals listing Serbian and Albanian postal addresses in recent weeks have exploited a weakness in registrar Network Solutions and appropriated names registered through the company, officials there said.
Domain takeovers enable the hijacker to control the server associated with a domain name, such as Viagra.com or Indianajones.com. Hijackers can then reassign the domain name to another Web server, or to no server at all, scuttling all traffic intended to go to the site.
This latest round of mass hijackings could be random hacking or part of a fledgling Balkan info-war, but since online identities can be easily spoofed, it's hard to know for sure.
Network Solutions spokeswoman Cheryl Regan confirmed that many domains had recently been "redirected" to a registrant listing an Albanian address, but refused to pinpoint the exact number of affected domains beyond "considerably less than 2,000."
WebDNS, a domain-name system-monitoring service based in England, reported Thursday that at least 50 domain names have been attacked since April 9, including Adidas.com, Jamesbond.com, Mafia.com, France.com, Italy.com, Spain.com, Slovenia.com, Croatia.com, Sarajevo.com, Kosova.com, Washington.com, and Bosnia.com.
"We have been in contact with owners of some of the domain names affected and have found the companies were either not aware of the situation or had been alerted by the fact services were failing," said WebDNS founder Alex Jeffreys. "Many had been in touch with Network Solutions and were in the process of having the domain re-transferred."
Among the victimized sites were those run by pro-democracy groups and other Web publications maintained by Serbian political opponents, such as Montenegro.com and Bosnia.com, both of which have since been returned to their owners.
Hijackers have targeted Internet domain names belonging to Montenegran pro-democracy activists and to news and information sites, said Montenegro.com owner Alex Obradovic, who runs Montenegro.com and related domains from Los Angeles. The sites provide updates on developments between Montenegro and its parent republic of Serbia.
Obradovic is convinced the hijacking is the work of hackers conducting an electronic attack on Montenegro, a Serbo-Croatian constituent republic bordering Serbia. Using electronic tracing tools, he determined that the Internet service hosting the hijackers is based in the Serbian capital of Belgrade. He says the possibility that hackers were dialing into the service's account from outside Serbia is "unlikely."
Network Solutions was able to return the domains to Obradovic before any changes were made, he said. But other Balkan-related domains, including Slovenia.com and Croatia.com have been hijacked for weeks and remain so, he said.
Late Friday, the Slovenia.com domain carried the message: "KOSOVO IS SERBIA Site hacked BYGreb-a-Thor and ScsiMaster.... Be happy if we hacked your site because we hack ONLY the best sites on the Internet!"
Obradovic suspects the hijackers are trying to undermine the spread of information in Montenegro and other republics as part of a propaganda war against opposition states.
Network Solutions' Regan would not comment on the possible info-war motive, nor confirm the likely geographical origins of the hijacking campaign. "We cannot address specifics of our active investigation of this domain-name attack," she said.
Regan said many of the hijacked domains had since been returned to their original owners. But a registry search early Friday showed that at least 50 domains still listed the hijackers' phony contact name, justdoit@megapost.net.
Later Friday the same search showed zero results, suggesting the company had disabled many of the hijacked records.
An assortment of random domains were caught in the attack as well, suggesting that the Balkan sites may be only a red herring in the campaign.
Among the other domains reported stolen was UnitedStates.com, which said two of its domain names were redirected to addresses in Serbia and then Albania.
But according to WebDNS, all of the hijacked accounts had one thing in common: They all were registered by Network Solutions.
The hijackers took advantage of the same weakness in Network Solutions' registration system that has plagued the company for months.
The Network Solutions technical or procedural glitch resulted in the temporary loss of a domain earlier this week owned by Web-filtering company Solid Oak Software.
Ongoing hijackings are not unusual, Network Solutions acknowledges, but the company said the numbers are typically small.
WebDNS's Jeffreys concluded that Network Solutions has serious security problems with database maintenance and changes, blaming it in part on the company's automated email system used to execute changes.
In response to the recent attacks, Network Solutions' only suggestion was for customers to invest in higher security. The company said early this week in response to the problem at Solid Oak that an overhaul of its registry system was a possibility.
"Emphasis needs to be made here that the domain names that had been attacked or "hijacked" were those whose registrants had subscribed to .... the lowest protection scheme available (by Network Solutions) for a domain-name record," Regan said.
The Guardian : Eurocorps to run Kosovo peace force
Richard Norton-Taylor
Moves towards closer European security and defence cooperation will get a boost today when Eurocorps, the French-sponsored multinational military grouping, takes over the running of the international peacekeeping force in Kosovo.
It is the first time in Nato's history that the alliance has entrusted an external operation to a unit which is not part of its integrated, US-dominated, command structure.
A Spanish general, Juan Ortuno, commander of Eurocorps, will take over K-For's headquarters in Pristina with a senior French officer as his deputy. He will command nearly 1,000 staff officers, including US, British, and Russian personnel.
The decision to give Eurocorps the task of controlling K-For after months of pressure from France and Germany has deep political resonance at a time when the US remains unhappy about EU plans for a European security and defence identity.
Eurocorps is a politically-driven creation from which Britain has kept its distance on the grounds that it is potentially divisive and more symbolic than militarily effective. Originally proposed by France, it now includes Germany, Spain, Belgium, and Luxembourg. It consists of 60,000 soldiers, based in Strasbourg, though it will contribute just 335 senior officers to the K-For headquarters, 30% of the total.
Eurocorps has never acted separately from Nato, and alliance officials insisted yesterday that K-For would remain Nato-led. K-For will revert to an integrated Nato command after six months.
The US remains sceptical about the EU's pledge to create an autonomous rapid reaction force of 60,000 soldiers, separate from Eurocorps, by 2003. Under this plan, the soldiers would be deployable within 60 days and be able to participate in peacekeeping operations for a year. Because of rotation needs, the plan would require up to 200,000 soldiers.
As Lord Robertson, Nato's secretary general, has pointed out, the European allies, with 2m mainly conscripted men and women under arms, had trouble fielding 40,000 soldiers for Kosovo.
The EU has agreed that its proposed force would be deployed in operations only after Nato has declined to do so.
Before the end of the year, the EU is due to hold its first "force generation" conference, where member states would be asked to make offers of troop numbers and equipment for the proposed rapid reaction force.
The US continues to express concern that the plan could be divisive, involve a new tier of bureaucracy, and that non-EU European allies could be excluded from decision-making.
The EU has recently set up a political and security committee and a military committee, as well as an international military staff attached to its Brussels headquarters.
The coming months will be decisive in helping to shape Nato's future, not least since France, keen to seize the opportunity for greater European independence in security affairs, takes over the EU presidency, on July 1.
The Sunday Times : Antics of an artist harry Milosevic
Gillian Sandford, Belgrade
AS OPPOSITION leaders plotting the downfall of President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia promise a summer of street demonstrations, other Belgraders are predicting this weekend that the spark for the president's overthrow will come from more shadowy sources.
Milosevic, through his tactics of divide-and-rule and outright police brutality, defeated street protests in 1997 and again last year after Nato's bombing campaign.
"We need something else," said Ivan, a young student caught up in the euphoria of Friday's demonstration, which attracted more than 100,000 people and saw the rival opposition leaders, Vuk Draskovic and Zoran Djindjic, shake hands. "We need someone who's really prepared to take the fight to Milosevic."
Many are looking to an unlikely source for salvation: Maki, a subversive artist who, for a decade, has ridiculed the president and been beaten and imprisoned for his efforts. Having escaped from police guards while in hospital last month, Maki has been on the run. A master of disguise, he has given television interviews and regularly taunted the authorities.
"Milosevic's dictatorship cannot be tolerated any longer," he wrote in a letter last week that was read at a gathering to mark the anniversary of the death of Slavko Curuvija, a liberal newspaper editor assassinated in Belgrade during the airstrikes. "We have to stand up so our children won't have to face Milosevic's firing squad."
Maki, whose real name is Bogoljub Arsenijevic, gave an insight into his idea of social upheaval in July, when he led thousands of supporters in a bloody rampage through the streets of the socialist stronghold of Valjevo in central Serbia.
A few days after the violence, in which several policemen were hurt, he appeared in neighbouring towns urging revolt. His luck ran out in August, when he was ambushed by special police as he emerged from the office of Momcilo Perisic, a former army chief of staff who has now joined the opposition.
Maki was savagely beaten: his injuries, including a broken jaw and shoulder, cracked ribs and a perforated kidney, took months to heal. In the meantime, he was given a three-year jail sentence, but he clambered out of a bathroom window in hospital and slid 40ft down a lightning conductor to freedom.
Maki's tough upbringing has ensured him cult status. He was raised by his mother in a working-class slum near Valjevo's Krusik arms factory, fronted a rock band and held his first exhibition at 17.
He established his artistic reputation by painting frescoes in Orthodox churches, and chose his nickname by rearranging the Serbian spelling of Camus, his favourite writer. Despite his anarchic nature, Maki is deeply religious, lending him additional kudos in a staunchly traditional nation.
He hit the limelight in 1992 when he constructed a 7ft phallus and named it after the president. He followed this with Serbian Worker , a piece of excrement in a fish tank, for which he received a suspended prison sentence. Both exhibits were smashed to pieces with boot and truncheon.
Maki's most recent television interview was smuggled to a studio in Bijelina, across the Drina river in Bosnia, and broadcast on the internationally regulated Bosnian Serb state television. "Milosevic's regime is like a house of cards, which can be demolished in a day or two if the people of Serbia rebel," he promised.
"They could have sentenced me to 100 years in prison, but I knew I was going to escape and that no prison could hold me. I had been preparing for the seven seconds of escape for seven months in advance."
Maki added that he was so well disguised at a recent exhibition of his work in Belgrade that his wife, Snezena, failed to recognise him.
"While the rest of the opposition have no strategy and just argue among themselves, Maki is a grassroots idol," said one senior journalist. "In the end, people like him are the ones who will save this country."
The New York Times: Chinese Embassy Bombing: A Wide Net of Blame
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
WASHINGTON, April 16 -- In the weeks before the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade last May, NATO was under tremendous pressure to escalate its war against Yugoslavia. The alliance's supreme commander demanded 2,000 targets in Serbia -- a number some aides considered arbitrary and too high for a country the size of Ohio.
Having begun the war for Kosovo with too few targets and the unrealistic hope of a quick victory, NATO had to scramble for new targets. According to a NATO official, the pressure was so intense that a cook and a motor pool worker with sufficiently high security clearances were drafted into NATO's targeting office in Mons, Belgium, to help with paperwork on potential missions.
In this atmosphere the Central Intelligence Agency submitted its first targeting proposal of the war. It was selected by its Counter-Proliferation Division, which had no particular expertise in either the Balkans or in picking bombing targets. The target was accepted, officials said, without further vetting by the military.
In fact, it was the Chinese Embassy. It was described in a secret document given to President Clinton for his approval as a warehouse that was headquarters of Yugoslav Army procurement. The document, provided to The New York Times by a military officer, included a satellite photograph, a casualty estimate and a description of the site.
The only thing that turned out to be accurate was the casualty estimate. The description of the target's relevance to the war was misleading and, one senior intelligence official said, it should have been apparent to any imagery expert that the building shown did not look remotely like a warehouse or any Serbian government building.
Ever since the bombing, Chinese officials have angrily accused the United States of a deliberate attack, while American officials have insisted that it was an error.
In an attempt to unravel what really happened, spurred in part by articles in two European newspapers suggesting that the bombing had been deliberate, The New York Times interviewed more than 30 officials in Washington and in Europe.
While the investigation produced no evidence that the bombing of the embassy had been a deliberate act, it provided a detailed account of a broader set of missteps than the United States or NATO have acknowledged, and a wider circle of blame than the government's explanation of a simple error of judgment by a few people at the C.I.A.
None of the people interviewed at the Pentagon, C.I.A., the State Department and the military mapping agency, or at NATO offices in Brussels, Mons, Vicenza, Italy and Paris said they had ever seen any document discussing targeting of the embassy, nor any approval given to do so. No one asserted that he or she knew that such an order had been given.
The bombing resulted from error piled upon incompetence piled upon bad judgment in a variety of places -- from a frantic rush to approve targets to questionable reliance on inexpert officers to an inexplicable failure to consult the people who might have averted disaster, according to the officials.
In retrospect, they said, the bombing, if not intended, could have been avoided at several points along the way.
Last week, 11 months after the fact, the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, dismissed a midlevel officer who put the X on what turned out to be the embassy. He also disciplined six other employees, saying that agency officers "at all levels of responsibility" contributed to the bombing.
The Pentagon has not conducted its own review but administration officials say the matter is now closed. China rejected Mr. Tenet's discipline as inadequate.
American officials have tried to explain how such a bizarre chain of missteps could have taken place in intelligence and military organizations that pride themselves on technological prowess.
"This was an error compounded by errors," said Under Secretary of State Thomas R. Pickering, who had the job of explaining the attack to the Chinese last year.
Even some NATO and American officials acknowledge that they cannot explain how or why so many mistakes occurred.
Chinese officials have been particularly suspicious since the attack actually hit the defense attaché's office and the embassy's intelligence cell. But what neither they nor American officials have disclosed is that the bombs, Pentagon officials said, were actually targeted throughout the building. At least one and maybe two of the bombs did not explode, the officials said.
Had the strike gone as planned, the embassy would have been demolished, the death and destruction far worse.
Even some of those who accept the American assurances that the bombing was accidental say they believe that blame has not yet been shared by all of those who contributed to the mission.
"It was a systemic problem," said Representative Porter J. Goss, the Republican from Florida who is chairman of the House's Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. "It was not a problem just at the C.I.A. The fact of the matter is that, at least at the Pentagon, somebody should stand up and say it isn't just the agency's fault. To fire one person and let off all the other agencies -- including the White House -- isn't doing justice to justice."
The Rush to Target: A Chaotic Scramble to Meet the Demand
ATO's initial plan was to bomb Yugoslavia for two nights, with daytime pauses to allow President Slobodan Milosevic to agree to NATO's demands that he withdraw Serbian forces from Kosovo. "You show them some lead -- boom! boom! -- and they'll fold," a NATO officer in Belgium said. "That was definitely the prevailing opinion."
American officials said they had always been prepared for a longer war, but when the bombing began on March 24, NATO had only 219 targets for all of Serbia, focused on air defenses and military communications.
On the first night, 51 of those targets were struck; by the third night, NATO had exhausted nearly half the original targets, even as Serbian forces began expelling Kosovo's Albanians en masse.
"We woke up to the fact that Milosevic wasn't going to come out on the front lawn with a white flag," the NATO officer said.
That realization touched off a scramble to find more targets. While diplomats wrestled over whether to begin bombing more politically sensitive targets, including those in Belgrade, NATO's military commanders, who for four decades had planned for war against the Soviet Union, found themselves grossly unprepared for the task of choosing targets for this kind of air campaign, the officials said.
The alliance had only two targeting centers, at the Joint Analysis Center in Britain and at the Air Force's European headquarters in Germany, both run by Americans.
Only Britain also contributed fully developed targeting proposals, and there were only two dozen of those, NATO officials said.
As the war continued, the American targeters were producing 10 to 12 new targets a day, while allied pilots were striking at twice that rate.
By early April, Lt. Gen. Michael C. Short, the alliance's air commander, kept raising the problem during NATO commanders' morning video conferences. "I'm running out of targets," he barked one morning, according to an officer who was there.
Gen. Wesley K. Clark, NATO's supreme commander, asked why he did not have 4,000 targets on his desk, a NATO officer said. By mid-April, General Clark halved his demand, and the Air Force's intelligence director for Europe, Brig. Gen. Neal T. Robinson, agreed.
According to several officials, the goal became an obsession -- derided by targeting officials as "T2K." Each morning, General Robinson briefed commanders on progress toward the goal. A month into the campaign, they still had only 400 fixed targets, not counting tanks and other weapons pilots were trying to hit in Kosovo.
General Clark declined to be interviewed for this article.
Picking targets is normally a painstaking process, involving reams of intelligence reports checked and rechecked against satellite photographs. By mid-April, NATO reached out to any military command with targeting expertise.
At that point, General Clark began to expand the scope of targets to include electrical grids and commercial facilities like tobacco warehouses and the Yugo automobile car factory. "You've destroyed virtually every military target of significance," an aide to General Clark said. "Now what do you do? You start looking for other targets."
Even so, by the end of the war, NATO had produced only 1,021 fixed targets. Of those, they bombed roughly 650.
Some senior officials played down the rush for targets, saying that as chaotic as the process was, there were ultimately very few errors in targeting. But officials in Europe and Washington maintained that as the pressure for targets intensified, proposals were not as thoroughly reviewed as they could -- or should -- have been.
Among those was the one received by fax from the C.I.A. <
The C.I.A. had provided information on scores of targets throughout the war, but it had not previously been asked to propose its own, Mr. Pickering and other officials said. Its history of picking targets has been checkered. During the Persian Gulf war, it sent bombers after a supposed intelligence bunker that proved to be an air raid shelter filled with women and children.
The agency has its own targeting cell, but it was the Counter-Proliferation Division, a small office whose focus was the spread of missiles and nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, that proposed this target.
Officers there saw the war as an opportunity to destroy the headquarters of the Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement, long a concern because of its suspected involvement in smuggling missile parts to places like Libya and Iraq, intelligence officials said.
The directorate is an arm of Yugoimport, an ostensibly private corporation but one that like most industry in Yugoslavia is closely linked to the ruling elite around Mr. Milosevic. Several officials conceded that it had only a tangential relation to the war's objectives; the targeting document showed that experts estimated only civilian casualties inside, not military casualties.
"It had nothing to do with the war in the Balkans," an official said. "They were thinking, 'While we're bombing anyway, here's a target that should have a great benefit to the nation and what we're doing.' "
Other officials disputed that, citing intercepted radio transmissions and agents' reports that the directorate was organizing truckloads of spare surface-to-air missile parts, as well as artillery and mortar shells, for the Serbian forces.
Even so, when agency officials talked about the proposed target in at least three meetings, they spent more time discussing whether they could legally justify the attack under the international rules of war than they did about the location of the headquarters itself.
The division's officers had no specific expertise in targeting or the Balkans, the officials said. None of those involved have been identified, but officials said the officer who has received the most blame -- and was dismissed by Mr. Tenet -- was a retired Army officer who had been contracted to work in the division.
He had been told to locate the directorate's headquarters and set to work, according to a person familiar with his task. On April 9, he called the National Imagery and Mapping Agency in suburban Washington requesting a map of Belgrade. Using it and two tourist maps, the officer tried to pinpoint the headquarters, equipped only with its address.
A senior defense official said the address -- 2 Bulevar Umetnosti in New Belgrade -- came from a letter intercepted by intelligence officials, though the address was easily available, including from the directorate's internet site.
The NIMA map, produced in 1997, shows major buildings and geographic features. It does not specify street addresses, but it identifies major landmarks. It was designed, a senior intelligence official said, for ground operations, like the evacuation of personnel from the American embassy.
One of the landmarks on the map is the headquarters of Mr. Milosevic's Socialist Party, which is on a parallel street, Milentija Popovica, and which NATO bombed during the war. Knowing that address and the address of other buildings on that same street, the officer used a technique called "resection and intersection" to locate what he thought was the headquarters.
The method involves finding addresses on parallel streets and drawing lines to the targeted street on the presumption that numbering schemes are uniform. It is used for generally locating landmarks in a city for such things as search and rescue missions. "To target based on that is incomprehensible," one official said.
Having chosen what he thought was the directorate, the officer called NIMA on April 12 or 13 and asked for satellite images of the site, which he received on the 14th, officials said. At that point a NIMA analyst assigned the building a number -- 0251WA0017 -- from the military's "bombing encyclopedia," a worldwide compendium of potential targets and other landmarks.
According to the officials interviewed, the satellite images did not raise concerns. When Mr. Pickering, the under secretary of state, briefed the Chinese about the bombing last summer, he said there were no seals or flags that would identify it as a diplomatic compound. An incredulous Chinese official asked why America's satellites did not see it was an embassy. "Didn't you see the green tiles on the roof?" the official asked, according to an American who was there.
In fact, a senior intelligence official said, satellite images contained clues that should at least have prompted questions -- not necessarily that it was the embassy, but rather about whether it was the headquarters of a Yugoslav arms agency.
"It doesn't look like an office building," the official said. "It looks like a hotel. It's too nice a place. Given all the space around it, I didn't see external fencing that I would expect from a government facility."
The Review: An Immense Error, Perfectly Packaged
ompounding the mistake, according to the officials, was the initiative taken by the officer who located the target. He produced what one official called a "superficially perfect" proposal by downloading from the military's secure intranet a targeting form and filling it out -- complete with the "bombing encyclopedia" number, as well as eight-digit longitudinal and latitudinal figures.
Impressively packaged, the proposal prompted no questions. The C.I.A.'s assistant director of intelligence for military support, Brig. Gen. Roderick J. Isler, ultimately approved it, and it arrived at the European Command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff appearing to be a more advanced proposal than it was, the officials said.
"This target came with an aura of authority because it came from the C.I.A.," said John J. Hamre, who recently stepped down as deputy secretary of defense.
Mr. Hamre said the Joint Chiefs never conducted a thorough review of the target. The reasons are not clear. Instead the chiefs received two proposals for the same target, one from the C.I.A. and another from European Command, which did not note that it originally came from the agency, and approved it. "They got false confirmation," an intelligence official said.
Agency officials said their officers had never intended the target to be viewed by the Pentagon as a complete proposal, but simply as a nomination. Instead, as one NATO officer put it, "it went through like a cog on an assembly line."
By April 28, 10 days before the bombing, planners in Europe had assigned the target, like every one in the war, a sequential number. It was No. 493, and the essential information about the target was boiled down to a single document to be presented to President Clinton and other NATO leaders.
This document identified the target as "Belgrade Warehouse 1," but under a heading called "linkage" called it the "HQ for the Federal Directorate Supply and Procurement." The objective was to "destroy warehouse and contents," which it went on to say would undercut the ability of Serbian forces to receive new supplies.
It also classified the possibility for collateral damage as "tier 3 high," which an official said referred to the likelihood of the impact of the bombs sending shards of glass flying considerable distances. That indicated analysts were able to distinguish the embassy's marble and glass structure. The directorate's headquarters was made of white stone.
Three red triangles on the image depict the points at which the bombs were to strike. The document also estimated that casualties would range from three to seven civilians, presumably those working inside, while the estimate for unintended civilian casualties, which also included those who might happen by at the time, ranged from 25 to 50.
The bombing, in fact, killed three and wounded at least 20.
Mr. Tenet has said that the C.I.A. proposed only one target during the war. Actually, the agency proposed two or three more, but after the embassy bombing, Pentagon officials refused to strike them.
In the end, despite its supposed value, NATO never did attack the intended target.
Allied Concerns: An American Goal: Keeping Secrets
s with most of attacks during the war, especially the strikes in Belgrade, planning and execution were done by Americans. In raids involving the stealthy B-2's and F-117 fighters, many details about the attacks were classified as "U.S. only," mainly for fear of revealing secrets about those aircraft.
After the war, some allies questioned the practice. The French Ministry of Defense's report on the war last November complained of military operations "conducted by the United States outside the strict NATO framework and procedures."
A senior NATO diplomat said the United States attacked 75 to 80 targets in this way. The Chinese Embassy was one of them.
The control of information limited the number of allied officers who might have been able to notice the targeting error.
Gen. Jean-Pierre Kelche, who as chief of the defense staff is France's top military officer, said that in spite of the restrictions on the military operations, all of the specific targets were reviewed by the political and military leaders of the major allies, including Prime Minister Jacques Chirac of France and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain.
"It was supposed to be an arms storage facility," General Kelche said in an interview in Paris. "It's clear the nature of that target did not create any problems for me."
He said the unilateral American operations were a political problem, but not an operational one. He added, however, that the militaries of each country were responsible for reviewing those targets its forces were scheduled to strike.
When Mr. Tenet dismissed the officer blamed for targeting and disciplined six others, he singled out another for praise. That officer, also not identified, raised questions about the target, Mr. Tenet said. In the days before the bombing, he called analysts at NIMA and at the NATO headquarters in Naples to express doubts, Mr. Tenet said.
Memories of his objections vary, and other intelligence officials raised questions about them. The officer, who once worked in the same proliferation office involved in targeting the embassy, now works in the Technical Management Office, an operation involved in highly classified operations, officials said.
He had no authority to review targets, or even know what they were, but heard informally that the directorate was being targeted, officials said, adding that he then called the imagery analyst at NIMA. On that day, April 29, nine days before the bombing, he told the analyst that he had recently spoken to a source who confirmed the directorate's actual location, about 1,000 yards south of the embassy.
At that point, a senior intelligence official said, the NIMA analyst could have withdrawn the target's "bombing encyclopedia" number or alerted more senior officials. Instead, he promised to call the officer who had identified the target in the first place.
The NIMA analyst tried unsuccessfully to arrange a meeting between the two agency officers, who did not know each other, officials said. On May 3, the analyst produced six more images of the building and its surroundings, which confirmed to the skeptical officer that the target was not the directorate, the officials said.
At that point, he raised his concerns with military officers in Naples, but he did not make his questions official or sound grave enough to remove the target from the list, the officials said. Then, he left work for three days to attend a training session.
When he returned, on May 7, he learned -- again informally -- that the target was on that night's list. He called Naples a second time, through back channels, but spoke to a different officer, who informed him that the B-2 was already on its way from its base in Missouri, according to officials.
"It didn't really raise the panic you think it would have," a defense official said.
While Mr. Tenet commended the officer's efforts, another senior agency official was critical of the fact that the officer -- perhaps out of fear that he was acting beyond his responsibilities -- had never voiced doubts to the assistant director of intelligence for military support, who was in a position to have put a hold instantly on the target.
The Questions: No Indications of a Sinister Plot
ast year, The Observer of London, in conjunction with Politiken, a Danish newspaper, published articles suggesting that the bombing was deliberate. Their stories said that the strike had been intended to silence transmitters at the embassy being used for rebroadcasting communications for the Yugoslav armed forces or, later, by the Serbian paramilitary leader known as Arkan.
All of the officials interviewed by the Times said they knew of no evidence to support the assertion, and none has been produced. They said there was also no evidence that the Chinese had in any way aided the Serbian war effort, though one NATO diplomat said it was impossible to rule out the possibility that the Chinese shared information with the Serbs.
Officials rejected the idea that the Chinese Embassy was being used for rebroadcasting and said they did not suspect during the war that it was doing that. General Kelche said photographs taken after the strike showed ordinary antenna on its roof, not microwave dishes that would have been used in military communications.
The officials said that after the bombing they did learn a great deal about the embassy's intelligence operations, including the background of the three Chinese journalists who were killed and who American officials say were in fact intelligence agents.
"It is -- or was -- considered the major collection platform for Europe," a senior defense official said. "One could say it was a silver lining to the bombing, but it was not deliberate."
The European newspapers also said there had been a list of targets ruled off limits for air strikes that included the Chinese Embassy -- at its actual address, not the mistaken one -- and that the embassy at some point was removed from the list.
According to the officials interviewed by The Times, American commanders in Europe did maintain such a list of buildings, like hospitals, churches and embassies. The Chinese Embassy was on that list, officials said, but at its old address and was not removed. They said the embassy was also listed at the wrong address on a similiar list in Britain.
Roy W. Krieger, a lawyer who represents one of the supervisors who was reprimanded by Mr. Tenet, said neither his client nor any of the others intended to bomb the embassy. "No sinister conspiracy exists, only a systemic failure masquerading as a conspiracy," he said.
He criticized the punishment of the C.I.A. officials alone, even though the NIMA map contained a critical error and none of the Pentagon's data bases included information on the embassy's actual location.
"The C.I.A.'s action is even more troubling in the face of the refusal of the Department of Defense to even acknowledge its failures contributing to this tragic event," he said.
After the bombing, Mr. Hamre and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, conducted the Pentagon's review of the targeting, but it was never made public. Officials from the Joint Chiefs of Staff refused repeated requests to be interviewed, as did Air Force commanders, on orders from their Chief of Staff, Gen. Michael E. Ryan, according to a spokesman.
Mr. Goss, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said members of Congress had intensely questioned officials. In the end, he said he was confident in their assurances it had not been a deliberate strike.
Washington Post : U.S. Plans To Return 700 Serbs To Kosovo
By Peter Finn
ISTOK, Yugoslavia, April 15 –– The United States is planning the first coordinated effort to resettle Serbs in Kosovo, despite the serious reservations of the U.N. refugee agency, which believes they cannot be protected from revenge attacks by ethnic Albanians, according to U.S., U.N., Serbian and Albanian officials in Kosovo.
The pilot project, which could begin as early as this summer, will involve about 700 Serbs forced to flee the province last year. U.S. officials said they hope it will bolster the standing of the moderate Serbian leadership within Kosovo, foster Serbian cooperation with the international community, and test the stated commitment of ethnic Albanian politicians to a multi-ethnic society.
The idea has gotten a cool response from U.N. officials. In an interview, Dennis McNamara, the Balkans envoy for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said, "We would be very happy to see the return of the Serb displaced population, but it's very difficult to be supportive or proactive on returns at this time.
"If we were going to promote or participate in this, the security conditions--housing, access to services, freedom of movement--would have to be in place," he said. "And the security conditions are just not there."
Nevertheless, the Americans are moving ahead with the effort. "Conditions are never going to be perfect, and there is never going to be a perfect moment," said one U.S. official. "This is something that has to start, even on a small scale."
No decision on a site has been made, but U.S. officials are leaning toward the village of Osojane, near Istok in northwestern Kosovo, which was visited by State Department officials last week. The village was inhabited by Serbs until last summer, when ethnic Albanian arsonists bent on revenge destroyed it shortly after NATO peacekeepers entered Kosovo.
Osojane, which would be rebuilt with U.S. funds, is being considered in part because the ethnic Albanian mayor of the region, Januz Januzi, supports the return of all displaced people to Kosovo. He has had an ongoing dialogue for the past six months with the one remaining Serbian enclave of 70 people in his area.
In addition, U.S. officials believe Januzi--a longtime activist who served nine years in a Serbian prison, helped found the Kosovo Liberation Army, and fought and was wounded in its guerrilla campaign against Serbian forces last year--has the standing to help sell the idea to the local ethnic Albanian community.
"People were very impressed with him," said one U.S. official.
Januzi said his history of commitment to the cause of Kosovo has so far inoculated him from local grumbling about his contacts with Serbs, but he cautioned that repatriation will fail unless Serbs who live or want to live in the area make some apology for the atrocities Serbian government forces committed against ethnic Albanians last year.
"I am for the return of Serbs," said Januzi, 42. "It is their right, but I don't want it to fail. For me, it will be easier to talk to Albanians and say, 'You should accept the apology and move on.' It would be a historic step, and I'm convinced Albanians can forgive."
Januzi noted that 29 Serbs returned to a village near Istok last November but fled again after 48 hours when 10,000 ethnic Albanians marched on them.
U.S. officials, although they would welcome an apology by the returning Serbs, don't view it as a prerequisite for starting the project. And because Osojane is a secluded village in a valley, they believe it can be adequately protected by NATO-led peacekeepers until conditions improve and allow Serbs to move freely in the province again.
There are very few ethnic Albanians living in the valley, which holds a series of sacked villages, but interviews with about a dozen people around Osojane indicate that residents are willing to accept the return of their Serbian former neighbors.
"People who didn't do anything can come back," said Takek Deskaj, 21, whose family home was burned.
"They wouldn't have any problem with us," said Lumnije Kerellaj, 32. "We might be a little afraid of them, but I think it will be okay."
The U.S. initiative gained momentum after Serbian Orthodox Bishop Artemije visited Washington in February. His church has been a long-standing critic of the government of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, but it and other moderate Serbian elements have been reluctant to cooperate with the interim U.N. administration in Kosovo because the ghettoized Serbian community remains angry that Serbs still have little guarantee of security in the province. In addition, Milosevic has tried to brand moderate Serbs who made contacts with U.S. and U.N. officials as traitors.
U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright urged Artemije to work with U.N. administrative bodies, which Serbs had been boycotting. In return for agreeing to participate in the U.N. institutions, Artemije asked for "visible signs" of progress for Serbs, including improved security, a radio station to get a moderate message out, and some effort to begin returning Serbs to their homes. Of the estimated 200,000 Serbs in Kosovo before the war, approximately three-fourths have fled since NATO peacekeepers arrived.
"Without people coming back, it's pointless to work on other issues with the international community," said the Rev. Sava Janjic, secretary to Artemije. "The future of Kosovo Serb moderates depends on returns. If this fails, we are dead."
Janjic also noted that he and the bishop have repeatedly condemned the violence that befell ethnic Albanians, expressed their shame and asked for forgiveness. But, he said, their efforts rarely are reported by the ethnic Albanian media. He said he was willing to restate the sorrow of Serbian moderates for the ethnic Albanian press if it would help people accept a multiethnic community.
"We don't hear each other," he said.
After Albright agreed to work on all three of the bishop's requests, a Serb finally attended the U.N.-sponsored Kosovo Transitional Council as an observer last month. Sava said he expects the Serb representative to take a permanent seat in three months if the U.S. repatriation project is clearly underway.
Last week, the State Department team toured the province to push the project forward and meet with ethnic Albanian leaders, including former KLA commander Hashim Thaqi, to inform them of their plans and get them on board publicly.
"I believe this needs support," Thaqi said in an interview. "Kosovo has its own institutions now, and we have an obligation to see the return of all Kosovo citizens, Serb and Albanian."
According to a U.S. official, however, Thaqi cautioned that it would be particularly important to carefully explain the process to ethnic Albanians. He also said the reconstruction of Serbian villages should be balanced with similar efforts for Albanians in the Istok area.
"This can be done," Thaqi said. "It will be difficult, but it's not mission impossible."
Most of those Serbs who will be resettled were original residents of the valley, although they may also bring friends or relatives with them, according to those familiar with the plan. U.S. officials rejected suggestions that ethnic Albanians should vet lists of those Serbs returning, but the United Nations is likely to check for suspected war criminals, officials said.
Even as the United States plans the resettlement effort, Serbs who have remained in Kosovo continue to fear for their safety and ask the U.N. refugee agency to evacuate, McNamara said. Hundreds of Serbs have been killed or have disappeared since the war ended; most, officials suspect, were targeted by vengeful ethnic Albanians.
Although the rate of killing has fallen in recent months--primarily because Serbs are now largely sealed off in guarded ghettos from Albanians--ethnic violence continues. Four Serbs were slain in the last two weeks, U.N. officials noted. McNamara said the current priority of the international community should be safeguarding those Serbs in Kosovo, not creating more Serb enclaves that would be at risk for attack.
The NATO-led peacekeeping mission, which comes under Spanish command on Monday, also is leery of the U.S. project, and it is unclear what troops would guard the Serbs brought back under the pilot program. The Istok area, including Osojane, is now patrolled by Spanish soldiers; it is unclear whether U.S. troops would also be brought in.
In any case, peacekeepers are likely to resist any large-scale resettlement of Serbs. Last week, officials here expressed astonishment when a NATO official in Brussels said that 25,000 Serbs could return to their homes in Kosovo this summer.
"No way," said one military official. "I don't know what hat that figure was pulled out of. Even something small, like the U.S. proposal, troubles a lot of people."
The Observer : Rape victims' babies pay the price of war
Up to 20,000 women were raped during the Kosovan carnage. Now the victims are bearing children fathered by their Serb tormentors. In this harrowing dispatch, Helen Smith reports on the awful fate awaiting the offspring of conflict
He was a healthy little boy and Mirveta had produced him. But birth, the fifth in her short lifetime, had not brought joy, only dread. As he was pulled from her loins, as the nurses at Kosovo's British-administered university hospital handed her the baby, as the young Albanian mother took the child, she prepared to do the deed.
She cradled him to her chest, she looked into her boy's eyes, she stroked his face and she snapped his neck. They say it was a fairly clean business. Mirveta had used her bare hands. It is said that, in tears, she handed her baby back to the nurses, holding his snapped, limp neck. In Pristina, in her psychiatric detention cell, she has been weeping ever since.
'Who knows? She may have looked into the baby's face and seen the eyes of the Serb who raped her.'
The words are uttered coolly, undramatically, by Sevdije Ahmeti almost as a matter of course. Ahmeti, tireless human rights activist, mother and member of Kosovo's transitional government, does not want me or anyone to sensationalise this poor woman's plight. 'She is a victim too. She is just 20 years old and cannot read or write. She has been abandoned by her husband. Psychologically raped a second time.'
She reels off Mirveta's details from a thick, yellow notepad. 'She is repenting, of course, but the attitude that she is a cold-blooded murderer is wrong. Who knows what this poor girl has been through? Who knows why she didn't abort?
'There were marks, signs of bites and bruises over her body, her intimate parts. We want to protect her; we will try to get her a new lawyer.'
This is what Ahmeti does: she speaks for the estimated 20,000 women now carrying Kosovo's dark secret. The innumerable women who were raped, and impregnated, abandoned by family and friends. The women outcasts violated, tortured and left for dead; the 'touched' women, who have now heaped shame on the houses of their husbands. The women who see the war every day, in their minds, in their bodies, through their rape-babies.
It is Friday morning and there are snowflakes splattering the window panes of the Centre for Protection of Women and Children which Ahmeti set up in 1993. Women trudge up the hill on which the centre stands, daintily side-stepping the litter and carrion birds that defile so much of the province.
Sometimes, when they are feeling strong, they step inside. Sometimes, if Ahmeti is lucky, a woman will even tell her story. So far, 76 women, mostly young and beautiful, the daughters of eminent Kosovars and village elders (women targeted by the Serbs) have been mus tered enough courage to enter the centre.
For everyone who had come there, Ahmeti said you could count at least a hundred more. They are just the tip of the iceberg; the very few who have managed to break the 'metallic silence' that surrounds the issue of being 'touched'.
For rape is not a word that Kosovar women ever use. This is not Bosnia; there is no cosmopolitan Sarajevo. There is only provincial Pristina. In the villages and hamlets, where the Yugoslav police, military and Serb paramilitaries evidently ran amok, rape has yet to enter their ancient lexicon.
'These are simple women, women who have been degraded, disgraced, and will carry this trauma like a bullet for the rest of their lives,' Ahmeti murmurs, chain-smoking. 'Raped women all over the world find it hard to speak, here they can hardly do it at all.
'They rarely tell each other... we've had cases of suicide, the lunacy of women losing all access to their children if it gets out.'
Mirveta, the pretty infanticidal mother, is no exception. She is typical of the selection process pursued by the perpetrators, according to a Human Rights Watch report released last month.
As they tried to ethnically cleanse Kosovo, paramilitaries - often aided by masked Serb neighbours - systematically searched villages for girls of prime, child-bearing age.
It was about power and control, humiliation and revenge. And what better way to damage the enemy's morale than to hit at his family? 'Our society is a traditional one where Albanian men are brought up to see themselves as breadwinners and protectors,' Ahmeti points out.
'Once you touch the woman, you touch the honour of the family and you provoke the man to react. The Serbs knew this. Belgrade had, for years, put out propaganda that the only thing Albanian women could do was produce like mice. So daughters were gang-raped in front of their fathers, wives in front of their husbands, nieces in front of their uncles, mothers in front of their children, just to dehumanise, just to degrade.'
It is estimated by the World Health Organisation and the US-based Centre for Disease Control that as many as 20,000 Kosovar women (4.4 per cent of the population) were raped in the two years prior to Nato's forces entering the benighted territory. Numbers to match Bosnia, if not more.
But unlike Bosnia, where international organisations were located throughout the war, the province was on its own. If, as Human Rights Watch argues, politicians did not exploit the fate of the women (which would have been a way of drumming up support for the Nato bombing campaign), aid organisations also played it down.
'I think there was a deliberate policy to keep it quiet. We knew, in such a patriarchal society, where the perception of rape is so medieval, that it would probably cause a lot of social distress,' said Gamilla Backman, an adviser on violence prevention at the World Health Organisation. 'Making revelations just to shake mentalities might have had the opposite effect and made life even more difficult for victims brave enough to speak.
'The international community has got cynical about rape. Time has shown, with the women of Bosnia, how very little talking can achieve.'
By the time the province was liberated, hundreds of women who had been plucked from columns of refugees as they tried to flee the Serb onslaught were discovered wandering the hills, often disoriented, drugged, half-naked and half-crazed.
'There was always so much focus on the refugees who managed to get out and so little on the people who stayed inside - the 700,000 of them who suffered the real trauma,' said Ahmeti.
How many of these women then found themselves pregnant will remain a mystery. How many gave birth is almost impossible to determine because of taboo.
Local humanitarian groups, including the Red Cross, have estimated that 100 rape-babies were born in January alone. Innumerable others almost certainly came into the world on bathroom floors and kitchen tables, behind the high-walled homes of family clans who have vowed never to speak.
'Only God knows,' said Professor Skender Boshnjaku, Kosovo's leading neuropsychiatrist, who specialises in women's illness, 'how many have been born in secret. I know of children who are being brought up by their grandmothers, women who want to protect their daughters. These babies will know a lot of hate, they will not have a lot of love.'
The issue of babies 'born of violence' is not a subject Kosovars find easy to address. Boshnjaku concentrates on his shoes when the conversation veers in the direction of the rape-babies. Did he think I would be able to talk to some of the victims?
No, he said flatly. Albanian women did not talk about themselves. They did not talk about their feelings. They used language economically, usually to convey the essentials of their primitive lives. They were 'the property of men, to be bought, sold and betrothed before birth'. They are 'sacks to be filled,' he says, citing the Kanun, the medieval war-and-peace code of behaviour still adhered to in these parts.
'Ours was a society built on generations of hate. There are older Albanians who speak Serbian, but generally there was very little interaction between our people and the Serbs. And now,' he said, waving his hands desperately, 'there are these babies.'
Even Ahmeti, who hails from a family of open-minded, well-travelled intellectuals, finds the phenomenon of Albanian-Serb progeny un-comfortable. Some women will accept them, some will nurture them begrudgingly, some will reject them. But, she said, they will not be dumped in orphanages and they will not be left in baskets and boxes on the streets.
'They are innocent children, they are not to blame,' she said. 'People, here, will take them into their homes and married women will be able to cover up. Our hope is that they grow up without the guilt of their mothers.' The local authorities are about to start a television campaign appealing for prospective parents. 'It concerns me greatly that some are calling them "children of shame".'
But rape, I am told on my first night in Pristina, is worse than death. To be an Albanian who gives birth to a child sired by a Serb is to be sentenced to a living hell.
Pedric, who told me this, is young and worldly. 'If I were normal, I would keep the kid, accept my wife. But in Kosovo, in our culture, death is better than rape. I could not accept my wife. She would be dirty, evil, the castle of the enemy,' he booms. 'A lot of women have been very sensible. They have kept quiet about it, they have given birth at home and, if they are even more sensible, they do what that woman (Mirveta) did last month. They kill their scum-babies.'
Agron Krasniqi, a gynaecologist at Pristina's University Hospital, is also at the table. 'All of us, we were conducting abortions around the clock,' he said. 'Only a few weeks ago we had a woman who came to the hospital and said she was raped and could we help. She was six months pregnant. There are so many women like that...Women who couldn't physically make the journeys to hospitals and private clinics because they couldn't afford it or didn't dare tell their husbands. In this instance, there was nothing we could do. It was a terrible business, as terrible as the abandoned babies we've also got at the hospital.'
Abandoned babies?
'Yes, we've got eight new-born babies and a roomful in the paediatric ward. There are boys as well. In our culture, boys are usually never abandoned. It is fair to say most are the product of rape.' No one wants to talk about the abandoned babies; no one wants to associate them with rape. But there they are, on the second floor of the Pristina clinic in an airy room off a chamber lined with incubators. Babies less than eight weeks old lie in little plastic cases, the others in blue-and-white check-cloth cots.
The doctors have given them names which they have written in blue ink on plasters they have stuck to their beds. 'They have nothing. The least we can do for their dignity is give them names,' said Enser, the neo-natalist. 'We try to cradle them, hug them whenever we can, because we now know how important the first six months are in a baby's life. Before we didn't do it, and you could see the difference.'
Did the mothers ever return to claim them? 'Never,' he said. 'And we don't really have any idea who they are because they usually come alone, very early, around 5am so no one will see them and then they give us false names. An American woman, a midwife, came the other day. She wanted to adopt Teuta, our oldest one, but the authorities don't want any to go abroad, they want them to stay here.'
In the paediatric wing, there are 12 more abandoned children, all between six and 18 months. They are kept for most of the day in a small room, playing on plastic tricycles, lying on mattresses, sitting on nurses' laps. Some are dark, some blond, some obviously Slavic with give-away high cheekbones and broad faces.
When we open the door they come rushing out, tugging at the hems of our skirts, jumping up and down, beseeching to be held. 'They are lovely children,' said the nurse, apologising for her insistence that in the room, at least, we do not take any pictures. 'There are other rape-babies, you know, in other hospitals. There are some in Prizren and some in Pec.'Around Pec, Serb paramilitaries and the Yugoslav army appear to have acted with wanton abandon, raping women in barracks, public buildings and private homes. It is in Pec that the UN-sponsored International Rescue Committee has established the Women's Wellness Centre, one of only two international organisations in Kosovo specialising exclusively in violence against women. The centre has taken a holistic approach in its attempt to attract victims. And since opening six months ago it has run classes in English, sewing and art.
But getting these same women to tell their stories is another matter. 'We have a lot of cases of domestic violence, which is prevalent in this culture,' said Jeanne Ward, an American psychotherapist who has worked on similar programmes in New York. 'But so far absolutely no rape cases, although a great many women are suffering from depression, isolation, nightmares, flashbacks, all the symptoms of such trauma. Confidentiality is a big problem here and the social stigma is just so great. Kosovar women are afraid that if they are perceived to have been raped they will automatically be cut off from their families, children, everyone .'
'Let me tell you a story,' she said. 'I know of one woman who was raped and when it got out she was immediately dropped by her fiancé. The dishonour, he said, was just too much. Since she's been deflowered and is no longer seen as fit for marriage, her family have made her a prisoner. She is now a servant to the household.'
The centre's Albanian director, Lumnije Decani, interrupted. 'Jeanne is right,' she said. 'It will take time, but I'm sure women will come. They want to, I know, they need to talk, which is why we are going to install 24-hour hotlines. You should go to Belegu.' 'And Lubeniq,' said the American.
It was in Lubeniq that about 70 men were shot dead in the village square, after taking up arms to protect their women. They had heard about the mass rapes. And they were scared. Belegu lies in the middle of a plain and Lubeniq stands on a hill on the road that leads to it. They are both wretched places, polluted by violence and death.
We stop at Lubeniq on the way to Belegu to find children playing around their relatives' graves. 'My daddy is in there,' said Mentor Ukshinaj, pointing to the mound of earth bearing a wooden stump and the name of Hajdar Ukshinaj. 'He died protecting my mummy. He died in front of me.'
When we go to Belegu, the members of the first house, a fine stone building erected around a triangular courtyard, rush out to greet us. Beqir Zukaj, a proud man in a white felt cap who is the head of the extended family, did not mince his gestures. Outside his stone, high-walled house, he made thrusting movements and performed the charade of ripping off his wife's clothes. 'It didn't happen here,' he said. 'It happened in the big barn in the other end of the village.'
Sevdije Hoxha was there and she remembered everything. Hundreds of people had converged on Belegu from other villages on the plain and when the Serbs began to encircle them they hid in the barn.
We went to the barn and she showed us its big lime-coloured doors. 'They came, they separated the women from the men, they took all our documents and then they took away the young ones. They took them to the brick building here,' she said, pointing to the half-constructed red-brick villa next door. 'We had plastered some of the pretty ones with animal manure, to make them smell and look less nice, but they took them anyway. You could hear them scream, beg, shout. Many have never come back to their villages. They got on tractors, they went to Albania and from there, I think, they went abroad.'
The ones who returned to Belegu are broken. 'Broken lives, broken hearts,' said Imer Zukaj, who spent years working in Switzerland. 'There is one young girl here. She is 17 years old. She was raped by six Serbs, who pinned her down, cut her breasts. Whenever I, or any man, greets her, which is when we go to her home, she jumps in the air and screams. She is not well. She is on medication. She doesn't speak. Nobody, you know, will marry her, her life is finished.'
When I asked Ahmeti if I could meet some of the victims, she glared. Hers is the only organisation that has managed to reach out to women trapped in villages like Belegu; she is furious that more has not been done for them.
After last month's infanticide, WHO initiated a programme to sensitise doctors and nurses dealing with women about to give birth - to spot those who might want to reject their babies. Other than that, Ahmeti said, psycho-social support has been minimal. The women are outcasts. Some are war widows and many have no work, no family, no one to turn to. There has been almost no attempt to socialise, reintegrate or resettle them with therapeutic counselling. Or to provide witness protection so they may eventually give evidence before the criminal tribunal at The Hague.
'This is a torn society and there are so many things that have to be done, but these women's needs have really never been addressed. Wherever you go in Kosovo you bump into victims, but these particular ones gain nothing from talking. You just rape their psyche a second time.'
She is right, of course. In Kosovo, everyone at some stage has been a victim and you do not have to go far to bump into one. Seated in front of Ahmeti, interviewing her, is 29-year-old Luljeta Selimi, a journalist who trained as a gynaecologist (a profession never allowed to flourish under the Serbs). 'Please excuse my English. I used to speak it very well, but last April the Serbs arrested me helping a friend give birth. They kept me in water for nine hours, beat me until I fainted and then threw me on a rubbish dump. It was Gypsies who saved me and took me to Macedonia,' she said. 'You will never find these women. I have had to spend weeks in villages posing as a doctor, gaining their trust, staying at their homes.'
Selimi, it turns out, has collected testimonies from 200 rape victims; each case documented in black notebooks and on cassette. 'I want the world to know what happened to my country, to these women. Thousands of women who now have nothing.'
Over the course of the next week she brought me three victims; women who are young, educated and angry with the world. Angry that Nato did not intervene or send in ground troops earlier; that help has not been more forthcoming; that they have been left to drift, dependent on small kindnesses. They have come to me, because they could never have me go to them - it would raise too many suspicions. They are willing to talk because they want the world to know that they exist. They have lost their homes, they have lost their valuables (extorted by the rapists) but they are still the lucky ones. At least they have been spared becoming pregnant.
'They stopped our car as my husband, son and daughter were driving towards the Macedonian border on 22 March, two days before Nato intervened,' said the school-teacher from a hamlet south of Pristina. 'They were paramilitaries, some wore bandannas, some masks.
'They made us get out and walk over the hills and then _ and then they took me, they made me comb my hair and they did what they did. When my husband tried to stop them, they shot him dead. My children were there, watching.'
The two other women were similarly stopped, one as she tried to flee across the Albanian border, the other as she hid with her family in the forest, hours after the Serbs had torched their village in the middle of Kosovo.
Both were virgins before and both have avoided sex since. Both hardly leave their homes. And both have the saddest, most vacant eyes I have ever seen.
'So what do you think I should do?' asked the one with red-dyed hair, the one who was raped for hours in the forest.
I looked at her and thought: 'Yes, what next?' Here I am, privy to the most painful event this woman will ever endure and I have no ready answer; no relief to proffer, only the ability to make her, and the children of war, 'exist'.
Some names have been changed.
The Times: Nato passes Kosovo baton to Euro force
FROM MICHAEL EVANS, DEFENCE EDITOR, IN BRUSSELS
THE Eurocorps, which Britain used to deride as a FrancoGerman anti-Nato organisation, is to take over command of the Kosovo peacekeeping operation next week.
Although it will operate within the Nato structure set up in the Yugoslav province, it will be the first time that a purely European military headquarters will be given the opportunity to run a largely alliance mission.
When the Eurocorps, now consisting of troops from France, Germany, Spain, Belgium and Luxembourg, was set up in the 1980s, Britain refused to join, accusing Paris of trying to undermine Nato. Now, however, with Tony Blair pushing for a strong European security and defence identity, the arrival of a Eurocorps headquarters in Pristina is viewed by London in a different light.
There are still no British troops assigned to the Eurocorps, but a colonel will serve as a liaison officer with the new HQ in Kosovo and the 3,300 British soldiers in the province will come under its command. The previously Nato-led peacekeepers will come under the command of Lieutenant-General Juan Ortuna, of Spain, with Major-General Marcel Wirth, of France, as his deputy.
Although the Eurocorps headquarters is taking over from Nato's Landcent HQ, it will still operate within a largely alliance format, with most of the serving soldiers contributed by Nato members.
Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, Nato Secretary-General, predicted yesterday that the handover would be carried out smoothly and he denied reports that General Wesley Clark, the American Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, who remains in overall charge of the Kosovo operation, had reservations about Eurocorps taking over the role.
The Eurocorps element of the headquarters staff in Pristina will comprise 335 military personnel. Nato sources said that the significance of the change was that although a non-Nato headquarters was moving into Pristina, it would have to rely on alliance troops. At the heart of the debate about the European Union's desire to act militarily on its own without the Americans has been the EU's acceptance that it will need Nato support to operate credibly.
In Serbia yesterday, hundreds of students set out from Novi Sad to join a a protest in Belgrade by up to 75,000 people against President Milosevic organised by the country's opposition.
In another development yesterday, Ibrahim Rugova, the moderate Kosovo leader, said in Berlin in an interview with Der Spiegel that Kosovo could find itself again at war if it is not granted independence.
The ethnic Albanian leader also backed the notion of a "Greater Albania", raising the spectre that violence may spill out of the breakaway province into neighbouring countries, including Macedonia.
Reuters: Grenade blast injures three in Montenegro hospital
PODGORICA, Montenegro (Reuters) - Two police officers and a patient, who has survived three previous attempts on his life, were wounded when an unidentified assailant threw a hand grenade through a Podgorica hospital window, police said Friday.
The two policemen, who were guarding a patient, underwent surgery immediately but were not in a critical condition, Slobodan Sekulic, a Podgorica police chief, told reporters.
"The patient, Mladen Klikovac, was only slightly wounded in the bomb attack," Sekulic said. The incident happened Thursday night.
Klikovac, who has the reputation of a loan shark, was under police protection after being shot in a Podgorica cafe Sunday by an unidentified attacker in the third attempt on his life, police sources said.
Two other patients in the same hospital room were unhurt.
The Guardian: 100,000 protest against Milosevic
Saturday April 15, 2000
More than 100,000 people filled Republic Square in central Belgrade yesterday to protest against the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic.
It was the first rally by all Serbian opposition parties in the capital since last August and a litmus test of support.
The high turnout will boost the beleaguered opposition leaders. Political analysts believe that because Belgrade is the intellectual and political centre of the country, it must provide the impetus for change.
The leader of the Democratic party, Zoran Djindjic, and his long-time rival Vuk Draskovic, head of the Serbian Renewal Movement, shared a stage to call for free and fair elections at all levels: local, republic and federal.
In their excitement, the protesters barely registered a moment at the start of the rally, when Mr Djindjic and Mr Draskovic shook hands unenthusiastically.
"The regime are the traitors," Mr Draskovic said. "They have betrayed everyone. They have made 1m citizens beggars."
Sixteen leaders of different opposition parties spoke during the course of the rally, which lasted for more than three hours.
"It is very important that so many people are here. It's a message to the opposition leaders that they have to stop their eternal bickering," said one doctor who attended.
Police kept a low-profile presence during the protest. A helicopter hovered overhead for a while and small groups of police stood a distance away, but offered no provocation.
Members of the student's resistance organisation Otpor walked for a day from the northern city of Novi Sad to attend the rally.
Protesters blocked key roads in the centre of the capital and young people waved flags of support for the main opposition parties.
At the time of the rally, the state-controlled television Politika was running a major movie marathon, showing films such as American Beauty, which many interpreted as an attempt to keep people at home.
Foreign journalists who attempted to enter Serbia to cover the rally were held at the airport and refused entry, according to the independent radio station B292.
Local radio also reported that a number of opposition supporters who were coming to the capital by coach were stopped by police, who delayed them by carrying out technical inspections of their vehicles.
The only non-government television station, Studio B, which tried to broadcast coverage of the rally, was jammed and went off the air when its transmitter suffered an unexpected power failure.
The Independent: 'You'll never know what I saw.' Then he shot himself
Serbia's 'Vietnam Syndrome' - Flashbacks to the ethnic cleansing and genocide are driving some former policemen and soldiers to suicide
By Vesna Peric Zimonjic in Belgrade
15 April 2000
On his wedding day, Dalibor Andric walked out of the restaurant where his bride and their guests were waiting for the traditional marriage feast to start, and blew his head off with a single gun shot.
Dalibor was 23 and had served as a policeman in Kosovo during the Nato air campaign against Serbia. He never talked about his time in the province. His bride, Marija, told of how he used to wake up in the middle of the night, sweating and screaming. To all her words of comfort, his answer was "You will never know what I saw and did."
Like another Serb policeman, who came home from a football match and killed his wife before turning his weapon on himself, Dalibor is a victim of a form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) now being widely reported among the police officers and military in Serbia. The affliction mirrors "Vietnam syndrome", experienced by American veterans of the Indo-China war. In Belgrade they call it "Vietnam syndrome – Serbian-style".
Early European victims of the syndrome were the many Yugoslav army recruits who were taken from Serbia proper, across the Drina river into eastern Bosnia, to remove the bodies of Muslim civilians killed during the war in 1992. After they removed the bodies with bulldozers, many ended up in the psychiatric ward of the élite Military Academy Hospital in Belgrade.
The Serbian public learnt of PTSD when, in 1995, a drunken young men entered the premises of a psychiatric clinic in Belgrade, asking for immediate help. After a while, the former Serb army volunteer lay on the ground, activated a hand grenade under his body and blew himself up.
According to experts, PTSD develops after severe stress, such as participation in or witnessing atrocities. It can arise several months after an event, or even years later. "It is always man-induced horror that causes PTSD," says Dr Srdjan Bokonjic, a Belgrade psychiatrist specialising in the treatment of Vietnam syndrome. "People who are unable to overcome deep trauma start constantly to relive a certain situation or event. Clinical symptoms of PTSD include nightmares, flash backs, aggressive behaviour, isolation from society. If not treated properly, it can lead to permanent destruction of the personality, alcoholism, drug addiction. The final outcome can be the most tragic – random killings and suicide."
So far, despite much anecdotal evidence of PTSD in Serbia's military ranks, there are no statistics on the disorder. Psychiatrists are reluctant to talk about the disorder, saying that it immediately brings politics into the conversation. Yet none of them denies that it can be linked to the questions many men who took part in combat asked themselves.
"It all explodes in your mind when you ask yourself, 'Why am I here? What is the purpose of this war? Look how humiliated and ashamed we are, leaving the Serbian holy land [Kosovo]'," said Milan J, 43, a Serbian army reservist. He spent three months in Kosovo, took part in evictions of ethnic Albanians but denies any involvement in atrocities. He admits that he feels manipulated by the army and is an angry man.
In a conservative society such as Serbia's, visiting a psychiatrist is considered a shame. But it is widely believed that many suicides among those who served in Croatia and Bosnia were a result of the disorder. "It would be interesting to know how many sought any help before committing suicide," Dr Bokonjic says.
The New York Times: U.N. Seizes Arms From Both Sides in Kosovo
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
RISTINA, Kosovo, April 14 -- Assault rifles, handguns and grenades were among the arms seized in raids on the homes of Serbs and Albanians in the divided town of Mitrovica, the United Nations peacekeeping force in Kosovo said today.
Ten assault rifles, 2 automatic pistols, 11 hand grenades, 4 bayonets, 600 cartridges and a gas mask were seized in the raids in a multiethnic northern neighborhood, said a spokesman for the security force, Lt. Col. Patrick Chanliau. Five Albanians and three Serbs were arrested and handed over to United Nations police officers, Colonel Chanliau said.
The troops regularly search for weapons in Mitrovica, where Serbs and Albanians clashed violently in February.
In an interview to be published on Monday in Der Spiegel, the German newsmagazine, a moderate Albanian leader, Ibrahim Rugova, warned that Kosovo could find itself at war again if it was not granted independence. Mr. Rugova also backed the idea of a "greater Albania," raising fears that violence might spill out of the breakaway province into neighboring countries.
The Christian Science Monitor : A test of wills in Montenegro
For the past few months, political brinkmanship has put Montenegro at odds with partner Serbia.
Alex Todorovic
PODGORICA, MONTENEGRO
"Does this mean war?" The large graffiti message on a wall in downtown Podgorica, Montenegro's capital, captures the air of detached concern gripping this southern Yugoslav republic of 600,000 people.
On the surface, Montenegro doesn't appear especially troubled. Podgorica is filled with luxury cars and smartly dressed people lounging in always-full Mediterranean cafes.
But in contrast to the relaxed atmosphere on the street, local papers describe a republic on the edge of conflict. Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic and international Balkan experts have been sounding the alarm that yet another Balkan war is looming. As tensions rise between Serbia and its increasingly restive junior partner in what remains of Yugoslavia, so does the possibility of a dangerous confrontation between the Army and Montenegrin police.
Despite the strain, local analysts do not expect full-scale war. More likely, they say, are further incidents, such as the Army's brief seizure of Podgorica airport in December. The two governments are playing a high-stakes game of political brinkmanship that serves both of their interests as elections approach.
It's easy to see signs of the tense standoff with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who faces the first major opposition protest in eight months today in Belgrade, and has made a career of exploiting crises outside Serbia to consolidate power at home.
Hotels once filled with tourists are serving as temporary barracks to the 20,000-member Montenegrin police force.
The two republics have been locked in a war of wills for two years, since Mr. Djukanovic beat a Milosevic ally in presidential elections. Since then, the only functioning Yugoslav institution in Montenegro is the Army. At 14,000-strong, it remains a significant presence.
Relations between Podgorica and Belgrade have grown increasingly testy since November, when Montenegro adopted the German mark as its currency, in a slap to the beleaguered Yugoslav dinar. A month later, Yugoslav troops briefly took over the airport in Podgorica in a dispute over a hanger. Observers interpreted the move as Belgrade muscle-flexing. In mid-February, the Milosevic regime began broadcasting state-controlled news to Montenegrins from a Yugoslav Army base, and in early March Serbia imposed an economic blockade on Montenegro, preventing trade between the republics.
The steady escalation has been accompanied by regular warnings from Djukanovic and other politicians that Mr. Milosevic is "preparing something" in the republic, from pro-Milosevic paramilitary groups to an Army-led coup.
"I take the war threat seriously," says Jim Hooper, an analyst with the International Crisis Group. "Milosevic is doing a classic 'operations stairsteps' pressure campaign - escalating the pressures against Djukanovic while trying to find the Western ceiling. Unfortunately, there is none. There is no security commitment from the West, and this will tempt Milosevic even more."
Though similar scenarios took place during the wars in Croatia and Bosnia - and during Kosovo's attempted split from Serbia - it may not in Montenegro. Unlike these conflicts, Montenegrins and Serbs share deep cultural ties and the same religion, making war an extremely risky venture.
Most local analysts do not think the situation will deteriorate that far. "Any effort by the Yugoslav Army to take control by force would pose a risk to Milosevic himself," says Slobodan Samardjic, an analyst at the Institute of European Studies in Belgrade. "Of course, it would be no good if the Montenegrin police provoked the Army in some way, but I don't believe anyone wants another war, and I don't think there will be one," says Belgrade military commentator Miroslav Lazanski.
For the moment at least, the high level of tension is proving mutually beneficial to both Djukanovic and Milosevic.
Montenegro has in recent weeks been in the international spotlight and received a significant stream of international aid, while Serbia struggles under a United Nations economic embargo. Djukanovic regularly meets with high-ranking Western diplomats, including Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Montenegro received a strong show of support three weeks ago in Lisbon, Portugal, at a conference of European Union leaders. The recent donors' meeting of the Stability Pact for Southeastern Europe was generous in handing out $65 million in aid to the tiny republic.
Milan Rocen, a foreign-affairs adviser to Djukanovic, says the US will give Montenegro approximately $89 million in 2000 through USAID and other programs. The EU donated $58 million in 1998-99, and more aid is coming, along with investment guarantees from the US and Germany.
More important than aid, however, is Djukanovic's political fortune.
Montenegro's political landscape is presently defined by the question of independence. There is no clear majority on the issue, according to opinion polls.
The compromise position, as represented by Djukanovic's ruling party, is for Montenegro to redefine its relationship in the federal government as equal partners with much larger Serbia. That is seen as impossible under Milosevic.
Djukanovic is in a waiting game until the situation changes in Belgrade or until support for independence reaches a critical mass. The results of municipal elections scheduled for June 11 will be a strong indicator of the republic's direction.
For Milosevic, a minor crisis in Montenegro could be a pretext for canceling elections later this year, or he could build patriotic support by pointing to "NATO stooges" across the border. Milosevic could even decide to let the republic go. Slovenia, for instance, broke away from Yugoslavia in 1991 with little resistance from Belgrade.
Although some Army commanders have made threatening statements to Montenegrin separatists, Milosevic said in a New Year interview that Montenegrins are free to leave if they wish. "He wishes to amputate those areas where he does not have absolute control. The question is how? For him, it's important that the responsibility is borne by someone else," says Dr. Samardjic.
The New York Times: Serbia's Bickering Opposition Plans Rally Against Milosevic
By STEVEN ERLANGER
BELGRADE, Serbia, April 13 -- Serbia's political opposition, superficially united after months of squabbling and pressure from the West, will hold a major political rally here on Friday but with no hope of pushing President Slobodan Milosevic out of power anytime soon.
With unclear goals and few specific plans for what to do next, the opposition hopes the rally will give voice to the widespread dissatisfaction with Mr. Milosevic, but no longer expects to attain its original aim of forcing early elections at all levels. Still, opposition leaders say pressure for elections is the most efficient and least risky tactic they could find.
"We're pressing for early elections -- what else can we do?" said Ognjen Pribicevic, chief adviser to the dominant opposition leader, Vuk Draskovic of the Serbian Renewal Movement. "Our only weapon is elections, elections. This rally will be a big 'no' to the regime and to state terrorism and a big 'yes' to elections. But after a million quarrels, we will be united on stage for the first time since 1997."
The rally will call for elections with no expectation of having even local elections before autumn. And the organizers also don't expect the crucial Serbian elections, which will not take place until at least the summer or autumn of 2001 -- after the Clinton administration has left office -- to result in any quick or peaceful transfer of power.
Speaking privately, they say their main hope is that a good showing by a relatively united opposition -- say, 10 or more percentage points better than the ruling coalition in the Serbian elections -- would lead the Milosevic regime to finally crack apart.
Moreover, the rally will not erase the festering fissures within the opposition, and its central dilemma: while most Serbs don't like Mr. Milosevic, they don't like this generation of opposition leaders much either.
Even Zoran Djindjic, who heads the Democratic Party and has had a long-running rivalry with Mr. Draskovic, acknowledges that opposition leaders have a credibility problem that is rooted in political failure.
And new faces are also having a hard time. Mr. Djindjic's popular young deputy, Slobodan Vuksanovic, challenged him for the party leadership when Mr. Djindjic did not resign his post in January, as he had promised to do if Mr. Milosevic remained in office.
Mr. Djindjic, organizing a trip to Washington and a brief meeting with President Clinton just before the party convention, barely beat off Mr. Vuksanovic's challenge. Mr. Djindjic has since moved harshly to rid the party of Mr. Vuksanovic's main supporters.
"Djindjic staying contributes to the sense of a frozen political system, and a frozen political system is what Milosevic wants," Mr. Vuksanovic said. "People are very angry with the Milosevic regime, but they don't trust the opposition."
Radomir Diklic, who runs the independent news agency, Beta, says the opposition needs new faces and a change of generation, and notes that one such fresh face, 36-year-old Goran Svilanovic, is running advertisements to promote himself that way. "There's no energy, no self-confidence and lost credibility," Mr. Diklic said. "Maybe 80 percent of the population are unhappy with the present situation, but maybe 60 percent are not happy voting for this opposition."
The rivalry between Mr. Djindjic and Mr. Draskovic is legendary, and stems from their broken alliance in 1997, when the opposition won the last local elections and Mr. Milosevic's effort to rob them of the victory brought hundreds of thousands of protesters onto the streets every day for three months.
But Mr. Djindjic's efforts to overthrow Mr. Milosevic through daily rallies last summer and fall, after the loss of Kosovo in the war, were a clear failure. Mr. Draskovic's strategy to force the regime into having early elections on all levels -- local, federal and state -- has also failed.
"Our unity is produced by these two failures," said Mr. Svilanovic, the leader of the Civic Alliance, a small party in the Alliance for Change that Mr. Djindjic's party dominates and that Mr. Draskovic refused to join.
With Mr. Draskovic again dominant, the formally allied opposition announced on Jan. 10 that it would have a rally by the end of March to press for early elections. There was so much infighting about whether to have such a rally, who would speak, in what order and on what topics that Mr. Svilanovic said the other day that he was "ashamed" of the opposition.
With the rally now going ahead on Friday, April 14, the joke is that it will take place on the "45th day of March." But there are few hopes that it will have any major impact, unless it turns violent, and real concerns that it will simply disappoint normal citizens who will attend and want a clear strategy for change.
The rally is being held on the Square of the Republic, which will look packed with even 50,000 people.
"In January, the rally was part of our common strategy for early elections," Mr. Svilanovic said. "Then it became an issue on its own, without a strategy, to show unity. But it must be followed by some action to show people that we are alive."
Srdjan Bogosavljevic, a respected pollster who runs the Strategic Marketing and Media Research Institute, says that Mr. Milosevic "still has a lot to play for" in the vital Serbian elections. His polls show that 39 percent of the electorate are undecided and nearly 12 percent will not vote -- half the voters. Of the other half, the opposition is only 5 percentage points ahead of the ruling coalition.
And he points out that the nationalist Radical Party always wins more votes than the polls indicate, making the race now nearly neck-and-neck, with the regime in control of the main television station, which is the way most people get news.
"People are dissatisfied with Milosevic and want change," Mr. Bogosavljevic said. "But they also believe what they hear about the opposition leaders," who are labeled corrupt, traitors in the pay of NATO and worse in the official media.
Although many oppose him, Mr. Milosevic has earned some credit for keeping promises and getting the population through its first post-bombing winter. Despite widespread predictions from the opposition and NATO capitals that severe energy and heating shortages would occur because of bomb damage, Serbs were warmer this winter than the residents of Kosovo, where NATO and the United Nations administration had enormous trouble providing electricity. The government has rebuilt many of the highway and railway bridges NATO bombed and rebuilt or repaired many houses and apartments that were damaged.
The economy is in poor shape and the average monthly wage is now about $50, but the opposition has been incapable of capitalizing on the hardship or even laying out a coherent program for social and economic change.
"We know there are social and economic problems," said Goran Matic, the Yugoslav Information Minister. "But people also know we've worked very hard after the war to try to solve them, and in very difficult circumstances."
The Guardian : Maze veteran helps bring back rule of law to Kosovo
Britain foots bill for repairs to prison destroyed by Nato air raids
Owen Bowcott in Istok
The blast patterns from exploding grenades are still visible on the bakery floor. Cell blocks and gate houses have crumpled under the impact of aerial bombardment. In a basement, a spray of dried blood stains the wall.
Istok prison, Kosovo's largest detention centre, was attacked repeatedly by Nato war planes during last year's conflict. More than 20 prisoners and guards were reported to have died during the air raids and it now appears that scores more may have perished when Serb forces opened fire on inmates gathering for a roll-call.
But in two months the jail is scheduled to reopen under the control of a new prison governor, from Northern Ireland. Britain's Department for International Development (DfID) is paying £700,000 to repair the severely damaged complex as part of its £110m expenditure on Kosovo.
There is a desperate shortage of prisons in Kosovo to hold both war crimes suspects awaiting trial, and the few people already sentenced. Anyone arrested for a serious crime such as arson is released, because there are only 280 places in smaller jails in Pristina, Prizren, Mitrovice and in the American Camp Bondsteel.
Istok will provide space for 500 inmates, who will mainly live four to a cell. The new governor, Billy Irvine, is a veteran of Northern Ireland's troubles, having served in the Maze and Maghaberry jails.
Istok will contain only ethnic Albanian men. Serb prisoners are already separated for their own safety and sent to the jail in Mitrovice. Women and young offenders go to a special unit in Prizren.
The DfID was initially sceptical about using resources to lock up people, but then officials became convinced that a functioning criminal justice system was essential for Kosovo to return to normality. Istok may not be the first foreign prison to receive British government aid, but it is the largest of such penal projects.
"The aim is to rebuild the prison as fast as possible," said Dr Mukesh Kapila, the head of the DfID's conflict and humanitarian affairs department, while on a visit to Istok.
The DfID's cash has been spent on a broad range of projects in Kosovo. New runway landing systems have been installed at Pristina airport, a hospital has been re-equipped, damaged electricity sub-stations are undergoing restoration and UK organisations are disposing of mines and unexploded bombs. This year the department expects to pay out at least another £30m towards the reconstruction of Kosovo.
Istok prison, which stands in the Drenica valley, appears on arrival to be almost in ruins.
Built in the mid-1980s, it contained more than 1,200 inmates by May last year. Most of them were ethnic Albanians who were arrested by Serb forces on suspicion of being members of the Kosovo Liberation Army.
"Repairing this is all part of getting law and order back to normal," said Mr Irvine. "It will be Kosovo's most secure unit and should create jobs for 380 prison officers.
"The staff, mostly local Albanians, will have to be re-trained. There are 4,000 outstanding criminal cases in Kosovo, so we will have lots of sentenced prisoners soon."
As reconstruction progressed, evidence emerged of killings of ethnic Albanian detainees by Serb forces. "A number of former inmates have shown up in recent weeks, having just been released from Serb jails. They all say they were here during a massacre before the bombing," said Mark Pauline a Canadian official.
"The bodies of 97 prisoners were found in a mass grave outside the prison. The international war crimes tribunal is investigating the murders of 173 people here.
"We were told they [the Serb guards] took all the prisoners out on to the sports field for a roll-call. Then they opened fire. The wall behind is pitted with bullet holes. Afterwards they went into the cell blocks, throwing in grenades and firing into air ducts where people were hiding."
Because of the bomb damage, some of which was inflicted by the RAF, not all buildings can be used. Prison visits will take place in the old gymnasium, and a hospital is being improvised.
The need to retrain prison staff is another problem. After 1989, Istok's ethnic Albanian guards were progressively dismissed - the last Albanian on the staff went in 1994 - and replaced by ethnic Serbs.
Since the defeat of the Yugoslav army last year, most Serbs have fled to Serbia, leaving mainly ethnic Albanians to be recruited. Their experience may be five to 10 years out of date but Mr Irvine and senior Canadian prisoner officers working alongside him hope eventually to return the institution to Kosovans.
The Nation : Kosovo on Hold
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Pristina/Gracanica, Kosovo
Clouds of blackbirds still do go wheeling and shrieking above Kosovo Polje, the bleak and windy site of the great Turkish victory over Serbia (and Albania) in 1389. The Field of Blackbirds itself is now surmounted by an ugly if imposing monument, on which is inscribed: "Those who have a Serb heart and do not come to fight for Kosovo will have neither male nor female children, crops or wine. They will be damned until they die."
Despite or perhaps because of its tribalism and bluster, this is a strangely unimpressive incantation: Millions of Serbs have had offspring--even female--and harvested the crops and the vintages without obeying the injunction. And the damned ones are those who fled Kosovo in abject terror and defeat, rather than face the consequences of what their death squads had done here. They saved neither honor nor territory. Today, the place where Slobodan Milosevic launched his terrible career with a demagogic speech to the Kosovo Serb chauvinists on the 600th anniversary of the battle in 1989 is guarded by soldiers of the UN. A few furlongs down the road, a jerry-built housing project, constructed for Serb settlers from the Krajina in an effort to shift the demographic balance a bit, is now occupied by Kosovar Albanian refugees.
A certain kind of Western intellectual, before the war in Kosovo, was addicted to saying that the province was Serbia's Holy Land or Jerusalem: a place of sacrifice and redemption and consecrated sites. Actually, what Kosovo was for many years was Serbia's West Bank or Gaza; a territory where the indigenous majority could be treated like dirt in the name of spurious ancient mythologies.
The Serbian Orthodox Church has had a lot to answer for here in helping to identify race and nation with faith and in promulgating an essentially fascistic view of the national question. However, the little town of Gracanica, just ten miles outside the capital of Pristina in the opposite direction from the Field of Blackbirds, affords a nice contrast. In this enclave of Serb inhabitants, and operating from the base of an exquisite little monastery dating back even earlier in the same fourteenth century, may be found Archbishop Artemije Radosavljevik and his secretary, Father Sava Janjic.
"Father Sava," as he is known, runs an extensive Kosovo-Serb website and describes Milosevic as "the cancer of Europe." He helped protect Albanians during the pogrom of last year, and has publicly accepted Serbian responsibility for the attempted erasure of the Albanian presence--Christian, Muslim and secular--in the province. Currently, he is battling to avert reprisals against the remaining Serb population. For this reason, he and his bishop logically and morally oppose the ongoing expulsion of Albanians from the Milosevic-dominated enclave in Mitrovica. As my comrade Stephen Schwartz so dialectically put it, the Serb extremists want to keep Kosovo part of Serbia; Father Sava wants to keep Serbs part of Kosovo.
This distinction is narrow but very deep. And it is not, by the NATO powers, well understood. Fourteen NATO armies and several UN contingents occupy Kosovo soil, as brazen an interference in anyone's "internal affairs" as could be found. Yet they do so under a mandate that proclaims the "territorial integrity" of federal Yugoslavia. When Bernard Kouchner, the French human rights activist and UN proconsul, speaks of political arrangements for the territory he is allowed to go no further than bromides about "autonomy." When elections are mentioned, as they are in a somewhat embarrassed tone, they are understood to be merely "local" and "municipal." (Incidentally, all tests of Kosovar opinion show that if real national elections were held they would be easily won by Ibrahim Rugova, the former leader of the civic and nonviolent resistance, and badly lost by the KLA.)
The absence of principle and direction is palpable and visible. All those army engineers and all that hardware, and almost a year later the power is out in the capital city as often as not. The roads are still pitted and scarred, the landscape is strewn with debris, the salaries of the international and humanitarian community seem to be paid ad hoc. The telephones don't work, even though Kosovo may become the first place in the world to have an all-cellphone network by the end of this year. This high-tech improvisation only emphasizes the other failures. However, Pristina does have a thriving subculture of bars, cafes, restaurants and clubs, and in one of these I met a senior European on Kouchner's staff. He carefully listed and answered my criticisms: The NATO countries had promised too much too soon; there was a crisis of high expectations among the Kosovars after what they had been through; the Serbian occupiers had sabotaged a good deal before running away; some important jobs had been given to incompetent KLA sympathizers in the first chaos of victory. But then, having performed his bureaucratic duty as an international civil servant, he said: "You live in Washington. Why not ask what half a day of bombing cost, compared to what we need here?"
I didn't quite know how to tell him that this irony--if it is an irony--is subject to diminishing returns. The American right was generally against the rescue of Kosovo in any case, while much of the left--including myself for a time--consoled and continues to console itself with the half-truth that intervention only made matters worse. In fact, the Kosovo war marked the first and only time in the twentieth century that ethno-fascism was stopped, and reversed, while it was still in progress.
The Albanian people, who were forcibly segregated from contact with the world for longer than any European population, are yearning to make up for the lost time. They seem to have picked the wrong election cycle in which to present their inconvenient selves, but all talk of our own "multicultural" values is vacuous while our regime splits the difference between Milosevic and Father Sava, or between Serbs in Kosovo and Kosovo in Serbia.
The Independent: Kosovo refugees spurned by nations worldwide
UN administrator Bernard Kouchner denounces the forced deportation of thousands of Albanians by Western governments
By Stephen Castle in Brussels
13 April 2000
Governments are deporting tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians to Kosovo as the surge of generosity shown by the world in response to Slobodan Milosevic's repression of the province evaporates.
The deportations were denounced yesterday by Kosovo's UN administrator, Bernard Kouchner. "We don't want them to come back at the same time," Mr Kouchner said. "Some of the children are in school in these host countries. What about the forced returns?"
Of nearly 96,000 Kosovars officially sent to the West by the UN last year, almost 90 per cent have returned of their own accord. Western governments are now making efforts to get rid of the remainder. Some countries are sending back more than they officially took in, filling planes with thousands of others who made their own way out of Kosovo. International officials warn the abrupt influx could seriously destabilise the fragile peace in Kosovo. Germany, for example, has started deporting dozens of convicted criminals.
Under the United Nations' Humanitarian Evacuation Programme, a total of 95,927 people were rescued from Kosovo – rather fewer than the 134,482 that the UNHCR says have gone back.
The two biggest batches of returns so far were from Germany, which took in 14,689 last year but has sent back 25,109, and Switzerland which admitted 1,687 but has sent back 19,669.
The discrepancy arises because many Kosovars arrived at borders under their own steam, or had already been in the West before last year's fighting. But as one aid worker put it bluntly: "The policy of the governments towards refugees is getting tougher; they have no shame any more."
David Boratav, Kosovo officer for the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, argues that the most significant threat is not of mass forcible returns but of a gradual erosion of conditions in the host countries.
He said: "A lot of people are going to be put under pressure because of the cutting of benefits for temporary protected persons or the downgrading of their status – for example, in Germany, from the category of 'war refugee' to 'toleratedperson'.
"It is likely that most states are going to find ways of downgrading the status of refugees to the level that people will conclude that there is no option for them but to return."
The right of all those who fled Kosovo to apply for political asylum in the West is being undermined, Mr Boratav argues. "It is unacceptable, at the moment, for people to be returned to Kosovo in a forcible way."
What worries pressure groups is that the most vulnerable people will be browbeaten into returning. Several categories could be at physical or psychological risk, including those in mixed marriages, those who deserted from the Kosovo Liberation Army or those who disobeyed its injunctions. Victims of rape or sexual abuse may be particularly unwilling to return to the scene of the offence.
Jacques Franquin, spokes-man for the UNHCR, said: "We are not going to argue with the fact that Kosovars are returned by host countries. That was part of the deal. But we do want governments to consider cases on humanitarian grounds."
The Independent: Deported arrivals clash with UN police
By Christian Jennings in Pristina
13 April 2000
Kosovo Albanians deported from Switzerland clashedviolently with United Nations police at Pristina airport yesterday in protest at their forcible repatriation.
UN police officers based at the airport struggled across the asphalt with some of the 15 Kosovo Albanians with criminal backgrounds who had arrived on a deportation flight from Zurich, alongside an estimated 45 Kosovo refugees deported because their requests for asylum had been refused.
"You are racists, I had a right to be in Switzerland," shouted one man, hands in plastic handcuffs, escorted by three police officers from the flight to an area where he was fingerprinted. Another man was forcibly restrained by seven policemen as hescreamed protests at having been deported. One officer was bitten by a deportee in the mêlée, the head of UN police at the airport, Lincoln Dinning, said.
An estimated 20 officers were involved in leading the deportees off the flight, which arrived just after midday, the first of four deportation flights from Germany and Switzerland to arrive yesterday at Slatina airport, Pristina.
Those on board were arrested in three cantons around Zurich and Berne, held in detention centres and then flown to Kosovo, accompanied by Swiss police. Switzerland will return between 20,000 and 35,000 Kosovo Albanians before the end of the year.
In conjunction with the International Organisation for Migration, the Swiss authorities have given Kosovo Albaniansillegally in Switzerland until the end of this month to register under a voluntary repatriation programme. If they have not registered in time, they will be deported.
The New York Times: Belgrade TV Shuts Out a Milosevic Rival
By STEVEN ERLANGER
ELGRADE, Serbia, April 12 -- In a bizarre reversal, Yugoslav state television withdrew an invitation today for an opposition politician to appear on a live discussion program tonight on the ground that another opposition politician refused to appear.
The official Radio Television Serbia at first canceled the program altogether, less than an hour before it was to be broadcast live, then went ahead with the broadcast, but without Zoran Djindjic, the leader of the opposition Democratic Party.
In a labored explanation by the announcer, the station said that because another opposition leader, Vuk Draskovic of the Serbian Renewal Movement, had refused to appear, "we thought it would be advisable to ask them again at another opportunity."
Mr. Djindjic, who has not appeared on state television since 1994, agreed to take part as an opportunity to win publicity for the opposition, despite the topic of the program, "The Fifth Column," designed to portray the opposition as traitors in the pay of the NATO countries that bombed Serbia. Mr. Draskovic, who controls his own television station, Studio B, refused to appear because he did not want to let state television, "which is a medium of state propaganda, appear to be open and democratic," said one of his top advisers, Ognjen Pribicevic.
Coming just two days before a major opposition rally in Belgrade on Friday, the incident made the government of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic appear indecisive or even fearful of the impact that Mr. Djindjic might make. Opposition officials assumed that state television expected both opposition leaders would reject the invitation.
Earlier today, in an interview, Mr. Djindjic said he would answer all criticisms and invite viewers to come to the rally on Friday "to hear for themselves what these so-called traitors have to say." The puzzle was less why he agreed to appear, he said, "than why they decided to ask me."
The program went on with other scheduled politicians from each party of the governing coalition: Vojislav Seselj, the slashing leader of the nationalist Radical Party; Nikola Sainovic of Mr. Milosevic's Socialist Party (who has been indicted by the Hague tribunal for his role in Kosovo); and Milovan Bojic of the Yugoslav United Left party of Mr. Milosevic's wife, Mirjana Markovic.
Mr. Seselj said that Mr. Djindjic was willing to come, "but this would have looked like the three of us were ganging up on this poor, lonely Djindjic," and that Mr. Draskovic "simply did not have the courage to confront his opponents." He added that when the two opposition leaders were ready to debate together, they should call, and "we'll carry on this political struggle with the force of our opinions through debate and not the lies and libels that Vuk Draskovic indulges in." Mr. Draskovic, Mr. Seselj said, "cannot be half fish and half girl."
Mr. Bojic said that the two opposition leaders, saying they were now united, had become a couple, and "it would not have been within the bounds of fair play simply to debate Mr. Djindjic."
But those explanations seemed lame, given that Mr. Djindjic was quite happy to appear without his opposition rival, Mr. Draskovic, who has himself not appeared on state television since he left the federal government last year, during the war.
The three politicians went on for two and a half hours to accuse the opposition of being in the pay of Washington and attacked the Serbs still in Kosovo for cooperating with the United Nations.
Reuters: Serbia's president had triple heart bypass - paper
BELGRADE, April 12 (Reuters) - Serbia's President Milan Milutinovic had a heart attack over the weekend and underwent a triple bypass operation, a newspaper said on Wednesday.
A statement carried by the state news agency Tanjug on Monday had said only that Milutinovic, 57, had undergone heart surgery, adding that it was a "planned" operation.
A source close to Milutinovic confirmed the heart attack, saying it was the second he had suffered in recent years.
Both the paper and the agency said he was recovering well.
"President Milutinovic underwent the triple bypass surgery in the Centre after a heart attack and was operated on by cardio surgeon Reik Huskic," the independent daily Danas said, quoting "unofficial" sources.
It said Milutinovic had gone into the "Dedinje" clinic in Belgrade early on Monday and security was tightened that evening when Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic had been expected to visit. It did not say if the visit took place.
Milosevic holds ultimate power over Serbia, which dominates the current two-republic Yugoslav federation of Serbia and Montenegro, but if Milutinovic had to step down over ill health, elections would follow that could weaken that power.
Serbia's constitution stipulates that the parliament speaker would step in for a maximum of two months pending early presidential elections, something Serbia's opposition has been calling for for months, along with a parliamentary ballot.
Milutinovic and Milosevic, along with three other top officials, have been indicted by a U.N. war crimes tribunal in the Hague for alleged atrocities their forces committed in the Kosovo conflict in 1998-1999.
Reuters: Serb police blame foreign intelligence for blast
BELGRADE (Reuters) - Serbian police Wednesday blamed foreign intelligence services for an explosion that damaged a branch of the ruling Socialist Party in Belgrade.
Col. Milenko Ercic, head of the capital's criminal police, said the Tuesday night blast was a terrorist act designed to create chaos ahead of an opposition rally against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic Friday.
"The throwing of the explosive device ... tells us about the increased activities of foreign intelligence services and their likely connections with certain opposition parties which would benefit from chaos on the streets of Belgrade," he said.
Opposition leaders denied any involvement and said the blast was a set-up by the state to raise tensions ahead of the rally.
Ercic said his officers had arrested three young men shortly after the explosion and confiscated an automatic weapon, ammunition and false identity documents from Hungary, Croatia and Montenegro from them, Beta news agency reported.
He gave no further details.
Vuk Draskovic, head of the Serbian Renewal Movement, said the government was trying to terrify its own people so it could cling to power despite growing public discontent with its rule.
"They now need to provoke something to blame others for the things they did," he told Reuters.
The opposition has been at pains to avoid clashes with the authorities during its eight-month-old campaign of street protests to try to oust Milosevic by forcing him to call free and fair elections which they believe they would win.
FEAR OF VIOLENCE DEEPENS PUBLIC APATHY
But fear of violence after several instances in which police beat demonstrators last year was one factor leading to daily protests in Belgrade running out of steam.
The recently united opposition has called for a new mass rally in the capital for Friday, in the hope that by joining forces they will be able to attract a big crowd to the streets and add to pressure for a vote.
Branislav Ivkovic, a senior Socialist Party official and science and technology minister, told a news conference the rally organizers had arranged the blast on behalf of NATO, which bombed Yugoslavia last year over Milosevic's policy in Kosovo.
"This was an act of those who will Friday try to advocate a program that does not exist, whose only aim is to get into power and justify the NATO aggression," he said.
Ivkovic said he had left the local party office in the central Vracar district with his wife and children after a meeting with youth leaders minutes before the plastic explosive went off at 11:10 p.m. (5:10 p.m. EDT), blowing out its windows.
Dusan Cuckovic, of the youth branch of the Socialist Party, told Reuters he was in the building when the blast occurred.
Asked who might have been behind the explosion, he shrugged. "It's a struggle for the New World order. Our enemies are very well financed," he said.
The youth wing of the Democratic Party, a leading force in the opposition alliance that blames Milosevic for years of conflict, international isolation and economic crisis, said the incident could be used as a trigger for more violence.
"The question is who could profit from this incident -- the opposition that is getting ready for the rally, or the regime who could make it an excuse to severely punish 'foreign traitors' and 'fifth column'?" it said in a statement.
The New York Times : Belgrade Stepping Up Intimidation of Journalists
By STEVEN ERLANGER
BELGRADE, Serbia, April 11 -- As hundreds of people today remembered a journalist executed on the street a year ago during the NATO bombing campaign, the Yugoslav authorities stepped up their campaign to intimidate and impoverish the independent press.
Many of those who came today to honor the journalist, Slavko Curuvija, were not great fans when he was alive. But with his death perceived as martyrdom, he has been transformed into a figure he himself would probably not recognize.
Mr. Curuvija, a publisher who had once been close to President Slobodan Milosevic and his wife, Mirjana Markovic, had turned against the regime. His killing was understood as a message to the independent press that overt criticism would not be tolerated during the war.
Today, in ceremonies at his grave and a downtown media center and at the unveiling of a plaque on the street where he was gunned down on Orthodox Easter as he walked with his wife, he was praised for defending press freedom and refusing to publish under wartime censorship.
The occasion was a chance for opposition politicians and journalists to show solidarity as the government continues a war of nerves and lawsuits against the press.
Today, the weekly magazine Vreme and its two top editors were fined a total of 350,000 dinars -- about $8,750 -- in a suit brought by the culture minister for a February article that said he arranged the firing of a theater director.
It was the first time that Vreme -- a magazine of opinion with a circulation under 20,000 -- had been fined under Yugoslavia's draconian Public Information Law, passed in October 1998. The first victims of the law were Mr. Curuvjia and his magazine, Evropljanin. Neither it nor his successful tabloid newspaper, Dnevni Telegraf, survived him.
On Monday, Studio B, the Belgrade television station that is the political opposition's main voice, was fined the maximum amount, 300,000 dinars, after a suit by a police official. The station's editor, Dragan Kojadinovic, was fined half that amount, also the maximum under the law.
But he said neither fine would be paid. "The government can now do whatever they want, but we will defend our rights," he said.
The law enables the government to indict, prosecute, convict and fine a newspaper or television station within 48 hours.
With the loss of Kosovo, the Belgrade authorities have stepped up their use of the law and applied it more broadly to radio and television stations, particularly those in the more than 30 cities and towns controlled by the opposition. The government has also started confiscating equipment if stations do not pay broadcast fees.
The intention is to drain the independent media of funds -- though some of the fines have been paid by foreign supporters like George Soros -- and to encourage self-censorship.
The government has also accused the independent media of being in the pay of the NATO countries that bombed Yugoslavia and that want to replace Mr. Milosevic. Journalists are being called traitors and "Gestapo underlings" by the Serbian information minister, Aleksandar Vucic of the nationalist Radical Party.
But Goran Svilanovic, president of an opposition party called Civic Alliance, says that the regime also intends to demonstrate the opposition's inability to defend the press that generally supports it.
"Milosevic shows his muscles," Mr. Svilanovic said today. "He's showing that he can do these things to the media and that we cannot protect them."
The regime has also used the courts to take over control of a popular evening tabloid newspaper, Vecernje Novosti, and the independent radio station, B-92, now reborn under the wing of Studio B as B2-92. It has repeatedly brought successful cases against the newspapers Danas and Glas Javnosti and against ABC Grafika, which publishes Glas Javnosti. The government has also rolled back small price increases for papers like the popular tabloid Blic, making it much more difficult to cover costs of increasingly expensive newsprint, and it is denying papers licenses to import newsprint.
Officials deny any campaign to muzzle the press. The federal information minister, Goran Matic, said last week that every station had to pay the broadcast fees it owes, as in any other country. "Stories about closing down media are lies and manipulation," he said.
Today, at a commemoration for Mr. Curuvija, a former spokesman for Mr. Milosevic, Aleksandar Tijanic, said that Mr. Curuvija "paid the full price for his words and his thoughts" and that all Serbs should consider how brave they had been since the killing. In a country where "politicians and criminals work the same stage," he said, the fact that Mr. Curuvija lies in the ground "does not mean that he is dead and that we are alive."
ITN : Kosovo Serbs end boycott of government
The fragile relations between Kosovo's bitterly divided communities have received a boost after a Serb representative attended a session of the province's interim government.
The move - which ends a boycott of over four months - is being regarded as a sign that they are ready to renew cooperation with rival ethnic Albanians.
The UN-supervised government meeting was attended by Bernard Kouchner, the UN administrator of Kosovo, as well as ethnic Albanian leaders Ibrahim Rugova and Hashim Thaci. Observing on behalf of Kosovo's moderate Serbs was Rada Trajkovic.
Kouchner appeared enthusiastic after the two-hour meeting, saying he expected Serb hardliners who oppose any cooperation with ethnic Albanians to eventually join the power-sharing body.
"It was the very beginning of something looking like the way to democracy," Kouchner said. "At the beginning it was a bit tense for Rada Trajkovic but some minutes after she became more open and it was a normal meeting.... They talked to each other like colleagues. The place of the Serbs is with us ... in the provisional administration of Kosovo."
Trajkovic also was upbeat. "We hope this will be the beginning for solving problems," she said, adding that one of the Serb community's chief goals was the return of Serbs who fled the province after the UN and NATO took over the running of the province when Yugoslav forces loyal to President Slobodan Milosevic retreated from Kosovo.
On Monday, a representative of Kosovo's Serbs outlined plans for some 20,000 Serbs to return to villages across the province that before the war had all-Serb populations and are not near ethnic Albanian settlements.
"I expect to come to meetings without an armed vehicle and escort," added Trajkovic, alluding to the security measures surrounding her appearance in Pristina, where no more than a few hundred Serbs are believed to remain. "This small wish of mine will be hard work for the international community."
Thaci described the atmosphere as "very good" adding that the ethnic Serbs and Albanians had to live together. The session was a rare positive development in Kosovo, where ethnic violence remains a near daily occurrence, with many victims Serbs targeted by ethnic Albanians seeking to get even for the nearly year-long Serb crackdown.
Tensions between ethnic Albanians, who make up more than 90 percent of the population and the estimated 100,000 Serbs remaining in Kosovo are still running high, almost a year after the NATO air war that led to the withdrawal of forces loyal to Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
Discussed at the session were the return of Serbs to Kosovo, security issues, student elections, regulations on the electronic media and agriculture, said officials. The next session will take place in a week. The Serbs plan to decide whether to become full members of the council after three months.
Reuters : Several hundred mark Serb journalist's murder
BELGRADE (Reuters) - Several hundred people gathered in Belgrade Tuesday to mark the anniversary of the unsolved murder of a prominent journalist and publisher.
"Even today we do not know who murdered him, but we do know he was killed because of his words," a speaker told some 200 people packed into Belgrade's Media Center for a solemn commemoration ceremony for Slavko Curuvija.
Another crowd blocked a road in the city center to unveil a plaque saying Curuvija died for his "sharp and critical words."
Curuvija, the outspoken founder and owner of the daily newspaper Dnevni Telegraf and periodical Evropljanin, was gunned down outside his Belgrade apartment block the third week into last year's NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia.
Five days earlier, state television had broadcast a commentary by a pro-government daily accusing him of treason and of welcoming NATO bombs, something Curuvija's supporters have said amounted to a call for a lynching.
Opposition leaders said the murder was aimed at sowing fear among opponents of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
"In a country where the regime's only goal is to stay in power, the victims are guilty, any punishment is just and silence is the best response," prominent columnist Aleksandar Tijanic told the ceremony.
"Our eyes, so used to darkness, will take a long time to get used to the light," he added.
In the year since Curuvija was killed, police have released no details of their investigation. But Serbia's ultra-nationalist deputy prime minister said on Tuesday he was killed in a criminal showdown.
"He did not die as a journalist but as a criminal, in a clash among criminals," Vojislav Seselj told the Serbian parliament Tuesday. He did not elaborate.
A year ago, Curuvija, who had published articles extremely critical of Milosevic, seemed to have known he was in danger.
"They can only stop me if they kill me. After me, it will be everyone else's turn," Curuvija's colleague Mitar Jakovlevski quoted him as saying shortly before his death.
Serbia has seen dozens of unsolved murders in recent years, including the Serbian police chief and Yugoslav defense minister, who was gunned down in a restaurant in February.
Curuvija's daily was banned in 1998 for "spreading fear, panic and defeatism" about possible NATO air strikes on Yugoslavia over its repression of the ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo. Both it and the weekly had previously been fined.
Both publications were re-registered in Montenegro, which unlike its larger partner Serbia favors liberal reform. When NATO started bombing in March last year, Curuvija stopped publishing to avoid subjecting his papers to war censorship.
Reuters : Serb parliament passes law seen boosting Milosevic
BELGRADE, April 11 (Reuters) - Serbia's parliament passed a law on Tuesday on the election of federal deputies that the opposition saw as a way of strengthening Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's grip on power.
The authorities defended the move as a necessary step to comply with constitutional law. Their opponents said it was designed to exclude Milosevic's political foes from the federal parliament, where they have threatened to try to impeach him.
The new law, which follows a ruling in November by the federal constitutional court that the previous one was illegal, was passed with 169 votes in favour, four against and one abstention out of 174 deputies present in the 250-seat parliament.
Opposition parties say the law gives the ruling parties, which dominate the Serbian parliament, effective control over who gets sent from there to the federal parliament.
"This law will ensure the election of a suitable delegation which will prevent any vote of distrust in the supreme commander (Milosevic)," Marjan Risticevic, of the opposition Vojvodina Coalition, told Reuters before the session.
Ratko Markovic, a Serbian deputy prime minister known as Milosevic's legal expert, disagreed, saying parties would be represented fairly as long as they turned up.
MAIN OPPOSITION BOYCOTTS SESSION
The main opposition Serbian Renewal Movement boycotted the session in protest at the authorities' refusal to hold a parliamentary inquiry into the deaths of four party officials in a car crash last year, a crash the party blames on the state.
"With this bill, Serbia has confirmed the priority of the federal legal system and federal institutions and its loyalty to the federal state," Markovic said.
His words were clearly directed at Montenegro, which launched a boycott of all federal institutions after its newly-elected deputies were blocked from parliament, where Serbia and Montenegro are meant to hold 20 seats each in the upper house.
Montenegro, which has been at odds with Milosevic since its people elected a pro-Western president in 1997, has also threatened to call a referendum on independence if the Serbia-dominated federation is not reformed.
Some in the West, where a U.N. tribunal has indicted Milosevic for war crimes in Kosovo, have been trying to encourage Montenegro to join with the Serbian opposition to try to oust Milosevic, with impeachment as one possible option.
However, some analysts say that even if Montenegro dropped its boycott, impeachment would be impossible because parliament is already weighted in Milosevic's favour.
They view the new law as a prelude to a possible change in either the Serbian or Yugoslav constitution to allow Milosevic, who is due to step down in the middle of next year, to stay in power.
Stevan Lilic, professor of constitutional law and an opposition leader, said the new law could be a trigger for a new Serbian constitution.
"Once they get a new constitution, the meter of a new mandate will start ticking for Slobodan Milosevic," he said, when the new law was first announced.
Washington Post : Back Channels: The Intelligence Community
By Vernon Loeb
Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) said yesterday that the Central Intelligence Agency acted appropriately in firing the intelligence officer most responsible for the mistaken bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade last year, but he questioned why other involved agencies haven't performed their own internal reviews.
"We're talking about a systemic breakdown here," said Goss, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. "To pull one guy out of the system and say, 'This guy was the perpetrator,' was not the way it was."
CIA Director George J. Tenet fired the officer and reprimanded six managers, including a senior official, last week for errors that led them to mistakenly identify the Chinese embassy as their intended target, a Yugoslav arms agency, during NATO's 78-day aerial bombardment of Yugoslavia.
Goss said he believes the Pentagon should have also assessed its role in the tragedy, since officials at one defense intelligence agency, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), have already acknowledged failing to update databases listing the addresses of foreign embassies.
Goss also said the National Security Council should examine its role in the tragedy, having ruled out the use of ground troops and adopted a policy of nonstop bombing that clearly pushed targeting procedures beyond the breaking point.
IN PUBLIC: Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, director of the supersecret National Security Agency, will make a rare public appearance on Capitol Hill Wednesday to talk about a most sensitive subject--the NSA's procedures for protecting the civil liberties of Americans whose communications are intercepted by the agency.
It's actually something Hayden likes to talk about in public.
At a recent appearance at American University's Kennedy Political Union, a student asked about the controversy swirling around Echelon, the code name for a worldwide surveillance network run by the NSA and its partners in Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
"I heard about it," Hayden deadpanned.
He then explained that the NSA doesn't spy on Americans, doesn't ask its foreign partners to spy on Americans, and doesn't channel intelligence information to U.S. corporations.
"Let me emphasize this," Hayden said. "The Fourth Amendment . . . is supposed to protect unwarranted intrusions in your life all the time, especially when the government might still have the want or need to do it. We don't get close to the Fourth Amendment."
His public coming-out on the Echelon controversy was supposed to have been before the House Government Reform Committee, chaired by the pugnacious Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.).
Burton had agreed to investigate concerns of Rep. Robert L. Barr (R-Ga.) that Hayden and Co. may be routinely violating the civil rights of American citizens by intercepting everything from Internet traffic to cellular phone calls.
But Goss's committee ultimately became the venue for the Wednesday hearing, given its oversight jurisdiction over intelligence gathering programs. The panel promises to be a far less adversarial environment.
When Goss became embroiled with NSA lawyers last year over the agency's collection procedures, he was concerned they were being too restrictive in applying legal safeguards, not too loose.
Barr, a former CIA analyst, will be allowed to make a statement at the beginning of the session. He said he welcomes the committee's interest "in examining the serious problems now coming to light with 1970s laws regulating 21st century technology."
WHO'S LEAKING? At a closed committee hearing last week, CIA officials told Goss that they had referred more than 20 leaks of classified information to the Justice Department for investigation since last November, including one involving the agency's inspector general's report on former director John M. Deutch's home computer security violations.
More than a few at CIA headquarters believed the leak came from Capitol Hill, where the House and Senate intelligence committees had access to the review. Goss said he had looked into the matter and believes "the Hill may have been a little complicit" in offering expansive comments on the report. But he said he's satisfied no one on his staff was the leaker.
Vernon Loeb's email address is loebv@washpost.com
The Independent : Sick Kosovar boy flies into UK for treatment
By Charis Owen and Paul Hunter, PA News
A desperately–ill two–year–old Kosovar boy arrived in Scotland tonight for a potentially life–saving operation.
Visar Zymberi, accompanied by his deaf–mute mother Sadije, left their home in Kosovo at 5am and finally touched down at Aberdeen Airport shortly after 9.30pm.
He suffers from a congenital oesophageal condition which means he can only swallow liquids.
Since birth he has been surviving on milk from his mother, who cannot hear or speak, and he will die if he does not receive appropriate medical treatment.
Administrative director of Aberdeen charity No Frontiers Bob Milne, who arranged the boy's journey to Scotland, said: "They are very, very tired and we are taking them to an address we have organised for them in the city.
"We'll take them to the hospital tomorrow to see what can be done for Visar."
The youngster was operated on three times during the first two months of his life, but his fourth operation was abandoned after the outbreak of war in the Balkan region.
Visar, who lost his father and grandfather during the fighting, comes from the mountain village of Prelofc in the Drenica Valley, which was one of the worst hit regions during the war.
Scottish charity workers discovered his plight at the end of last year during door–to–door visits in the area and No Frontiers, with the assistance of other members of the Scottish Charities Kosovo Appeal team, helped bring him to the UK.
A Territorial Army medical team from Aberdeen has carried out an in–field assessment of Visar's condition and reported back to medical experts inScotland.
Visar is due to be assessed by staff at Aberdeen Royal Children's Hospital who will decide how and where his needs can best be met.
Mr Milne said Visar's prospects were good if he received treatment, but he would die without help.
"This operation that we are assuming he needs is not some fantastic unheard–of operation.
"I wouldn't go so far as to say it is routine but the prognosis for the future is wonderful if he receives medical treatment of some sort or another."
He said the youngster had his first three operations in Belgrade, but in the current political and military climate it was almost impossible for his mother, an ethnic Kosovar Albanian, to take him back there.
He said: "You may as well go and have a party on the moon –it would be just as easy. If ever there was an innocent victim of war he is it."
Mr Milne said in Visar's area, about 95% of the houses had been damaged or destroyed in the war, and the family was currently living in a converted cow shed.
The United Nations has issued special passports to replace documents destroyed when their house was burned down.
Visar was accompanied by his mother and uncle, Nexhmedin, as well as interpreters and charity workers. The group flew from Skopje, Macedonia, via London Heathrow.
An appeal launched by No Frontiers in February to cover the expenses involved has already raise £6,300, but more is still needed.
Newsweek International : The Perils of Peacekeeping
A year after the Kosovo air war, the result of NATO's efforts is a highly volatile mess
By Andrew Nagorski
Iri Dienstbier has the disturbing habit of speaking his mind. That's why, when I visited him in the 1980s in communist Czechoslovakia, the former journalist-turned-dissident stoked furnaces for a living. That's why, when Vaclav Havel named him the first foreign minister in a newly free government, he never learned the diplomatic art of obfuscation. And that's why, when he recently presented his conclusions on Kosovo as the special rapporteur of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, he was uncompromisingly blunt. A year after NATO's air war over Kosovo, he declared, the peacekeeping mission there has failed "to achieve a single goal: neither security for people nor freedom of movement, not to mention creating conditions for the development of democratic institutions in a multiethnic society." Driving his message home, he added: "The bombing hasn't solved any problems. It only multiplied the existing problems and created new ones."
This is a message Western leaders don't want to hear—and strenuously seek to refute. NATO Secretary General George Robertson, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and others have been making the case that the bombing did achieve its main goal: it allowed the Kosovo Albanians, most of whom were brutally driven out after the war started, to return home and begin the rebuilding process. If Albanians returning to their burned-out villages then resorted to violent reprisals that forced most of Kosovo's Serbs and Romas (Gypsies) to flee, these officials maintain, no one should be surprised. It would be unrealistic to expect that Kosovo can be turned into a tolerant, multiethnic society overnight, they say. Fair enough. But let's not kid ourselves: we didn't have a clear strategy when we blundered into the war in Kosovo, and we don't have any clear plan for what to do now. As demonstrated by last week's clash between U.S. troops and local Serbs in southern Kosovo that left several people injured on both sides, the result is a highly volatile mess. Increasingly, it's also a mess that threatens to sour Americans and Europeans on future military actions in the name of humanitarian ideals.
Just how bad is the situation on the ground? The earlier revenge-murder rate of 40 to 50 a week has dropped to four or five a week, but there are a lot fewer Serbs and Romas to shoot at. Crime, gangs and the heroin trade are all flourishing. Although they formally disarmed, some elements of the Kosovo Liberation Army have tried to export unrest into Albanian-inhabited areas of Serbia, and Slobodan Milosevic has continued to incite Serbs who remain in Kosovo. While U.N. and NATO officials desperately search for signals that the two communities will start tolerating each another, virulent editorials in Kosovo Albanian newspapers have proclaimed retaliation "a natural instinct" and called Serb children "born killers" who will never reform.
The international community has hardly risen to the occasion. Bernard Kouchner, the head of the U.N. administration in Kosovo, has few resources at his disposal so far. About 4,700 international policemen are supposed to be on duty there, but 2,000 slots remain unfilled. The EU has been big on promises and slow on delivery of its "stability pact" for the Balkans, which is supposed to provide a massive injection of economic aid. It was so slow in providing money for the staff of the economic reconstruction program, the EU's putative showcase, that Washington anted up the funds for 35 of the 45 staffers. The NATO-led peacekeeping force has dropped to 38,000 from 45,000 earlier, as nations have failed to fully replenish their original contributions.
The United States has only 6,000 troops in Kosovo, but they are in one of the hottest spots—the southeast sector where about half of the remaining Serbs are concentrated. This isn't an issue in the American presidential campaign yet. Unlike the Elián González case, Al Gore hasn't broken ranks with Clinton, and George W. Bush hasn't been pushing for a U.S. pullout. On Capitol Hill, though, some Republicans are already making such calls, grumbling that the Europeans should take care of the peace since U.S. fighters won the war. And if U.S. troops should get caught in a deadly fight with either the Serbs or Albanians there, all bets about keeping Kosovo out of the presidential race are off.
Most troubling is the fuzzy future status of Kosovo, which leaves it as a tempting target for extremists of any persuasion. The Rambouillet peace conference was doomed, in part, because it didn't address this issue. Albright got the KLA to sign the agreement by mentioning a referendum about Kosovo's status in three years, but with no explanation of what such a vote would mean. (Historians will have plenty of other Albright mistakes to ponder: her propensity for diplomacy by public ultimatum; her insistence on terms that not even a far more enlightened Serb government could have accepted; her bizarre claim of victory when only one side signed.) Today, NATO still insists on the fiction that Kosovo is a multiethnic autonomous province within Yugoslavia. It ignores the Albanians' push for independence and rules out partition, which is already happening, as a possible solution.
But it's time to get real, not ruling out anything that might work. Once goals are finally set, the Europeans need to exercise the leadership they keep promising by providing most of the resources and personnel necessary to meet them. The implications of success or failure will be enormous. Peacekeeping missions are proliferating in remote areas—East Timor, Sierra Leone, Georgia. Located in NATO's backyard, Kosovo should be easier. "If we can't turn the situation around in a tiny area with 1.7 million people who are mostly on our side, it's the end of humanitarian interventionism everywhere," argues NATO spokesman Jamie Shea. An overblown prediction, perhaps—but only a tad, I'd say.
The New York Times : War Crimes Panel Picking Up Steam on Balkan Cases
By MARLISE SIMONS
THE HAGUE, April 9 -- Confounding the many critics who long called the international tribunal here a mere fig leaf for Western shame, the court dealing with Yugoslav war crimes has just completed an extraordinary month.
It has opened the first United Nations trial ever to focus exclusively on sexual violence against women, including gang rape and the use of women as sexual slaves as part of a war strategy.
It has begun the trial of one of the top generals accused of being responsible for the carnage in 1995 at the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, probably Europe's worst massacre of civilians since World War II.
And on Friday, prosecutors brought before the court a top Bosnian Serb political leader who is charged with complicity in the genocide that the prosecutors say his people perpetrated against Bosnia's Muslims and Croats, but who not so long ago was accepted as a figure who could meet with Western presidents and prime ministers.
While problems remain, and the recent momentum is the result of slow shifts by Western governments and tribunal prosecutors themselves, the changes have engendered a rare sense of excitement in the sober high-security building on the outskirts of this Dutch city where judges are quietly testing and defining uncharted international laws.
Usually the building feels more like a subdued hospital for the Balkan heart, a place that tries to put patches on the wrenching pain of witnesses while lawyers haggle over legal remedies.
But last week, which began with the capture of Momcilo Krajisnik (pronounced mohm-chee-loh cry-ish-nik), the senior Bosnian Serb politician who was brought before the court on Friday, seemed to galvanize staff members and visitors. He is the highest-ranking Serb in the tribunal's custody.
"The momentum and the energy at the tribunal have been amazing," said Heather Ryan of the Coalition for International Justice, who has monitored proceedings on behalf of several human rights groups for almost two years. "I've not seen so much substance at any one time, at least in the public arena. The tribunal seems to have hit a new stride."
For Mr. Krajisnik's first appearance, at which he pleaded not guilty to all nine counts against him, the usually empty public gallery overflowed and hundreds crowded the lobby to follow the event on television monitors.
Other courtrooms here heard testimony of great moment. United Nations peacekeepers gave the most vivid accounts yet of the tense days in July 1995 around Srebrenica that led up to the alleged massacre by Serbs of perhaps 8,000 Muslim men.
Two Dutch peacekeepers at the trial of Gen. Radislav Krstic, one of the Bosnian Serb commanders at Srebrenica, for the first time publicly testified that even before the peacekeepers' forced departure, there had been blatant signs of impending slaughter.
One of the Dutch soldiers, Paul Groenewegen, detained by the Serbs at the time, said he believed that executions had been going on, as he heard repeated single gunshots for a whole day, "perhaps 20 to 40 shots" per hour.
Andre Stoelinga, another Dutch soldier, said he had seen clothes and shoes piled by the roadside and a truck loaded with blue and bloated bodies. "It's a smell I won't forget," he told the court on Thursday.
Those accounts are significant because they differ widely from past tribunal testimony by the Dutch commander, Lt. Col. Ton Karremans, who said that while the peacekeepers had no choice but to hand over the civilians under their protection, they had no reason to suspect the coming executions of the Muslim men.
Such details have long been known inside the Dutch government, but their disclosure has shocked the Dutch public. Politicians and newspaper editorial writers have demanded a parliamentary inquiry.
The drama now going on at the the tribunal, with young women sobbing as they speak of gang rape and senior political and military war leaders standing in the dock, can also be followed by more people in the Balkans, for whom these trials are most intended.
The new South East News Service for Europe, financed mainly by the European Union, has begun to broadcast regular live television and radio programs and summaries from the trials, allowing people in Montenegro, Bosnia and parts of Serbia and Croatia to follow the tribunal's many activities.
Several factors have contributed to the tribunal's new momentum.
Western governments, which long appeared to pay only lip service to the court, lauding its objectives but starving it of funds and intelligence, now find it more politically convenient to have their soldiers arrest important suspects, like camp commanders and Bosnian Serb and Croat generals.
British troops were the first to do so, after the election of a Labor government in 1997 that succeeded the Conservatives who were in power during the 1991-95 wars in Croatia and Bosnia. American, Dutch and German soldiers followed.
Court investigators, whose work has often been painfully slow, have also managed to speed up indictments as the body of evidence has grown. A third courtroom, added in late 1998, has helped.
But it took public complaints from Louise Arbour, the former chief prosecutor, for NATO countries to release more intelligence reports and to use peacekeepers to seize key documents in Bosnia.
It appears that Carla Del Ponte, the former attorney general of Switzerland who took over as chief prosecutor last fall, has now pressed France into greater action.
French troops were seen as providing a de facto safe haven for key suspects in their sector of Bosnia, which covers much of the Bosnian Serb republic in the eastern part of the country.
Mrs. Del Ponte, who gained a record for toughness as a prosecutor fighting organized crime, called on the defense and foreign ministers in Paris in January. On Feb. 29, when President Jacques Chirac of France visited the tribunal, she handed him a piece of paper with the names of three Bosnian Serbs in the French sector whose indictments she had just signed days before.
Tribunal officials will not identify the two others, but the third, Mr. Krajisnik, was the right-hand man of the Bosnian Serb wartime political leader, Radovan Karadzic, who was indicted by the tribunal in 1995.
Mr. Krajisnik was pulled out of bed by French troops a month after Mr. Chirac's visit to The Hague. By NATO standards, a month between indictment and arrest is a record time.
"Contrary to my predecessors, I've had no cooperation problems with France," Mrs. Del Ponte bluntly told Le Monde last week.
Insiders say it does not hurt either that the new tribunal president is French. Judge Claude Jorda took over from Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, an American, last fall.
Of course, the tribunal still faces obstacles. With 39 detainees in custody at special cells near The Hague, it now faces a bottleneck. The new government in Croatia, unlike that of the late President Franjo Tudjman, is eager to have indicted Croats face their day in court. It has already handed over a major war crimes suspect, Mladen Naletilic, after years of stalling by Mr. Tudjman.
There was some talk here last week about whether Mr. Krajisnik's arrest has sent Dr. Karadzic, the tribunal's most wanted political leader, across the border into Serbia, beyond the reach of NATO.
He is known not to be welcome in the circles of the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, his onetime patron. But the capture of Mr. Krajisnik, a close ally, has left Dr. Karadzic more isolated. He is said to move from place to place, accompanied by bodyguards, in the French sector of Bosnia.
Gen. Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb wartime military commander, who personally oversaw the capture of Srebrenica and like Dr. Karadzic has been indicted twice by the tribunal on charges of genocide, has long been in Belgrade. Twelve days ago he even appeared there at a match between the Yugoslav and Chinese soccer teams.
Some observers of the tribunal fear that the arrest of Mr. Krajisnik may have to be a surrogate for General Mladic and Dr. Karadzic, whose capture, if attempted, is likely to be far riskier.
Graham Blewitt, the tribunal's deputy prosecutor, said he was optimistic. "We see this new arrest as the precursor of the arrest of Karadzic," he said in an interview. "We want to believe that the French are going to comply with their promise, which is to detain the people who have been indicted in Bosnia."
The Guardian : CIA takes rap for embassy attack
Martin Kettle in Washington
One CIA officer was sacked and six others reprimanded yesterday as the American intelligence agency finally took the rap for the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade last year at the height of the Nato conflict with Yugoslavia over Kosovo.
George Tenet, the CIA director, acted against the seven employees last week after two internal agency reviews on the bombing, on May 7, which killed three Chinese citizens and injured more than 20 others. The attack plunged US-China relations into deep freeze and renewed doubts about the Nato campaign in several European nations.
Mr Tenet's decision, which was announced in an unusual public statement from the agency, follows 11 months of public and private Chinese government pressure for "severe punishment" of those responsible for the bombing.
The action has immediately sparked allegations in the US that President Bill Clinton's administration has used the agents as scapegoats in an effort to smooth relations between Beijing and Washington after Chinese officials refused to let the matter die.
The agents against whom action has been taken have not been identified. However, reports in the US yesterday said that the sacked agent was a mid-level career officer whose targeting error was blamed for the incident.
The others, said to include one senior official and four supervisors, received punishments varying from spoken admonitions to suspended promotions and pay awards.
The US has already apologised to Beijing and agreed to pay $28m (£17.5m) in compensation to the Chinese government, as well as $4.5m (£2.8m) to families of those who were killed and injured.
The CIA confirmed yesterday that its internal inquiries had concluded that the intelligence officers had intended to target the Yugoslav military supply headquarters, but wrongly identified the building housing the embassy.
"The evidence shows that this was clearly a tragic accident," spokesman Bill Harlow said in a statement.
Although Chinese - and, from time to time, some western sources - have claimed that the American attack was a deliberate act, the official Washington version of events which emerged within days of the attack has not substantially changed in the ensuing months.
The CIA says the bombing was caused when the now sacked officer mistakenly identified the military supply HQ on a street map on the basis of its address, 2 Bulevar Umetnosti, which was in fact several hundred yards away from the building housing the Chinese embassy.
The map on which the target was identified was a 1997 map that showed the Chinese embassy located at its earlier address in the centre of Belgrade.
After the location was wrongly fixed, it was discussed during three meetings among CIA officials, none of whom questioned the targeting procedure that had been used. The target details were then passed to the Pentagon and Nato, but were not queried there either.
The whole saga is particularly embarrassing for the CIA because this was the only one of 900 targets struck by Nato planes during the 78-day campaign that was wholly selected by the agency.
"The CIA lacked formal procedures for preparing and forwarding target nomination packages to the US military," Mr Harlow admitted.
However, as reported in the Guardian last year, in the week preceding the embassy bombing another mid-level CIA officer did voice doubts and objections to the identification of the target.
This agent called colleagues at the US military mapping agency in Washington with his doubts and also discussed the matter with the Nato taskforce in Naples, Italy, which was responsible for issuing instructions to B-2 stealth bomber crews about their night missions. No senior official intervened, however, and the strike went ahead. The officer who raised the concerns was officially praised - though not identified - by Mr Tenet in his official statement.
A lawyer for one of the reprimanded officers said yesterday that it was "manifestly unjust" to blame individual CIA officers when "the failure was systematic".
Roy Krieger said: "It's shameful that the CIA caved in to political pressure to provide scapegoats. The agency has already publicly admitted that the map provided to the officers contained errors without which the Chinese embassy would not have been mistakenly bombed. These officers were asked to improvise and did the best with the materials provided to them."
The Sunday Times : America in talks to renew envoy links with 'pariah state' Serbia
Tom Walker
WASHINGTON has begun delicate negotiations with the government of President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia aimed at re-establishing an American presence in Belgrade, diplomats have revealed.
They say that a relatively junior American diplomat could be in the Serbian capital as early as June, and that both sides have been anxious to re-establish links for some time.
The talks appear to contradict Washington's publicly stated policy of treating Milosevic's Serbia as a pariah state. The State Department reacted angrily last Friday to Australia's appointment of a new ambassador to Belgrade.
America and Britain broke off relations with Yugoslavia before Nato airstrikes began last March, and Washington was disappointed that not all nations in the western alliance followed suit.
Greece and Italy retained their contacts with the Milosevic regime throughout the crisis. Britain, France and Germany have all re-established "interest sections" since Nato and the United Nations took over in Kosovo.
The Clinton administration had believed Milosevic might fall from office because of Kosovo. It has felt increasingly uncomfortable as the Yugoslav president has not only held on to power but has also moved closer to China, which has become Serbia's biggest benefactor.
Determined not to be left out in the hub of a region where America wants to dictate international policy, Washington has used intermediaries from Russia and Greece to help pave the way for some rapprochement with Belgrade, diplomats said. Moscow is expected to send its new ambassador to Belgrade this week.
"We've been anxious to get an official presence there for nine months in the way that Britain has," said an American source.
"The first guy in will probably be a first secretary, and we won't be allowed much more than consular offices for the moment. But as soon as we get the green light, we're in."
Diplomats said Washington was anxious to keep Milosevic at arm's length, but wished to help Serbian officials become more involved in the running of Kosovo under the UN.
They also confirmed that basic American intelligence- gathering in Belgrade was rendering policy-making difficult. "They feel really disadvantaged at the moment. They've got no feel for it," said one European diplomat in the Serbian capital. "And the China thing worries them. Milosevic's wife is much too keen on the Chinese."
Any deal will probably involve the Yugoslav government being given access to its old embassy building in Washington.
The Croatian press suggested last week that William Montgomery, America's ambassador to Croatia, could become the first official to go to Belgrade. But Montgomery's office denied the reports, claiming: "We don't have relations, there is no embassy, no mission, no job."
A Yugoslav government source confirmed that an American diplomatic presence in Belgrade could bring mutual benefits. "It's much better to talk direct," he said. "There's a lot of bargaining going on at the moment."
Children reap Kosovo's spring harvest
The Independent
Legacy of war - As the snow melts, more young lives are shattered by the thousands of cluster bombs which Nato left behind
By Christian Jennings in Grmija
8 April 2000
Kosovo's bleak winter has finally begun to lift, giving way to a tremulous spring. And in the last three weeks, three children have been killed and 13 seriously injured after they accidentally detonated some of the thousands of unexploded Nato cluster-bombs strewn about the woods, hills and villages.
"Everyone recognises that with the advent of spring there is an increased danger of incidents involving mines and unexploded ordnance," says Leonie Barnes, chief information officer at the United Nations' mine action co-ordination centre (Macc) in Pristina, the outfit that organises all mine-clearing and mine-awareness activities throughout Kosovo.
Above the public swimming pool at the Grmija recreation ground, west of Pristina, the snow is melting, revealing a car park littered with syringes, tangles of hastily discarded underwear, empty bottles of Montenegrin red wine, and dozens of used condoms. Next to one puddle lie six shiny brass cartridge cases, ejected from a 9mm automatic handgun. But as the daytime temperatures start to rise, more is being brought to the surface than the detritus of nocturnal lust.
"During the air-war, the hills around Grmija had concentrations of Serbian troops dug in," says a Macc official. "And there were 22 recorded Nato cluster-bomb strikes on this area alone." The swimming pool and picnic area, as well as the woods in Grmija, are being made safe by battle area clearance teams from Bac-Tec, a British organisation which employs former Army and Navy bomb disposal experts.
Twenty-two cluster-bomb strikes means 22 aerially launched bomb canisters, each containing 147 bomblets. Each of the 3,234 bomblets dropped on Grmija would normally explode on contact with the ground, in the air, or with a tank or armoured vehicle, depending on how it is fused. But there is a 10 per cent failure rate, which means that more than 300 bomblets, each the size of a baked-bean tin, capable of killing anybody within 15 metres, probably lie in the undergrowth.
"People in Kosovo haven't been able to see their fields since last year," says Dr Merkur Dobroshi, in the orthopaedic ward of Pristina University Hospital. "They haven't been able to move about, and now it's spring, and they will go out and discover what is waiting for them."
Lying in the beds in front of him, badly injured and disfigured, are Albert Bagraktari, aged 10, and his cousin, fromKlina, in central Kosovo. "At first I thought that there had been a power-surge and the TV had blown up," says Albert's mother as her son paws in agony at the bandages covering his eyes. "Then I realised it was the children, who had been playing with something."
The only person who knows exactly what they were playing with is in the hospital's intensive care unit. Gasmend, aged 11, was holding the device when it exploded, and doctors are trying to save his arms and legs.
Ms Barnes, of Macc, who was an ammunition technical officer in the Australian Army for 10 years, and later worked on mine clearance in Bosnia and Mozambique, said: "The problem now is the movement of the population over the countryside. People are impatient, they want to go out and see their fields, go to the forest to collect firewood.
"They don't see sometimes that they may have to wait another year before it is safe, before we've cleared."
Although Macc knows thelocation of more than 300 Nato cluster-bomb strike areas, involving some 3,000 cluster-bombs, the failure rate of 10 per cent means there are thousands of unexploded bomblets in a province half the size of Wales, as well as anti-tank and anti-personnel mines, booby-traps and other devices.
The population of Kosovo is lucky, however. So well co-ordinated is the mine-clearance operation, so ample the donor funding for demining organisations, and so well recorded the Serb minefields and Nato bomb-sites, that Ms Barnes sees an end to the problem.
"We could feasibly clear Kosovo in two to three years," she says. And by the end of this year, she hopes it will be possible for the people of Grmija to venture out for their walks and picnics without the risk of stepping on the legacy of last year's war.
Captured Bosnian Serb politician denies war crimes charges
The Times
FROM MARTIN FLETCHER IN THE HAGUE
FIVE days after being seized from his home in a pre-dawn raid, Momcilo Krajisnik, the most senior Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect yet apprehended, appeared before an international tribunal yesterday to answer the charge of genocide.
As he did so, an adjacent court heard an old man, hiding his identity behind a screen, tell in harrowing detail how, while Mr Krajisnik was president of the Bosnian Serb parliament, Serb soldiers mowed down 1,500 Muslims in a field. The man was one of just five survivors.
Mr Krajisnik appeared in the dock flanked by armed guards, protected by bullet-proof glass, and wearing a three-piece suit sent from his home in Pale soon after French troops captured him in his pyjamas last Monday and flew him to The Hague. The public gallery was packed and a crowd watched the 30-minute hearing on television monitors outside.
The silver-haired right-hand man of Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader, stood scowling beneath his bushy eyebrows as a British judge, Richard May, read out the nine charges against him: genocide, complicity in genocide, extermination, murder, violations of the laws of war, wilful killing, persecution, deportation and inhumane acts.
After each, there was pause as Mr Krajisnik listened to the translation on headphones before firmly replying: "Not guilty." Otherwise, Mr Krajisnik spoke only to ask to make a statement. Judge May refused. His lawyer, Igor Pantelic, said later that Mr Krajisnik, who was in office during the 1992-95 Bosnian conflict, wanted to protest his innocence.
His client was "shocked" by his arrest. There was no precedent for the elected president being held responsible for the actions of military forces. The charges were "politically motivated".
As Mr Krajisnik was led away, the old man testified in the trial of Radislav Krstic, the Bosnian Serb general whose forces overran the Muslim "safe haven" of Srebrenica in July 1995 and killed 7,500 men in Europe's worst massacre since the Second World War. Speaking slowly and deliberately the man told how he and a busload of Muslim prisoners from Srebrenica were taken to a field where Serb soldiers made them line up and turn their backs. They were then raked by machinegun fire. Other busloads arrived and met the same fate.
"There were bursts of fire just cropping them down. You could hear the bullets hitting bodies and the earth falling around. I could feel it all," the man said. After each execution soldiers asked if anyone was alive. "Sometimes a voice was heard. A soldier came up with just one bullet, bop, bop and so on."
Two survivors tried to flee but were shot. One soldier told another: "We have made a genocide like it was in Jasenovac in '41", a reference to a Second World War camp where thousands of Serbs were killed by Nazis and their Croatian collaborators.
The old man lay motionless throughout the day until the soldiers left. He wanted to wait until dark but feared the Serbs would send bulldozers to bury the bodies and "they would cut me to pieces alive". He saw two other survivors making for nearby bushes so "across these bodies I ran 15 yards, trampling over them. I went into the bramble. "Nobody else stood up. Everybody else was dead." Asked how many died that day he replied: "Between 1,000 and 1,500."
As the Bosnian Serb member of Bosnia's post-war tripartite presidency, Mr Krajisnik met President Clinton, Tony Blair, the Pope and President Chirac of France. Today he languishes in a UN detention unit inside a Dutch prison near The Hague: a potent reminder to Mr Karadzic, Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb army chief, and other suspected Bosnian war criminals that in their own land they are not safe.
There are 39 Bosnians being held in the unit; Serbs, Croats and Muslims. They are not segregated. The irony is that three ethnic groups unable to share a country live quite harmoniously together when confined in one small building.
Serb opposition leader arrested near Montenegro
BELGRADE (Reuters) - A deputy leader of the Serb opposition Christian Democrats was arrested Friday while trying to cross an internal Yugoslav border into Montenegro , the party said.
"Our vice president and well-known writer Svetislav Basara, was prevented from crossing into Montenegro after several copies of the party's newspaper were seized from him," a statement from the party said.
It added that police were detaining Basara with no explanation.
Serbia, an isolated senior partner in the Yugoslav two-republic federation, has been at odds with smaller, reformist Montenegro since 1997.
There has been almost no trade between Serbia and Montenegro for months, but Basara's arrest was the first case of a prominent Serbian opposition figure being detained at the border crossing.
Serbia's opposition and the Montenegrin leadership share similar views on the need for political and economic change.
Australian coup for Milosevic
The Guardian
Anger in US as Canberra falls out of line by telling new ambassador to present himself to Yugoslav leader
Kosovo: special report
Christopher Zinn in Sydney and Owen Bowcott
Saturday April 8, 2000
Australia has broken ranks with the west by sending a new ambassador to Yugoslavia and instructing him to hand his credentials to the head of state - President Slobodan Milosevic, who is charged with war crimes.
Charles Stewart, Canberra's new man, arrived in Belgrade on Tuesday. He replaces the outgoing ambassador, Chris Lamb, who left on February 15. A time and date for formal presentation of Mr Stewart's credentials is to be discussed with the Yugoslavian foreign ministry, a spokesman for the embassy said.
Canberra's decision has provoked anger in western capitals, where a policy of sanctions and diplomatic isolation are viewed as crucial in the attempt to make Serbia a pariah state and hasten the downfall of the Milosevic regime.
Madeleine Albright, the US secretary of state, is understood to have phoned Canberra to urge the administration to drop the idea.
The Foreign Office in London was reluctant to voice any concerns. A spokesman said: "Australian diplomatic representation is a matter for them. We are aware of it. It is not causing us any worry."
The only UN embargo in force against what remains of Yugoslavia - made up of Serbia and Montenegro - is a ban on arms sales. An EU ban on commercial flights was suspended in February; EU sanctions against oil sales and financial investments go on.
There is speculation in the Yugoslav capital that the improvement in relations with Canberra has its origins in missions that visited Belgrade to seek the release of three Australian workers from the aid organisation Care, who were arrested at the beginning of the Kosovo conflict and jailed on espionage charges.
Long meetings were held between leading figures in Australia's large Serbian expatriate community, government representatives and officials from Care, to win the men's release. Malcolm Fraser, a former Australian prime minister who is chairman of Care Australia, went to Belgrade several times to meet Mr Milosevic to lobby for the men's release; they were freed late last year.
Defending its present move, Canberra's department of foreign affairs and trade said the ambassador was needed to serve the large number of Australian citizens and dual nationals living in and visiting Yugoslavia; it did not signify support for the regime.
Mr Fraser insisted that no deal had been struck to secure the aid workers' surprise release: "There were no bar gains." Asked about other nations' refusal to renew diplomatic relations with Belgrade, he replied: "I could think of nothing worse for Australia than to be bound by European Union or Nato policy. We're an independent country, we need to make our own decisions."
EU and Nato states have so far avoided creating the spectacle of a western ambassador paying homage to Mr Milosevic, fearing it would boost his credibility. Mr Stewart's presentation of his credentials to the president is bound to be on Yugoslav TV and the press.
Other governments have avoided this by not rotating ambassadors or by bringing in a lower level of representative.
The US has no diplomatic post in Belgrade; the British, French and Germans have so-called interest sections hosted by other countries and confined to cultural, consular and commercial activities.
Italy is very keen to have a full ambassador to handle the substantial issues between Belgrade and Rome. It wants a deal where a new ambassador does not have to present him or herself to Mr Milosevic.
Under the Vienna convention, a new ambassador is only an ambassador-designate until his "letter of credence" is accepted by the head of state. So Mr Stewart will be Australia's new ambassador only when Mr Milosevic accepts him.
Milosevic's Media Muzzle
The Washington Post
By Anne Swardson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, April 8, 2000; Page A11
KRALJEVO, Yugoslavia –– It looked, briefly, as if power had returned to the people.
Every night for a week in mid-March, about 5,000 residents massed in the center square of this town 75 miles south of the capital, Belgrade, and demanded that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic give back what he had taken away: their local television station.
The channel went off the air March 17, after inspectors from the federal Telecommunications Ministry confiscated a key piece of its transmission equipment. Because TV Kraljevo was opposed to Milosevic, the confiscation was seen as a political move. So the Kraljevans sang songs, chanted slogans, waved signs and made speeches.
On March 25, the government relented and gave the device back. Broadcasts resumed. Since then, TV Kraljevo has been beaming its message to 800,000 viewers undisturbed. Unlike many other towns where Milosevic has cracked down on independent media, Kraljevo, it seemed, had won.
But journalists and opposition leaders here now say the real victor, at least in the long term, was Milosevic. As soon as the device was returned, turnout at the anti-Milosevic rallies plummeted. The opposition-led city government tried to keep up the protests, but Kraljevans, apparently satisfied their demands had been met, stayed home.
"That's why I think Milosevic will survive," said Bosana Milosavljevic, a journalist with the media group that controls TV Kraljevo and the local newspaper. "His strategy [of returning the equipment] might convince some people, and others will be too apathetic. There is no real threat to his regime."
In recent months, Milosevic has launched a crackdown against Yugoslavia's independent media that is fiercer than any since he came to power a decade ago. Equipment has been confiscated, signals have been jammed, fines imposed. Newspapers, magazines and TV stations have been taken over or shut down.
But the true genius of the campaign, many here say, is that it is not universal and in some cases, such as that of TV Kraljevo, it is not irreversible. Milosevic is managing to muzzle many opposition voices and at the same time win public approval when he occasionally allows an independent outlet to keep operating.
"He's trying to silence the opposition media, but not completely," said Panayotis Vlassopoulos, Greece's ambassador to Yugoslavia and a keen observer of the local scene. "He's playing an equilibrium game."
The crackdown comes ahead of elections anticipated this fall and is particularly significant because much of the independent media is controlled by, or is on the side of, Yugoslavia's opposition parties. The opposition holds political power in 34 cities in Yugoslavia, including Belgrade. In many cases, it either owns or controls television stations and newspapers in those cities. If the opposition media are silenced, opposition to Milosevic is effectively silenced.
Many of the reports in the independent press that offend the regime appear to be standard fare by normal journalistic standards. They discuss Yugoslavia's economic problems, for instance, or print statements from opposition leaders. The opposition media, which receive significant funding from abroad, also cover their own woes, such as the confiscation of TV Kraljevo's equipment, which has not been reported in the state-controlled press.
The federal Information Ministry did not respond to questions about the crackdown. But Information Minister Goran Matic was quoted in news reports this week as saying "stories about closing down media are lies and manipulation. . . . Just as nobody can drive his car without license plates, in the information sector nobody can broadcast programs without respecting regulations."
And in fact, in many of the cases where the government has taken action against opposition media, a technical violation of one law or another has occurred. TV Kraljevo, for instance, was broadcasting on Channel 48 without a license--because its application for a frequency had never been acknowledged. The station had to pay $11,300 in fines to restore service and get a license.
"Milosevic is quite legalistic. He actually likes to do things by the books, to maintain appearances," said Liljana Smajlovic, a reporter with the magazine NIN. "He likes to give the impression of a functioning society."
The outcome Milosevic prefers, she said, is self-censorship: When NIN was sued recently for printing an interview with a dissident law professor and lost, the judge told the magazine's editor he could have saved the magazine trouble and money by not publishing the offending material.
In addition to the government sanctions, there are more frightening, anonymous, attacks. Slavko Curuvija, owner of a newspaper and magazine, was slain in Belgrade last spring; the case has not been solved. Transmission equipment was stolen from the opposition Belgrade station Studio B in January. This week, an unexplained fire in a building housing independent radio and television stations in Novi Sad killed a woman and injured seven others.
A law passed in October 1998 gives the government a wide range of power over what the media can say and do, and broadcast media regulations also give it authority to grant or revoke licenses.
Since the law was passed, 47 fines totaling $555,000 have been imposed on Yugoslav media, according to the Independent Journalists Association of Serbia. Two newspapers have been shut down and one taken over, and the equipment of several television stations has been confiscated.
"Offices of independent media organizations have been visited on a daily basis by financial police as a form of additional pressure," the journalists' association said in a March 25 report. "Their editors and staff are being continuously anonymously threatened or directly intimidated." To make it particularly nerve-racking, the rules are unevenly applied.
"You publish something one day and you think you'll be fined and aren't. The next day you publish a weather forecast and you get fined," said Gordana Susa, president of the association.
The editor in chief of Blic, Yugoslavia's largest-circulation newspaper with about 220,000 copies daily, cited a long list of ways the government has tried to crack down on his paper. Blic has been fined repeatedly. Its supply of domestic newsprint has been cut off--after prices for it were doubled by the government--and it has been denied a license to import more newsprint. The government forced Blic to roll back a price increase, made it reduce its ad charges by 30 percent and raised its fee to print at the government-owned printing plant.
"Their first desire is to drain as much money from us as they can," said the editor, Veselin Simonovic. "Then they want to force us to have such losses that we have to close down the newspaper and they can say they didn't force us to do it. I think this is the strongest oppression of the independent media since I've been working in it, which is 15 years."
So far, Blic is surviving by reducing the number of pages in each edition. Blic also hopes to start selling a separate package of ads with each paper to boost revenue.
"If the government goes after that," Simonovic said, "we will think of something else."
Young radicals show a clenched fist to Milosevic's state machine
The Guardian
Activists' peaceful message could marginalise Serbia's divided opposition
Nick Thorpe in Belgrade
Friday April 7, 2000
Along the walls of the Plateau, a student area just off the main pedestrian street in the heart of Belgrade, three young men with a bucket of glue, a paint-roller, and a pile of posters are moving rapidly along a wall.
On each poster is a clenched fist, the word Otpor, which means Resistance, and the slogan "Because I love Serbia."
Otpor, which was formed by a group of 15 friends at Belgrade University in 1998, has grown into a national network of activists with a simple message of resistance to President Slobodan Milosevic and his government.
It is the latest star in the opposition sky over Serbia - but one that is growing in importance so rapidly, that it threatens to eclipse the others.
It now claims between 5,000 and 10,000 activists in 102 towns across Serbia.
It has no members, only "activists", many of whom are still at secondary school. They shun the idea of leaders, and seek peaceful confrontation with the authorities by spraying graffiti, leafleting public places and staging colourful events, such as street theatre.
A basic condition of joining is the willingness to be arrested, and the authorities have been swift to oblige. There have been 300 arrests and 9,000 hours in police custody for activists so far, they say proudly.
A more sinister development is physical attacks on activists by groups of well-organised men in black leather jackets, who frequently disrupt opposition gatherings.
"We do not just represent resistance to Milosevic's regime," says Milja Jovanovic, a Belgrade activist. "But resistance to this whole . . . chaos that's been on our shoulders for the last 10 years."
We are sitting in Otpor's Belgrade HQ, a first-floor flat decorated mainly with the stencilled fist. Mobile and landline phones are ringing, and eager young men and women are bent over computer screens.
Ms Jovanovic has pigtails, wears the obligatory Otpor T-shirt, and is, at 25, old for the movement. The average age of activists is 20 to 21.
One year after the Nato air strikes, the authorities are keen to remind the public of Serbia's resistance to "the Nato aggressors" and to paint their domestic political opponents as Nato puppets. A rival poster campaign has begun in Belgrade, showing the Otpor fist clutching a wodge of dollars, beside pictures of the US secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, and the former Kosovo Liberation Army leader Hashim Thaci.
Otpor's response is typically bold and provocative - to stage a commemoration for all the Serbian policemen who died in Kosovo.
But the actions of Otpor activists have also won them friends.
"Otpor now has a significant role in the political life of Serbia, particularly when we're faced here with such a weak and divided opposition," said Bratislav Grubacic, a respected political commentator. "Otpor is kind of a virus that might spread all over Serbia."
The next united opposition rally in Belgrade is due on April 14, although preparations were marred as usual by bitter recriminations between the two main opposition groups, the Serbian Renewal Movement, led by Vuk Draskovic, and the Alliance for Change.
Otpor activists have sharply criticised the opposition as well as the government.
"They're very young and radical towards everyone, including the opposition," said Ognjen Pribecevic, adviser to Mr Draskovic, "but their main target is Milosevic, and we accept this."
And for all the radicalism, the movement's efforts will soon swing to that most dull and necessary of democratic tasks - trying to persuade the electorate, especially the young, to turn out and vote in the local and federal elections due later this year. Otpor activists will not be standing themselves, but they will urge voters to choose opposition parties.
•Opposition councillors occupied a town hall in the northern Serbian town of Zrenjanin to demand punishment for the abductors of a colleague, a councillor said yesterday.
In a telephone call from the town hall, Bojan Kostres, of the opposition League of Social Democrats, said the councillors would remain in place until their demands were met.
They also wanted the reinstatement of two colleagues who were stripped of their mandate. The abducted councillor was freed after missing an important council session.
Serb Wounded in Shoot-Out With NATO
The New York Times
By The Associated Press
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (AP) -- NATO peacekeepers clashed with pitchfork-wielding Kosovo Serbs trying to attack a monastery where moderates who agreed to participate in an interim U.N. government had taken refuge.
A Serb man was shot in the leg when peacekeepers opened fire late Thursday on a crowd of protesters trying to break through a line of Swedish peacekeepers guarding the Gracanica monastery, said Maj. Philip Anido, a spokesman for the peacekeepers in Pristina.
The 16th-century monastery in the all-Serb village of Gracanica, about five miles southeast of Pristina, has become the unofficial base of the moderate Serbian National Council, led by Bishop Artijeme.
The council is seen by many of Kosovo's few remaining Serbs as pro-Western for agreeing Sunday to participate in the U.N.-led power-sharing body that includes ethnic Albanian and international representatives.
The injured Serb, who was not identified, was taken to a Russian military field hospital in the nearby town of Kosovo Polje for treatment. No further information was immediately available.
A Kosovo Serb man was arrested in the incident and the town was sealed off. Afterward, reporters saw several vehicles full of Serbs being escorted out of Gracanica, headed toward Pristina.
Since alliance troops entered the province last June after a 78-day NATO bombing campaign ended a Serbian crackdown on ethnic Albanians, thousands of Serbs have fled the province out of fear of revenge attacks.
Radical Serbs have increasingly accused the more moderate members of the dwindling minority of siding with the West.
The moderate Serbs are expected to attend the first meeting of the interim government as observers on March 12 when the top U.N. official for Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, will be present.
Opposition Serb Activist Abducted
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP) - An opposition activist was abducted today in northern Serbia, shortly before a municipal assembly session in which he and other deputies planned to oust a mayor loyal to President Slobodan Milosevic.
The League of Social Democrats of Vojvodina, a strong opposition faction, said Jan Svetlik, a deputy in the local assembly of the northern town of Zrenjanin, was taken from his home by three unidentified men.
The abduction occurred just hours before a session of Zrenjanin's municipal assembly, where Svetlik had recently secured a majority of votes to retake control of the town's government, said League official Emil Fejzulahu.
Fejzulahu said the abduction was a ``brutal way to decrease the number'' of opposition activists in the assembly and prevent the ouster of the current mayor, a member of the ruling Socialists.
The League and several other opposition parties had won 1996 local elections in Zrenjanin, 45 miles north of the capital Belgrade. But they lost control after the 1998 defection of four members who switched allegiance to Milosevic's Socialists, the party that dominates the central government and much of the country.
Recently, however, the four defectors announced they would return, bringing with them two Socialist deputies who decided to switch sides.
Today's session began with protests by the opposition deputies, who demanded Svetlik's immediate release.
The opposition also protested that the Socialist-dominated Zrenjanin government stripped their two defectors of their position as assembly members. The move was apparently meant to further diminish the opposition's narrow majority in the local legislature.
A crowd of several hundred opposition supporters gathered on the town's main square in protest.
US troops fled Serb mob and lost prisoner
The Guardian
Jonathan Steele
Thursday April 6, 2000
American troops were forced to release a suspect, abandon vehicles and trek over a mountain path to escape stone-throwing Serbs in the latest humiliation suffered by international peacekeepers in Kosovo.
As full details emerged yesterday of the worst clash involving US troops since they arrived last June, it became clear that Tuesday's incident in an area close to the Macedonian border amounted to a fiasco. It also showed how well the Serbs have set up a network of vigilantes who can mobilise crowds at short notice.
The trouble started after US military police and Polish troops entered the isolated Serb village of Sevce to search the home of a man detained for illegal possession of two hand grenades. His neighbours quickly pulled logs across the only road out of Sevce and fighting broke out.
The Americans called up reinforcements but before they could arrive were forced to abandon their vehicles and trek through a narrow canyon to the next settlement, Jacinze.
"There were Serbs up on the sides of the canyon throwing rocks," Major Debbie Allen, a US spokeswoman, said. The mile-and-a-half walk took the soldiers two hours.
At Jacinze the peacekeepers joined up with the reinforcements who had arrived by helicopter, and there was fighting with some 300 Serbs. The peacekeepers fired rubber bullets and used stun grenades and dogs. In the melee, a Serb woman dragged the arrested man away from the troops. "The man escaped," another US military spokesman said yesterday, adding that the villages were now calm. The abandoned military vehicles and equipment were retrieved.
The incident follows a clash last month when stone-throwing Serbs, organised by men with walkie-talkies, forced US troops to cut short an arms search in northern Mitrovice. That was in the French sector of Kosovo, and the Pentagon later said that US troops would be confined to their own region in south-eastern Kosovo, except in emergencies.
Tension has been high between the Serbs and Americans because the US led the Nato air strikes, but there is mounting suspicion that the Serbs want to highlight the chaos in Kosovo during the US presidential campaign. George W Bush, the Republican front-runner, has hinted that he might withdraw US troops.
US efforts to restrain armed former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army from crossing into southern Serbia have also suffered a set-back. An agreement brokered by US diplomats with Hashim Thaci, the political leader of the now dissolved KLA, has broken down, and Albanian paramilitaries have again been spotted in Serbia by US monitors.
The gunmen claim they are defending Albanians from the threat of Serb repression, but their avowed aim is to join the region to Kosovo.
Violence in Kosovo
Serbs, 11 NATO Peacekeepers, Injured in Riot
By Alison Mutler
The Associated Press
P R I S T I N A, Yugoslavia, April 4 — Kosovo Serbs angry over the arrest of a Serb for illegal weapons possession clashed today with NATO peacekeepers, leaving 11 Americans and one Pole injured, the U.S. military said.
The independent Yugoslav news agency Beta said 14 Serbs were also hurt, including 10 who were struck by rubber bullets fired in an attempt to break up a Serbian crowd.
However, the U.S. military said it could not confirm the number of Serbs injured in the melee — reportedly involving shoving, clubs, dogs and rubber bullets — which began Tuesday in a southeastern mountain region near the Macedonian border.
Eight Hour Confrontation
At the Pentagon, spokesman Air Force Lt. Col. Vic Warzinski said the confrontation lasted about eight hours before the crowd of Serbs who confronted a U.S. unit was dispersed and the U.S. and Polish troops left the scene.
Warzinski said the most serious injury to U.S. troops was a broken hand. A U.S. military spokesman in Kosovo, Capt. Russell Berg, said the other injuries were contusions and abrasions.
It was the highest number of injuries in a single incident to U.S. peacekeepers in Kosovo so far. The clash also marked the first major incident between Serbs and NATO peacekeepers since a tense situation in the enclave of Kosovska Mitrovica calmed down last month.
The NATO force is devoted largely to policing and disarming militants. But nine months after NATO’s 78-day bombing campaign forced an end to the Serb crackdown in Kosovo, and the pullout of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s forces, new violence in the region has thwarted efforts to establish normality in the Serbian province.
According to a U.S. statement, the trouble started when American military police and Polish soldiers of the 18th Air Assault Battalion seized two hand grenades in a Serbian house in the village of Sevce, about 40 miles south of Pristina.
About 150 Serbs surrounded the house and refused to allow the troops to leave.
Beta said several thousand Serbs from four villages in southern Kosovo set up the barricades after peacekeepers detained a Serb man in Sevce and took him to Camp Bondsteel, the main U.S. base in Kosovo.
According to the Beta report, Serbs from the villages of Gotovusa, Jazince, Sevce and Strpce massed near roadblocks a short distance away set up by Polish troops serving in the American sector, demanding that the man be released.
U.S. troops later brought him back to the barricade in attempt to ease the tension, saying he would be released in 48 hours under normal procedure, according to Beta.
Women Tried to Free the Man
Beta said, however, that several women attempted to wrest the man from the soldiers. The peacekeepers then released attack dogs to try to disperse the crowd. The villagers responded with clubs and dogs of their own, Beta said.
Beta said four Serbs and one peacekeeper were injured at Sevce and 10 Serbs were injured by rubber bullets fired at the barricade.
“Reinforcement units were sent to assist in dispersing the crowd,” the U.S. statement said. “Currently, 11 U.S. soldiers, one Polish soldier, and one translator have been treated for non-life threatening injuries. The number of injured civilians has not been confirmed.”
The statement gave no further details and no indication whether the injuries occurred at the house or the roadblock.
An estimated 10,000 Serbs live in the mountain area near the border, making it the second largest concentration of Serbs in Kosovo after Kosovska Mitrovica.
Peacemaking Efforts in Jeopardy
April 4 — NATO chief George Robertson said today that the alliance’s effort to instill peace in Kosovo is on the “razor’s edge between success … or failure” and he urged continued endeavors to rebuild the region ravaged by ethnic cleansing and war.
“A huge amount has been achieved to bring normality and peace and decency back to Kosovo,” Robertson said in a speech on the 51st anniversary of NATO’s founding. “But more, much more, still needs to be done.”
Since the 78-day NATO air war ended Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s systematic campaign of repression against ethnic Albanians in Kosovar last year, rebels have been disarmed, houses are being rebuilt, children have returned to school and police patrol the streets, Robertson told members of the news media at a luncheon.
“We are still on that razor’s edges between success … or failure — failure of political will, a failure to put in the right resources,” he said. “We have to succeed … for a whole series of reasons but most of all because we want to create a model … for what the international community can do in stopping evil and rebuilding a healthy, ethnic, democratic society.”
The United Nations took charge of running Kosovo after the war led to the withdrawal of troops loyal to Milosevic.
Critics have complained that the whole effort is moving too slowly, has failed to achieve ethnic peace and that Milosevic is still in power. Violence has flared and people are frustrated over a lack of progress in bringing those responsible for war atrocities to justice, among other things.
Robertson said authorities are working to “gradually, one by one” arrest those indicted for war crimes.
“It does take time because a lot of people are in hiding, a lot of people are in exile,” he said. “But we will arrest them when the time is right. … We will continue relentlessly.”
— The Associated Press
New York Times correspondent banned from Serbia
NEW YORK (AP) _ The New York Times' correspondent in Belgrade has been banned from Yugoslavia for a year after entering the country without a visa, the newspaper's foreign editor said Tuesday.
Also banned in addition to correspondent Carlotta Gall was a photographer working for the Times, Andrew Edward Testa, said foreign editor Andrew Rosenthal.
"We're asking the Yugoslav government to reconsider this and rescind it," Rosenthal said.
Gall, a British citizen based in Belgrade, had been working in Kosovo when her visa expired more than a month ago, Rosenthal said. The Yugoslav government declined to renew it, he said.
She and Testa had traveled to Montenegro, which is part of the Yugoslav federation but apparently imposed no visa restriction. On Sunday, they were headed back to Kosovo by car when they missed a turn on a road.
They mistakenly entered Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic, where they were arrested, Rosenthal said. A magistrate accused them of entering Serbia without a Yugoslav visa, issued the ban and imposed a fine of about $160 for each.
Gall was released and allowed to travel back to Kosovo, said Rosenthal, and "she remains our Yugoslav correspondent." He did not immediately know Testa's whereabouts.
Bombed Bridges Divide Serbian City, Government
The Washington Post
By Anne Swardson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, April 4, 2000; Page A25
NOVI SAD, Yugoslavia –– When the weekend weather is fine, residents here flock to the Danube River to stroll along the banks, play with their children and look at what NATO wrought during the bombing last year.
Huge pieces of three ruined bridges still lie in the water where they fell. The only means of crossing is a pontoon bridge, and the line of cars waiting to get on can stretch for a mile.
"We are suffering because of those who have chosen evil," said Mira Orcic, 60, who was returning home via the bridge after planting seeds in her family's garden across the river. The walk had taken an hour and a half.
For Yugoslavia, there are no greater symbols of the damage caused by NATO airstrikes than the three bridges of Novi Sad, once lifelines within a bifurcated city. Their destruction inconveniences tens of thousands of residents every day. Countries from Germany to Romania face hundreds of millions of dollars in losses because no ships or barges can pass through the debris here.
But the bridges also highlight another of Yugoslavia's tragedies: That they remain destroyed and the river blocked more than a year after the first span was destroyed April 1, 1999, is due in large part not to NATO or the West but to the political divisions that wrack this country.
Novi Sad and the Serbian region in which it lies, Vojvodina, are run by political parties opposed to Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. The government of Serbia, Yugoslavia's dominant republic, is controlled by Milosevic loyalists. Quarreling, jealousy and maneuvering between the two sides are the biggest reasons for the lack of action in Novi Sad.
"The bridges are being used in a political battle between city hall and the regime," said Slobodan Beljanski, a local lawyer. "Regardless of which side you are on, you can see people suffer."
City officials say they were the first to try to rebuild the bridges. They came up with architecturally meritorious designs and planned to remove debris, said City Council Chairman Predrag Filipov. But the city doesn't have the $100 million to reconstruct all three bridges, and the Serbian government has refused to fund the city's plans.
Serbian officials also have blocked the city's efforts to reach beyond Yugoslavia to help get the bridges rebuilt. City officials had arranged to bring in Austrian engineers, for instance, but they were denied visas by the Yugoslav government in Belgrade.
City officials hope to get money from Europe, and they received some positive signs from a Balkan donor conference in Brussels this week. Bodo Hombach, coordinator of the international Stability Pact for the Balkans, said European financing is available to replace the pontoon bridge with a "humanitarian bridge." But the funds have not been definitely committed.
In the meantime, as elections approach, Milosevic and his allies in the Serbian government want Novi Sad citizens to see that they can replace the bridges. So Serbian officials recently began building a temporary drawbridge near the pontoon bridge.
"We don't need technical assistance," said Milos Bosaragin of Serbia's Information Ministry. "Our engineers and experts are doing the job without any problem."
Meanwhile, removal of the debris, estimated to cost $24 million, is not on Serbia's list of priorities. "Our starting point is that the Danube should be cleaned by those who blocked it," Bosaragin said. "We expect the European Union to pay all the costs of taking out the debris. We are not capable of undertaking this investment."
The EU is studying a proposal to pay for the cleanup and a decision is expected shortly.
In the meantime, the 350,000 citizens of Novi Sad make do. Before the bombing, this was a city that lived on both sides of the Danube. Residents of Novi Sad proper, on the south, crossed to the north to their country cottages and small gardens. Many of the 50,000 who live on the north side, an area called Petrovaradin, commuted to work in Novi Sad.
"Only after the bridges were destroyed did I understand how much I was connected to the other side of the river," said Orcic after her long walk. "My legs ache."
Still, she said, the pontoon bridge is an improvement from the months immediately after the bombing, when people could cross only on a barge-like ferry pushed by two motorboats. It was so crowded passengers occasionally fell off; the wait for one could last hours.
Transit wasn't the only thing halted when the bridges were bombed. The spans had also carried electric, gas and water lines. Novi Sad was without running drinking water for months.
Olivera Kakucka, 39, now spends three hours a day traveling from her home in Novi Sad to her clerical job at a hospital across the river and back.
"I'm sad because I spend less time with my kids and my family," she said. "I don't know who should clean it up. But when I go to work and see the wrecked bridges, I ask, 'Why did they have to destroy them?' "
The purpose of destroying all three bridges was, in part, "to have a psychological impact on the Milosevic regime and the military," said one NATO diplomat. At the time, NATO said the bridges could have been used as military supply lines to Serb-led Yugoslav forces in Kosovo, far to the south, but the main goal was "a sense of disruption in the overall command, control and communication systems, and a certain degree of military pressure by taking the conflict to Yugoslavia as a whole," he said.
That rationale is particularly galling to people here because Vojvodina has long opposed Milosevic. Like Kosovo, it was a fairly autonomous province of Serbia until Milosevic stripped it of local authority in 1989. It also is ethnically mixed and, say many here, tolerant of minorities.
"We don't understand why the people of Novi Sad had to pay the highest price for Milosevic's policies," said Dorde Subotic, spokesman for the Reform Party of Vojvodina. "We are very bitter."
Down at the river, Sanja Mastic and her husband were eating McDonald's hamburgers, wearing shirts with logos in English and drinking Coca-Cola as they surveyed the wreckage one recent day.
"To be honest, we felt really stupid when we realized what we were doing, drinking and eating these things and looking at this sight," Mastic said. "You can't escape American influence. We can forgive, but we can't forget."
Serb Man Killed by Leftover NATO Cluster Bomb
NIS, Yugoslavia (Reuters) - A man died Tuesday when he hit a leftover NATO cluster bomb while digging in his garden in southern Serbia, police said.
Vladimir Jovanovic, 70, died in the explosion, Nis police said. The bomb was dropped by NATO in May during its 11-week air campaign against Yugoslavia's repression of ethnic Albanians in the Kosovo province.
Jovanovic's son Ljubisa told the state news agency Tanjug that his father was wounded in a NATO attack 11 months ago in the same area.
US fears terrorist attack in Kosovo
BBC News
By Nick Wood in Kosovo
US officials have come under criticism over a raid by K-For military police on an Islamic relief organisation in Kosovo last weekend.
The police, who were acting on a tip-off from US officials, raided a house rented by the Saudi Joint Relief Committee (SJRC).
The operation followed fears of a possible terrorist attack on the US office in the province.
US security officials say they believe members of the SJRC are linked with Osama bin Laden, the man suspected of being behind the attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
In a separate incident British soldiers blew up a suspect car belonging to an employee of the charity.
The owner had stuck an SJRC sticker to his windscreen.
Neither incident revealed any evidence that could link the group with any terrorist activity.
Suspicious photos
K-For officials say the operations were part of increased security measures introduced after two members of the group were supposedly seen taking photos near the US office and K-For headquarters in Pristina.
New vehicle checkpoints have been introduced in the area, and visitors to both compounds are obliged to enter on foot.
It is not the first time the US officials here have raised concern about the charity.
Before Christmas a warning was given of a possible threat to US citizens in Kosovo.
Secret document
In a document seen by the BBC in Pristina, US officials called on the UN police force in the province to undertake open surveillance of the group.
Marked "Secret: US office only - Release to UNMIK" the report names two former members of the charity.
It claims Adel Muhammad Sadiq Bin Kazem, and Wa'el Hamza Jalaidan, the Committee's former Director, are "associates of Osama bin Laden" and that Mr Jalaidan helped Mr bin Laden "move money and men to and from the Balkans".
The claims are being strongly denied by the group.
A spokesman for the group says they were "stunned" by the raids, and are awaiting an explanation from K-For.
They have also offered to open up all their files for K-For or police officials to look at.
Bad publicity
The Relief Committee works as an umbrella body for several Saudi NGO's including the Saudi Red Crescent, and has a multi million-dollar budget partly financed by the Saudi government.
It works with the UNHCR and the World Food Programme, and has worked with K-For on the rebuilding of several schools in the province.
The group's Assistant Director, Faisal Alshami, said he was disappointed at what he saw was an attempt to paint his organisation in a bad light.
"We have spent a lot of money here, trying to help people, we really hope this is not an attempt to curtail our work" he said.
Privately some K-For and UN police officials say the US is highly concerned about "force protection", or avoiding US casualties, in the run-up to presidential elections later this autumn, and is reacting to even the slightest threats.
Key Bosnian Serb Figure Held in War Crimes Case
The Washington Post
By Charles Trueheart
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, April 4, 2000; Page A01
PARIS, April 3 – French-led NATO troops burst into the Bosnian home of Momcilo Krajisnik, a former key Bosnian Serb leader, and arrested him early today on charges of genocide, making him the highest-ranking Bosnian Serb taken into custody in connection with Bosnian war atrocities.
The seizure of Krajisnik could for the first time give war crimes investigators a window into the highest reaches of the wartime Bosnian Serb leadership, which has been accused of displacing and executing thousands of Bosnian Muslims in an "ethnic cleansing" campaign that became a notorious hallmark of the 1992-95 conflict.
Krajisnik, who was flown to The Hague to stand trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, was speaker of the Bosnian Serb parliament during the war and later served as the Serbian member of Bosnia's tripartite presidency. As such, he had direct links to Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb president, who is still wanted by the war crimes tribunal, and to Gen. Ratko Mladic, who led Bosnian Serb military forces and is also on the tribunal's wanted list.
"Next to Karadzic himself, he's the most significant person we could hope to arrest," said Graham Blewitt, the tribunal's deputy prosecutor, in a telephone interview.
According to witnesses and news service reports from the scene, French and other Bosnia-based NATO troops arrested Krajisnik early this morning after surrounding his house in Pale, 15 miles southwest of Sarajevo, and blasting open the door with explosives.
"They took my dad away," Krajisnik's son Milos, 21, told the Associated Press.
"If they had only rung the bell I would have opened the door, but they threw a bomb," Krajisnik's 80-year-old father, Sretko, told the AP.
Milos Krajisnik said NATO troops tied up him and his 19-year-old brother and turned their faces to floor during the capture. The official Yugoslav news agency, Tanjug, said Krajisnik, a 54-year-old widower, was led away in his bare feet, clad only in pajamas. No injuries were reported in the apprehension, which brings to 39 the number of Bosnian war crimes suspects in custody after surrendering or being arrested on warrants issued by the tribunal. Fourteen have been sentenced.
Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, who helped forge the 1995 Dayton accords that ended the war, hailed the arrest as a significant development in postwar Bosnia, which has remained in a de facto split among Muslim, Serb and Croat parastates.
"This removes the most visible public opponent" of the peace process in Bosnia, said Holbrooke. Krajisnik "is a racist, he is a separatist, and he supports murderers. . . . He was a living symbol that you can get away with murder."
Bosnian Serb leaders immediately criticized the capture, the Reuters news agency reported from Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. The vice president of Bosnia's Serb Republic, Mirko Sarovic, called it a blow to normalization among Bosnia's three ethnic communities on the eve of local elections scheduled for Saturday. In Belgrade, capital of Serb-led Yugoslavia, the Foreign Ministry said the arrest showed that NATO "continues its policy of genocide" against the Serbs.
Karadzic, who maintains a low profile in the Serb Republic, made no comment. Neither did Mladic, who was seen last week at a soccer game in Belgrade.
The high-profile arrest reflects the tribunal's tightening focus on prosecuting fewer suspects but more important ones – those accused of orchestrating mass killings rather than the men who pulled the triggers. Just a month ago, for instance, Bosnian Croat general Tihomir Blaskic was sentenced to a prison term of 45 years.
Krajisnik's "will be the biggest trial we've ever had to prepare for," Blewitt said. "The case we'll be presenting against Krajisnik is effectively the case we'd be presenting against Karadzic, although the indictment covers a narrower period of time, from July 1991 to December 1992."
To prove that Krajisnik was responsible for genocide, the gravest crime under the tribunal's jurisdiction, prosecutors will have to show that his actions were carried out with the explicit purpose of destroying an ethnic group – in this case the Bosnian Muslims – in whole or in part. Asked if prosecutors had evidence of genocide that constitutes a smoking gun, Blewitt said: "Yes."
"This is good news for justice and good news for the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina," said NATO Secretary General George Robertson, using the formal name for Bosnia. "To those individuals who remain at large, I will repeat . . . the net is closing."
The arrest was made on Bosnian Serb territory controlled by French forces just as France was weathering a new round of criticism that it has shown little zeal in detaining war crimes suspects there. All but a few of the arrests by NATO-led troops in the former war zones have been carried out in the British- and U.S.-controlled sectors.
Krajisnik had been the subject of a sealed indictment since Feb. 21, but his onetime power and stature had made him a likely target of tribunal prosecutors. "He was present at every meeting where political and military actions were decided upon that resulted in deportations, illegal arrests, ethnic cleansing and the deaths of thousands of Bosnians," said Paul Risley, a spokesman for chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte.
Like Karadzic, Krajisnik is charged with a wide range of offenses covered by the tribunal's mandate: genocide; complicity in genocide; crimes against humanity; violations of the laws and customs of war; and "grave breaches" of the post-World War II Geneva Conventions, which codified what are collectively known as war crimes.
Krajisnik was known as "Mr. No" because of his outspoken resistance to various peace proposals aimed at ending the war. Ultimately, he was a signatory to the Dayton accords. After the war, Krajisnik served in the rotating three-member Bosnian presidency and assumed much of the power that Karadzic was forced to relinquish in 1996 after his indictment by the tribunal.
An economist by training, Krajisnik also had been an executive of Bosnia's largest company, Energoinvest. In the years before the dissolution of the old six-republic Yugoslav federation, he served a brief jail sentence for embezzling state funds; during and after the war, he was alleged to have been active in the black market.
"One assumes the defense for this guy will be aggressive," Blewitt said. "We're talking high leadership here."
Special correspondent Colum Lynch at the United Nations contributed to this report.
Serbia Delays Sensitive Kosovo Albanian Trial
By Dragan Stankovic
NIS, Yugoslavia (Reuters) - A defense lawyer's request for more time prompted a Serbian court Monday to postpone a sensitive trial of two ethnic Albanians on charges linked to an alleged massacre of Serbs in Kosovo in 1998.
The trial, based on accusations which Belgrade has said proved its crackdown in the province was justified, is now due to open Thursday in the southern city of Nis.
The defendants, Luan Mazreku and Bekim Mazreku, are among a total of 20 people alleged to have taken part in the kidnapping, torture and killing of Serbs in the village of Klecka, southwest of Kosovo's capital Pristina.
Luan Mazreku's new attorney, Boro Nikolic, said Monday he needed more time to prepare the defense as he had only taken on the case Sunday.
In 1998, Serbian police said they found a brick-made furnace where bodies were allegedly burned with quicklime after they captured the village from separatist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guerrillas several months into the conflict.
Police took reporters to the scene shortly after the capture, in August, and stood by while Bekim Mazreku confessed he took part in a firing squad executing 10 people he said he had thought were Serbs.
A Kosovo Albanian human rights group called for an international investigation, saying there was no proof. A Finnish team of forensic investigators visited the site in late 1998. Their findings have not been made public.
Belgrade called on the international community to condemn the incident and have ever since complained that it, and another two cases of alleged mass murder of Serbs, were not treated with the same gravity as alleged killings of Albanians by police.
``Bekim Will Tell The Truth''
``Bekim told me he would defend himself by telling the truth,'' Bekim Mazreku's lawyer, Cedomir Nikolic, told Reuters, adding the defense would deny the prosecution on all accounts. ''Bekim is going to deny he committed the crimes.''
Monday's trial postponement was the second since mid-March, when the court said it had had to delay the trial after the two accused had given conflicting statements and had to be given separate defense lawyers.
A Belgrade lawyer monitoring the case said Bekim Mazreku and his namesake -- the two are apparently not closely related -- were not charged with actual execution, but with crimes against a Serb boy and girl among the Klecka group.
They are also charged with killing two compatriots in a different incident and attacks on Serbian police.
``The charge sheet says the defendants, both born in 1978, killed two ethnic Albanians, raped and tortured a Serb girl age between 12 and 15 and cut off an ear of an eight-year-old Serb boy,'' said the lawyer, who declined to be named.
The lawyer said the indictment did not mention Bekim's confession, but added that all evidence and statements would be heard in the trial. The lawyer said the defendants could change statements given in police custody.
In previous trials of Kosovo Albanians, the accused have rejected previous confessions, saying the had been given under duress.
If found guilty on all counts, the two defendants would face up to 20 years in jail.
Kosovo Albanians and the international community have accused Serbian forces of massacres and ethnic cleansing of the province's Albanian majority, especially during NATO bombings that forced Belgrade to let international peacekeepers in.
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and four of his closest allies were indicted last May by the U.N. war crimes tribunal for atrocities their forces committed in the province.
Most Wanted UN War Crimes Suspects
By The Associated Press,
RADOVAN KARADZIC: Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has been indicted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for crimes against humanity and violating the customs of war during the Bosnian conflict.
In 1995, he was also charged with genocide for masterminding the slaughter of more than 6,000 Muslims in the U.N.-protected Srebrenica enclave in northeastern Bosnia.
During the 1992-95 war, Karadzic served as the first Bosnian Serb president. He was replaced by his deputy, Biljana Plavsic, in 1996 and was last seen in public that September.
He fled his stronghold village of Pale, east of Sarajevo, and is believed to be hiding somewhere in Bosnia, in the French-controlled southeastern zone.
NATO-led peacekeepers in Bosnia have been reluctant to go after him, because he is reportedly heavily protected by armed personal security guards. Belgrade sources close to Karadzic say he has lost weight.
Before the war, Karadzic was a psychiatrist in Sarajevo.
If arrested, he could implicate Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who is widely blamed for instigating the Croatian and Bosnian wars.
RATKO MLADIC: Former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic has also been indicted by the U.N. tribunal for crimes against humanity, violating the customs of war and genocide during the Bosnian war.
In 1991 he led Yugoslav troops in Knin, Croatia and one year later, assumed command of the forces of the Yugoslav army's 2nd military district, which effectively became the Bosnian Serb army.
Mladic led the Bosnian Serb military for the duration of the war, under Karadzic, with whom he shares an indictment for genocide linked to the massacre at Srebrenica.
He was ousted from his post in December 1996, and remains at large. Mladic has frequently been seen in Serbia, most recently last Tuesday, when he showed up - flanked by eight bodyguards - at a soccer match between Yugoslavia and China.
It is widely believed that Mladic lives in Belgrade's Dedinje district, where Milosevic also has his home.
Serbian ethnic cleansing scare was a fake, says general
The Sunday Times
John Goetz, Berlin
and Tom Walker
A REPORT purporting to show that Belgrade planned the systematic ethnic cleansing of Kosovo's entire Albanian population was faked, a German general has claimed.
The plan, known as Operation Horseshoe, was revealed by Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, on April 6 last year, almost two weeks after Nato started bombing Serbia. German public opinion about the Luftwaffe's participation in the airstrikes was divided at the time.
Horseshoe - or "Potkova", as the Germans said it was known in Belgrade - became a staple of Nato briefings. It was presented as proof that President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia had long planned the expulsion of Albanians. James Rubin, the American state department spokesman, cited it only last week to justify Nato's bombardment.
However, Heinz Loquai, a retired brigadier general, has claimed in a new book on the war that the plan was fabricated from run-of-the-mill Bulgarian intelligence reports.
Loquai, who now works for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), has accused Rudolf Scharping, the German defence minister, of obscuring the origins of Operation Horseshoe.
"The facts to support its existence are at best terribly meagre," he told The Sunday Times. "I have come to the conclusion that no such operation ever existed. The criticism of the war, which had grown into a fire that was almost out of control, was completely extinguished by Operation Horseshoe."
Scharping reported in his wartime diary that he had received the intelligence report on Horseshoe from Fischer. But according to Die Woche, the German news weekly, the report was a general analysis by a Bulgarian intelligence agency of Serbian behaviour in the war.
Loquai has claimed that the German defence ministry turned a vague report from Sofia into a "plan", and even coined the name Horseshoe. Die Woche has reported that maps broadcast around the world as proof of Nato's information were drawn up at the German defence headquarters in Hardthöhe.
The Bulgarian report concluded that the goal of the Serbian military was to destroy the Kosovo Liberation Army, and not to expel the entire Albanian population, as was later argued by Scharping and the Nato leadership. Loquai also pointed to a fundamental flaw in the German account: it named the operation Potkova, which is the Croatian word for horseshoe. The Serbian for horseshoe is Potkovica. "A state prosecutor would never think of going to trial with the amount of evidence available to the German defence ministry," said Loquai.
Nato sources rejected Loquai's claims, but admitted it was impossible to prove the origins of the Horseshoe story. "There's never any absolute certainty about these things," said one source. "But the idea that there was nothing pre-arranged is counter-intuitive.
"Look at the speed with which the Serbs moved. It was systematic. Until we get into Belgrade and start tearing the files apart, we will never be certain - and that's never going to happen."
In Belgrade, government sources said several Yugoslav army officers had dismissed Operation Horseshoe as part of Nato's propaganda war.
'Racist' Newspaper Riles U.N. In Kosovo
The Washington Post
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, April 3, 2000; Page A08
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia – Confronted by chaos, confusion, frustration and grief every day in postwar Kosovo, ethnic Albanian residents can walk to a news stand and find an easy way to make sense of it all.
Through the pages of a paper called Bota Sot, readers can enter a philosophically tidy, hate-filled world. It is a place where every Serb is born a demon, the concept of ethnic tolerance is a sure path to renewed repression by Belgrade, and Kosovo's foreign overseers are conspiring against all ethnic Albanians.
All Serbs "who are living today in Kosovo are criminals," the newspaper wrote last month. "Retaliation is a natural instinct," it said in January. Foreigners running the province are operating "in solidarity and open cooperation with the Serbian criminals," it asserted, with NATO peacekeepers even going so far as to stage attacks on Serbs so that the blame will be directed at innocent ethnic Albanians.
In the more than nine months since the United Nations took control of Kosovo, no other source of news has vexed Kosovo's international overseers as much as Bota Sot, Western officials here say. Daan Everts, who heads the local office of the 55-nation Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, has repeatedly denounced the newspaper for what he has described as its "vitriol and bile" and its "outright lies and slander" – words Western officials use more typically to describe the official media of Serb-led Yugoslavia.
But the newspaper, printed in Germany and Macedonia under the direction of a longtime Albanian nationalist, has proved immune to the criticism. Officials say that while the paper is read by only 15,000 of Kosovo's estimated 1.5 million residents, its inflammatory language is helping to undermine any hope of coexistence between Serbs and ethnic Albanians.
Wanting to encourage free speech in Kosovo, Western officials have been unable to find easy solutions to the issues raised by Bota Sot's invective. In February, largely because of Bota Sot, the OSCE and the United Nations imposed a new regulation banning the spread of "hatred, discord, or intolerance" whenever it seems likely to disturb public order. Violators can be fined and sent to jail for up to five years, but no one has been charged under the new statute, and Bota Sot has led the Kosovo Association of Journalists in a chorus of protest against the regulation.
Everts has been reluctant to take the extreme step of blocking distribution of Bota Sot, aides say, partly out of concern that to do so would smack of censorship and invite comparison with the recent government closures of independent media outlets in Yugoslavia. In the past 2½ months, Belgrade has shut down at least 10 independent television and radio stations and threatened or fined 20 others that diverged from the state-approved point of view.
Part of the West's dilemma in Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the dominant republic of Yugoslavia, is that Bota Sot is not the sole offender. Other ethnic Albanian news outlets sometimes present distorted accounts that rarely attribute provocative claims or seek a reply from those who are aggrieved. If Bota Sot is closed, where would the line be drawn?
Bota Sot, which means the World Today, was created in 1995 as "a paper where everyone could say what they want," editor-in-chief Teki Dervishi said. Asked if the newspaper has promoted hatred, he answered indirectly. "Hatred is a very subjective category. . . . Hatred was not created by an article, but by the historical experience of Serbian-Albanian relations."
There's little question that Dervishi's own experience with Serbs has been grim. In 1963, when he was 13, he was arrested by Serbian police for posting Albanian flags throughout the southern Kosovo city of Djakovica. He was sent to a notorious camp known as Goli-Otok on an otherwise uninhabited island in the Adriatic Sea that he describes as being "like Auschwitz."
Dervishi spent 3½ years there, he said, including eight months in solitary confinement, where he met only with an interrogator determined to pry loose the name of the adult who told him to put up the flags. "But that person did not exist," Dervishi said.
After his release, he bounced around several newspapers in Macedonia and Kosovo, serving as a theater critic and columnist. But editors found his views too radical. The editors "were for the democratization of Serbia to solve the problem of Kosovo," he says, dismissing the idea as absurd. "There has never been a ruler of Serbia that is democratic, and no Serbian intellectual ever said . . . good things about Albanians."
The irony of this blanket stereotype – a mirror image of what radical Serbs propound about ethnic Albanians – is lost on Dervishi, who adds that he does not trust West Europeans because historically "they are always on the Serbian side." He claims further that "French propaganda" is behind the idea that ethnic Albanians are forcing Serbs out of Kosovo, while numerous investigations conducted by U.N. police refute that assertion.
Dervishi persuaded Xhevdet Mazreka, a Kosovo travel agency owner who moved to Zurich in 1986, to put up the money for his newspaper, which now claims a staff of 20 in Pristina, the provincial capital, as well as correspondents in most Kosovo municipalities. In addition to its readers in Kosovo, the paper claims a daily circulation of 30,000 expatriates in Europe and the United States, giving it a large profile among a group of people that traditionally has been more radical than Kosovo's resident population.
Serbs are typically described as shkije in Bota Sot, a rude designation. But other deprecating adjectives – barbarous, brutal, blood-sucking – are also piled on. The paper has alleged, without substantiation, that 12-year-old Serbs are trained to plant land mines; that Serbs in Kosovska Mitrovica have castrated captive ethnic Albanians; and that the crash of a World Food Program plane in November was caused by Serbian artillery.
The paper consistently takes positions that many U.N. and OSCE officials say are racist. "Serbian children were born killers and as such will remain for all their lives," claimed one of the Bota Sot editorials that provoked outrage among foreigners here.
A series of OSCE reports on other ethnic Albanian newspapers notes that they indulge in such slurs less frequently, but often do "not bother to check rumors and dubious information or carry responses" from those who have been accused. The reality in Kosovo "is terrible enough," said one recent report, "but the press has done much . . . to inflame passions."
Serbs to end Kosovo boycott, with reservations
The FT
3 Apr 2000 04:38GMT
By Andrew Gray
GRACANICA, Yugoslavia, April 2 (Reuters) - International efforts to foster cooperation between Kosovo's ethnic groups got a boost on Sunday with a decision by Serb leaders to end a six-month boycott of the province's main postwar institutions.
Members of Kosovo's Serb National Council, meeting at a 14th century monastery complex south of the capital city Pristina, agreed to send representatives to two multi-ethnic bodies set up by the United Nations administration in charge of the territory.
We are ready to take our share of responsibility to participate in the political process, said Father Sava Janjic, an Orthodox priest who acts as the spokesman for the council.
The United Nations hailed the move, although it was hedged by several caveats. The representatives will only be observers and their participation will be reviewed after three months, by which time the Serbs want to see progress on issues of concern to them.
Another shadow over the decision was its rejection by leaders in the flashpoint city of Mitrovica, home to the largest remaining urban Serb population in Kosovo. They said they would take no part in the U.N.-sponsored bodies.
We hoped that they would join us in our common efforts because we think that unity is very much important in these days of suffering, Janjic said.
SERBS TARGETED IN WAVE OF ATTACKS
Kosovo's Serbs have been the targets of widespread intimidation and attacks by revenge-seeking members of the ethnic Albanian majority since the United Nations and NATO took over responsibility for the province last June.
Serbs say more than 200,000 members of their community have fled Kosovo in fear of their lives -- both during and after NATO's bombing campaign to end repression of Albanians by driving out Serb and Yugoslav security forces.
The Serbs quit the multi-ethnic bodies last September in protest at the violence and what they saw as an indulgent attitude towards Albanians by international authorities.
Bernard Kouchner, the former French cabinet minister running the U.N. administration, welcomed their decision to return.
Now the real work can start on setting up the administration of Kosovo, he said. This decision gives us a real possibility of building a united and tolerant society.
Janjic said the council was encouraged by statements from the United Nations and Western states about improving the conditions of Kosovo Serbs, many of whom are confined to enclaves heavily guarded by troops from the NATO-led KFOR peacekeeping force.
LEADERS WANT PROGRESS WITHIN MONTHS
Serb leaders would need to see progress on issues such as security and the return of Serbs who have fled to stay in the multi-ethnic institutions longer than three months, he said.
I am afraid, if there are absolutely no results after the three-month period, we would not be able to continue our participation within the interim administration, he said.
Under the decision, the Serbs will send Rada Trajkovic, a doctor and politician, as an observer to meetings of Kosovo's Interim Administrative Council, the highest-level body involving local people in the temporary administration.
The Serbs said they would also send three representatives to Kosovo's Transitional Council, a sort of mini-parliament set up by the U.N. to reflect the spectrum of Kosovo society, and leave another seat free for a representative from Mitrovica.
But Oliver Ivanovic, the Serb leader in the city which has been the scene of a string of violent clashes involving peacekeepers, Serbs and Albanians over the past few months, made clear he saw no reason to take part in the administration.
That would be a catastrophic move at this moment, he said. By joining this body, the Serb issue would be forgotten.
French NATO Officer Shot in Kosovo
PARIS (AP) - A French officer in the NATO peacekeeping force in Kosovo was shot to death by a fellow French soldier, NATO peacekeepers said Friday. It was not immediately clear if the shooting was an accident.
The 29-year-old French lieutenant, whose name was not immediately released, was shot Thursday night in the ethnically divided city of Kosovska Mitrovica by a French soldier who had recently arrived in Kosovo, Lt. Fabrice Turco said.
The army spokesman said the attack did not appear to be linked to military affairs, although the reasons behind it were still unclear.
The soldier accused in the shooting had enlisted two years ago and served in previous missions abroad, said Lt. Col. Charles de Kersabiec, an army spokesman. The soldier, whose name was not released, was sent back to France for psychological reasons, he said.
The two men were talking privately when people nearby heard gunshots and rushed over, de Kersabiec said. The soldier immediately claimed responsibility.
French defense authorities in Kosovo have opened an inquiry into the shooting.
Serb Leader Says Karadzic Not Influential
By Fredrik Dahl
BANJA LUKA, Bosnia (Reuters) - Wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic no longer has any influence on the party he founded a decade ago, according to Vice President Mirko Sarovic of Bosnia's Serb republic.
Sarovic, a leading member of the Serb Democratic Party (SDS) set up by Karadzic in 1990, said in an interview that he had not seen the former Bosnian Serb leader for three years and did not know where he was.
``I think very, very few people know his whereabouts,'' Sarovic told Reuters Friday.
Sarovic, speaking in the de facto Bosnian Serb capital Banja Luka, said there had recently been ``certain information circulating'' that Karadzic was in neighboring Yugoslavia.
Post-war Bosnia comprises two autonomous entities -- the Serb republic and the Muslim-Croat federation, each with their own governments and parliaments.
Karadzic has twice been indicted by the U.N.'s International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for war crimes during the 1992-1995 Bosnian conflict, including the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre of Muslim men in Srebrenica.
He and his former military commander Ratko Mladic remain at large more than four years after the war ended. Other reports have suggested he is hiding in eastern Bosnia, still politically controlled by Bosnian Serb hard-liners.
Observers Disagree About Karadzic
Political analyst James Lyon at the International Crisis Group think tank told Reuters this week he believed Karadzic remained influential and that many Bosnian Serbs regarded him as a folk hero.
But Sarovic, predicting that the SDS would do well in April 8 local elections, insisted the party had changed and now favored cooperation with the international community.
``Today we are working on building up quite a different structure of the party which is not headed by Radovan Karadzic any more, nor does he in any other way affect its way or its leaders.
``We want to build up a party which is open and which does not cause fear in anybody,'' he said. ``We are willing to fight to build up a completely new legitimacy of the party and a new image.''
Turning to the situation in Serbia, Sarovic said his party did not support Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, saying he had given up both Sarajevo and the northern port of Brcko during negotiations on the 1995 Dayton peace treaty for Bosnia.
But Sarovic also suggested that Milosevic was unlikely to lose power anytime soon, despite international isolation.
He described Milosevic's position as quite stable, adding that he was playing with the West. ``He is a great master in this kind of situation,'' Sarovic said.
``Any forecast that Milosevic will fall in a month, two or three is completely meaningless and can only be stated by people who do now know the situation,'' he said.
Sarovic also said it had been a political mistake to indict Milosevic for war crimes in Kosovo, saying he was now cornered.
``If he gives up power he knows he will be put on the first plane to (ICTY headquarters in) The Hague,'' he said. ``He is able to control power much longer than anybody in the West thinks.''
Kosovo vineyards yield first taste of 'freedom vintage'
The Independent
By Andrew Buncombe in Rahovec, Kosovo
1 April 2000
The wine was red and, though it was chilled, as Qamil Cena poured from the clear, unlabelled bottle its flavour leapt from the glass.
"This one is from 1992. It is made from the merlot grape," said Mr Cena. "It is one of our best wines."
The year 1992 may have been a good vintage for the wine-makers of southern Kosovo, but it was also the one in which Mr Cena, a trained agriculturist, was forced out of his job. Like many Kosovo Albanians, Mr Cena, 36, a manager with the state-owned Orvin wine company, struggled to make ends meet after the authorities filled senior positions with Serbs.
He returned to work last summer – seven years after the war started. Now, nine months on, Mr Cena and thousands of other Kosovo Albanians have been reinstated. In such circumstances the renamed winery is preparing to make what may be its most memorable vintage yet.
But asked whether there are plans to have any special name for the wine, Mr Cena said: "First we have to produce the grapes and then we can think about it. We don't plan to have any special name for the wine but that could come later."
The wine industry of southern Kosovo has always been important but the Orvin wines were considered the best. Before the war, 80 per cent of the wine they produced – including cabernet sauvignon, merlot, chardonnay and riesling – was exported.
But that was then. Although the Albanian workers regained control of the winery, renaming it the less-than-roundedAgricultural and Industrial Enterprise of Rahovec (NBI Rahoveci), the future is full of challenges.
Last year the entire crop was lost during one of the coldest winters in living memory and so people were not able to work the vines. They expect only 30 to 40 per cent of their vineyards – 3,500 hectares – to produce grapes for this year's pressing.
There is also a shortage of necessary materials. The 600 workers are short of fertiliser and herbicide. With the exception of the wine labels, which they produce themselves, everything else – the bottles, the corks, the barrels of oak in which the wine is aged for a minimum of two years – must be imported. To add to their difficulties, a small area of the vineyards still cannot be entered because landmines left by the Serb forces remain.
But the enterprise – its wage bill now being paid by the United Nations, the new owner of former state-owned firms – cannot afford to fail. While 600 people are employed directly by the plant, up to 30,000 people are involved in the region's wine industry.
Many of these are employed on an ad hoc basis – helping with the harvest in September and October. But others own the vineyards that make up two-thirds of the total acreage providing grapes for the plant.
Among these owners are the brothers Bahtiar and Gazmend Tara, who this spring are cutting back the dead wood on their three hectares of vines. Their family of 11 depends on the grapes and other produce they can grow.
"We don't really hope for much of a harvest," saidBahtiar, his fingers furiously working a pair of secateurs. "Everything was frozen this winter so we don't expect great results. We will have to wait until next year."
The Rahovec workers believe the future lies in restoring the export agreements that Orvin had with a number of European countries, particularly with Germany.
In the meantime, for the workers at the plant, spring is a busy time of year and they intend to go on doing what they have done for many years – growing grapes, making wine.
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