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NewsPro Archive
May 2000
The New York Times: Serbia's Detroit That Was: In Distress and Angry
RAGUJEVAC, Serbia, May 24 -- Velimir Pajevic, a pediatric surgeon, says that the average size of the craniums of newborns here is one centimeter smaller than in 1991, a result of declining nutrition.
Kragujevac, the capital of Serbia in the early 1800's, is a city of nearly 200,000 people, built around the Zastava car and munitions factory, said to be the first factory built in the Balkans.
But after a decade of war, sanctions and decline, about 60 percent of those of working age are not working, said Branislav Kovacevic, president of the Sumadija Coalition, a regional opposition group in this traditional heartland of Serbia.
Zastava, which employed 40,000 people 10 years ago, now employs 4,000, officials here say. Some 20,000 people are officially unemployed, while 35,000 others are on "paid leave" from Zastava and its associated companies.
Branko Vuckovic, a reporter and editor with Radio Kragujevac, said the city used to be the Serbian Detroit. "Now it's the Serbian Gdansk," he said, referring to the Polish shipbuilding city, where Solidarity was born, that no longer makes many ships.
He gestured to the remains of a few espressos and mineral waters on a cafe table. "That's about 100 dinars," he said, or about $2.50 at the unofficial rate of exchange. "Those on paid leave from Zastava are paid 350 dinars a month -- just three times what's on this table."
The government is repairing part of Zastava bombed by NATO during the war, and says it has plans for greatly expanded car production. But few here believe such assertions, saying the only future for the factory is an assembly arrangement with a more modern car company, currently impossible because of international sanctions.
Life is so hard here, for so many, that this is known as "the valley of the starving." Of course, that is an exaggeration, since many city dwellers get by because of their connections to the land, said Borivoje Radic, head of the city's Executive Council and a member of the Democratic Party.
Yet life has rarely been harder here, he says. The city is also home to at least 20,000 refugees, 15,000 of them from Kosovo and the rest of them Serbs who fled from Bosnia and Croatia. But the city's annual budget, given the decline of the country's currency and economy, is now only a fourth of what it was in 1997, Mr. Radic says -- the equivalent of $4 million, down from $16 million.
So there is plenty of anger here, in one of the most important towns for Serbia's democratic opposition, some 90 miles south of Belgrade. Here the opposition coalition built in 1996 and called Zajedno, or Together, remains together, unlike that in Belgrade, where the Democratic Party of Zoran Djindjic and the Serbian Renewal Movement of Vuk Draskovic are usually at daggers drawn.
"If it weren't for the opposition leaders in Belgrade, Milosevic would not be in power," Mr. Kovacevic said. "People no longer believe in the people on the stage of those rallies."
Here, about 2,000 people a night gathered to protest the seizure of Studio B in Belgrade, the main opposition television station, while the crowd of protesters in Belgrade itself, 10 times larger in population, had shrunk to fewer than 700.
Part of the problem is that Studio B was perceived as a propaganda organ for Mr. Draskovic, much as state television serves the interests of Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav president, and did not serve as a true public-interest station.
Here, there is a full complement of news, with Radio B2-92, which lost its frequency in Belgrade, available, as well as opposition television news and documentaries. A local FM station broadcasts the Serbian-language programs of Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, the BBC and Deutsche Welle all day long. "People here are well informed," Mr. Vuckovic said.
A local opposition weekly, The Independent Light, said Serbia was "on the razor's edge," but described Belgrade as "deaf, blind and anemic," a pun on the association of independent broadcasters, or ANEM, whose broadcasts can no longer be heard in the capital. But it is also a commentary on the general view of Belgrade from here, which is of well-off, cynical, corrupt politicians and citizens who are largely indifferent to the fate of the nation.
"Belgrade is a great disappointment," Mr. Radic said. "You can't expect to defend Studio B from here. If they dared to take TV Kragujevac, we couldn't avoid a serious conflict." Like Studio B, TV and Radio Kragujevac are owned by the city, which is run by the opposition.
In fact, four years ago, the Serbian authorities tried to seize control of the television here. Up to 50,000 people gathered around the station, which had been occupied by the police. People cut off electrical power to the building and threatened to invade it; a deal was done and the station was left alone.
It would be the same now, Mr. Vuckovic said. "In Serbia, we say that when you show your teeth, the government retreats. But when people are undecided, then they just go faster."
But as everywhere in Serbia there is more talk of revolution than signs of it.
"Here, the situation is highly explosive," Mr. Radic said. "It would only take a spark." Mr. Vuckovic agrees, saying, "It's like a small room full of gas fumes."
But the phlegmatic Dr. Pajevic thinks that the reality is far different.
There is less of a sense of revolution here than of passivity, anxiety and alienation. People are still afraid to lose what little they have left, and they mistrust the desires and capacities of the Belgrade leaders of the opposition.
Dr. Pajevic, the surgeon, says the right analogy is surgical, not military. "We're far from an explosion," he said. "What you have here is anesthesia, anesthesia and hopelessness. There is so much disappointment in the opposition, many people won't even vote."
People live day to day, he said, scraping by on friends and gray market trading. Few pay their electricity bills, but the government does not insist, a form of social pacification. "Our boss plays nice like that," Dr. Pajevic said, laughing. And while the independent newspaper Blic is available here, for eight dinars, "for the same money, people will buy bread and milk for their kids."
Vesna Pajevic, the doctor's wife, is a city official in charge of social welfare issues. A former member of Mr. Draskovic's party, she became disgusted with its hierarchy and joined the Democratic Party instead, which has also disappointed her.
"The credibility of the opposition is dropping even here, where the coalition continues," she said. "There is too much corruption and not enough clear goals and strategies. People need to see that we are working for them."
The biggest mistake of the opposition, Dr. Pajevic said, was to win local elections four years ago and take power. "These guys were practically jobless, and now they've got cars and salaries and cell phones and things to lose," he said. "They've become fat and happy. People wonder if they really do want change. People think that both the regime and the opposition want to keep the status quo."
The Christian Science Monitor: Looking ahead to elections, Milosevic sets the stage
A crackdown left Serbia's opposition in disarray, but student group has a plan.
Alex Todorovic
Special to The Christian Science Monitor
BELGRADE, YUGOSLAVIA
Over the past decade, the only thing Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic could count on with any certainty was that Serbia's divisive opposition would inadvertently help him stay in power.
This golden rule of Belgrade politics is once again proving true. Some opposition leaders and analysts say a recent government crackdown is aimed at marginalizing and dividing the opposition ahead of coming elections.
If so, the effort appears to be working. A severe crackdown that began May 17 with the takeover of Studio B, Serbia's largest opposition-controlled television station, and was followed by the arrest of hundreds of political activists and police violence on Belgrade's streets, served to drive a wedge into the multiparty opposition.
The Alliance for Change, a broad coalition, wanted to confront the regime through massive civil disobedience. But the Serbian Renewal Movement, led by Vuk Draskovic, backed away, even though it lost the most in the government action: The party controlled Studio B.
With his party dominating Belgrade's city government, Mr. Draskovic also stood the most to lose, opposition leaders say privately.
"Draskovic was worried that the next step in the government crackdown would be the takeover of city government, which would result in the loss of the few scraps of bread his party receives," is the bitter assessment of one opposition leader, who insisted on anonymity.
The only thing moderate and radical elements could agree on was a weekend visit to Moscow, where they unsuccessfully lobbied the Russian government to withdraw support for the Milosevic regime. The lack of decisive action left Serbia's democratic movement disheartened. Attendance at nightly antigovernment rallies dwindled to embarrassingly low numbers, then were called off altogether on May 29.
All is not lost for Serbia's opposition, however. Many people see the greatest hope for change in Otpor (Resistance), a student movement founded in 1998. The group's logo, a clenched fist, has become a popular symbol of placing national interests above opposition squabbles.
The fact that the group is relatively new, has no cult-of-personality leaders, and doesn't seek political power, has made it popular.
At a protest on May 27, euphoric chants and applause were reserved for Otpor activist Nemanja Nikolic, who berated the handful of opposition leaders standing on the stage behind him.
"Leaders, you've wasted one week on vain rallies. You must tell people what you are going to do," Mr. Nikolic yelled.
"Serbia's united opposition is just a conversation forum. Anyone who listened to the opposition leaders could see there will be no united strategy," said Zarko Korac, another opposition leader.
Frustrated with the lack of coherent strategy, Otpor is proposing an incremental plan for peaceful civil disobedience. Though more popular than any opposition party, Otpor has yet to prove that such a loosely organized group can inspire a serious campaign against the government.
Just in case, legislators may take up a "law on terrorism" - reportedly drafted by Milosevic's wife, Mira Markovic - that would give the government lavish legal power against its most dangerous political opponents, notably Otpor. Government-controlled media frequently refer to members of the group as "terrorists," claiming they are funded by the West with the goal of destabilizing Yugoslavia.
Opposition parties are waiting to see whether the law is just a threat or whether it will really be passed, perhaps as early as this week.
The apparent collapse of the opposition's hard-won unity is the most serious threat facing the democratic movement. Western diplomats spent months convincing opposition leaders to unite in order to defeat Milosevic in elections due later this year. They finally did so in January. Opposition leaders admit breaking their alliance was and is one of Milosevic's key goals.
Independent opinion polls show that a united opposition would be much stronger at the ballot box than as a group of separate parties.
But the different wings of the opposition cannot agree on fundamentals, such as in which elections to participate and under what conditions.
Nobody expects the vote to be fair, but leaders such as Democratic Party leader Zoran Djindjic say support for the ruling coalition is so low that it's impossible to fudge the numbers that much.
Government officials have indicated that municipal and federal elections will be scheduled this fall.
The federal elections will eventually determine Milosevic's political fate: Two chambers of the federal parliament pick the Yugoslav president.
Milosevic's term expires in July 2001, and the Constitution bars him from serving another term. He has also filled the constitutional term limit as Serbian president. But few expect Milosevic to relinquish the reins of power, especially given his indictment for war crimes by the international tribunal at The Hague, Netherlands, over Yugoslavia's mistreatment of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
Sinisa Nikolic, a lawyer and constitutional expert for the Democratic Party, says the most likely scenario is for Milosevic to be chosen as prime minister, a position currently occupied by Momir Bulatovic.
As former opposition parliamentary representative Vlatko Sekulovic puts it, "In the end, none of this really matters. He could run a tire service and remain in control."
Mr. Sekulovic and other observers believe the recent crackdown was "a training exercise" for the coming elections.
"We all know that he has to steal the elections if he wants to remain in power, but he doesn't want another 1996, when hundreds of thousands of people were on the streets for months. The police brutality was a way of telling people things have changed since then," says Sekulovic.
Chirac wants EU summit with ex-Yugoslav states
PARIS, May 30 (Reuters) - French President Jacques Chirac proposed on Tuesday a summit between the European Union and the democratic countries of ex-Yugoslavia and reminded Belgrade it could join the club if it also respected the popular will.
In a major speech on French foreign policy, Chirac also urged EU members to forge ahead with a common defence and consider a new rapid reaction force for southern Europe.
Speaking to defence experts and parliamentarians from the Western European Union, he also criticised the United States for planning an anti-missile defence system that he said would rekindle the arms race and undermine Europe's own security.
Speaking about France's priorities for its EU presidency in the second half of this year, Chirac said he wanted to make Europe "a key player in the world" while maintaining the essential role NATO played in Europe's defence.
Aides said the summit could be held later this year, possibly with prominent opponents of President Slobodan Milosevic representing present-day Yugoslavia.
"A summit between the European Union and the countries of ex-Yugoslavia which are most advanced in their democratic evolution would allow us to clarify objectives and revive a stalling process," the president said.
"The aim would be to support recent developments in Croatia, welcome the efforts taken by Macedonia, note progress made in Bosnia, to encourage them to go further...and to remind Yugoslavia the door will be open to it as well as soon as it joins this movement."
Chirac also mentioned Montenegro, the Yugoslav republic whose government is committed to democratic change and has threatened a referendum on independence if Belgrade blocks its reforms.
CHIRAC WANTS MORE DECISIVE BALKAN STRATEGY
Aides said Montenegro might also attend the summit if the right way to describe its participation was found. Montenegro and its bigger partner Serbia make up the Yugoslav federation.
Stressing that Europe's common defence policy should first concern security on its own continent, Chirac said: "We should have a more decisive strategy for the Balkans.
"We should tell these countries more clearly what we expect of them and what we are ready to do to help them."
Recalling its role in the Kosovo crisis last year, Chirac said the EU -- which has already pledged to boost its rapid reaction forces to 60,000 troops by 2003 -- should create a separate force specially for crises in southern Europe.
EU states should also declare by year's end how many troops, command infrastructure, transport craft and intelligence facilities they were ready to commit to the common effort.
"Defence seems to be an issue that is quite naturally given to reinforced cooperation among a restricted number of states which want to go faster and further than others," he said.
He welcomed recent decisions by EU states to opt for the Airbus A 400M as the future European military transport plane.
EU members could also pool resources to develop the satellite centre of the Western European Union, a defence forum due to be incorporated into the EU, into a full European system of satellite intelligence, he added.
The French leader took the opportunity to reiterate his opposition to U.S. plans for a missile defence system which he said would "put into question the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, one of the pillars of strategic stability in the past 30 years."
"As allies and friends, we must convey to the United States our conviction that questioning this treaty would risk damaging efforts for non-proliferation and resume the arms race."
Montenegro cannot arrest indictee Milosevic
PODGORICA, Yugoslavia, May 30 (Reuters) - Prime Minister Filip Vujanovic of Montenegro said U.N. war crimes indictees will not be arrested in the republic if this could provoke conflict or bloodshed, local media reported on Tuesday.
Vujanovic was responding to reports that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, indicted by the international war crimes tribunal in the Hague, would visit the pro-Western Yugoslav republic at odds with Belgrade for the last several years.
Predrag Bulatovic, vice-president of Montenegro's opposition Socialist People's Party, has said it had invited Milosevic to visit Montenegro and that he had accepted.
Vujanovic's government pledged to cooperate fully with the tribunal. But he said no one really expected Montenegro to arrest Milosevic or Defence Minister Dragoljub Ojdanic, also indicted for alleged Kosovo war crimes.
"This would clearly provoke internal conflicts, and it would make no sense to expect such a thing of Montenegro and absolutely no one is asking us to do this," Vujanovic told Montena television carried by Montena-fax news agency.
"Montenegro would not receive him (Milosevic) as a man who is leading a democratic and reformist project but as a man who is conducting a policy of dictatorship damaging to the Serb people and Serbia, and to us who are in a union with Serbia."
He said he did not believe Milosevic would actually visit.
Vujanovic accused some Yugoslav federal army commanders of being alienated from the people's interests and acting as if they were the military wing of Belgrade's ruling party.
"They are acting as if they were listening to a political order from Belgrade and not a professional order the army has to carry out," Vujanovic said.
The army conducted anti-terrorism exercises last week at the Montenegrin capital Podgorica's airport, the scene of a tense stand-off with Montenegrin police last December.
In an interview with Belgrade daily Glas Javnosti on Tuesday, Yugoslav army chief of staff Colonel-General Nebojsa Pavkovic said the military would answer any attack against its troops, family members and facilities wherever it might happen.
"The troops will respond with all means available, especially against those who may order such attacks," he said, rejecting accusations that the army was politicised and was siding with the authorities in Belgrade.
But he said Milosevic was the supreme commander under the constitution and any attacks on him would be taken as attacks on the army itself.
3 Serbs are killed in Kosovo village
Area patrolled by US troops
By Danica Kirka, Associated Press, 5/30/2000
RISTINA, Yugoslavia - An attacker shot and killed a 4-year-old Serb boy and two men in an eastern Kosovo village patrolled by US peacekeepers, NATO officials said yesterday.
The attack Sunday in the village of Cernica, 28 miles southeast of the capital, Pristina, also injured two men, said Captain Russell Berg, a spokesman for American forces stationed in Kosovo. The men were being treated at the US military hospital at Camp Bondsteel.
The attacker, thought to be ethnic Albanian, remained at large, Berg said.
The killings provoked widespread Serb protests, including a threat by moderates to withdraw from an interim government administered by the United Nations with both Serb and Albanian representatives.
The Serbs rejoined the council only last month after a monthlong boycott.
''It is high time we reconsidered where our participation in the administration ... is leading us,'' said Momcilo Trajkovic, a representative of Serb moderates.
The attacker, armed with an automatic weapon, opened fire on a group of Serbs gathered in a store in Cernica, killing 4-year-old Milos Petrovic, said Lieutenant Scott Olson, a spokesman for US forces at nearby Camp Monteith.
The boy's grandfather, Vojin Vasic, 60, and Tihomir Simjanovic, 45, also died in the attack.
US peacekeepers were only a few hundred yards away, but didn't see the attack, Olson said.
''They heard the gunfire and ran in that direction,'' he said.
The soldiers evacuated the wounded to a hilltop near the local Serbian Orthodox Church so a helicopter could land and ferry them to the hospital. The three died before the helicopter's arrival, Olson said.
The slayings were the latest in a series of attacks on Serbs by ethnic Albanians seeking to get even since the end of the Serb crackdown in the province nearly a year ago. Violence - or fear of attacks - has led tens of thousands of Serbs to flee Kosovo.
Less than 100,000 Serbs now live in Kosovo, down from 200,000 before the outbreak of fighting last year between Yugoslav forces and ethnic Albanian rebels that led to NATO intervention and the deployment of international peacekeepers.
The top UN official in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, denounced the attack, saying that only the regime of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic stands to gain by unrest in this southern Serb province.
''What can possibly be gained by killing a child?'' he said in a statement.
NATO said a person reported by Serb media to be a suspect in the shooting had turned himself in to authorities, but peacekeepers said they had not yet determined whether the man could be described as a suspect or a witness.
About 600 villagers, almost all those in Cernica, attended the burial of the three last evening, the Serbian news agency Beta said.
The attack occurred just as US peacekeepers were attempting to set up a meeting between the community's ethnic Albanian and Serb leaders to work out problems and build trust.
It was the third time such a meeting was close at hand only to be shattered by violence.
Protesting the killings, more than 1,000 Serbs rallied in the divided northern town of Kosovska Mitrovica, briefly blocking traffic near the main bridge that divides the town into Serb and Albanian neighborhoods.
Yugoslavia: Russia Plays Both Sides In Serbia
By Alexandra Poolos
Serbian opposition leaders visited Moscow hoping to gain Russia's help in their struggle with the regime of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. So far the visit has had one tangible result -- Russia has urged Milosevic to restore independent radio and television Studio B to opposition control. Alexandra Poolos looks at the results of yesterday's visit and what can be expected in the future from Russia.
Prague, May 30 (RFE/RL) -- Serbian opposition leaders returned to Belgrade from Moscow this morning full of high hopes. Zoran Djindjic, Vuk Draskovic, and Vojiskav Kostunica went to Russia to campaign for support in their struggle against the authoritarian policies of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and his crackdown on independent media. After meeting with low-level Foreign Ministry officials and members of the Duma, the trio left with a Russian Foreign Ministry statement calling for the return of an independent status to the radio and television broadcaster Studio B.
The Russian Foreign Ministry statement, however, is nothing new, but rather only a slight escalation of what has already been said. A ministry statement issued before this visit had expressed Russia's "grave concern" over Belgrade's crackdown on independent media. That earlier statement said: "Freedom of expression and freedom of media are inseparable parts of the democratic process."
It still remains unclear whether the opposition delegation managed to achieve their most important task -- generating Russian sympathy for their goal of deposing Milosevic.
After his meetings with Russian officials, Draskovic said that Russia is the only country that can help them to deal with Milosevic.
"If there is any voice today that has to be respected, it is the voice of Russia."
But will Russia use that voice to help the Serbian opposition?
Some Serbian opposition officials say they believe that Russia is moving to align itself with their concerns. Predrag Simic, an adviser to Draskovic, told RFE/RL that Russia has a lot to gain from criticizing Milosevic: "Russia has more -- say -- balanced interests in the Balkans. Because only supporting Milosevic would threaten the escalation of the crisis. Because the Serbian government is now very keen to use violence to suppress voices of dissent of the opposition, and that might restart...the cycle of the Yugoslav crisis."
Simic believes that Russia has a good incentive to criticize Milosevic -- preserving peace in the Balkans. He says that if Milosevic continues with his crackdowns, it may lead to a break with Montenegro, which could trigger another Yugoslav war:
"First, Russia does have a way to influence officials in Belgrade to stop the violence and to return an independent status to Studio B. Second, we do believe Russia is interested in preserving the Serbian-Montenegrin Federation and preserving stability in the Balkans. And third, we believe that Russia is talking to the Serbian opposition not only on behalf of itself but on behalf of the international community."
Russian analysts say that Moscow stands most to gain by remaining an ally of Serbia. That's why, they say, Russia is staying friendly with both sides in Serbia, both the Milosevic regime and its adversaries. They point out that, while showing lukewarm support for the opposition, Russia is also shoring up its overall support of Serbia and minimizing its criticism of Milosevic.
Viktor Kremenyuk is deputy director at the U.S. and Canada Institute in Moscow, a foreign-policy research organization. Kremenyuk says that Russia sees Serbia as its one true ally in the Balkans and in Europe:
"The general Russian line is that Serbia is a Russian ally and that Russia has a strong commitment to help Serbia out of this crisis. There was a kind of shaky balance between the commitments of Russia toward NATO, because of the Russian participation in KFOR, and the commitment of Russia to Belgrade. So I think that currently, I think the Russians feel they have to work more closely with Belgrade rather than NATO."
In the past, Russia has consistently supported Milosevic. Moscow opposed NATO's air campaign last year, and has recently said it is prepared to extend a $100 million loan to Yugoslavia to repair damage from the bombings. Earlier this month, Russia hosted Yugoslav Defense Minister General Dragoljub Ojdanic, a man who has been indicted for war crimes by the Hague-based tribunal.
Kremenyuk says that Russia ultimately believes it must continue to deal with Milosevic.
"Milosevic is acceptable because he is the recognized leader of Serbs and the Russians have no choice. They cannot say they don't like Milosevic and are not going to work with him. As long he is Yugoslav president, the Russians have to work with him. But that doesn't mean that the Russians will go as far as not to have any contacts with the opposition."
In short, according to Kremenyuk, Russia is walking a fine line. If Moscow openly supports Milosevic, he says, the crackdowns in Serbia could get worse. That would help escalate opposition and popular protests, and increase the possibility of the Yugoslav leader's ultimate fall. But, Kremenyuk says, if Russia criticizes Milosevic, it will then be demonstrating support for a West-leaning, anti-government movement.
Thus the safest policy -- and the one Russia seems to be following -- is to say as little as possible. Such a policy, Kremenyuk notes, will help Russia retain Serbia as an ally no matter what occurs.
RFE/RL: Western Press Review: From Russia To Serbia To Northern Ireland
By Joel Blocker
Prague, 29 May 2000 (RFE/RL) -- Our selection of subjects touched on by Western press commentary today and over the weekend ranges across the entire continent of Europe -- from Russia in the east through Serbia in the center to Northern Ireland in the west. There are comments both on Russia and, some days before President Bill Clinton's visit to Moscow, on U.S.-Russian relations. Analysts also look at the latest crackdown on the independent press in Serbia by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, and discuss the weekend's agreement by Ulster unionists to resume autonomy in Northern Ireland.
NEW YORK TIMES:
In an editorial yesterday, the New York Times found Russian President Vladimir Putin's new tax plan, in the paper's word, "promising." It wrote: "Though Russia's new president has yet to chart a clear course on most domestic fronts, he made clear last week that he intends to move aggressively to mend the economy, ending years of meandering policies. The Putin government," the editorial went on, "asked parliament to replace the country's progressive but largely dysfunctional personal income tax with a simple flat tax."
Putin, the paper argued, "is right that tax rates are too high. A destructive competition to raise revenue rages among Russia's local, regional and federal authorities. Indeed, local officials often help businesses hide their local tax payments so that local governments can avoid sharing the proceeds with Moscow as the law requires. Russia," the editorial states, "has created the worst of all tax worlds: high rates and little revenue."
The paper said further: "It will not be easy to make the flat tax and other reforms work. Corruption and bureaucratic incompetence will not disappear overnight. But Putin is starting his economic reform in the right place. If Russia can get its tax system in order and the Kremlin can begin to count on a steady source of income for government programs," the New York Times concluded, "the country can at last begin to deal with some of its chronic problems, including a failing health care system, erratic law enforcement and the poverty of millions of elderly citizens."
LOS ANGELES TIMES:
On Sunday,the Los Angeles Times wrote of what it called "missile insecurity," one of the chief contentious issues between Washington and Moscow today. The paper's editorial said: "High on President Clinton's agenda when he meets with President Putin in Moscow next weekend is a proposal to amend the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile, or ABM, Treaty. It would allow the U.S. to deploy a national missile defense -- known often by its acronym NMD -- system designed to protect all 50 states against limited missile attacks."
The editorial argues that pushing ahead with NMD could mean scrapping the ABM treaty, inviting a new arms race, and souring relations with the U.S.' European allies, who see NMD as destabilizing. The paper then goes on to suggest that, in its words, "NMD could threaten rather than improve national security, especially if it leads China to expand its strategic missile force and develop countermeasures that it could sell to such states as North Korea, Iran and Iraq. These are the very countries," it notes, "whose so far nonexistent intercontinental missiles NMD is supposed to deter."
"Moscow," the editorial says further "-- which retains thousands of nuclear warheads -- might be convinced that a missile defense system using no more than 250 interceptors wouldn't affect the strategic balance. But China, which has only 20 long-range and now largely obsolescent missiles, could see a security threat." But, it concludes, "what surely should be apparent is that the bigger the U.S. missile defense system, the less inclined Russia will be to downsize its nuclear stockpile. This supposed security enhancement could well leave the U.S. farless secure than it is now."
WASHINGTON POST:
In a news analysis for the Washington Post today, correspondent Steven Mufson says that the idea that there are "rogue" states that threaten the U.S. is itself increasingly being questioned by U.S. and European security analysts and officials. He writes: "The existence of such a threat has become an article of faith, widely accepted by the Clinton administration and some of its Republican critics, but questioned by some policy experts here and by many abroad."
Mufson goes on: "When President Clinton visits Moscow next weekend for his first summit meeting with President Putin, rogue states will be the ghosts at the negotiating table. Fear of their still- theoretical capabilities has made winning Russia's agreement for a limited U.S. missile defense the Clinton administration's top priority in Russia policy, overshadowing the war in Chechnya, economic reform and future NATO expansion." He adds: "Critics of the theory of rogue states say the allegation that these countries are irrational or suicidal is more questionable. Their leaders appear to be very concerned about self-preservation, and the U.S. has successfully employed diplomatic as well as military initiatives to engage or contain them."
Mufson sums up: "Yet fear of rogue states remains widespread. Many policy-makers warn of letting concern about small rogue states prompt the shredding of major accords, like the ABM Treaty that the administration is trying to persuade Russia to amend. But national missile defense remains an alluring prospect for those worried about preserving America's latitude for action in a crisis, when a small country with nuclear missiles might threaten to use them."
POLITIKEN:
Turning to events in Serbia, the Danish daily Politiken says today: "Serbia's free media are being assaulted on a daily basis by President Slobodan Milosevic, whose means of preserving the power are becoming increasingly dictatorial. But," the paper adds, Serbia's "relatively independent media continue doing their best to stand up to the propaganda put out by state-controlled organs."
"Still," the editorial goes on, "none of the independent media have much faith in the ability of Serbia's organized political opposition to win the increasingly aggravated internal conflict, in which Milosevic's desperate power plays are continually making economic conditions worse." Nor, the paper argues, is there must hope "that any outside help for the independent media is forthcoming."
"The West," it says, "has supported freedom of speech in Serbia -- but mostly with words and resolutions. True, it has helped set up some TV stations and radio stations and transmitters. Yet none of these have had much effect. To make things work, Serbian voters must be approached in a much more direct fashion by the West." The editorial sums up: "It remains unclear how long Milosevic will be able to stay in power. But the message from Serbia is nonetheless unequivocal: the fight is worth fighting, and it will be fought."
GUARDIAN:
Britain's daily Guardian sees additional dangers in Yugoslavia today. The paper says: "The renewed fighting in the Presevo valley, in southern Serbia, between Yugoslav army units and ethnic Albanians is one of several recent reminders that the situation in the Balkans, nearly a year after the 'liberation' of Kosovo, remains volatile." The editorial lists other outstanding problems:
"The final status of Kosovo, a de facto UN-NATO protectorate but still sovereign Yugoslav territory, is nowhere near being resolved. In Serbia, the indicted war criminal Milosevic has been conducting a crackdown on what his regime describes as 'Western-backed terrorists.' This instability, which extends to Montenegro and is intensifying ahead of scheduled local elections which Milosevic's party is expected to lose, has been exacerbated by a spate of unexplained assassinations of Milosevic associates and the continuing economic dislocation caused by NATO bombing and Western sanctions."
The paper then hones in on Serbia: "The potentially explosive situation," it writes, "and its worrying implications for overall, European-led efforts to bring lasting political and economic stability to the Balkans, will be on the agenda in Moscow today when Romano Prodi, the European Commission president, and Antonio Guterres, the Portuguese prime minister whose country holds the EU presidency, are due to meet President Putin. Russia remains," it says, "deeply ambivalent about methods employed by the West to force democratic change in Serbia."
The Guardian concludes: "After their Moscow summit, Mr. Prodi and Mr. Guterres visit Washington on Wednesday to meet President Clinton. They will doubtless seek -- and receive -- assurances about the U.S.'s Balkan commitment. But, increasingly, a lame-duck Clinton is not in a position to deliver. Europe has to find a way to get out of this Russian-Chinese-American squeeze. The only person it helps is the deeply undeserving Slobodan Milosevic."
Finally, several papers today praise Saturday's accord by Northern Ireland's Ulster Unionist Party that will allow what is called "devolution" -- that is, the granting of autonomy -- to move forward in the province.
IRISH TIMES:
The Irish Times calls it "a good result for Trimble," recalling that it comes "two years and one week after the electorate -- North and South -- overwhelmingly ratified [the Belfast Agreement that provides for the province's autonomy]."
The editorial goes on to say: "With the path now cleared for the full implementation of the Belfast Agreement, it must be acknowledged that the British government's decision to suspend the Northern institutions last February has been, in some measure, vindicated. If the controversial suspension had not happened," the Irish Times sums up, "the IRA would not have come forward with its, Mr. Trimble would not have been in a position to go back to his party for endorsement, and the principle of guns-for-government would still be in deadlock. It is now imperative that all aspects of the Belfast Agreement are honored in the letter and the spirit."
AFTENPOSTEN:
In Norway, the daily Aftenposten writes in an editorial: "Northern Ireland begins a new chapter of its history today as its government is meeting for the first time since it was suspended by London in February. The meeting," it notes, "was made possible after Trimble on Saturday got the support he needed to conduct negotiations with what the Irish Protestants call their arch-enemy: the Catholic Sinn Fein [the IRA's political arm]. Still," the paper concludes, "there is continuing skepticism whether the Northern Ireland political process, now resuscitated, will bring its people closer to the long-lasting peace they have desired for so long."
The New York Times : Departing French General Sees Few Guarantees in Kosovo
By CARLOTTA GALL
MITROVICA, Kosovo, May 27 -- The French commander of this volatile town, Gen. Pierre de Saqui de Sannes, told a visiting United Nations Security Council delegation recently that the place was calm.
Minutes later, before the visitors had even left town, the first stones were thrown in a weekend of street violence that left six French soldiers and one United Nations police officer injured, several buildings burned and dozens of foreign cars damaged.
It is the nature of Mitrovica, the last town in Kosovo with a significant presence of Serbs, to explode without warning, and no one knows better than the general. In February, on his second day in the job, the town exploded in the worst night of rioting that the NATO-led forces, known locally as KFOR, has seen since foreign troops arrived in Kosovo in June.
Three months later, as he prepared to hand over the job to another French general, General de Saqui de Sannes conceded that the situation remained extremely delicate and that there was no guarantee against further violence.
"I cannot stop another attack occurring in north Mitrovica," he said in an interview. "There are a number of extremists on both sides. It could happen again."
Foreigners who are working here complain that despite 2,000 troops, including a contingent from the French Foreign Legion, and several hundred international police officers, the forces are still not in control of either the Albanian-dominated southern part of Mitrovica or its northern Serbian enclave.
"KFOR and the U.N. have been unable to become the ruling power here," said a senior officer who works for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
"They have never been the governing authority, except on paper."
Former members of the now disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army rule the Albanian side, and the Serbs are in charge in the north, the officer said, adding, "There is a climate of complete impunity here that has to be changed."
Some changes have been instituted since the violence in February and March, with troop reinforcements arriving and the appointment of a retired American general, William Nash, as the new regional administrator. General Nash, who has experience as a peacekeeper in nearby Bosnia, has injected a certain dynamism into decision making.
After the violence, he had a stream of people attend meetings in his office and reintroduced joint police and military patrols, a recognition of the poor cooperation that has existed.
From the street, Mitrovica's divisions look uglier than ever. The boundaries between the Serbian northern district and the Albanian areas are now defined by coils of razor wire and sandbagged checkpoints. In the name of security, the troops have reinforced the divisions between the two.
Some Albanians expelled in February have returned to a designated zone around the Ibar River, the waterway that divides the Serbian and Albanian districts. The Albanians returned under armed protection and now live behind armor and barbed wire.
The United Nations high commissioner for refugees estimates that 60 percent of the estimated 2,000 who fled in February have not returned.
Izet Jaha, 72, an Albanian, has French soldiers watching over him from an observation post in the house next door. "While KFOR is up there," Mr. Jaha said, "we can take our socks off while we sleep. If they were not here, none of us would be here."
The Serbs also feel insecure, distrustful of the peacekeepers and the United Nations, while fearing that a mass influx of Albanians into their district would force them to flee. Dusko Prodanovic, a Serbian bank manager who lives a block from the dividing line, said that the increased security was "just a charade" and that he saw little prospect for peace.
"I think the Albanians hate us so much that they do not want to live with us," Mr. Prodanovic said.
"The Americans are just waiting to expel us," said his wife, Bosanka.
If the Albanians suffered more directly from the violence in February, the Serbs have lost out overall, said a member of the O.S.C.E. office here. "The Serbs have lost a lot in these last three months," she said, adding that if the violence had been planned, it was a mistake.
"They managed to expel a few hundred Albanians," the member said. "But the reaction of the international community was very strong against them."
After trying to negotiate with the Serbs to return the Albanians and establish a safety zone, General de Saqui de Sannes did it by force. He also used force to push back from one bridge the Serbian thugs who keep watch on the river to deter Albanians from crossing to the northern side.
"We showed that we will not accept partition, and the Albanians feel that," the general said. "Now we must show that we will also not accept that Serbs be pushed out."
General Nash arrived last month with a mission to prevent the partition of the city and the northern Serb-dominated part of Kosovo. His goal has already shifted to returning the Serbs to Kosovo.
"The issue we now face today is not partition, but the prosperous and safe return of Serbs to their homes." the general said in an interview.
But violence simmers on. After the outburst on April 29 that followed the Security Council visit, one additional elderly Albanian couple was evicted from an apartment in northern Mitrovica. And the Serbian bridge watchers remain in charge on the main bridge, threatening Albanians and, sometimes, foreigners.
The international forces have failed to arrest anyone for the killings in the riots in February and the damage on April 29. Police cells are full of petty criminals and drug addicts, but the general conceded that arresting the real troublemakers "could spark a bigger problem."
The approach has raised questions about the determination of the French troops to enforce order. In the smaller Serbian enclave of Gracanica, by contrast, Swedish troops move in forcefully to arrest troublemakers immediately in commotions.
A Swedish soldier recently shot one man in the leg to deter an attack, and several men have been expelled for three months, said a Swedish officer. "You have to show them force," the officer said. "Otherwise they don't stop."
The Observer: British deal fuelled Balkan war
Military sale to Slovenia flouted Tory foreign policy
Blaz Zgaga and Antony Barnett
Sunday May 28, 2000
Britain flouted its own foreign policy by approving the sale of millions of pounds worth of military equipment to a former Yugoslav republic only days before the outbreak of the bloody Balkans war, The Observer has established.
Eight days before Slovenia became the first area to break from the unified Yugoslavia in 1991, a British firm delivered communications equipment to the Slovenian forces to help them fight the Serb-led Yugoslav army.
The revelation that this deal was approved by the Conservative Government will embarrass former Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, who was the principal architect of the West's policy of supporting a unified Yugoslavia. He had warned the republics to stay in the federation.
Until now, Germany has shouldered the blame for the Balkan tragedy by prematurely recognising the breakaway republics of Slovenia and Croatia. Britain's help to Slovenia casts a new light on events.
Labour MP Ann Clwyd, who sits on the House of Commons International Development Select Committee, said: 'These revelations show once again that the export of military equipment from Britain needs to be much more rigorously scrutinised.'
After Slovenia declared independence, the Yugoslav army began its military offensive against the 'rebel' republic. The ensuing 10-day war signalled the start of the conflicts that ultimately killed hundreds of thousands.
Three months after Britain exported military equipment to Slovenia the United Nations imposed an arms embargo on the region.
The Observer has obtained details of the multi-million-pound contract between the Slovenian Defence Ministry and Racal, the British defence and communications group. A fax dated 29 May, 1991, from one of Racal's military subsidiaries, Racal Tacticom, to the Slovenian Defence Ministry lists four batches of tactical military communication equipment worth £5 million.
Racal's communications network played a vital role in helping Slovenia beat the Serb-led Yugoslav forces. The equipment arrived on 17 June, eight days before the war of independence began.
Janez Jansa, then Slovenian Defence Minister, praises Britain for its role in his memoirs. He writes: 'The government of one of the more decent Western states has, on our request, officially approved the export of mili tary radio stations with secure data transmission to Slovenia.'
One senior source at Racal Defence Electronics confirmed that it had delivered the equipment after it received an export licence from the Department of Trade and Industry. He said the contract was with the 'regional government' of Slovenia, and the export was for 'the purpose of national defence'.
Misha Glenny, a Balkans expert, said: 'If the British Government was fully aware of this, it would imply that the Government was covertly operating in contradiction of its stated policy and aims. It would also shift some of the responsibility carried by Germany.'
The former Slovenian Defence Minister's book also claims that the British Embassy in Belgrade learnt that the Yugoslav air force was planning to shoot down a Slovenian aircraft due to carry the equipment to its new owner. According to Jansa, the British tipped off the Slovenians, who decided to send the cargo by road. Government sources in Slovenia confirm that the aircraft that was to have delivered the shipment was a passenger plane owned by Adria Airways, the national airline. The jet was to have flown from Gatwick to the capital Ljubljana, in central Slovenia.
Suggestions that the British Embassy in Belgrade knew of the military shipment and warned the Slovenians are strongly denied by Sir Peter Hall, who was ambassador in Belgrade. He said: 'These allegations of British Embassy involvement are without foundation... I had no, absolutely no, knowledge of any military equipment being sent from Britain to Slovenia. Indeed, given the great tension in the region at the time I would be surprised that any such equipment would have been sent at all.'
The Observer contacted Lord Hurd and Peter Lilley, who was then Trade Secretary, with details of the arms shipment. Both declined to respond. A spokesman for the Blair Government refused to comment, saying it needed permission from Racal to give details of any export licence.
Lord Owen, the EU peace negotiator in Bosnia, said: 'I am surprised that such sales took place, particularly as the British Government, the US and Nato's view was to keep the Federation of Yugoslavia together. But this equipment was not aggressive - it was radios not guns. I think it sails close to the border but does not cross it.'
Blaz Zgaga works for the Slovenian daily 'Vecer'.
Reuters: Clinton keeps U.S. sanctions on Yugoslavia
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Clinton extended U.S. sanctions against Yugoslavia on Thursday, saying it still represented an "unusual and extraordinary threat" to U.S. national security.
The sanctions were imposed in April 1999 in response to Yugoslavia's crackdown on the ethnic Muslim minority in Kosovo. The sanctions impose a general ban on all U.S. exports to and imports from Yugoslavia, including Serbia and Montenegro.
An exception is agricultural products and medicine and medical equipment subject to safeguards to prevent diversion to military or political use by the Yugoslav government.
"This situation continues to pose a continuing and unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy interests and the economy of the United States," Clinton said in documents sent to Congress notifying them of the extension of the sanctions for another six months.
The Washington Post: Yugoslavia Students Protest Milosevic Regime
By Jovana Gec
Associated Press Writer
Friday, May 26, 2000; 8:59 AM
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia –– Thousands of students, outraged by the impotence of opposition leaders, marched Friday in the capital, demanding an end to the "tyranny" of President Slobodan Milosevic.
The students voiced frustration over the opposition bickering that has enabled Milosevic to survive politically for the past decade despite Yugoslavia's disintegration and loss of Kosovo province last year.
Marching outside Belgrade's City Hall, which is run by the opposition, the students chanted slogans calling on opposition leaders to come out and explain their strategy.
"Ten years is too much out of a lifetime to be spent in the hell of tyranny," the students said in a manifesto. "We call on all to end this shame."
The students, led by the Otpor, or Resistance, movement, said Friday that over 700 of its activists have been detained for questioning in recent months.
About 4,000 students, chanting "Kill yourself Slobodan and Save Serbia!" outlined their demands at the Belgrade rally.
They included a call to allow a "peaceful transition of power" and a demand for those "responsible for Serbia's demise to leave."
"There must be no silence – silence is complicity," the statement said.
The students urged the opposition "by personal example to give impetus to a wide national rebellion against state terrorism."
The opposition has called a mass rally for Saturday in Belgrade in what will be a major test of strength, but the students were skeptical.
"It's the final moment for the opposition to come to its senses and not waste time," said Branko Ilic, an Otpor leader. "We will come to the rally to see whether the opposition has any plan."
In a rally in the southern Serbian city of Nis, one opposition leader, Goran Svilanovic, criticized his colleagues, saying they failed to respond adequately to the government takeover of Belgrade's Studio B television last week.
"If we do not resist now, they will come into our houses, burn them and chase us away," Svilanovic told about 3,000 people.
Fearing a student uprising, the government has ordered university classes to end by Friday – a week early – and banned all gatherings on campuses across Serbia.
The Holy Synod of the Serbian Orthodox Church endorsed the students' demands and called for the release of all detained and an end to government violence, the independent Beta news agency said.
Later Friday, the independent daily Danas was fined about $50,000 in a libel suit filed by Serbia's Deputy Prime Minister Vojislav Seselj, an ultranationalist leader who has called for even tougher measures against free media.
An editor in Danas, Rasa Savic, said the daily was given 24 hours to pay the fine.
Several hundred people attended the ninth consecutive evening protest against last week's government takeover of Belgrade's Studio B television.
At the rally, Studio B journalists read their news in an open-air makeshift studio on the balcony of the Belgrade City Hall.
Two hours later, independent Index radio – the only nongovernment radio station still heard in Belgrade – was overpowered by a stronger signal playing folk music at the time of the station's main evening news.
Meanwhile, the Yugoslav army, which is controlled by Milosevic, urged a crackdown on "external and internal enemies." The latter term is used to describe the opposition.
The Yugoslav Left, a party led by Milosevic's influential wife Mirjana Markovic, accused the opposition of trying to split the country through "terrorism."
Meanwhile, police detained and questioned more than a dozen opposition and Otpor activists in several Serbian cities.
In Milosevic's hometown of Pozarevac, police arrested 11 people, including a priest, as they attempted to visit an opposition activist jailed there since May 2.
Serb Government Orders Early Closure of University
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (Reuters) - Serbia's government ordered an early closure of Belgrade University for all classes, allowing students in only for exams, a news agency reported.
The independent Beta news agency quoted sources at the university as saying the order came from Serbia's Minister for College and University Education, Jevrem Janjic.
``In a note marked 'urgent' sent to all rectors and deans, Janjic ordered that after May 26 it was no longer allowed to extend classes or hold any supplementary lessons,'' Beta said Thursday.
It added Janjic informed the deans that any kind of ''assembly or events'' at the schools were banned, and that the deans would be held responsible for any breach in the regulations.
``Students will be allowed to enter schools only on the day of their exams and will not be able to use libraries,'' said the order, as cited by Beta.
The move was seen as an attempt to counter students' plans to gather and organize a general university strike.
A source close to the student-based Otpor (Resistance) movement told Reuters that at a student rally scheduled for Friday in downtown Belgrade Otpor planned to call for a start to the strike.
``This closure is an attempt to prevent that,'' the source who requested anonymity said.
The government has branded Otpor a terrorist, fascist and illegal organization that it said was behind the murder of a top Yugoslav official Bosko Perosevic on May 13. Hundreds of Otpor members have been detained, some beaten and jailed.
The opposition Democratic Party of Serbia described the move as ``draconian,'' adding that it ``destroyed what last crumbs of autonomy our universities used to have,'' Beta reported.
``Deans have been reduced to petty clerks, whose primary task is to defend the regime, rather than classes, students and science,'' the party said.
Meanwhile, 15 lecturers in the Drama School started a strike Thursday to protest ``the beatings of students.''
``We inform you that we won't be able to conduct exams in June or enroll new students until the thugs who beat students leave (the university) and are prosecuted,'' the lecturers said in an open letter carried by Beta.
In the southern city of Nis, some 2,000 students assembled outside the Medical School and then took a protest march to the central police station, where police stopped them and refused to take a letter explaining the Otpor was not a fascist organization. No incident occurred.
Over the past few days students, Otpor members at several Belgrade colleges staged separate protests ahead of the big rally Friday.
Yugoslav army holds exercise in Montenegro airport
BELGRADE, May 26 (Reuters) - Yugoslavia's Second Army held military exercises on Friday in Montenegro's Podgorica airport -- the scene of a tense stand-off with the pro-Western republic's police last December.
The state news agency Tanjug said the exercises were staged by the army's special anti-terrorist unit and were part of regular army activities, citing Major General Momcilo Radevic, deputy commander of the Second Army which covers Montenegro.
"These young men are ready to resist all forms of terrorism at any given moment," Radevic said.
An eyewitness in Podgorica said the airport remained open during the exercises. There were no indications of tension with the republic's police, who staged joint exercises with the army earlier this month to show tensions had eased since December.
The Belgrade government last week pledged a crackdown on what it calls "terrorism" organised by the West to destabilise the country. Officials have accused the Serbian opposition and Montenegrin government of carrying out Western orders.
Opposition activists have called on troops to stay neutral in their dispute with the authorities in Belgrade.
The Yugoslav Army General Staff on Friday joined senior government officials to say they would do whatever was necessary to uncover "terrorist activities" intended to reduce the army's combat readiness or wreck the constitutional order.
ARMY COMPLAINS OF PRESSURE
"The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Army are exposed to considerable pressure and open threats, as well as terrorist activities initiated by foreign and domestic enemies," said the army statement quoted by Tanjug.
Montenegro, the junior partner in the Yugoslav federation, has taken steps to distance itself from Serbia since NATO's 11-week air war on Yugoslavia in 1999, conducted to force Belgrade to end its repressive policies in Kosovo.
The West and the Montenegrin authorities have accused Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic of stepping up pressure on Montenegro by increasing the military presence there.
The army has dismissed the claims and Yugoslav officials have said it is Montenegro that is stoking tension by building up its police force.
During the December stand-off between the Yugoslav army and Montenegrin police, the airport was closed for a day. Tension rose over jurisdiction over the airport, which has military and civilian areas side by side.
The two sides later agreed to cooperate to reduce tension.
Radevic said the army would not hold planned exercises in June which would have coincided with sensitive local elections "so that regular military activities are not used for political purposes by political parties."
The election will test the strength of Montenegro's pro-Milosevic opposition and the pro-Western Montenegrin leadership, which has threatened to hold a referendum on independence if Belgrade does not agree to reforms.
The Los Angeles Times : Milosevic Muzzles Yugoslavia's Media; the World Can Help It Speak
The Los Angeles Times : Milosevic Muzzles Yugoslavia's Media; the World Can Help It Speak
Balkans: Nations can contribute cash, training and expansion of Web capacities to keep the press independent.
By ANNA HUSARSKA
MOSCOW--While Russian President Vladimir V. Putin offers precious moral and material support to Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic--$32 million worth of oil and a $102-million loan--the notoriously disunited Serbian opposition leaders seem to be implying that they have a special channel to Moscow (where the Yugoslav ambassador is no other than Milosevic's brother, Borislav).
On Friday, Vuk Draskovic, the leader of one of the main opposition parties--the Serbian Renewal Movement--suggested that he and two other opposition leaders may travel together to Moscow to request "Russia's assistance in curbing terror against Serbia's citizens." The Russian Foreign Ministry is denying any knowledge of an invitation extended to the Serbian opposition.
Draskovic is known to have turned his coat so many times that perhaps one should not take his words too seriously. It may be more constructive to concentrate on the "together" aspect of the supposed trip. This is obviously a result of the recent crackdown in Serbia, which so effectively concentrated the minds of the opposition. Indeed, it seems that Milosevic decided to go full steam ahead with eradicating the democratic-minded media.
The takeover last week of Studio B television was the boldest move so far, although it was not surprising. In fact, it is rather logical. Milosevic thrives on conflict and, having lost the last three wars in the former Yugoslavia, he went after the Fourth Estate.
It is also a clear sign that he is afraid or at least disturbed by free media, which is his way of recognizing their importance.
The end result of the crackdowns is that the opposition in Serbia, weak as it may be, is left almost voiceless. This would seem to be the case for the independent television and radio stations--Studio B, Radio B2-92 and Index Radio--raided by police on May 17. Police also padlocked the newsroom of Blic, the most popular independent daily, which was housed in the same building. (Journalists have since been allowed to return.)
Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Vojislav Seselj put it rather bluntly when he expressed his satisfaction that Studio B was taken out of "the hands of a criminal gang," which he claimed "plundered it and provoked terror." He added that "the state has been waiting too long to face this evil. Now there is no more waiting; that evil must be nipped in the bud."
Well, the print, audio and electronic media are well past the bud stage. Serbian journalists are vulnerable but not hopeless. After being shut down, the staff of Blic worked on the premises of two other nongovernment dailies and produced the paper for the next day, in a reduced size and with a reduced print run, but there it was.
As for Radio B2-92, it probably is going to simply speed up its contingency plans. It is worth recalling that the veteran radio station survived an earlier government takeover (when it was called B-92) in the beginning of the NATO action against Yugoslavia. In this case, B2-92 concentrated on its Web site and satellite transmissions.
Repairing the damage done to the coverage by independent-minded television may prove the most difficult. But here the neighboring freer parts of former Yugoslavia can offer a helping hand. Plans were already well-advanced to cover the whole, or almost whole, of Serbia with broadcasts from Republika Srpska, the Serbian part of Bosnia; the satellite program of Montenegro TV has a special news program employing well-known Serbian anchors.
Serbs protested the attack on their media by staging street protests. They participate in small and dwindling numbers, but in greater numbers than when their president waged three wars in their name against non-Serbs.
Those who protest (and those who think, "Why bother, if nothing will change") need outside support. The international community should spare no effort in helping them with cash and training. This should include backing the nonstate printing facilities, even tiny ones, inside Serbia and outside, expanding the Web and satellite capacities for independent-minded radio and boosting the transmission signal for television broadcasters in Montenegro and Republika Srpska that carry news for Serbian audiences. This aid should be given discreetly, if possible through former East Bloc countries, so as not to put a stigma of collaboration-with-the-enemy on the recipients. The training, too, can be done by the anciens combatants from Czechoslovakia, Hungary or Poland.
This would be a new incarnation of the East European common market, and it also would help prevent more violent forms of know-how--such as terrorism--from creeping in as Serbs are plotting how to get rid of Slobodan and gain "sloboda," which is a long-forgotten word meaning freedom.
Anna Husarska Is the Senior Political Analyst at the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, an Independent Watchdog Group
The New York Times : Opposition in Disarray as Belgrade Cracks Down
The New York Times : Opposition in Disarray as Belgrade Cracks Down
By STEVEN ERLANGER
BELGRADE, Serbia, May 25 -- The leaders of the democratic opposition in Serbia are divided about how to respond to the government's seizure of the main opposition television station, undercutting their credibility and damaging the image of unity they are trying to project to voters and the West.
There are sharp internal arguments about the dangers of confrontation with Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav president. Some leaders favor a more systematic program of civil disobedience, including hunger strikes. Others press for a negotiated settlement with Mr. Milosevic that might bring early elections under fairer conditions.
The seizure of the television station, Studio B (including Radio B2-92's transmission facility in Belgrade), and the continuing attack on the independent print media have also opened new divisions about the wisdom of taking part in local and federal elections when they are called, probably this autumn.
The smaller parties grouped in the Alliance for Change generally favor going to elections in any conditions. But the largest opposition party, the Serbian Renewal Movement of Vuk Draskovic, now says in internal debates that it would be impossible to take part in elections under these conditions, say political leaders who spoke on condition of anonymity.
In general, these leaders say, Mr. Draskovic -- who had sworn to defend Studio B, which he controlled and which was lavish in its coverage of him and his party -- is opposed to any plan of confrontation that would give Mr. Milosevic a further pretext for a general crackdown. Already, the government says it is drafting a new law on terrorism that could be used to detain individuals for 60 days without charges. It is also drafting a new law banning foreign financing for nongovernmental organizations here, which tend to promote democracy, human rights and civil society.
The popular student movement, Otpor, or Resistance, is pressing for civil disobedience, including the blocking of roads and a halt to urban services like water, electricity, transport and garbage collection.
Fearing student unrest, the Government today ordered all universities to end the spring semester on Friday, a week ahead of schedule, and banned student gatherings on campus. In protest, student leaders have called a major rally for Friday.
Earlier in the week, Zoran Djindjic, leader of the Democratic Party, the largest within the Alliance for Change coalition, issued a call for civil disobedience.
Mr. Draskovic is allied to the Alliance but is not a member. He is said to be concerned for two reasons. First, that a tired, depressed, poor population will not follow the political opposition's call to arms, and second, that a growing crisis would favor the Serbian deputy prime minister, Vojislav Seselj, the head of the nationalist Radical Party, while Mr. Draskovic apparently believes that a deal, with Russian pressure, may still be possible with Mr. Milosevic's Socialists.
But some other leaders believe that Mr. Draskovic is simply afraid to lose control over Belgrade and its lucrative concessions, and that he would rather do a deal with Mr. Milosevic, still hoping to succeed him, than confront him and risk arrest. "He's trading Studio B for kiosks," one leader said bitterly.
Mr. Draskovic, Mr. Djindjic and Vojislav Kostunica of the Democratic Party of Serbia, are scheduled to travel to Moscow on Monday to seek Russian support. They intend to ask the Government of President Vladimir V. Putin to press Mr. Milosevic for the return of Studio B and early, democratic elections on all levels, said a Draskovic adviser. Predrag Simic.
"Moscow has leverage over both the regime and the opposition and is in a good position to mediate," Mr. Simic said.
In a meeting on Monday, opposition leaders disagreed even about the wisdom of having the large rally in Belgrade they announced for Saturday. The rally will go ahead, but the opposition leaders say they have no agreed plan of action to announce there.
"It's the worst of both worlds," one leader said. "Some argued that if we're not willing to fight hard with civil disobedience, using local city councils under our control, then we should just cancel the rally and say so, and then put our resources into preparing for elections. But we're going ahead with the rally with nothing new to say."
The problem for the opposition is also its strength. There are 16 leaders from a wide variety of parties of varying size. Inevitably, joint decisions are "lowest common denominator," another leader said.
But given that Mr. Draskovic controls the largest party, with the most votes, any concerted program of civil disobedience or electioneering is less likely to succeed without him, said a leader of the Alliance for Change.
Alliance leaders, who generally favor a more robust challenge to the regime and participation in elections under almost any circumstances, are considering whether to distance themselves from Mr. Draskovic. That might help them refurbish their credibility with some in the electorate, but it would also weaken the image of unity that voters, who generally dislike the Milosevic government, find attractive.
A third opposition group, led by former army generals and government officials who have broken with Mr. Milosevic, is trying to distance itself from the squabbling.
The Clinton administration and the European Union have pressed the opposition to stick together. After last summer's efforts to oust Mr. Milosevic through daily rallies failed -- rallies Mr. Draskovic opposed -- the West came to a consensus that elections were the best way to undermine Mr. Milosevic.
But the seizure of Studio B and increasing pressure against the independent daily newspapers Blic and Glas Javnosti have made Mr. Draskovic question the idea of taking part in any elections. While such a position could change -- elections haven't been called -- his position is a reversal of 1997, when Mr. Djindjic boycotted Serbian elections against American advice and Mr. Draskovic took part, validating the vote.
"People have made it clear they don't want civil war," said a Draskovic adviser. "Free and fair elections are the best means to overthrow Milosevic."
But one Alliance leader said, "This is another gift for Milosevic."
Yugoslavia Lashes Out at War Crimes Tribunal
BELGRADE (Reuters) - Yugoslavia lashed out at the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague Wednesday, denouncing an invitation to cooperate as "extreme arrogance."
"I will not agree under any conditions or at any cost that a single Yugoslav citizen be extradited to the so-called Hague tribunal. We do not recognize it, it is an illegal body," Yugoslav Justice Minister Petar Jojic said Wednesday.
Jojic was reading a response to a letter from tribunal chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte of April 26 which he said had asked Yugoslavia to help the tribunal and "to hand over certain Yugoslav citizens and others and transfer them to the Hague."
The United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) indicted Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and four other top Yugoslav Serb officials a year ago for alleged war crimes in Kosovo.
"Indicting top officials in Yugoslavia and Serbia is aimed at breaking up the federal state and its member republic and separating Kosovo from Serbia," Jojic said.
JOJIC USES STRONG LANGUAGE IN RESPONSE
Jojic, a member of the ultra-nationalist Serbian Radical Party, called Secretary of State Madeleine Albright "the illegitimate mother of this inquisition body" and Del Ponte and her predecessor Louise Arbour "symbols of prostitution."
"To the whore Del Ponte, self-proclaimed prosecutor of the criminal Hague tribunal," his letter began.
"You (del Ponte) are participating in the criminal project of the destruction of the Serb people and its national being."
He said the tribunal had resorted to deceit, organized abduction and force in arresting suspects, citing the arrest of Bosnian Serb General Momir Talic at a conference in Vienna and the recent arrest of another indictee inside Serbia.
Serbian police have arrested eight local people allegedly involved in the kidnapping of Bosnian Serb Dragan Nikolic "Yankee" in Smederevo, southeast of Belgrade, accusing them of being "mercenaries" and charging them with terrorism.
Jojic called on the court to prove its impartiality by indicting Western leaders for crimes committed against the Yugoslav population during NATO's March-June bombing campaign, saying more than 2,000 civilians had been killed.
The Washington-based Human Rights Watch in February said 500 civilians were killed during the air strikes.
Jojic also criticized the court for not indicting Kosovo Albanian leaders for alleged genocide against Serbs and other Non-Albanians in Kosovo.
NATO-led forces and United Nations administrators took control of Kosovo last June after Yugoslav security forces pulled out of the province. More than 150,000 Serbs and other minorities have fled Kosovo to Serbia since then in addition to thousands who fled to neighboring Montenegro.
Montenegro increases Albania ties despite Belgrade
SHKODER, Albania, May 23 (Reuters) - Montenegro said on Tuesday that growing cooperation with Albania was not a sign it was seeking to split from Serbia and it would be up to its citizens to decide on independence.
Prime Minister Filip Vujanovic, leader of Serbia's uneasy pro-Western partner, told reporters after meeting Albanian Prime Minister llir Meta that the small coastal state wanted to work with neighbouring Albania despite Belgrade's objections.
Belgrade severed diplomatic ties with Tirana after Albania sided with NATO forces which bombed Serbia to force an end to repression of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo last year.
"Our cooperation with Albania is not a sign of a project for an independent Montenegro. Our project envisages the right of the Montenegrin people to decide about their future together with Serbia or independently," Vujanovic said.
"This could also be to the benefit of a democratic Serbia. But the stance of the present government in Belgrade does not seem relevant to us," Vujanovic said through an interpreter.
Vujanovic said the political situation in Montenegro, which has adopted the German mark as its currency, was stable and predicted that Montenegrins would back democratic reforms in local polls on June 11 in the capital Podgorica and Herceg-Novi.
"Our road towards Europe is clear. If Serbia wants to, it can come on board. If not we shall go it alone, but the citizens of Montenegro will decide."
Vujanovic and Meta agreed to boost cooperation in transport, trade and telecommunications. They re-opened a border crossing in February three years after it was closed when Albania descended into anarchy after investment schemes collapsed.
Inaugurating a fibre optic link between the Albanian and Montenegrin phone systems, Vujanovic placed the first symbolic call to his office.
In addition to boosting water, rail and air transport with Montenegro, the two leaders backed joint projects to clean up Shkoder lake which they share.
Up to 300 Albanians cross daily into Montenegro, some of them bringing back cheaper goods that have helped reduce prices.
Vujanovic said trade was restricted by the Yugoslav army, which polices Montenegro's frontier. The prime ministers also agreed to step up the fight against trafficking of prostitutes and drugs.
Vujanovic said Montenegrin ethnic minorities in Albania and Albanian ethnic minorities in Montenegro should help promote cooperation between the two countries.
NATO scolds Russia for visit by Yugoslav war crimes suspect
FLORENCE, Italy (AP) _ NATO welcomed Russia back to the table Wednesday after a yearlong estrangement over Yugoslavia, but not without some tough talk on Moscow's relations with Belgrade.
The meeting in Florence was Russia's first ministerial-level session with NATO since the alliance's 78-day air war against Yugoslavia a year ago. Moscow staunchly opposed the bombing campaign, but later joined the allies in a peacekeeping effort in Kosovo.
Moscow has sent mixed signals on Yugoslavia. It opposed Belgrade's sanctions against the Yugoslav republic of Montenegro. But earlier this month it played host to the Yugoslav defense minister, Gen. Dragoljub Ojdanic, even though he has been indicted by the U.N. tribunal in The Hague for war crimes in Kosovo.
The U.N. Security Council resolutions require Russia to arrest war crimes suspects who enter its territory.
"The United States joins other allies in insisting that such an incident not be repeated," U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov on Wednesday.
Ivanov blamed the failure to arrest Ojdanic on "an internal, technical hitch," and said the issue was being addressed.
At the same time, Albright and others praised Russia for returning to security talks with the alliance.
"I'm glad the NATO-Russia relationship is getting back on track," said NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson. "Of course we're not going to agree on everything, and some of the talking will be tough. But we are talking."
Ivanov told reporters that it would take time to repair relations. "It's much easier to destroy than rebuild," he said. "A year ago, mutual trust was undermined."
The Russian foreign minister sharply criticized the U.N. war crimes tribunal, which he said was too "politicized" and dominated by the United States and Western Europe.
Differences over a proposed missile shield for America also led to frank exchanges among the 19 NATO foreign ministers. Albright tried to allay European fears about the proposed National Missile Defense, or NMD, saying the shield would not weaken the military alliance between Europe and the United States.
"There will be no decoupling, no reducing America's enduring commitment to this alliance, its citizens, its territory," she said.
The Russians and Chinese, however, oppose the U.S. plan. And despite Albright's assurances, the Europeans still worried that the missile shield would upset the balance on global arms control.
"We are asking Clinton to reflect before his decision on the repercussions of NMD on the entire world system," French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine told reporters. "There could also be consequences on proliferation."
The Clinton administration has not yet decided whether to go ahead with the program _ which would include setting up a small number of interceptors to knock down incoming missiles from rogue states. There are serious doubts about whether the system would even work.
Albright, however, offered the allies a gift in perhaps the biggest shift in U.S. arms export policy since the end of the Cold War. The program to streamline and ease export restrictions would make it easier for NATO countries, as well as Japan and Australia, to buy sophisticated U.S. arms, she said.
It could also boost business for U.S. defense contractors, who now sell NATO countries about $10 billion worth of weapons a year.
A senior U.S. official said the program was aimed at encouraging a "trans-Atlantic defense industrial base" and closing a technology gap between the United States and Europe that became painfully obvious during the Yugoslav air campaign.
As the ministers met Wednesday, several peaceful anti-NATO demonstrations took place in Florence, including one that attracted several thousand people.
Washington Post : Montenegro Seen As Beacon of Hope
By Anne Swardson
Wednesday, May 24,
PODGORICA, Yugoslavia –– On most soft spring nights, as leisure-seeking Montenegrins stroll about their dingy capital, a lanky figure in a suede jacket and blue jeans can be spotted around midnight at a secluded sidewalk cafe.
Watched over by three discreet bodyguards, President Milo Djukanovic is barely noticed by most passersby as he and his wife, Lidija, sip soft drinks and chat with friends. Relaxed and calm, he does not look like a man who has pulled his republic back from the brink. But he has.
A year ago, as NATO bombs rained on Yugoslavia, this part of the country seemed ready to explode. The campaign was directed primarily at Serbia, Montenegro's larger partner in the Yugoslav federation, and hardened the divide between the Western-looking Djukanovic and Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. But NATO also targeted Montenegro, and many citizens here were furious with the West. European and U.S. officials feared that Milosevic would try to inflame the discord in Montenegro and topple Djukanovic.
Today, however, Djukanovic's hold on power appears stronger than ever, and his plans to turn his republic toward the West are moving forward swiftly, experts here and abroad say. In the past few months, Montenegro has adopted the German mark as its currency, an act of economic audacity that infuriated Milosevic. In retaliation, Milosevic imposed a blockade between Serbia and Montenegro, but Djukanovic has overcome many of its effects, in part through a generous and largely unconditional infusion of Western aid.
With Djukanovic more secure, the United States and its allies are beginning to point to Montenegro as a Balkan beacon, a model of how to develop a market economy that will spark political change elsewhere in the region. If Montenegro can prosper under Western sunshine--and with Western funds, including $55 million from the United States this year--perhaps its more recalcitrant neighbors will see the light, the thinking goes.
"We support the democratic and market-oriented reforms of the Djukanovic regime as a model and stimulus for similar reforms throughout the former Yugoslavia," said Ambassador James Dobbins, senior U.S. policy adviser on the Balkans.
In an interview recently, Djukanovic said what more and more people around here believe: In all probability, he can outlast Milosevic, and will be around to secure Montenegro's future when the Yugoslav leader is gone.
"Time works for us; it is on our side," he said. "We are aware that over the long term, we are sure winners in the war against Milosevic."
In the short term, however, a serious Serbian threat looms. About one-third of Montenegro's 680,000 people favor retaining an alliance with Serbia--that is, they support Milosevic and the Yugoslav federation, opinion surveys show. Others want complete independence just as firmly, and find Djukanovic too conciliatory, which could be costly for him in local elections in two major cities next month.
In addition, Milosevic has as many as 20,000 soldiers posted inside Montenegro and on its borders, including paramilitary forces believed to be far better trained and equipped than Montenegro's rapidly growing police force of some 15,000.
All of which leaves Montenegro's future in question. The Yugoslav government never answered a Montenegrin proposal last August to restructure the constitutional relationship between the two republics. Djukanovic had promised to hold a referendum on independence if the proposal was not answered in six weeks, but now, nine months later, he says there is no hurry.
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing Djukanovic is reshaping Montenegro to conform to the West's image. It is a world of contradictions, a place where government officials talk of joining the European Union while corruption and black-market activity run rampant. The streets are filled with BMWs and other expensive cars, while the average monthly wage is about $75. Foreign investors dream of hotels filled with tourists on the spectacular rocky Adriatic coastline, yet the little business privatization that has occurred so far has been limited mostly to those with government connections.
Montenegro has, however, made progress against some of its traditional ills. More than 20 alleged Italian organized crime figures have been extradited from Montenegro to Italy to face charges related to cigarette smuggling. The former foreign minister, Branko Perovic, is facing smuggling-related charges as well; he resigned last year and says he will go on trial in Italy to prove his innocence.
And the impact of the Serbian border blockade may not be as severe as first thought. Montenegro has ensured adequate supplies of essential items by importing meat from Slovenia, milk from Croatia and bottled water from Bulgaria, among other items. Goods also continue to flow from Serbia: On two recent days, the border checks were largely a formality and even loaded trucks were permitted to pass in both directions after being examined.
Many small merchants who have traditionally crossed the border to peddle their wares still do so, just more carefully. Goran Rakonjac, for instance, now uses horse-drawn farm carts and travels back roads to haul the soft white cheese produced at his family farm in Serbia to market in Bijelo Polje, 15 miles away in Montenegro. He used to simply throw the cheese in his car and drive it over; now, the process is more time-consuming and less convenient, but he can still make money.
"It's the two sides that are struggling for power, and it's the population that suffers," Rakonjac said as he sipped a beer at a border watering hole after a successful day at market.
Djukanovic says additional Western aid is needed to prevent the blockade from doing more damage. Western aid also helps counter the effects of Montenegro's impossibly tangled government budget and economic system. In addition to the $55 million that the United States will give to Montenegro this year, it also will provide government guarantees for private investors. The European Union plans to give about $36 million in similar direct financial support and is expected to approve $45 million for a new bridge and highway in Podgorica, the capital.
What worries experts here, however, is that the largely unconditional Western aid will give Djukanovic little incentive to unravel Montenegro's tradition of cronyism. The arriving funds from Western nations pay not just for bridges and tunnels, but for pensions and other benefits--allowing Djukanovic to continue to pass the largess to the well-connected, some say.
"Montenegro does not have a lot of time to waste as far as reforms are concerned, and reforms can only be imposed with the help of the international community," said Slavko Drljevic, general manager of a commercial bank and a former finance minister. "They should publicly request conditions and the government should publicly answer."
Djukanovic said privatization here "is transparent and consistent with Western rules. . . . From the first day, we have had British and European consultants." As for Western financial aid, he said, "Every cent of the assistance we have received has been spent for the purposes for which it was intended."
According to U.S. officials, Djukanovic is making progress in reshaping his tradition-bound republic, but technical advisers are watching the situation and offering advice, and more conditions will probably be laid down as the amount of aid to Montenegro rises. Experts say, however, that Montenegro's key strategic position induces the West to be perhaps a tad less picky about Djukanovic and his policies than if circumstances were otherwise.
As Nicholas Whyte of the Center for European Policy Studies, a Brussels-based research organization, put it: "Obviously a lot of bad habits have been learned over the last 50 years and some officials in the government have done well through unorthodox means. But our perception is that the political will to reform is genuine and strong."
Milosevic casts shadow over NATO business
FLORENCE, Italy (Reuters) - One year ago NATO was beginning its third month of bombing to force Serbian security forces out of Kosovo and, as its leaders later admitted, was starting to feel desperate about the outcome.
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic ultimately gave way without forcing NATO to mount a land invasion.
But he remains in power, posing a direct and immediate threat to NATO credibility and the stability of the southwestern Balkans.
This corner of Europe represents NATO's greatest investment, and Milosevic its biggest risk factor.
Alliance foreign ministers who meet for regular talks on Wednesday in Florence are expected to issue a fresh warning to the Serbian president to stop oppressing those rising numbers of his own people who want a change to democracy.
But there is no obvious threat, such as bombing, to back that demand up.
And having been indicted for war crimes and kicked out of the leaders' club in which he used to negotiate such issues, Milosevic has nothing to lose.
"Ministers will likely lay down some markers for the Serb dictator," said a NATO envoy ahead of the Florence conference, a twice-yearly gathering.
But what NATO could or would do to prevent Milosevic from systematically silencing his political opponents is unclear.
PRESSURE POINTS
With over 60,000 troops deployed in Kosovo and Bosnia, the 19-member alliance has bound itself to a policy of limiting the reach and suffocating the regime of Milosevic through sanctions.
Some NATO leaders call his ham-fisted closure of independent media a sign of panic in a crumbling power structure.
But privately, alliance officials and diplomats fear he still has many dangerous cards to play.
In what it calls a policy of deliberate vagueness, NATO has warned Belgrade it would "not remain indifferent" to any bid, military or otherwise, to oust the pro-Western government of Montenegro, Serbia's little sister republic in Yugoslavia.
What that means is not clear. But it does not have the unmistakable edge of the military intervention threats that NATO issued over Kosovo in early 1999.
Some observers believe NATO allies were unnerved by how close they came to an all-out ground war in Yugoslavia last year and have no appetite -- and no consensus of 19 -- to wade ashore for a fight in mountainous, ethnically divided Montenegro.
A move by Milosevic to disrupt the June municipal elections in the Adriatic republic, however, could trigger a scenario that puts NATO to the supreme test.
But even short of such a major showdown, which some analysts argue he can ill afford, Milosevic can inflict pain at points in and around Kosovo in hopes of wearing down Western resolve.
Others say the past 10 years teaches that there is no predicting what Milosevic thinks he can or cannot afford.
AIR OF ABSTRACTION
So while NATO tries to go about its business of post-Cold War modernization and adaptation to new threats and new European aspirations, it must have one eye looking over its shoulder for a new threat from Belgrade.
Against such a menacing background, with alliance prestige as well as flesh-and-blood troops on the line each day, some topics on the agenda in Florence have an air of abstraction.
Ministers will discuss the European Union's planned rapid reaction corps and how it is to mesh with NATO, and the United States' proposed national missile defense and how it might be achieved without derailing key arms-control treaties.
Both are projects only lately off the drawing board, postulating abstract crises and threats as yet unknown.
But they at least appear amenable to logic and negotiation, while with Yugoslavia those routes seem closed.
Even formal reconciliation between NATO and Russia, through the presence of Foreign Minister Ivan Ivanov in the Fortezza da Basso conference hall, comes under Yugoslavia's cloud.
The West's satisfaction at his acceptance was negated by its anger at Russia's provocative reception of Yugoslav Defense Minister Dragoljub Ojdanic in Moscow this month.
A senior alliance diplomat said NATO partners "remain outraged" at Russia's decision to host an indicted international war criminal with full honurs, and failure to arrest him.
NATO efforts to determine exactly where "new hope" Russian President Vladimir Putin stands on Milosevic are continuing, NATO sources said.
Belgrade Seeks Foreign Policy Initiative
Belgrade Seeks Foreign Policy Initiative
By Philippa Fletcher
BELGRADE (Reuters) - Yugoslavia's isolated government sought to seize the diplomatic initiative from its opponents Tuesday, saying relations with Russia and China were thriving and ties to the West could be restored.
The Foreign Ministry also said the government would press ahead with measures designed to stop what it called attempts to stir unease in Serbia, where political tensions have increased sharply over the past week.
Opponents of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic said Tuesday that they had received an official invitation to visit Moscow on May 29. They want support from Belgrade's traditional ally in their struggle against the government, which has shut opposition media and made dozens of arrests in recent days.
Assistant Foreign Minister Nebojsa Vujovic declined comment on the proposed visit, which follows a Moscow trip by opposition Serb leaders from Kosovo and signs that Belgrade's other fellow-Orthodox ally, Greece, is also courting the opposition.
``This is a private matter and we are not using our diplomatic channels for private matters,'' he told a briefing. There was no immediate word from Moscow on the visit.
Vujovic said the government's good relations with Moscow had been proven by a recent visit there by Foreign Minister Zivadin Jovanovic and Defense Minister Dragoljub Ojdanic.
He hailed Russia's decision, confirmed Tuesday, to boycott the meeting of a council in charge of observing the 1995 Dayton peace accord that ended fighting in the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Russia refused to participate because Yugoslavia was not invited.
Vujovic also said Li Peng, the head of China's National People's Congress, would soon visit Belgrade, but did not say when.
HELP FROM MOSCOW?
The West has cut almost all official links with Belgrade since last year's conflict over Kosovo, during which a United Nations tribunal indicted Milosevic and four aides for alleged war crimes committed in the province by Serb forces.
Moscow played a key role in persuading Milosevic to allow international peacekeepers into Kosovo and thereby end almost three months of NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.
Opposition leaders hope Russia will now help them to oust the Serb strongman.
``It looks as if besides the fight for democracy in the squares, streets and in the free press, a quiet and invisible but just as fierce fight is being waged on the diplomatic field,'' Predrag Simic, adviser to opposition leader Vuk Draskovic, told Reuters.
In Moscow, Milosevic's brother Borislav, Belgrade's envoy to the Russian capital, was quoted by Interfax news agency as saying he did not see anything serious or unnatural in Russia maintaining contacts with Serb opposition leaders.
Moscow would never support calls for the overthrow of the Yugoslav authorities, Interfax quoted the envoy as saying.
Belgrade has accused Western governments of using the Serbian opposition to foment tensions within Serbia, which dominates what remains of Yugoslavia, to oust Milosevic.
Vujovic said that the government was preparing to stop what it calls ``terrorist activities'' and the opposition calls legitimate dissent.
``There is an action going on initiated within the government structure to introduce legislation which would stop and prevent terrorist activities,'' Vujovic said, without elaborating.
Vujovic said that Yugoslavia was against Western governments, not people, and relations could improve if they dropped sanctions, compensated for the bombing and stopped interfering. Without that, he said, there could be no peace.
The Independent : Serb court jails Albanians 'held at random'
The Independent : Serb court jails Albanians 'held at random'
By Vesna Peric Zimonjic in Belgrade
23 May 2000
A Serbian judge wound up the country's biggest mass trial yesterday, convicting 143 ethnic Albanians on terrorism charges allegedly committed during the 11-week Nato air campaign against Yugoslavia. He sentenced them to a total of 1,632 years in jail.
Judge Goran Petronijevic gave 49 members of the so-called "Djakovica Group" 13 years each, 51 got 12 years, 20 got 10 years, 11 got nine years and 10 got seven years. Two juveniles were sentenced to seven years each in juvenile detention. All the accused denied the charges, saying they were arrested at random. They were rounded up in Djakovica in western Kosovo where hundreds of ethnic Albanians were ordered out of their homes by the Yugoslav Army (VJ) and police during April and May 1999.
The trial, denounced by human rights campaigners as a travesty of justice, was in Nis, 150 miles south of Belgrade, where several Kosovo courts moved after the Serb admin-istration withdrew from the province in June 1999. The civil rights group the Humanitarian Law Centre (HLC) described the trial as "an unprecedented event since the end of WWII", adding: "Never has such a large group been put on trial and charged unselectively with the same criminal offence."
Teki Boksi, one of the defence lawyers, said: "The sentences have nothing to do with what really happened. This was a political trial. These people were sentenced only because they were ethnic Albanians."
Mr Boksi said no evidence was presented to back the accusation that the accused formed units of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The prosecution said they attacked Serb forces three times in April and May 1999, killing one policeman and two soldiers.
Judge Petronijevic said it was impossible to determine the individual guilt (of the defendants) and that "it was not necessary". Tests had established beyond reasonable doubt that those sentenced had used weapons, he said.
Mr Boksi said: "Most of the defendants are educated, urban people, one of them professor of mathematics at Pristina University. This trial is damaging and counterproductive, because its outcome will influence trials of Serbs in Kosovo. Tensions in Kosovo will not be eased by this." Dozens of Serbs are in Kosovo prisons, awaiting trial on war crimes charges.
"We expect the international community to put pressure on judiciary institutions in Serbia so the problem of this trial could be solved in a proper manner," Mr Boksi added. "Otherwise, its outcome can only help extremists on both sides."
The New York Times : U.N. Aide in Kosovo Faults NATO on Unexploded Bombs
The New York Times : U.N. Aide in Kosovo Faults NATO on Unexploded Bombs
By CARLOTTA GALL
PRISTINA, Kosovo, May 22 -- One boy was killed and two other children were seriously wounded by a cluster bomb on Sunday, and a United Nations official said today that NATO had delayed the marking and removal of its unexploded bombs.
Since refugees returned to Kosovo in June, more than 100 people have died in mine and bomb accidents, and hundreds have been wounded. An estimated 40 percent have been the victims of cluster bombs.
One cluster bomb releases up to 200 bomblets that scatter over a wide area and should explode on impact. But explosives experts have found that there is a high failure rate, as high as 20 percent in some areas, and the bombs lie on the surface or often dig into the earth. Children and farmers often find the bright-colored, shuttlecock-shaped bombs.
NATO did not provide detailed information on the airstrikes that dropped 1,392 cluster bombs on Kosovo until two weeks ago, nearly a year after the conflict ended, said John Flanagan, program manager of the United Nations Mine Action Coordination Center. It coordinates civilian organizations clearing mines and unexploded ordinance across Kosovo.
"It was definitely frustrating," Mr. Flanagan said. "Ten months after the conflict finished, we are just getting to grips with the information, and it shouldn't be like that."
Teams that search for unexploded mines have been able to mark only 60 to 70 percent of the cluster bomb sites so far. That much could have been accomplished earlier if the teams had the information on the airstrikes, he said.
The NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo has also failed to meet its commitments to survey and mark the bombed areas, he said. "It became clear that we did not have all the information, and the marking was not done," Mr. Flanagan said. "Sometimes the first we knew of a strike area was when there was a casualty."
Another sore topic has been whether depleted-uranium munitions were used in the air campaign in Kosovo. NATO finally admitted in February that such munitions were used. Last week the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, wrote to the NATO secretary general, George Robertson, asking for detailed maps showing where those strikes were made in Kosovo.
Mr. Annan asked for precise areas of the strikes and for assistance to undertake "systematic radiation measurements and sampling." He also asked for help in preventing damage from the munitions.
While there is some debate about the danger of depleted-uranium debris, there is no doubt about the danger of cluster bombs, which has shocked both peacekeeping soldiers and civilians working to render the mines harmless. "Cluster bombs almost always cause multiple casualties, and it is nearly always young people who get injured," Mr. Flanagan said. "We did not anticipate the number of them used and their attractiveness to kids."
Refugees in the camps were not warned of the dangers of cluster bombs, he added, and even soldiers under the NATO command were not always well-informed. In the 10 1/2 months before April this year, there were 478 casualties in Kosovo from mines or bombs, and 100 of them were fatalities, Mr. Flanagan said. With the arrival of spring, the casualty figure has climbed again, to 15 casualties in April. Four teams are concentrating on clearing cluster bombs and hope to clear the 333 known sites of bomblets this year.
But the bomblets from a single bomb can scatter over a large area. When he applied directly to the United States military, Mr. Flanagan said, he finally received vital details like the direction of attack of the plane and wind conditions.
He blames the structure of NATO and of the peacekeeping force as much as anything for the delay and lack of help. Under their mandate, peacekeepers have restricted themselves to clearance they judged essential to their mission, and they have left the mine clearance to civilian teams financed by the United Nations.
"A lot of work was done, and then there was a line drawn in the sand," Mr. Flanagan said, alluding to the fact that many military explosives experts were pulled out, even while cluster bomb sites remained unmapped and uncleared. "They could have made a significant dent in the situation."
The Christian Science Monitor : Wiring up the powerless
The Christian Science Monitor : Wiring up the powerless
Susan Moeller
CAMBRIDGE, MASS.
The concept of "digital democracy" champions the Internet as a means by which all people can be given a voice. Taken literally, the creation of a digital democracy would institutionalize the fundamental human right of free expression.
In doing so, it would help establish participatory democracy and equitable global development.
Faith in the exponential expansion of technology and the West's economic interest in a stable world may make the notion of a digital democracy conceivable, but the idea's timeliness comes from two coincident political realities.
First, the end of the cold war and the increase in internal ethnic conflicts have given rise to a questioning of the value of the nation-state frame. Politicians, academics, and journalists have begun thinking about the world in terms that cross boundaries - terms such as globalization and human rights.
Second, the emergence of human rights as a critical component of Western foreign policy - even if it is often only a rhetorical one - has meant that there has been some shift in focus from the sovereignty of nations to the rights of individuals. Giving voice to the voiceless is not a frivolous understanding of the term human rights. As James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, has said: "Freedom of the press is not a luxury. It is not an extra."
For eight months last year, teams from the World Bank interviewed 20,000 poor people in 23 countries. According to Mr. Wolfensohn, those interviewed said what differentiated them from the rich was not just money. The poor most despaired of their lack of voice: "The inability to convey to people in authority what it is that they think. The inability to have a searchlight put on conditions of inequality."
Potentially, a digital democracy could give the currently disenfranchised a say in their own and the world community. But it is nowhere near to making good on that promise. According to Nua, an Internet consulting company, almost half the world's online users live in the US and Canada (136 million) and more people go on the Internet in Sweden (3.5 million) than in Africa (2.5 million).
Even in India, home to the largest middle class of any nation, only one-half of 1 percent of households have Internet access. The wired, like those software engineers President Clinton visited on his trip to India's Cyber Towers - South Asia's Silicon Valley - are citizens of the globe they're astride. The unwired are often isolated from their government services enjoyed by better-conncected citizens.
In virtually every nation, there are two new segments of society: the wired and the unwired, the information rich and the information poor. Simple and affordable access to phone lines are major impediments in a world where 2 billion people, according to Intel, have never made a phone call. On the other side of that equation, the Gartner Group and the Yankee Group both estimate that by 2003 there will be more than 1 billion mobile-phone users. Today, according to Intel, there are only 9 million Internet users in China, but there are 70 million cellphones there. These statistics give some credence to the belief, shared by Intel and others such as Chris Gent, chief executive officer of the European communications giant Vodafone, that most people's first interaction with the Internet will not be through a PC box, but with cheaper, hand-held mobile devices.
Yet global disparities are not solely linked to the availability and cost of telephone services, hardware, software, and Internet service providers. Another restriction on digital democracy is the lack of an incentive for potential users. What most of the people on the planet really need from the Internet is content - in the traditional sense of news and information - in a language they understand. It's one community in sub-Saharan Africa able to learn from the experience of other small communities elsewhere about how to allocate and administer scarce water resources. It's Belgrade's independent radio station B-92, denied access to the air during the war in Kosovo, able to tell its story and to find an even larger audience on the Web.
In this respect, the most valuable roles for the Internet in the global community are to serve as a free press for those who don't have one, and as a tool for multilateral communications for those who lack an essential telecommunications infrastructure. If a muzzled press or the absence of a free press is an abuse of human rights, expanding the reach of the Internet and the community of Internet users is human rights work. Building a digital democracy can be both a human rights goal and a business investment plan. Privileged countries can work to expand those opportunities for the voiceless and the powerless. This spring, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave $50 million to Save the Children to support a global campaign to save the estimated 5.4 million newborns who die every year. In addition to launching and expanding health programs, the money will also fund a global information campaign to both increase local understanding of the causes of infant deaths and raise awareness of the social, as well as the political and economic costs of those deaths.
The wired among us can pressure the e-world and now the mobile world to decide that helping to connect the powerless is not only an ethical assumption of global responsibility, but is also, ultimately, a pocketbook issue.
The Independent : Serb court jails Albanians 'held at random'
The Independent : Serb court jails Albanians 'held at random'
By Vesna Peric Zimonjic in Belgrade
23 May 2000
A Serbian judge wound up the country's biggest mass trial yesterday, convicting 143 ethnic Albanians on terrorism charges allegedly committed during the 11-week Nato air campaign against Yugoslavia. He sentenced them to a total of 1,632 years in jail.
Judge Goran Petronijevic gave 49 members of the so-called "Djakovica Group" 13 years each, 51 got 12 years, 20 got 10 years, 11 got nine years and 10 got seven years. Two juveniles were sentenced to seven years each in juvenile detention. All the accused denied the charges, saying they were arrested at random. They were rounded up in Djakovica in western Kosovo where hundreds of ethnic Albanians were ordered out of their homes by the Yugoslav Army (VJ) and police during April and May 1999.
The trial, denounced by human rights campaigners as a travesty of justice, was in Nis, 150 miles south of Belgrade, where several Kosovo courts moved after the Serb admin-istration withdrew from the province in June 1999. The civil rights group the Humanitarian Law Centre (HLC) described the trial as "an unprecedented event since the end of WWII", adding: "Never has such a large group been put on trial and charged unselectively with the same criminal offence."
Teki Boksi, one of the defence lawyers, said: "The sentences have nothing to do with what really happened. This was a political trial. These people were sentenced only because they were ethnic Albanians."
Mr Boksi said no evidence was presented to back the accusation that the accused formed units of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The prosecution said they attacked Serb forces three times in April and May 1999, killing one policeman and two soldiers.
Judge Petronijevic said it was impossible to determine the individual guilt (of the defendants) and that "it was not necessary". Tests had established beyond reasonable doubt that those sentenced had used weapons, he said.
Mr Boksi said: "Most of the defendants are educated, urban people, one of them professor of mathematics at Pristina University. This trial is damaging and counterproductive, because its outcome will influence trials of Serbs in Kosovo. Tensions in Kosovo will not be eased by this." Dozens of Serbs are in Kosovo prisons, awaiting trial on war crimes charges.
"We expect the international community to put pressure on judiciary institutions in Serbia so the problem of this trial could be solved in a proper manner," Mr Boksi added. "Otherwise, its outcome can only help extremists on both sides."
The New York Times: Serb Opposition Leaders Going to Moscow to Ask Putin's Help
By STEVEN ERLANGER
ELGRADE, Serbia, May 19 -- The leaders of Serbia's political opposition finally emerged from their private meetings and spoke to their supporters tonight, telling a rally of fewer than 5,000 people that they would fly to Moscow next week and ask Russia to help moderate the policies of the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic.
It seemed to some an odd gesture from the opposition, just three days after Mr. Milosevic's government seized the main opposition television station, Belgrade's Studio B, and silenced independent broadcasting in the capital, including radio B2-92.
Vuk Draskovic, leader of the main opposition party, the Serbian Renewal Movement, returned from Montenegro to appeal for calm, saying that "no television station or government authority is worth a single life."
Zoran Djindjic, leader of the Democratic Party, announced a large rally to be held in Belgrade a week from Saturday. "We will see who is bigger," he said. "We'll see if they send cordons of police against a million people."
But he made no mention of the plans he says he favors for widespread civil disobedience to protest government's moves against the independent media, and it seemed highly unlikely that a million people -- more than five times the size of Belgrade's biggest rally in the last two years -- would turn out here.
There were scattered clashes with the police the first two nights of these rallies, with up to 150 injured nationwide, including at least 4 police officers, and 40 people detained. But tonight, both sides seemed listless, and there was no confrontation.
Mr. Draskovic, appealing for peaceful resistance, said that he, Zoran Djindjic of the Democratic Party and Vojislav Kostunica, leader of the Democratic Party of Serbia, would go to Moscow, a traditional Serbian ally, late next week and hoped to see President Vladimir V. Putin.
Mr. Putin's government has promised Mr. Milosevic energy aid and loans, and recently was host to Foreign Minister Zivadin Jovanovic and Defense Minister Dragoljub Ojdanic, who has been indicted on charges of war crimes in Kosovo. But Mr. Putin's government has also been host to Mr. Draskovic and high-ranking Serbian Orthodox leaders opposed to Mr. Milosevic in the past.
In an interview later, Mr. Draskovic said that Russia was the only country that could influence Mr. Milosevic and to which the opposition could appeal without being accused of toadying to NATO, which bombed Yugoslavia last year.
"After NATO's aggression against Serbia, the majority of Serbs are very, very disappointed by the fact that NATO, including our traditional allies, bombed our country without even a formal decision of Security Council of the United Nations," Mr. Draskovic said. "Our people don't accept so frankly initiatives from the Western countries who bombed us, and secondly, Russia opposes sanctions against our state and nation."
Mr. Draskovic hastened to say that he was not an enemy of the United States or Europe, but he urged them to stop suggesting new sanctions against Serbia in response to the seizure of Studio B, the station his party controlled until three days ago. "Serbia is now like a gulag," he said. "We need to break down the outer wall of the prison built by our American and European friends. After that, democracy will come more easily to Serbia."
The party of Mr. Milosevic's wife, the Yugoslav United Left, part of the ruling coalition, said today that it was preparing a new law against terrorism that is widely expected to be used against the opposition, including the student movement Otpor, or Resistance.
The new law is said to be largely based on the British law against terrorism used in Northern Ireland that allows detention without trial. Predrag Simic, a Draskovic adviser, said sardonically tonight, "We can now say that the regime is taking something from the West."
The New York Times: Student Movement Emerges as Popular Foe of Milosevic
By STEVEN ERLANGER
BELGRADE, Serbia, May 20
A student movement demanding sweeping political change is surging in popularity and is now a significant target for attack by the government of the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic.
The movement, called Otpor, or Resistance, has given fresh energy, insouciance and an arrogant innocence to Mr. Milosevic's political opposition. Otpor has not been shy about criticizing opposition leaders for their lack of unity and credibility.
Loosely organized and without a clear leadership structure that could be subject to arrest, Otpor is intended to be difficult to repress. But it shows few signs of becoming a serious revolutionary organization.
Still, government officials are attacking the group as "fascist hooligans" and "terrorists." The officials are giving strong signals that Otpor will be a prime target of -- or at least the pretext for -- a sweeping new law on terrorism that could be introduced as early as Monday.
The law, said to be largely based on the emergency measures in force here during NATO's bombing war last year, could provide for detention without charges or limitations, restricting the rights of the accused.
At the moment, people can be detained for questioning for 72 hours without being charged, a measure the police have been using liberally against young Otpor activists all over Serbia.
During the war, the police could detain people on national security grounds for up to 60 days without trial, and the police were given the right to search people or property without warrants. The law under consideration would also authorize the police to confiscate all firearms, registered or not.
If passed in such a form, the law would create an informal state of emergency. It could be used against opposition politicians and also against independent journalists, whom the government accuses of working for NATO and the "enemies of the state."
Otpor spokesmen say more than 200 of their members have been detained in the last week throughout Serbia. They are often arrested at home in the early hours, questioned by the police for up to a day or more, threatened and sometimes beaten.
On Saturday another 34 Otpor people and eight opposition politicians were detained, questioned and later released.
"The regime senses the danger, that we don't care a lot about anything else other than taking them down," said Milan Samardzic, 23, a law student with Otpor. "We're not in it for power or money, unlike many of the opposition politicians. We just want change. The idea of resistance itself is very powerful."
Vukasin Petrovic, 23, a political science student and one of Otpor's steadily changing spokesmen, says that about 25,000 people have signed up to become members, and that the organization may be able to call on as many as 50,000 people.
More ask to join every day, Mr. Petrovic says, "and we're getting a little overwhelmed. Things are moving at a very quick pace."
Otpor started as a student response to a restrictive law on universities in October 1998. While many regard it as a movement of arrogant rich youths from nice families, its surge in popularity is a direct result of disappointment with this generation of political leaders, who have failed during the last decade to bring down Mr. Milosevic.
Otpor activists say they want to inspire the population and "guide" the political opposition, as a kind of monitor, to keep them unified.
"The opposition leaders have shown that they are very vain, and that their petty interests are more important to them than our larger interests as a country," Mr. Samardzic said. "We say we've seen through the regime and we're disappointed in the opposition. The opposition leaders don't seem to have a solution, and people don't trust them. But we do deserve the people's trust, at least so far."
During the last large opposition rally in Belgrade, on April 14, an Otpor member was on stage with leaders of political parties and said, "Our task is to secure your victory." He then warned them in vulgar terms: "Gentlemen, this time there will be no betrayal, because whoever betrays now is scum."
At a later rally, on May 15, many leaders including the Democratic Party head, Zoran Djindjic, wore Otpor T-shirts, bearing a fist, though in Mr. Djindjic's case he wore a stylish black sport jacket over it. It was also a gesture of solidarity with two young Otpor activists and a lawyer who had been beaten badly in Mr. Milosevic's hometown, Pozarevac, by bodyguards working for his son, Marko.
The case was important because two local judges and a prosecutor resigned, apparently over pressure from the government to bring charges of attempted murder against the young men, who asserted that they had not begun the fight. One judge who released them quit after they were rearrested.
The government has tried its best to impugn the organization. When Bosko Perosevic, a senior official of Mr. Milosevic's party, was slain in Novi Sad on May 13, the government announced that the 50-year-old killer was an Otpor activist and a supporter of the opposition figure Vuk Draskovic's party, suggesting that both were in the pay of Western intelligence agencies.
Both charges were denied, but the police said they had found Otpor leaflets in the killer's apartment.
"We're kind of like a marketing agency," Mr. Petrovic said, "promoting one idea, the idea of resistance as a habit of mind, a way of standing up in dignity. To me, dignity is very similar to resistance."
Otpor tries to provoke and mock the authorities with sometimes daily happenings and with slogans like "Bite the system." In the last three months, Mr. Samardzic said, Otpor has put up 400,000 posters and handed out two million leaflets and badges throughout Serbia.
Otpor insists that this is paid for solely with donated materials, labor and money from Serbs abroad. But the organization is also getting money and advice from the West through programs to "promote democratization" in Serbia.
After the seizure of the main opposition television station Studio B last week, Mr. Samardzic said he was appalled by the confused reactions of the opposition, especially Mr. Draskovic, the leader of the Serbian Renewal Movement, who remained in Serbia's sister republic, Montenegro, for two days before returning to Belgrade.
"The silence of the opposition has not just been strange, it's been a disaster," Mr. Samardzic said. "People assume Vuk is afraid. Well, so are we all. But he's not selling popcorn" -- he is a political leader.
Otpor is proposing a program of civil disobedience, of the kind Gandhi used against the British in India. When he is reminded that the Serbian authorities are not British and behave by different rules, Mr. Samardzic only shrugs.
Milan Milosevic, an analyst for the independent weekly Vreme, who is no relation to the president, said: "Otpor is important because they are a litmus test for popular feeling against the authorities. It is true that they are a judgment on the opposition, but no one sees them as a political alternative. They show no leadership or management. People make the Otpor fist to show the political leaders that they're not serious enough."
One opposition leader, Zarko Korac, a psychologist and university professor who heads the Social Democratic Union, says teachers are accustomed to being criticized by students.
Otpor matters, he says. "They have the energy and the innocence of youth, and they are uncompromising and unyielding," he said, noting that the government of President Suharto in Indonesia had been toppled by student demonstrations.
"These students feel they have no future, no employment," Mr. Korac said. "They can't travel and work. So they are fighting for their own future, which is also the future of the country."
Otpor's symbol, the fist, "is a clear, clean message," he said.
So clean that one of Serbia's most influential writers and briefly Yugoslavia's president, Dobrica Cosic, walked into an Otpor office this month and filled out a membership form. Mr. Cosic, a nationalist picked by Mr. Milosevic and then discarded by him, is blamed by some for helping to create the myth of Serbian sacrifices in Kosovo. A drawing by a noted cartoonist, Corax, showed Mr. Cosic scrubbing himself clean in a bathtub using the skeletal fist of Otpor.
Still, with signs pointing toward an attempted crackdown and even a ban on Otpor, the organization will need whatever help it can get.
Mr. Korac says such a crackdown on Serbia's children, like the seizure of Studio B, has cumulative consequences with the public. "It's like insults in a marriage," he said. "It adds up. It may not show right away on the streets, but it's building. People are very angry."
AP: Serbs demand free media amid continuing police arrests
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP) _ A few thousand Belgraders gathered Sunday to protest the government's clampdown on nongovernment media, while police arrested more opposition activists throughout the country.
At least three activists of the pro-democracy student group Otpor, or Resistance, were detained, in addition to dozens arrested in previous days.
In Smederevo, 20 miles southeast of Belgrade, activist Marko Markovic was charged with "violating public law and order" after police arrested him for walking in the street wearing a T-shirt with the group's emblem, a clenched fist, the independent Beta news agency reported.
In Belgrade, about 3,000 opposition supporters gathered to listen to journalists from the banned Studio B television, whose reporters, after being kicked out of their premises by police on Wednesday, have begun reading their news from an open-air, make-shift studio in downtown Belgrade.
The latest crackdown against government opponents follows the recent assassination of a close aide to President Slobodan Milosevic. The government accused Otpor and a top opposition party of being behind the killing.
Otpor and the opposition Serbian Renewal Movement have denied the charges, but the regime ignored their pleas, closing down the opposition-controlled, Belgrade-based Studio B television as well as the popular B2-92 radio station.
The move triggered protests in Belgrade, which quickly erupted into violence, leaving more than 150 people injured and landing a few dozen in jail.
A top official from Milosevic's ruling Socialists, Uros Suvakovic, reiterated on Sunday the regime's pledge to "fight against terrorism" and opposition parties accused of working in the interests of NATO and other perceived Milosevic foes in the West.
"We must not be soft," Suvakovic declared.
The Socialists and their neo-communist allies, the United Left, which is led by Milosevic's wife Mirjana Markovic, have said they will introduce legislation in the coming days aimed at giving the regime even broader authority in suppressing opponents.
The opposition, which maintains contacts with west European countries and the United States, is now trying to secure some support from Moscow, which has traditionally been inclined to back Milosevic.
Yugoslavia on Sunday demanded that the European Union lift sanctions against it, expressing particular anger at the EU's selective approach to punish the Serb republic while sparing pro-western Montenegro, both of which are part of Yugoslavia.
The official Tanjug news agency on Sunday carried a message the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry sent to Brussels, protesting the ban on trade, financial and most other links between EU member countries and Yugoslavia, imposed for Milosevic's belligerent policies.
"This is continuing pressure aimed to destabilize Yugoslavia," which has "also inflicted great losses to Yugoslavia's neighbors," the statement said.
Reuters: Yugoslavia asks EU to lift sanctions
BELGRADE, May 21 (Reuters) - Yugoslavia has asked the European Union to lift sanctions against it, saying they are worsening the country's economic and humanitarian situation and destabilising the region, Belgrade media said on Sunday.
"Yugoslavia demands that the EU immediately abolish all sanctions imposed on it so far," pro-government daily Politika quoted a Memorandum of the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry as saying.
"The sanctions are unfounded, are worsening the economic and humanitarian situation in Yugoslavia, contributing to the instability of the region which cannot be in the interest of the EU or Europe as a whole," the memorandum said.
It was handed over to EU representatives in Belgrade who were summoned to the Foreign Ministry.
"EU sanctions against Yugoslavia and the policy of constant pressures on economic, political, media and other levels is part of continued efforts to destabilise Yugoslavia," the memorandum said.
The European Union last April tightened financial sanctions against Yugoslavia to increase pressure on President Slobodan Milosevic, who is viewed as the main obstacle to democracy.
The EU has pledged to keep selective sanctions hitting the Milosevic's regime as long as he stays in power but has promised to maintain support to the democratic opposition.
Independent economists and opposition leaders have also criticised the sanctions saying they hit ordinary people much harder than the government.
The memorandum said the exemption of Montenegro, Serbia's junior partner in the Yugoslav federation, from EU sanctions was a "direct attack on Yugoslavia's constitutional order and the unity of the people and leadership of the country."
Reuters: EU foreign ministers to mull Balkans, enlargement
BRUSSELS, May 21 (Reuters) - European Union foreign ministers meet on Monday to discuss issues expected to range from Balkans aid to EU enlargement and troublespots round the world.
The 15 ministers will also be briefed at monthly talks in Brussels on an EU trade deal with Beijing which removes the last big barrier to China joining the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten will explain to the ministers a seven-year, 5.5 billion euro ($4.90 billion) funding plan for the Balkans and outline proposals to accelerate the delivery of overall EU aid.
"Things have become bogged down in member states' scrutiny of strategy and projects and procedures. Patten wants faster and lighter procedures," an EU diplomat said.
Yugoslavia remains a priority for the EU following street protests in Belgrade after a new crackdown on independent Serbian media by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
The Union underlined this by meeting Serbian journalists in Brussels last week, and the ministers are expected to review ways to support the independent media.
They are also due to underline their efforts to encourage democracy in Montenegro by accepting plans to provide it with 20 million euros, taking financing of the Balkan republic by the EU's executive Commission past 100 million euros since 1998.
The ministers are also expected to agree a common position on enlargement before the EU's next talks on Thursday and Friday with 12 countries trying to join the wealthy Union.
Some of the 12 are concerned the talks are going too slowly and EU diplomats doubt the first of them will meet their target date of 2003. Some diplomats are also concerned about the slow pace of talks on reforming the EU's institutions to ensure decision-making is not frozen when new members join.
Last week's deal with China marked success in another set of negotiations where progress had been slow. EU Trade Commisisoner Pascal Lamy will brief the ministers on the agreement and they are widely expected to back it.
The deal will cut tariffs on more than 150 leading European export items and open sectors of China's potentially vast market of nearly 1.3 billion people to foreign companies.
The ministers are also expected to discuss disputes with non-EU countries over the trade in bananas, a source of friction with the United States.
They will also review ties with Moscow before an EU-Russia summit on May 29, and discuss tensions in Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone and the Great Lakes region of central Africa. It was not clear whether they would discuss the situation in Fiji, where the prime minister has been taken hostage.
The New York Times : Serb Opposition Leaders Going to Moscow to Ask Putin's Help
By STEVEN ERLANGER
BELGRADE, Serbia, May 19 -- The leaders of Serbia's political opposition finally emerged from their private meetings and spoke to their supporters tonight, telling a rally of fewer than 5,000 people that they would fly to Moscow next week and ask Russia to help moderate the policies of the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic.
It seemed to some an odd gesture from the opposition, just three days after Mr. Milosevic's government seized the main opposition television station, Belgrade's Studio B, and silenced independent broadcasting in the capital, including radio B2-92.
Vuk Draskovic, leader of the main opposition party, the Socialist Renewal Movement, returned from Montenegro to appeal for calm, saying that "no television station or government authority is worth a single life."
Zoran Djindjic, leader of the Democratic Party, announced a large rally to be held in Belgrade a week from Saturday. "We will see who is bigger," he said. "We'll see if they send cordons of police against a million people."
But he made no mention of the plans he says he favors for widespread civil disobedience to protest government's moves against the independent media, and it seemed highly unlikely that a million people -- more than five times the size of Belgrade's biggest rally in the last two years -- would turn out here.
There were scattered clashes with the police the first two nights of these rallies, with up to 150 injured nationwide, including at least 4 police officers, and 40 people detained. But tonight, both sides seemed listless, and there was no confrontation.
Mr. Draskovic, appealing for peaceful resistance, said that he, Zoran Djindjic of the Democratic Party and Vojislav Kostunica, leader of the Democratic Party of Serbia, would go to Moscow, a traditional Serbian ally, late next week and hoped to see President Vladimir V. Putin.
Mr. Putin's government has promised Mr. Milosevic energy aid and loans, and recently was host to Foreign Minister Zivadin Jovanovic and Defense Minister Dragoljub Ojdanic, who has been indicted on charges of war crimes in Kosovo. But Mr. Putin's government has also been host to Mr. Draskovic and high-ranking Serbian Orthodox leaders opposed to Mr. Milosevic in the past.
In an interview later, Mr. Draskovic said that Russia was the only country that could influence Mr. Milosevic and to which the opposition could appeal without being accused of toadying to NATO, which bombed Yugoslavia last year.
"After NATO's aggression against Serbia, the majority of Serbs are very, very disappointed by the fact that NATO, including our traditional allies, bombed our country without even a formal decision of Security Council of the United Nations," Mr. Draskovic said. "Our people don't accept so frankly initiatives from the Western countries who bombed us, and secondly, Russia opposes sanctions against our state and nation."
Mr. Draskovic hastened to say that he was not an enemy of the United States or Europe, but he urged them to stop suggesting new sanctions against Serbia in response to the seizure of Studio B, the station his party controlled until three days ago. "Serbia is now like a gulag," he said. "We need to break down the outer wall of the prison built by our American and European friends. After that, democracy will come more easily to Serbia."
The party of Mr. Milosevic's wife, the Yugoslav United Left, part of the ruling coalition, said today that it was preparing a new law against terrorism that is widely expected to be used against the opposition, including the student movement Otpor, or Resistance.
The new law is said to be largely based on the British law against terrorism used in Northern Ireland that allows detention without trial. Predrag Simic, a Draskovic adviser, said sardonically tonight, "We can now say that the regime is taking something from the West."
The Los Angeles: Belgrade's Closed-Down Broadcasters Go Low-Tech
By PAUL WATSON, Times Staff Writer
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia--Forced off the air by the state's seizure of their studios, Belgrade's independent broadcasters were reduced Thursday to reading the nightly news from a balcony of City Hall.
The news anchors had to pause each time they read out Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's name Thursday night, however, as a crowd of about 10,000 demonstrators below demanded the president's head.
"Slobodan, save Serbia!" the protesters chanted. "Kill yourself!"
Serbian riot police fired tear gas and beat protesters for the second night in a row after some in the crowd set fire to garbage bins and threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at officers who blocked a march through the city.
At least 12 people were treated for minor injuries after the skirmishes, which lasted more than an hour.
After months of anti-Milosevic protests, brief clashes with riot police have become more of a violent ritual than a sign of the long-awaited uprising that protesters repeatedly called for Thursday night.
The balcony news readings included a statement issued by Serbia's Interior Ministry police, which said four officers had been injured, two of them seriously, in the first night of recent unrest Wednesday. At least 60 injured protesters had gone to emergency rooms for treatment, the news reader also told the jeering crowd.
Opposition leaders told the crowd that they would hold daily demonstrations until Milosevic gives in to their demand for early elections, but they have made that rallying cry before, only to call off protests as interest lagged.
The latest confrontation with Milosevic--sparked by the Serbian government's seizure of Yugoslavia's main independent television and radio stations in the dead of night this week--has failed to draw crowds even half as large as several previous protests.
A leading critic of Milosevic, Serbian Renewal Movement chief Vuk Draskovic, was absent from Thursday's rally--even though the opposition-led Belgrade city government controlled Studio B television before it was seized.
Draskovic's main rival in the anti-Milosevic movement, Democratic Party chief Zoran Djindjic, attended but didn't speak. Instead, four minor opposition figures addressed the crowd.
Milosevic's increasing repression is "confirmation that we are in a state of emergency," said Vukasin Petrovic, a 24-year-old leader of the democracy movement called Otpor, or Resistance.
He accused Hadzi Dragan Antic, one of Milosevic's closest family friends and editor in chief of the state-run Politika publishing house, of "leading the war against" Otpor as head of a secret "crisis headquarters."
International condemnation of the Serbian government's seizure of independent broadcasters Studio B and Radio B2-92, including sharp words from the U.S. and European Union, fell on deaf ears in Milosevic's regime.
The government moved to silence the last independent broadcaster outside Belgrade that has a signal strong enough to reach the city--which is the capital of Yugoslavia and its dominant republic, Serbia--by jamming Radio Pancevo's transmission from a nearby suburb.
Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Vojislav Seselj, who co-signed the decree authorizing Studio B's seizure, told a news conference Thursday that he hopes more independent broadcasters and print publications will be closed down.
Journalists at the popular independent daily newspaper Blic were allowed to return Thursday to their newsroom in the same office tower as Studio B. Seselj singled the paper out as one of the publications he would like to have closed.
Seselj, a former paramilitary commander who once pointed a handgun at a photographer in the lobby of parliament, repeated his charge that the independent media incite terrorism and are agents of the West, which went to war against Yugoslavia last year to force Milosevic's troops out of Serbia's Kosovo province.
"We will not allow American agents to come to power through terrorism and enraged street violence," Seselj told reporters.
The Independent: Clashes as 10,000 protest in Belgrade
By Vesna Peric Zimonjic in Belgrade
19 May 2000
Violent clashes between police and civilians in the streets of Belgrade last night left at least six badly injured. Police used rubber batons and tear gas against crowds protesting at President Slobodan Milosevic's crackdown on independent media.
Hundreds of police in riot gear closed in around nearly 10,000 people who had massed around the opposition-run city hall to hear staff from the banned TV station Studio B stage a public reading of the evening news from the balcony. Police vans and armoured vehicles charged the crowd several times. The protesters responded by throwing firebombs and stones. Some could be heard shouting "Kill yourself, Slobodan, and save Serbia."
Witnesses said police threw some protesters to the ground and beat them with truncheons. Sirens could be heard all over the centre of the city as the police pursued groups of demonstrators into side streets. Many took refuge inside the city hall, but those who could not get past the police were beaten.
The opposition leader Zoran Djindjic, one of those taking refuge in the city hall, said: "It is obvious that the regime's fuse is extremely short, and the use of disproportional force shows that Milosevic's fascist-communist coalition is in panic."
The trouble flared as anger spread at President Milosevic's decision to close down independent media, including the opposition-controlled Studio B station, which has maintained persistent criticism of theregime, and a number of small independent newspapers.
Violent protests were also reported from the southern Serb city of Nis last night as municipal authorities met to discuss the crackdown. As deputies from the ruling Socialist Party left a council meeting they were attacked and beaten with sticks. Earlier yesterday more than 10,000 protesters had gathered in Novi Sad, in the north of the country.
Opposition parties have used the independent media to criticise rising poverty in Yugoslavia and the country's isolation. The clampdown began after the murder last weekend of a prominent ruling party official, which was blamed on a student opposition group.
The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe condemned the media closures, while the Russian government expressed "serious concern" over the media crackdown. But the Serbian Deputy Prime Minister, Vojislav Seselj, said: "The state has waited too long to face the evil, and there is no more waiting. We won't allow American agents to come to power."
AP: Serbia's popular independent broadcaster struggles against all odds
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP) _ B2-92, an independent radio station shut down by authorities as part of their sweeping crackdown against media not under central government control, has been a thorn in President Slobodan Milosevic's side since it went on the air under another name 11 years ago.
Then known as B-92 _ B as in Belgrade and 92 for the frequency used _ the station was first shut down in March 1991, during major anti-government clashes. A policeman and an opposition activist died in those confrontations, the first test of Milosevic's grip on power.
B-92 first went on the air May 15, 1989, the brainchild of students and journalists eager to test what they thought would be new freedoms amid weakening communist control in Yugoslavia.
Its FM frequency first covered only 30 miles around Belgrade. Still, B-92 quickly became the station of choice of those opposed to Milosevic's growing authoritarianism and policies that fed wars in Croatia and Bosnia, contributing to Yugoslavia's breakup.
In shutting down the broadcaster in 1991, the Justice Ministry said that B-92 had "provoked aggressiveness among the people." The station was allowed to resume operation the next day, after massive popular protest.
By the mid-1990s, B-92 had outgrown the confines of Belgrade. Using satellite and other modern communication methods, it expanded coverage to reach 60 percent of Serbia's listeners and organized a network of more than 30 local radio and television stations to fight government restrictions on the media.
In 1993, the station expanded into television, producing documentaries for distribution to regional broadcasters throughout the country. The Internet was harnessed in 1994 to provide news in Serbian and English on a Web site and vie free e-mail subscription.
By 1996, B-92 also was involved in publishing, television, CD and video production, running an Internet provider and staging forums on freedom of the media, as well as more traditional journalism seminars.
The government accused B-92 of receiving funds from foreigners and other "enemies of the state."
Mass demonstrations in 1996 over election fraud led to a new shutdown. Again, authorities backed down after strong international and domestic protest that saw tens of thousands of people massing in front of B-92's offices. Officials said the pause in broadcasting was caused by a malfunctioning transmitter.
Shrugging off continued criticism by the authorities, B-92 retained its critical voice, taking Milosevic and his associates to task for their disregard of democratic rules. Recognizing its courage, MTV gave B-92 its "Free Your Mind" award in 1998, and the International Committee to Protect Journalists declared it the best radio in the world in 1993.
The next clampdown was not long in coming. Days after the beginning of NATO airstrikes to force Milosevic to seek peace in Kosovo, authorities took over B-92's studios and offices on April 2, 1999, fired its staff and began broadcasting pro-government programs under the station's name and frequency.
It took months, but the broadcaster managed to get back on the air by August under a different name, B2-92, and frequency, using the signal of Belgrade's Studio B radio and television station, run by the anti-Milosevic political opposition.
On Wednesday, police in woolen masks took over Studio B television and radio B2-92 at the stations' headquarters in downtown Belgrade, as part of a sweeping crackdown on media that authorities claim are undermining the state.
Shortly after the takeover, B2-92 began broadcasts via satellite and the Internet from a secret location.
The Christian Science Monitor: Angrier crowds facing US troops in Kosovo
FRAGILE OPERATION
Anti-American attacks are on the rise, as Congress votes this week to limit mission.
Richard Mertens
Special to The Christian Science Monitor
VRBOVAC, YUGOSLAVIA
To the six US soldiers suddenly confronted on a narrow road in southern Kosovo, the crowd seemed to form in an instant. Angry Serbs roared up in cars and came running across the fields, a half dozen troublemakers quickly swelling to a mob of 75.
"People just came out of the woodwork," says Staff Sgt. Mark Williams, whose squad had responded to an explosion at a Serb house in Vrbovac. Then the unruly crowd began to hurl softball-sized rocks. "I tried to talk with them," says Sergeant Williams, of Clarksville, Tenn. "I said, 'I'm trying to help you guys.' But they wouldn't listen."
Hostile crowds are an occupational hazard of peacekeeping, but US troops in Kosovo have faced them with increasing regularity in the past two weeks, including the incident in Vrbovac on May 10.
"I think everyone anticipated that tensions would rise in the spring and summer," says Lt. Col. Lloyd Miles, commander of the area that includes Vrbovac, where American soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division are based. "You've got everyone out, the days are longer, and they've got nothing to do."
The unrest comes as pressure mounts in Washington to place limits on US participation in the NATO-led peacekeeping mission.
On Wednesday, the House of Representatives approved an amendment to a defense spending bill, that would cut off funding for the the 5,900 American troops in Kosovo, unless the president certifies by April 1, 2001 that NATO allies have fully funded police, humanitarian aid, and reconstruction programs in the Serbian province. The Senate was due to vote on a similar measure yesterday.
The Clinton administration fiercely opposes the congressional effort, and the presumed Republican nominee for president, George W. Bush, has also come out against it.
NATO Secretary-General George Robertson warned that an American pullout could cause severe harm. "The NATO presence in Kosovo needs to be decided on the merits of our being there - the job that we are doing and that we need to finish," he said in Brussels yesterday.
'A dangerous mission'
The recent violence has underscored not only the fragility of the peace in Kosovo, eleven months after NATO-led peacekeepers moved in to end the Yugoslav Army's terrorization and mass expulsion of majority ethnic Albanians. It also highlights the risks that American soldiers face as they struggle to keep order in an unpredictable and often volatile situation. Avoiding American casualties has been a major concern for US forces here, aware of an apparent zero-tolerance policy at home.
"It is a dangerous mission," observes Lieutenant Colonel Miles, of Fountain, Colo. "As we saw the other night, soldiers could be injured or killed when things get out of hand. There are extremist elements, and they're clearly working against the goals of the international community." Goals that include the difficult task of restoring a democratic and multiethnic Kosovo, reconciling the bitterly divided Serbian and ethnic Albanian communities.
Most of the recent trouble has centered around Vitina, a dusty market town with a mixed population. The violence has mainly targeted Serbs: houses blown up, an elderly man shot while fishing, an 8-year-old-girl and her parents wounded by gunfire in their yard. On Saturday night, five mortar shells fell on Vrbovac, one just a quarter mile from an American outpost.
But Serbs have lashed out at Albanians, too. Two weeks ago, a Serb mob in the village of Klokot, enraged by the killing of the fisherman, yanked ethnic Albanians from passing cars and set fire to the vehicles. More than a dozen Albanians were injured; some might have died, if American soldiers had not come to the rescue.
In both Klokot and, last week, in Vrbovac, Serb rage also turned on the soldiers. The Serbs say they are frustrated because the Americans are failing to protect them. "People in the village have been closed in for months," says Nenad Kojic, the mayor of Vrbovac. "They don't have freedom of movement, and now they don't have the freedom to sleep freely in their homes. People have been very, very angry."
The incident in Vrbovac showed just how angry. Williams says the villagers "seemed to think we wouldn't shoot them.
"To me, I didn't want to have to shoot someone if I could get all my people out safely. But the thought came across our minds," he adds.
"It seems there's a day and night attitude," adds Lt. Lou Bauer, of Windsor, Kentucky, whose platoon camps out at the Serbian Orthodox church in Vrbovac. "We've learned some Serbian words, like Dobar dan ("Hello")....They'll smile and wave. At night, when the bombs go off, they're quite hostile."
In February, Serbs in the ethnically divided northern town of Mitrovica - where French troops have faced hostile crowds for months - pelted US soldiers with rocks and snowballs during a multinational operation to search for weapons.
Afterward, American officials forbade US troops from returning to Mitrovica. But the recent trouble around Vitina, which seemed to start with the bombing of a Serb Orthodox church on April 29, has brought the largest spate of attacks directed against American soldiers.
Orders from Belgrade?
Even though the unrest has surprised no one, its causes are not altogether clear to military commanders and other Western officials. Some of it, they say, springs from longstanding grievances between Serbs and ethnic Albanians. It also comes at a time when Serbs who fled their homes last year, with the arrival of NATO forces, are talking about coming back.
"I'm sure whatever organization is behind it, is to discourage Serbs from returning, and to push the [remaining Serbs] out," Miles says. But officials also wonder about the hidden hand of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Local Serbs have refused to cooperate with the West and are thought to maintain close ties to the Belgrade government. Groping for explanations, officials speculate that some of the violence, including the bombing of empty Serb houses, may be part of an effort to discredit the NATO-led peacekeeping effort, or KFOR.
"I really don't know if all these explosions are made by Albanians," says Kurt Kraus, chief of the United Nations police in Vitina. "Maybe some ... are being made by Serbs, just for political reasons, so they can say, 'See, KFOR can't protect us.' " Local ethnic Albanians favor this explanation, and since no one has been caught, officials can't rule it out.
The recent unrest also has raised questions about American tactics in Kosovo. Vrbovac mayor Mr. Kojic says the Americans could protect his village better if they put more troops on the outskirts and fewer in the center.
In the meantime, Miles has warned his troops "not to get sucked in to the hate." The Army has reinforced its units in and around Vitina. It has increased the number of patrols and checkpoints. It has imposed a curfew over the whole area. But the Americans say they cannot, in the words of one captain, "put a soldier on every street corner." And although the beginning of this week was calm, no one really expects the violence to end soon.
"So many small things can set it off," Miles says. "It can also be quiet for a few weeks. There's no way to tell."
The New York Times: Senators Reject a Deadline for Kosovo G.I.'s
By ERIC SCHMITT
ASHINGTON, May 18 -- In a victory for the Clinton administration, the Senate today narrowly rejected a measure to set a deadline for withdrawing American ground troops from Kosovo. Gov. George W. Bush of Texas had also criticized the measure, but even so 40 Republicans voted for it.
By a vote of 53 to 47, senators stripped a provision from a military construction spending bill that would have cut off funds for the 5,600 United States troops in Kosovo by July 1, 2001, forcing their withdrawal unless Congress authorized an extension.
In the last few days, several of President Clinton's cabinet officers waged an all-out campaign to defeat the measure, phoning wavering senators and sending military commanders to Congress to warn of the dangers to American troops and Washington's commitment to the NATO operation if the measure passed. Defense Secretary William S. Cohen said he would recommend that Mr. Clinton veto the legislation if it passed.
The outcome was close enough, and important enough for the administration, that Vice President Al Gore presided over the roll-call, prepared to cast a tie-breaking vote if needed. "To have been forced to withdraw in this manner would have demoralized our allies and emboldened those in the region who favor violence as a solution to their disputes," Mr. Gore said in a statement.
Fifteen of the 55 Republicans voted for a Democratic amendment to strike the withdrawal language from the $8.6 billion military construction spending bill. At least two or three Republicans, including Thad Cochran of Mississippi, said they were swayed by the opposition by Mr. Bush, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
"I'm glad Bush said what he said because it showed this was not aimed at this president in particular," Mr. Cochran said in an interview.
Earlier this week, Mr. Bush criticized the provision, calling it a "legislative overreach" that would tie his hands if he became president. Today, a spokesman for Mr. Bush, Scott McClellan, said, "The Senate made the right decision."
The legislation revealed the restiveness in Congress over America's open-ended commitment in Kosovo and Bosnia, which so far has cost $20 billion. It also stoked the smoldering debate over competing prerogatives: Congress's constitutional power of the purse and the president's authority to send American forces to far-flung hot spots.
In several hours of heated debate today and on Wednesday, both sides accused the other of jeopardizing the safety of United States troops, America's commitment to its European allies and the long-term security of the Balkans.
"The intent of the amendment is to restore congressional oversight over the Kosovo mission," said Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, the provision's chief Democratic sponsor. "Of course, the administration doesn't like it. They want a free hand to participate in military adventurism whenever and wherever they please. They don't want to hear a peep out of Congress."
But critics said imposing an arbitrary deadline for withdrawal would send a dangerous signal of uncertain American resolve to President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia, and undermine the unity and morale of NATO's peacekeeping operation, which involves forces from Britain, France, Germany, Italy and other nations, in and out of Europe. They have been in Kosovo since NATO bombed Yugoslavia early last year to protect Albanians in the province.
A deadline "would precipitate a year of dangerous uncertainty and wavering commitment to our allies," said Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, a leading foe of the provision and sponsor of the amendment to kill it.
The 15 Republicans joined 38 Democrats in supporting Mr. Levin's decisive amendment, while 40 Republicans and 7 Democrats opposed it.
Mr. Levin's measure also eliminated a second contentious provision to withhold 25 percent of the military's funds in Kosovo this year, unless Mr. Clinton certified by July 15 that the European allies were meeting their commitments for reconstruction aid, police officers and food and medicines in Kosovo.
Without the presidential certification, the measure required that money could be spent in Kosovo only for an orderly withdrawal of American forces.
The defeated provision's chief Republican author, Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, remained undaunted after today's vote.
He vowed to offer the provision on the European share of Kosovo aid as an amendment to the Pentagon's budget bill for fiscal year 2001 when that legislation reaches the Senate floor in the coming weeks.
On Wednesday, the House approved, by a vote of 264 to 153, an amendment on the European aid share similar to the Senate's.
But the House version gives the next president until April 1, 2001, nearly nine months longer than the Senate, to certify that the European allies are meeting their commitments.
The House version actually sets even higher standards than the Senate provision. Under the House measure, for instance, the allies would be responsible for 50 percent of reconstruction aid; the Senate version required at least 33 percent. The House version would require allies to pick up 90 percent of the new civilian police in Kosovo; the Senate version required at least 75 percent.
The allies are now providing 63 percent of the police and are close to providing 75 percent of basic human aid, the White House said. The United States has pledged 15 percent of the total financial support to Kosovo.
The director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, Jacob J. Lew, said today that while the allies had made significant progress in increasing the proportion of their pledges, he could not guarantee that they would meet the targets by July 15.
Moreover, he said, the allies used different bookkeeping practices, which "could prevent certification of numeric burden-sharing shares."
"The rigid, mechanical burden-sharing tests contained in the amendment undermine the peacekeeping effort," Mr. Lew said in a letter to the Senate Democratic leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota. "The commitment of American forces abroad should not rest on mechanical formulas and record-keeping technicalities."
It was unclear tonight whether Mr. Clinton's advisers would recommend that he veto any legislation containing just the burden-sharing requirements, and not the more onerous language about withdrawing troops.
But it seemed almost certain that the fight over American military involvement in the Balkans would not end with today's vote.
"We have no long-term plan for Kosovo," complained Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority leader, who supported the deadline for withdrawing American forces. "We don't know how long we're going or how much it's going to cost. Commitments are not being fulfilled by the Europeans, and that's unacceptable."
The Guardian: Bush and Clinton unite to block Kosovo pullout
Martin Kettle in Washington
Thursday May 18, 2000
Senate Republicans who are pressing to set a date for the withdrawal of US troops from Kosovo have been ambushed by an unlikely alliance between President Clinton and the Republican presidential candidate, George W Bush.
The two political opponents have joined together in a last-ditch effort to prevent the passage of a bill which would cut off funds for the 5,900 US troops in Kosovo by July 1 2001, and which observers believe was on the verge of winning majority support in the Republican-controlled Senate.
The bill, jointly sponsored by the Republican armed services committee chairman, Senator John Warner, and the veteran Democrat Senator Robert Byrd, would pull the US troops out unless Mr Clinton or his successor obtains congressional approval for continued deployment.
The president would also be required to put forward a timetable for the transfer of responsibility for peacekeeping in Kosovo to European nations, and to certify that all Nato countries are paying their share for the operations.
The Byrd-Warner bill has been described as "a de facto pull-out decision by the United States" by the former Nato supreme commander General Wesley Clark, and is viewed with alarm in most European capitals.
Domestic political opposition to the bill has mainly come from Democrats, who are in a minority in the Senate, and from Republican Senator John McCain, who warned this week that the bill would "send the message to Nato that the United States is an unreliable ally".
Until yesterday, momentum had seemed to be growing for the bill, with most Republicans assuming that the plan had the support of Mr Bush, the Texas governor. But the Republican Senate leadership was taken by surprise by Mr Bush's statement this week that the bill interferes with the constitutional powers of the presidency.
"The Clinton-Gore administration has failed to instill trust in Congress and the American people when it comes to our military and deployment of troops overseas, but the governor does not believe this provision is the way to resolve the lack of presidential leadership," the statement said. "Governor Bush views it as a legislative overreach on powers of the presidency."
Senior members of the Clinton administration kept up the pressure against the bill yesterday. The plan to withdraw US troops was "playing with fire", the secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, said. "We are more than bookkeepers and spectators. We are leaders."
Meanwhile, the defence secretary, William Cohen, said that President Clinton might have to veto the bill, even though that would jeopardise $8.6bn (£5.76bn) worth of new defence spending projects contained in separate sections of the bill.
EU condemns crackdown on independent Serbian media
BRUSSELS, May 17 (Reuters) - The European Union condemned Wednesday's crackdown on the independent media in Serbia and said it stood firmly behind opposition forces in their struggle for democracy.
EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana regretted what he called a denial of democracy. External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten said Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic would ultimately lose his battle with the independent media.
"I deplore the cowardly crackdown on the independent media ...carried out under cover of darkness by Milosevic's henchmen this morning," Patten said in a written statement.
"Only a state which is terrified of the truth resorts to sending men in masks into television and radio studios; only a regime determined to try to cut Serbia off completely from the rest of Europe could conceive of behaving in this way."
He said modern technology meant truth could not be snuffed out easily and added: "Milosevic and his cronies will ultimately lose this battle; the tenacious independent journalists will win it."
The media outlets raided included Studio B, considered the most important opposition television channel. The Serbian authorities accused it of calling for their violent overthrow.
"The decision taken today to silence important voices constitutes a denial of democracy and a violation of the right of expression," Solana said. "The European Union supports the brave efforts of journalists, students and politicians in their struggle for freedom and democracy."
Montenegro's President Milo Djukanovic, a former Milosevic protege who has become a key opponent, said the move by Belgrade was "not an expression of strength but a sign of panic."
"Milosevic knows his political ratings are at their lowest in all his last 15 years," Djukanovic told reporters in Brussels after talks with Solana. But he cuationed that "this doesn't mean the end of the dictatorship is near."
Solana is planning to meet representatives of Serbia's independent media in Brussels on Friday, although it is not clear how many or who will make the trip.
The 15-nation EU has been trying to promote the democratic opposition in Yugoslavia and regards Milosevic as a major obstacle to democracy and stability in the region.
The Times: Congress votes for Kosovo pullout
BY BEN MACINTYRE
THE US House of Representatives yesterday voted in favour of a proposal to withdraw US troops from Kosovo next year unless European nations honour their pledges of aid, despite warnings by the Administration that such a move could undermine regional stability and threaten Nato itself.
The measure, reflecting mounting unease in Congress over US missions abroad, requires the President to certify by next April 1 that Nato allies have fulfilled financial pledges for the rebuilding of Kosovo. Without such certification, the President would have 30 days to submit plans for the withdrawal of the 5,900 US troops in the region.
The Senate is considering an even stronger measure, to force the withdrawal of troops unless Congress explicitly authorises a decision to keep them in place.
The vote came just hours after Madeleine Albright, the US Secretary of State, gave a warning that Congress was "playing with fire" by attempting to set premature deadlines for a Kosovo withdrawal.
William Cohen, the Defence Secretary, said a self-imposed deadline would encourage similar pullouts by European troops, threatening Nato.
Serb police close down last free television station
Belgrade crackdown: Opponents of Slobodan Milosevic say the silencing of independent media marks the first step to a state of emergency
By Vesna Peric Zimonjic in Belgrade
18 May 2000
The full weight of the Serbian state cracked down yesterday against opponents of the regime, when dozens of police took over the premises of Studio B radio and television in Belgrade, silencing independent outlets serving half of Serbia.
An official statement read out on Studio B said the government decided to take over the station at 2am after it had "called for the violent overthrow of the legitimate authorities". The statement was signed by two deputy prime ministers: the ultranationalist Vojislav Seselj and Milovan Bojic, a leader of the powerful party of Mira Markovic, the Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's wife.
Mr Milosevic's government had been threatening a crackdown on opposition forces since Saturday's killing of a senior official, Bosko Perosevic, in the northern city of Novi Sad. Authorities have blamed the opposition but pro-democracy leaders deny the charges.
Dragan Kojadinovic, Studio B's manager, said there were no legal grounds for the takeover of his station and branded it "the beginning of a state of emergency". Vladan Batic, one of the opposition leaders, agreed, saying: "The government has imposed an informal state of emergency. This means the beginning of civil war in Serbia."
The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe condemned the move and called on Belgrade to stop repression of free speech. "It is almost impossible to comprehend that a European state at the beginning of the 21st century can act in such a totalitarian way," said Freimut Duve, the OSCE's representative for freedom of the media.
Studio B is controlled by local authorities in the capital, and run by the biggest opposition party, the Serbian Renewal Movement of Vuk Draskovic. The station planned to broadcast a news programme from the city hall yesterday, following a protest rally organised by the opposition.
The Serbian government held an emergency session following the seizure, amid speculation that it would announce a formal clampdown. But there was no announcement.
Studio B's offices are in a building which also houses the independent B2 92 radio station, the privately owned Blic daily newspaper, which has the largest circulation in Serbia, and Index Radio, popular with students. B2 92 had used some Studio B frequencies after the original B 92 was taken over by the government during the Nato air raids last year.
Music was being played on Studio B's radio waves yesterday, while films were shown on television. The only news broadcast was from the state-controlled Tanjug news agency. Media staff were told by plainclothes police officers "not to circulate" from their offices.
The last major event aired by Studio B and other independent media was Monday's opposition rally in Belgrade, called to protest against the government's obstruction of another demonstration that was to have been held last week in Pozarevac, Mr Milosevic's home town.
The broadcasting takeover followed a series of daily threats by top government officials against opponents of the regime after the killing of Mr Perosevic, who headed the government of the northern province of Vojvodina.
Ivan Markovic, a senior official of Mrs Markovic's JUL party, said Mr Draskovic and other opposition leaders were ready to pay "total obedience towards American führers of neo-fascism", with a programme of "terrorism and killings".
The Indenpendent: 'Bounty hunters strike inside Serbia to seize war crimes suspects'
By Zeljko Cvijanovic in Banja Luka and Vesna Peric Zimonjic
18 May 2000
Serbian police officers yesterday accused the United Nations of paying mercenaries thousands of pounds to abduct suspected war criminals hiding in the former Yugoslavia.
The kidnappers were said to hunt down their former comrades in the Bosnian wars using intelligence provided by UN war crimes investigators.
The practice came to light after Dragan Nikolic, 43, a Bosnian Serb on trial for war crimes in the Hague, claimed he was kidnapped in Smederevo, 30 miles east of Belgrade. Serbian police arrested seven men and a woman yesterday who were allegedly involved in seizing him.
Police said the group received £31,000 for the kidnapping from unspecified "foreign services". One of those arrested is a policeman, while another was expelled from the force for an alleged attempted murder.
A Serbian police source confirmed that Mr Nikolic was abducted by two men who claimed to be police officers. They bundled him into a car boot and drove him to the border with Bosnia, where he was bound before being smuggled across the Drina river by boat and handed over to American S-For soldiers on 21 April. Mr Nikolic was indicted in November 1994 when he was identified as the commander of the Susica camp, near Vlasenica, where Bosnian Muslims were allegedly tortured, raped and executed in 1992. In a court appearance on 28 April, he pleaded not guilty to 80 separate charges – the highest number faced by any War Crimes Tribunal defendant.
But Mr Nikolic hopes that the circumstances of his arrest will lead to the case against him being dismissed. His defence counsel intends to prove that the former camp commandant was detained on territory which does not fall under UN jurisdiction. Nato claims he was apprehended by S-For troops in northern Bosnia. According to the tribunal's statutory code, prosecutors could be forced to release Mr Nikolic if the arrest is deemed illegal.
Mr Nikolic's lawyer, Howard Morrison, is also likely to refer to the case of Stevan Todorovic, who was arrested in south-eastern Serbia. Mr Todorovic claims he was abducted by members of the so-called Spider ring who are due to go on trial in Belgrade this month for the attempted assassination of President Slobodan Milosevic and other Serbian officials.
He says he recognised three Spider members from their pictures in a newspaper and is convinced they are the same men who kidnapped him in September 1998.
The Spider group is believed to have been working for the French and Serbian secret services simultaneously, initially recruiting Serbian veterans to fight for the ousted dictator Mobutu Sese Seka in the former Zaire.
The Serbian police source said suspected war criminals across Yugoslavia were living in fear of the kidnappers.
The Chief UN prosecutor at tribunal in The Hague, Carla del Ponte, recently called for "creative ways" to arrest war crimes suspects who are "beyond the reach of S-For". The United States government has offered a reward of $5m (£3m) for the arrest of Mr Milosevic and his senior commanders in Bosnia.
Washington Post : Cohen Warns of Veto Over Kosovo Pullout Bill
By Eric Pianin and Helen Dewar
The Clinton administration yesterday launched a campaign to thwart Senate efforts to impose a deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Kosovo, as Defense Secretary William S. Cohen threatened a presidential veto and warned that lawmakers were harming prospects for peace.
The Senate could vote by midweek on a military construction bill including language that would cut off funds to keep U.S. troops in Kosovo beyond July 1, 2001.
The House is also likely to vote this week on a bipartisan proposal to begin withdrawing U.S. troops by April 1 unless President Clinton certifies that European allies are meeting their obligations for humanitarian, reconstruction and peacekeeping assistance.
Cohen said in a letter that the Senate measure would be "counterproductive to peace in Kosovo" and would "seriously jeopardize" U.S. relations with NATO allies. Meanwhile, Gen. Wesley K. Clark, the former NATO commander, planned to meet with senators today to express his concern that a precipitous U.S. withdrawal "could give [Yugoslav President Slobodan] Milosevic the victory he could not achieve on the battlefield," as Clark put it in a letter last week.
The brewing showdown reflects congressional displeasure with continued U.S. involvement in what many lawmakers view as a no-win peacekeeping effort following last year's NATO air war against Milosevic's forces.
The bipartisan Kosovo amendment, drafted by Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.) and attached to the military construction bill, would cut off funds for the 5,900 U.S. troops in Kosovo beyond July 1, 2001 unless Clinton or his successor obtains congressional authorization to keep them there. The bill contains emergency funds to replenish defense accounts diverted to the Kosovo war.
According to Warner, the amendment would provide enough time for the administration to develop an exit plan or for Congress to authorize the mission. "That is not cut-and-run," Warner said in a floor speech last week. "That is not undermining NATO. That is not sending a signal to Milosevic that the United States is turning its back."
But in his letter to Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) yesterday, Cohen said that "while certainly more could be done, we should not lose sight of the fact that the Europeans are in fact carrying this burden" and that U.S. forces account for only about 15 percent of the peacekeepers in Kosovo.
Last week, 11 senators from both parties circulated a letter urging defeat of the Kosovo withdrawal language. The letter, drafted by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), ranking minority member on the Armed Services Committee, and John McCain (R-Ariz.), also a senior member of the panel, said tying NATO burden-sharing to funding of an ongoing mission was a "serious mistake" and would "send the message to NATO that the United States is an unreliable ally."
Clark put it even more strongly in a letter that the senators circulated. Steps called for in the proposal would amount to a "de facto pullout decision by the United States" that would "invalidate the policies, commitments and trust of our allies in NATO, undercut U.S. leadership worldwide and encourage renewed ethnic tensions, fighting and instability in the Balkans," Clark said.
Yesterday, McCain, an unsuccessful candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, told reporters, "I would hope the Republicans would consider that perhaps we may have a different president--a Republican president--in the White House next year. Do we want to set this kind of precedent?"
The House proposal, sponsored by Reps. John R. Kasich (R-Ohio), Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and others, will be considered in connection with the defense authorization bill for the next fiscal year. A similar initiative, which threatened withdrawal by next month, was rejected in March by a 219-200 vote. It has been modified to pick up more votes, including extending the deadline to next April and allowing the president to waive the deadline for up to 180 days.
40 Activists Detained in Serbia
By DUSAN STOJANOVIC, Associated Press Writer
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP) - Police briefly detained 40 student activists opposed to President Slobodan Milosevic - some on suspicion of murder - as a top government official called Tuesday for a crackdown against Yugoslav opposition leaders and their followers.
Key opposition figures accused Milosevic and his aides of trying to foment civil war as a pretext to impose full dictatorial control.
``Civil war is being provoked by those who are conducting repression, those who speak the language of hatred, those who are arresting all those who think differently,'' said Nebojsa Covic, a former Milosevic ally turned opposition leader.
Police and government officials say the student group Otpor, or Resistance, was behind the assassination of Bosko Perosevic, a top official of the ruling Socialist party who was shot last Saturday in the northern town of Novi Sad. The government appears ready to seize on the killing to crack down on dissent fed by growing poverty and isolation during Milosevic's more than 10 years in power.
Serbian state television said Tuesday that police arrested 20 Otpor activists in the Novi Sad region on suspicion of being behind the Perosevic slaying. It quoted a police statement as saying that ``printed material and objects'' were found in their possession and that they were being investigated in connection with the killing.
Police detained another 20 Otpor activists in the central Serbian town of Valjevo Tuesday after they distributed the group's leaflets on the streets, opposition groups said.
Pedja Lecic, an Otpor activist from Belgrade, said that all 40 were later released.
The confrontation between Milosevic and his critics is increasing tensions in Serbia, the larger of the two remaining Yugoslav republics and Milosevic's power base. Unlike in Montenegro, the smaller Yugoslav republic whose leadership has turned away from Milosevic, Serbia's government remains loyal to the Yugoslav president, despite growing grass-roots opposition.
On Tuesday, Ivan Markovic, a spokesman for the neo-communist JUL party of Milosevic's wife, described an anti-government rally Monday as ``a gathering of terrorist leaders and their followers.'' He charged that the rally's call for an uprising against Milosevic's government actually was ``a call for the destruction of the country and its institutions.'' He linked the demonstrators to NATO, which last year bombed Yugoslavia.
``We are asking the appropriate authorities, above all the public prosecutor, to undertake all legal measures for the protection of the country and all its citizens,'' Markovic said in a statement carried by the state Tanjug news agency.
Opposition leaders said such calls for a crackdown could lead to a civil war between Milosevic's followers and opponents. The critics charged that Milosevic would then introduce a state of emergency that would ban basic civil rights and opposition parties and indefinitely postpone elections scheduled for later this year.
The Milosevic camp ``is ready to stay in power by all means, abandoning even the semblance of democracy,'' opposition leader Goran Svilanovic said.
The New York Times : G.O.P. Step on Kosovo Draws Fire From Bush
By ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON, May 16 -- Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, today sharply criticized a bill backed by Senate Republicans that would set a deadline for withdrawing American ground troops from Kosovo. Mr. Bush called the bill a "legislative overreach" that would tie his hands if he becomes president.
But the Senate majority leader, Trent Lott of Mississippi, along with the bill's chief Republican sponsor, John W. Warner of Virginia, said they would push ahead with the measure. That sets up the first major foreign policy clash between Mr. Bush and congressional Republicans.
Until today, momentum seemed to be building among most Senate Republicans for the measure, which would cut off funds for the 5,900 United States forces in Kosovo by July 1, 2001, forcing their withdrawal, unless Congress authorizes an extension.
Many Republicans said they assumed that Mr. Bush endorsed the measure, which may be voted on as early as Wednesday.
But last weekend, opponents of the measure, including at least five Republican senators, warned Mr. Bush's top aides of the potential conflict. In response, the Bush campaign issued its statement.
"The Clinton-Gore administration has failed to instill trust in Congress and the American people when it comes to our military and deployment of troops overseas, but the governor does not believe this provision is the way to resolve the lack of presidential leadership," Scott McClellan, a spokesman for Mr. Bush, said.
"Governor Bush views it as a legislative overreach on powers of the presidency."
Top aides to President Clinton have recommended that he veto an $8.6 billion military construction bill if the Senate language is attached. The bill includes $4.7 billion for American military operations in Kosovo, anti-drug efforts in Colombia and other defense spending.
Defense Secretary William S. Cohen warned today that passage of the measure would send a dangerous signal. "If the United States were to mandate an artificial deadline for our departure, then I suspect that other members of NATO will do the same," he said. And that would lead to "the return to the kind of conflict we witnessed last year."
After Mr. Bush's views were made known today, splits quickly formed in the party line, and Republicans were casting about tonight to figure a graceful way out of the showdown.
"I agree with the governor," said Senator Thad Cochran, a Mississippi Republican. "He would need the flexibility of a newly elected president to make decisions with his own advisers."
Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, said, "We're putting that new president in a very difficult position, with no flexibility and no latitude on a very, very complicated issue in the Balkans."
Such opposition would likely kill the proposal, said Senator Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican who heads the Appropriations Committee, and who supports the measure.
But Mr. Lott said he still supported the measure.
Mr. Warner agreed, but said the floor vote would be close.
"Presidents are very protective of their prerogative, but what I'd say to him is that Congress has its own prerogative and it's the power of the purse," Mr. Warner said in an interview.
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Texas Republican, said she would recommend pushing back the deadline to give the next president more time to work with the Congress.
The New York Times: U.S. Study Offers Grim Prognosis for Lasting Peace in Balkans
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
ASHINGTON, May 15 -- On the eve of a Senate vote to set a deadline for withdrawing American troops from Kosovo, a General Accounting Office report released today said that prospects for lasting peace in Kosovo, Bosnia and other parts of the Balkans remained bleak and warned of the prospect of instability and even renewed violence.
The report, released by the House Armed Services Committee, credited NATO-led peacekeeping missions in Bosnia and Kosovo for ending open conflict. But it said that little progress had been made toward creating peaceful, democratic governments committed to political and ethnic reconciliation.
The 90-page report is sure to provide support for critics of the prolonged American military operations in the Balkans.
American troops have served in Bosnia since that country's ethnic warfare ended in 1995, and now total 4,200. About 5,900 Americans have been in Kosovo since a NATO-led peacekeeping force occupied the Serbian province last June following NATO's air war against Yugoslavia, of which Serbia is the larger of two republics.
Last week, in a lopsided, bipartisan vote, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved an amendment setting a deadline of July 1, 2001, for withdrawing American ground troops unless Congress votes to give specific approval for an extension. The full Senate is expected to vote on the legislation on Tuesday as part of a larger military construction spending bill.
The report by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said that forces opposed to peace continued to wield influence in the Balkans, inhibiting progress toward political stability.
The report's authors cited evidence of Serbian paramilitary units and former Kosovo Albanian fighters operating in Kosovo, as well as "small groups of armed thugs organized and controlled by extremist political leaders" in Bosnia, where Muslim, Croat and Serbian groups fought for control of the country for more than three and a half years.
In both Kosovo and Bosnia, which were once part of the former Yugoslavia, "the former warring parties largely retain their wartime goals," the report concluded.
While the report criticized political leaders in Kosovo and Bosnia for failing to embrace "political and social reconciliation considered necessary to build multiethnic, democratic societies and institutions," it also criticized the United Nations for failing to provide needed resources, particularly in Kosovo, where an international police force has been slow to get off the ground.
The report did not advocate an American or NATO withdrawal, as some members of Congress have called for. On the contrary, the report said that factions in Bosnia and Kosovo "would resume war if the NATO-led troops were withdrawn."
The report warned that the region could face "an escalation of violent incidents or armed conflict" over the next five years, not just in Bosnia and Kosovo, but also in Macedonia and in the two remaining republics of the former Yugoslavia, Montenegro as well as Serbia.
Sen. John W. Warner of Virginia, a Republican who sponsored the Senate legislation with Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, a Democrat, said today that the report underscored the concerns that led him to propose the amendment on the American presence in Kosovo.
But Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen and senior Pentagon commanders have mounted an intense campaign against the legislation, warning that it would undermine NATO's operations and embolden the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic.
The Christian Science Monitor : Hot outlet for Belgrade youth, Internet crime
Alex Todorovic
BELGRADE
Sandra's bookshelf is filled with expensive art books and her CD holder overflows with the latest Western hits. A digital camera rests atop her dresser. The top drawer is filled with lingerie from Victoria's Secret.
Like most young Serbs, Sandra, who, did not want her real name used for this report, has virtually no income. But she can enjoy these small luxuries thanks to the Internet. You may even unknowingly have bought her a gift.
All of the goods in her apartment, except the computer, were ordered from US Internet sites, using stolen credit-card numbers. And although Yugoslavia is under an international embargo, the goods were delivered to Sandra's neighborhood post office. "Everyone at the post office knows how I got this stuff. It's no secret," she says.
After Sandra pays the customs tax - money she gets by selling some previously arrived goods or, she says, by bribing customs officials with part of the take - she goes home with little fear of being caught. The goods either get here or they don't.
Belgrade's educated urban youth say they are awash in goods stolen over the Internet; mostly books and CDs, but also computer programs, clothing, fine stationery, and less often, scanners, hard discs, CD "burners," or recording devices, and other computer accessories.
Internet thievery is a common problem in all developed countries, but in Serbia local authorities have little incentive to take notice. Yugoslavia has no official relationship with Interpol, the international police agency in charge of credit-card fraud. That has allowed Belgrade's youth to steal with impunity. It's one of the advantages of living in a pariah state.
And in a country where the average salary is less than $50 a month, the temptation is great.
While an accurate measure is hard to come by, Belgrade youths boast that tens of thousands of households contain goods purloined over the Internet. At Zsu Zsu cafe in downtown Belgrade, a group of young Belgraders recently spoke openly about their illicit activities. All are students, and spoke matter-of-factly on the condition that their real names not be used.
Seventeen-year-old high-school student Aleksa laughs when asked how many of his classmates have received goods from the Internet. "That's the wrong question," he says. "You should ask how many of my classmates have not stolen goods from the Internet.
The trend began two years ago, but picked up momentum after last year's NATO bombing campaign over Kosovo, which left Yugoslavia further isolated both politically and economically.
"The only negative consequence I've ever heard about is one local Belgrade DJ, who ordered all of his music and equipment over the Internet. He got a warning letter from the FBI," says Zarko, an engineering student.
Thieves can even write their own address when ordering goods with little fear local police will arrest them, they say. Still, "most of us actually write down the names of our aging grandmothers when ordering stuff, or a dead neighbor, just to be on the safe side," says Dejan, a law student. "You never know what will happen after the government here changes. I don't want to wind up on some list, then get arrested when I leave the country."
Not everything ordered comes through, but plenty does. "My good friend just received an A4 Compaq scanner," says Aleksa. "Suddenly my little collection of CDs seemed kind of stupid. Now I'm going after the bigger stuff as well."
Obtaining credit-card numbers can be done in a number of ways. The easiest is to find one posted at any number of hacker Web sites. The most popular method in Belgrade has been to use programs, available on underground search engines, that generate likely credit-card numbers based on a mathematical formula. From there, the would-be thief usually enters a pornography site, where the numbers are tested for validity.
"Penthouse I found to be the fastest site. Out of 100 numbers, I had a success rate of about 15 percent, and each number took a minute or less to run," says Dejan.
The merchant-verification system also has a huge loophole: The credit-card number and expiration date are all that matter. Any name can be punched in. Although more thorough verification is available, it costs more and most companies don't bother for minor purchases.
Once a thief has a few valid numbers, he or she can open an e-mail account under a pseudonym and go shopping.
The last and most important sleight of hand involves not writing "Yugoslavia" in the country field, but some adjacent state. Companies won't deliver to Yugoslavia as it is under international sanctions. Instead, would-be thieves write in Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, or Macedonia. "Some post office worker in Slovenia then gets annoyed and says to himself, 'Those Americans don't even know where Belgrade is,' then forwards the package," explains Zarko.
"Our biggest success has been Amazon.com," he boasts, to general agreement. "Things just keep on coming, like it's an endless birthday."
"It's much wiser to go easy on the purchases with any single number.... They track buying patterns on Amazon, and when someone looks like they're on a spree, the card is flagged," adds Aleksa.
While some of the youths expressed moral reservations about their exploits, others feel justified. "I think it's a way to get back at America for bombing us last year. Why should I feel guilty? VISA takes the hit, not the cardholder," says Zarko.
Sandra has an original way of dealing with the moral issue. "I buy some things for myself, then contribute to a charity. I recently gave $150 dollars to an environmental organization at the Eddie Bauer Web site."
The Guardian: Opposition rallies against Milosevic's clampdown
Gillian Sandford in Belgrade
Tuesday May 16, 2000
A Serbian opposition leader wearing a T-shirt with the clenched-fist symbol of the youth resistance movement warned President Slobodan Milosevic to "leave our kids alone" at a demonstration in the capital Belgrade yesterday.
"If you touch our children, you touch our future and this is the end. There is no step back after that," Zoran Djindjic, leader of the Democratic Party, said at the rally in Republic Square, attended by around 30,000 people.
The demand came as the Milosevic regime acted against students and activists from the youth movement Otpor (Resistance) after the weekend assassination of a senior government figure in the northern city of Novi Sad.
Opposition leaders called the demonstration after cancelling a rally in Pozarevac, Mr Milosevic's home town, last Tuesday, accusing the author ities of blocking access to roads and detaining activists and independent journalists.
It had been planned as a protest against the alleged beatings of three supporters of the Otpor movement in the town.
Student organisers admitted that they were disappointed with the turnout at yesterday's rally, which drew only a fraction of the 100,000 people who attended a rally in Belgrade on April 14.
Tension increased at the weekend after an unknown assassin shot Bosko Perosevic, a senior official in Mr Milosevic's Socialist party and head of the Vojvodina provincial government.
Official spokesmen blamed the murder on the youth movement, opposition parties and foreign governments.
At yesterday's rally, Branko Ilic, a 20-year-old member of Otpor, called for a minute's silence from the crowd as a mark of respect.
"For us Brako Perosevic is a victim," he said.
The police detained several activists at the weekend, but released them after questioning. They also issued wanted posters for the arrest of two Otpor members, saying they were sought in connection with Perosevic's murder.
The resistance movement dismissed the allegations. It said the two wanted youths were in Bosnia at the time of the murder and had been there for a month.
The Yugoslav information minister, Goran Matic, warned that the authorities would take action against Otpor.
It was not a registered organisation and would no longer be tolerated, he said. Members who continued with street actions would be arrested, he said, adding: "The time of street spectacles is over."
The assassination of Perosevic was caught on television. He received a call on his mo bile phone while he was attending an agricultural fair. He moved away from his official delegation to take the call and was shot at close blank range by a security guard.
The police gave chase and arrested the man.
Mr Matic said that the man held for the murder, Milivoje Gutovic, 50, was linked to the opposition.
He said police found Otpor propaganda in his flat, and manuals on terrorism.
"It has been firmly established that Gutovic is a member of Otpor, and according to his own statement, a member of the Serbian Renewal Movement with close ties to some of the party members and sympathisers," he said.
But the Democratic party said its local representative in the Novi Sad area knew Mr Gutovic.
It denied that he was an opposition supporter, saying that he was a supporter of Mr Milosevic's Socialist party.
FEATURE-Greyland battles Yellowland in NATO exercise
PINHEIRO DA CRUZ, Portugal, May 16 (Reuters) - The amphibious troop carrier carrying a multinational force hit the the beaches of Yellowland as NATO swung into action to impose peace with its warlike neighbour, Greyland.
On the shores were soldiers with horrific injuries. One had his arm blown off. The intestines of another were poking through a gash in his abdomen. In the hills, victims of ethnic cleansing awaited urgent evacuation.
From a distance, bikini-clad tourists looked on in mild amusement -- the soldiers were only pretending to be wounded, their mutilated limbs were made of plastic. The evacuees were local villagers.
They were taking part in operation Linked Seas 2000, a two-week NATO exercise that ended on Monday.
It was the first major land and sea exercise since the war in Kosovo and the first time NATO has practised deploying peacekeepers by sea on such a large scale.
Yellowland and Greyland are in southern Portugal, two imaginary countries at war over their borders. NATO has been called in to enforce a peace deal.
The operation involved some 12 NATO nations and five countries from outside the alliance. More than 30,000 military personnel, 80 warships, 11 special forces teams and 125 aircraft took part.
AN ARMED ENFORCER OF PEACE
The operation was an affirmation of the new role as an armed enforcer of peace that NATO is trying to carve out for itself.
Gone are the days of repulsing Warsaw Pact tanks across the plains of northern Europe, in comes the rapid deployment of forces to prevent human catastrophes.
Vice Admiral Luis Mota e Silva, NATO's Commander in Chief for the Southern Atlantic, said the idea was to train as many soldiers, sailors and airmen how to deploy peacekeepers from the sea, and deal with humanitarian problems when they arrive.
"There are things happening in today's world which are unacceptable. We should not accept that human beings are doing what they are doing to each other," he said.
Coming from mainly Spanish vessels off the Portuguese coast, troops landed near Pinheiro da Cruz in the south of the country and on the small island of Porto Santo.
Georgian troops were made up by their British counterparts with realistic looking wounds supplied by a film prop company.
And, for the first time, NATO used an entire civilian population as part of an exercise.
Inhabitants of Porto Santo were pressed into service -- as refugees: Yellowlanders who were victims of ethnic cleansing carried out by Greylanders.
CIVILIANS PRESSED INTO SERVICE
"Don't worry, your wife is safe," said one U.S. medic as he tended to the imaginary wounds of a Porto Santo resident who was bawling with particular gusto.
Further away, marines from the United States, Netherlands and Germany set up an entire refugee camp including a field hospital and registration post.
"Here, the forces are being confronted with what you would find in that kind of situation: injuries both physical and psychological," said Thomas Wilson, Commander of Standing Naval Force Atlantic.
"In the real world what you are seeing here might be applicable to disaster relief or perhaps missions similar to things that we saw on television in Kosovo."
Following a decade of conflict in the former Yugoslavia, the scenario for the operation is indeed familiar.
It pits the hardline republic of Greyland, led by a General Vulgar, against the pro-Western republic of Yellowland.
After months of fighting along the border, tensions between communities and ethnic cleansing, NATO is called in to police a U.N.-brokered peace deal.
And it has probably been followed closely in the Balkans.
The imaginary pro-western republic of Yellowland nestles in the underbelly of its foe, rather like the tiny republic of Montenegro, which sits uneasily beside its neighbour Serbia -- the target of a 78-day bombing campaign last year.
Independent : Milosevic ally is shot dead
AP
14 May 2000
A top official of President Slobodan Milosevic's ruling Socialist Party was shot dead at an agricultural fair yesterday. The victim, Bosko Perosevic, was head of regional government for the northern Vojvodina province, and a firm supporter of Milosevic's autocratic policies.
He was touring the fair in the northern city of Novi Sad when a security guard at the fair compound approached him and fired at close range. died in hospital hours later.
The attacker, identified as Milivoj Gutovic, a 50-year-old who had worked at the exhibition for years, was caught after a short chase.
Belgrade-based Studio B Television reported that seconds before the attack Perosevic's mobile telephone rang and he moved away from his delegation to take the call.
At that moment, Gutovic approached him, pressed the gun to Perosevic's head and fired. Studio B said the attacker had known Perosevic for some years.
It was the latest in a series of high-profile shootings in which government officials, top businessmen and underworld figures have been assassinated. The general manager of the Yugoslav national carrier, JAT, was killed last month, the country's defence minister was shot dead in February and a known underworld figure, Zeljko Raznatovic-Arkan, was assassinated in January.
Earlier in the day, members of the opposition Democratic Party gathered at the exhibition gate to hand out party leaflets. Seven were arrested by the police, but were later freed after a group of 50 protesters gathered at the main jail in Novi Sad to demand their release.
Associated press : Yugoslavia threatens crackdown
Government accuses opposition of planning assassination
Police hold down a man Saturday suspected of shooting and killing Bosko Perosevic, an ally of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia, May 14 — The Yugoslav government announced a major crackdown Sunday on the country’s main opposition groups, accusing them of masterminding the slaying of a top official in President Slobodan Milosevic’s ruling Socialist party — on behalf of NATO.
A DAY AFTER Bosko Perosevic, 43, head of the Vojvodina provincial government and chief of a Socialist Party branch there, was shot and killed while visiting a trade fair, the government claimed the anti-government student organization Otpor and the opposition Serbian Renewal Movement party were behind the attack and would be punished.
“All who perform activities against the state will be treated in accordance with the law and prevented. The time of their street actions is over,” Yugoslavian Information Minister Goran Matic said.
Police said in a statement that they were “beyond doubt” that the suspected gunman, Milivoj Gutovic, 50, was an activist with Otpor and the Serbian Renewal Movement.
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The statement, carried by the official Tanjug news agency Sunday, said “posters and propaganda material of Otpor and of Serbian Renewal Movement, as well as brochures on terrorism,” were found in Gutovic’s home.
MSNBC reporter's notebook: Zoran Stanojevic's Belgrade Confidential
Gutovic, a longtime security guard at the Novi Sad exhibition venue, allegedly approached Perosevic at an agricultural fair Saturday, pressed a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. He was taken into custody immediately.
Both groups have denied the allegations and any connection with the gunman.
The Serbian Renewal Movement expressed condolences to Perosevic’s family and called Gutovic “a monster.”
Matic also claimed the NATO countries who launched a 78-day air attack against Yugoslavia last year were behind the killing.
“This (slaying) was not the work of a single maniac, but an organized murder with a deep political background, with the aim to destabilize Yugoslavia,” Matic told reporters Sunday. “We are faced with a concept of active destabilization of Yugoslavia by the same who carried out armed aggression against our country.”
The government appeared ready to crack down on the rising dissent in Yugoslavia, which is impoverished and isolated after more than decade of Milosevic’s rule and three lost wars, as well as respond to NATO’s virtual control of the Kosovo province.
Matic said a number of arrests had been made already in connection with the slaying but would not specify how many. Asked whether opposition activists who are expected to hold a rally Monday in Belgrade would face arrest, Matic said: “That is correct.”
Milosevic attended a Sunday memorial for Perosevic, along with about 200 other officials.
“The NATO aggressors are now putting their weapons in the hands of their servants here, to do for them the dirty job, to spread fear and chaos,” Gorica Gajevic, the Socialists’ secretary general, said in a speech at the memorial.
Gajevic called Otpor “ordinary NATO mercenaries” and promised that “Serbia will fight against them just as it fought back against any other evil.”
Otpor activists in Belgrade and Novi Sad called the government’s comments an attempt by Milosevic’s regime to halt their popular anti-government protests.
“We are a thorn in their side. They are trying to break us with this, but we will not give up our demands” for democracy and free elections, said Miroslav Kecman, an Otpor activist.
He added that at least Novi Sad police had called one Otpor activist for questioning. Earlier Sunday, an independent radio reporter and a member of the Serbian Renewal Movement were also detained in Novi Sad for questioning.
An Otpor activist in Belgrade, Ivan Marovic, told the Associated Press that a number of the groups’ activists have been arrested in several Serbian towns but that some were released after lengthy questioning.
Irish Times: 'Father of the nation' opposes Serbian regime
From Gillian Sandford, in Belgrade
YUGOSLAVIA: A former Yugoslavia president, Mr Dobrica Cosic, whose nationalist ideas won him the title "the father of Slobodan Milosevic" has dramatically lent his support to radical young people in Serbia by joining the anti-Milosevic resistance movement Otpor.
Otpor - a youth and studentbased activist movement - has been gaining support across Serbia since it became public in November last year. It claims to have at least 20,000 members and organises protests that provoke and challenge the regime.
In recent days many leading regime officials, including the Serbian police chief, Mr Vlajko Stoiljkovic, have branded Otpor members as "terrorists" and "fascists".
Analysts say the decision of Mr Cosic (79) to join Otpor provides it with credibility and legitimacy because of his stature in the country. He is a renowned novelist and anti-fascist writer whose ideas have led many people to call him: "father of the Serbian nation."
Mr Cosic was sitting at one of his favourite restaurants in Belgrade on Tuesday morning when a student leader of Otpor, Mr Vukasin Petrovic (24), decided to approach him.
"I said, `Good Morning'. He immediately began praising us, saying that we were doing a good job. `You are the future of this country', he said to us. I asked him if he would like to join, and he said, `Yes, with pleasure'," recalls Mr Petrovic.
Mr Cosic later told local journalists: "My decision to join Otpor is to offer human and moral support to those young people who are motivated by patriotism, democracy and civilised behaviour and who do not want to accept the system that exists at the moment, and a society without hope. I believe that the movement Otpor does not only oppose the present situation but also fights for a free, prosperous and humane society."
Mr Cosic was among the authors of a memorandum written by academics of the Serbian Academy of Science and Arts in 1986. This was highly influential in fomenting nationalist thought.
"His nationalist ideas provided a climate of opinion that Milosevic could then manipulate," says Prof Srbijanka Turajlic, a member of the Otpor Council - a group of respected advisers to the youth movement. But she welcomed his membership of Otpor.
Many liberals will be uncomfortable with Mr Cosic's membership of Otpor, because of his close past links with Mr Milsoevic. He was president from June 1992 to June 1993, at the start of the Bosnian war when Mr Milosevic was President of Serbia and some believe Mr Cosic could have sought to exercise the authority vested in his office to try to prevent it.
Mr Cosic's decision to join is important, says Mr Petrovic. "He was an anti-fascist fighter in the second World War and this is important because of our media war against the regime."
LA Times: Light Touch to Deadly Serious Struggle
By RICHARD BOUDREAUX, Times Staff Writer
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia--Their end is dead serious, but their means are often prankishly comic.
Otpor, a student movement bent on ousting Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, carved up a big cake in the shape of Yugoslavia on Milosevic's birthday last year and served pieces to passersby, telling them that this is how his ethnic wars have dismembered the country.
On New Year's Eve, the activists gathered scores of revelers in this capital city and, at the stroke of midnight, sent everyone home with a party-pooping lecture. The master of ceremonies cited an "absence of anything to celebrate" under Milosevic's rule.
On Easter Sunday, the student activists mocked the regime by handing out brightly colored eggs. "It's hard, but watch out," they warned. "It'll crack."
For a populace tired of lost wars, international isolation and one-man rule, but also bored with traditional opposition parties, Otpor has struck an irreverent funny bone and gained thousands of followers, injecting new life into the struggle for control of Yugoslavia and its dominant republic, Serbia.
"The idea is to make protest creative and entertaining," said Vukasin Petrovic, 24, who helped start the movement 19 months ago at Belgrade University and is trying to overcome his generation's cynicism and apathy toward politics.
The clenched fist that is the symbol of Otpor, which means resistance, is painted on walls and printed on T-shirts across the republic. It's almost as ubiquitous this spring as the bull's-eye target that many Serbs wore a year ago, in defiance of North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombs, during the war over Serbia's Kosovo province.
Since last summer, Otpor activists in their teens and early 20s have staged hundreds of mini-demonstrations across the country, satirizing the man who has ruled Yugoslavia and Serbia for nearly as long as they can remember. They have helped prod their elders in Serbia's weak opposition parties into a loose, fragile alliance.
It is uncertain whether the alliance can stay together and beat Milosevic in the next elections, scheduled to be held in Yugoslavia by the end of this year and in Serbia in 2001. But Otpor has unsettled the regime, sharpening a struggle for the hearts and minds of 18-to-24-year-olds, who are the least inclined to vote.
Police have arrested hundreds of Otpor demonstrators, holding them for brief periods. Citing the group's support from the West, officials have branded its members foreign mercenaries. "Their ideology is American money," said Ivan Markovic, a Yugoslav Cabinet minister. "We must salvage the young from the claws of such militant groups."
The Yugoslav United Left Party, led by Milosevic's wife, has formed its own youth branch to counter Otpor. An attempt to force one Otpor member to join Milosevic's Socialist Party last week led to a confrontation in the president's hometown, leaving three other activists badly beaten and in jail and setting off a new round of anti-government protests.
"What scares the regime is a metaphysical thing," Belgrade political analyst Ivan Vejvoda said. "Seeing Otpor, they see a future that's not theirs. They see a generation of younger people who are willing to draw the line and feel they have little to lose."
Student-led protests have cornered Milosevic twice before during his 12 years in power: in 1991 and in the winter of 1996-97. But they lost steam both times after prominent student leaders joined mainstream opposition parties that feuded and splintered.
Speaking last month to 100,000 people at a rally of the reunited opposition, Otpor activist Vladimir Pavlov vowed that the student group will remain strong and independent. "Next time one of you betrays us, 100,000 of us will appear at your door," he warned.
Otpor's jesting style of protest evolved from the wit of speakers at the 1996-97 rallies. But Petrovic, the movement's intense, bearded co-founder, didn't smile and displayed little humor during an hourlong interview. Twice arrested, he's clearly not in it for the fun.
"We've learned from past failures that there should be no leaders," he said, insisting that Otpor's decisions are collective. "We can be led by an idiot or united around an idea. If we put individuals forward as leaders, they can be discredited. It's harder to discredit an idea."
Milosevic Meets Iraqi Official
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP) - Joining forces to denounce their common foe, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and Iraq's foreign minister on Friday issued a joint statement blasting the United States.
Yugoslavia's state television quoted Milosevic and Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf Friday as saying the United States was the leader of ``hegemonism and NATO neocolonialism.''
Milosevic praised ``friendly relations'' between Yugoslavia and Iraq. The two officials said that ``Iraq and Yugoslavia are determined to defend their countries' freedom, sovereignty and territorial integrity,'' the television report said, quoting a joint statement.
Both nations were ``confronting the policy of dictate and power'' and thier stand was ``receiving increasing support in the world,'' the report said.
Milosevic has forged alliances with Iraq, Belarus, Cuba and some African countries since last year, when Serbia lost control of its southern Kosovo province following NATO's 78-day bombing campaign.
The New York Times: Pentagon and Several Senators Oppose Plan on Pulling Out G.I.'s in Kosovo
By ERIC SCHMITT
ASHINGTON, May 12 -- The Pentagon and a bipartisan group of senators today criticized legislation that sets a deadline for withdrawing American ground troops from Kosovo, warning that the measure would undermine the NATO operation and embolden President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia.
Earlier this week, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved a provision to cut off financing for the troops after July 1, 2001, unless the next administration could win specific approval from Congress. The measure is attached to a military construction spending bill that goes before the Senate for a vote on Tuesday.
The legislation underscores the growing unease on Capitol Hill over America's open-ended commitment to the Kosovo peacekeeping mission, where 5,900 United States troops are serving as part of a NATO operation.
But today, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen warned in a letter that the provision "is counterproductive to peace in Kosovo and will seriously jeopardize the relationship between the U.S. and our NATO allies."
In the letter to Senator Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican who heads the Appropriations Committee, Mr. Cohen said that if the Kosovo language stayed in the bill he would recommend that President Clinton veto the legislation, even though it would reimburse the Pentagon for its expenses in Kosovo and pay for several important military construction projects.
Separately, 11 Republican and Democratic senators sent a letter to the Senate Republican and Democratic leaders, Trent Lott and Tom Daschle, echoing Mr. Cohen's warnings. "Enactment of this Kosovo provision would send the message to NATO that the United States is an unreliable ally, to Slobodan Milosevic that the United States is irresolute," the senators said.
Gen. Wesley K. Clark, who commanded the allied air campaign against Yugoslavia last spring and who stepped down as the NATO military commander this month, also opposes the provision.
"These measures would invalidate the policies, commitments and trust of our allies in NATO, undercut U.S. leadership worldwide, and encourage renewed ethnic tension, fighting and instability in the Balkans," General Clark said in a letter this week to Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee.
The measure's two main sponsors, Senators John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia, and Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, say the bill does not apply to American troops in Kosovo providing intelligence, surveillance or headquarters support.
They say they are merely exercising Congress's power of the purse.
The measure, which was approved in committee 23 to 3 in a bipartisan vote, would also require the White House to begin planning with European allies in advance of the American withdrawal.
The amendment would also withhold some Kosovo financing unless President Clinton certified by July 15 that the European allies were meeting their commitments for aid and reconstruction.
Senate opponents of the provision stalled a final floor vote on the bill until Tuesday afternoon, giving the administration time to marshal what is expected to be a fierce lobbying campaign next week.
The House rejected similar legislation in March.
On Tuesday, Mr. Cohen, Gen. Henry H. Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and perhaps Gen. Joseph Ralston, the new NATO military commander, are expected to address the senators' regular policy luncheons.
Stifling the Press?
Leading Serb Journalist Arrested For Critical Articles
By Sue Masterman
May 11 — Serb police have arrested a leading Serb international journalist and human rights activist who dared to put his name on highly critical articles which appeared abroad.
Miroslav Filipovic, 49, was plucked from his home in the southern city of Kraljevo earlier this week by police who also confiscated the hard drive of his computer, floppy disks, around 100 pages of documents, his passport, address book, business cards, diary and personal papers.
Wednesday the district court in Kraljevo referred the case to a military prosecutor. The police prosecutor claimed that they had evidence to charge him with espionage and spreading lies. If found guilty, Filipovic faces up to 15 years in jail.
Part of a Group Targeted by Milosevic
Filipovic is a respected correspondent of the Belgrade daily Danas who also works for Agence France Press and for the Institute for War & Peace Reporting (IWPR). He is also a member of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, many of whose members have been targeted by the legal system controlled by President Slobodan Milosevic or physically threatened.
It is probably Filipovic’s work for the IWRP, one of the best sources of news from former Yugoslav regions, which has brought Milosevic’s wrath upon him. His latest report, published on Tuesday, was a stinging indictment of the way Kraljevo treats the fellow Serbs who fled from Kosovo and were forcibly settled there.
But it is probably a previous article, published in late April, entitled “Generals Jump Ship,” that led to his arrest. In it he describes how generals dismissed from the Yugoslav army by Milosevic because of their “questionable loyalty” have joined forces with Montenegro’s President Milo Djukanovic and his government.
A Sworn Milosevic Enemy
Djukanovic is a sworn Milosevic enemy. He is threatening to break out of the Yugoslav Federation in which Montenegro is the junior partner alongside Serbia. The United States and Britain have both warned Milosevic that any attempt by him to intervene in Montenegro could result in NATO counter-action.
Filipovic also reveals the results of a survey carried out within the Yugoslav army. “The results of the survey are devastating for Milosevic,” he says. He quotes the commander of a motorized unit as saying “I am sure that the majority of officers and soldiers will refuse to follow an order that might cause bloodshed in Montenegro.”
The journalist’s arrest is the latest in a spate of blatant attempts by Milosevic to muzzle the independent press by fair means or foul. More than 40 percent of the independent broadcasting media have been closed down, had their equipment stolen, or been hit by crippling fines. The regime also regularly jams broadcasts from regions where the opposition is planning or staging demonstrations.
Demonstrations and Deaths
On Wednesday some 10,000 Serb opposition protesters marched in the streets of the industrial town of Kragujevac, where 80 percent are out of work since NATO bombed the Zastava automobile plant and weapons factory.
There were 1,000 opposition demonstrators gathered in the Town Hall of Cacak, after police banned a street demonstration there.
Milosevic is most concerned about the emergence of a new opposition force, Otpor, a student resistance movement which is gathering support by the day.
Milosevic specifically attacked them in his Tuesday speech to mark World War II Victory Day. Calling them “the new Nazis” and “fascists,” he also described them as “little servants and bloody allies of the occupier who explain their treason as patriotic concern and patriotic moves.”
The day before, the opposition called off at the last minute a demonstration planned in Pozarevac, Milosevic’s home town, for fear that lives could be lost.
The demonstration was a protest against the beating up of local opposition members by a gang of thugs alleged to have been sent by Marko Milosevic, the Yugoslav President’s powerful son who owns the cafe where the incident took place.
Instead, local authorities loyal to parties lead by Milosevic and his wife Mira Markovic held a “street party.” Only 150 supporters turned up.
Milosevic is rarely seen in public these days. Three of his close associates, warlord “Arkan”, the Minister of Defence and the head of Yugoslav Airlines (JAT), have been gunned down in cold blood in Belgrade this year. None of the crimes has been solved.
Russia attacks Nato for neglecting Serbs
Ian Black in Brussels
Thursday May 11, 2000
Russia attacked Nato for its Kosovo policy yesterday at the first meeting between senior military officers since relations were ruptured over last year's war in the Serbian province.
General Anatoly Kvashnin, the chief of the Russian general staff, complained before starting talks at alliance headquarters in Brussels that Nato was not doing enough to protect Serbs from attacks by ethnic Albanians.
"No positive signs can be seen in the situation," he said. "Nato is trying to present a better picture than actually exists."
Gen Kvashnin's remarks cast a cloud over what Nato had hoped would be the resumption of friendly relations with Moscow, and came amid Serb protests.
In Kosovo, Serbs demonstrated in the ethnically mixed northern town of Mitrovice, demanding speedy trials for jailed friends and relatives.
"We are aware of the problems regarding Kosovo's judicial system," the local Nato commander, French Brigadier General Pierre de Saqui de Sannes, told the protesters, alluding to a backlog of cases awaiting trial because of lack of personnel and inadequate legislation.
In Belgrade, the families of several hundred missing Kosovo Serbs held a march demanding that their loved ones be released or at least accounted for.
Several Serbs were yesterday reported wounded in a grenade and machinegun attack in Cernica, an ethnically-mixed town 20 miles south-east of Pristina.
Alliance leaders acknowledge that violence remains a serious problem in Kosovo, but insist there has been some progress in achieving peace.
Russia opposed the bombing of Yugoslavia and its relations with Nato were effectively frozen until February.
Russian troops serve alongside the Nato-led K-For peacekeeping troops, but Moscow remains on good terms with the regime of President Slobodan Milosevic.
Meanwhile, the European commission yesterday announced a revamp of its aid efforts to Kosovo by cutting red tape and speeding up delivery.
Chris Patten, the external relations commissioner, warned that if the EU wanted to be taken seriously in foreign policy it must back up words with deeds. "We cannot go around making huge spending promises to people unless we put it in the budget," he said. "I'm embarrassed by the size of the gap between committed and spent aid."
The EU is footing half the bill for reconstructing Kosovo, because the US paid most of the cost of the war. Brussels will spend £464m in the Balkans in 2001, £203m of that in Kosovo and £23m in Serbia.
Earlier this week the EU announced it was giving an immediate £11.7m to Montenegro to bolster the stability of its pro-western regime.
Covering the cover-up in Kosovo
Thursday, May 11, 2000
By Bill Steigerwald
It's the kind of trouble-making headline we should see more of from our important news magazines -- "The Kosovo Cover-Up."
It's not Newsweek's cover story. That honor belongs to a fluffier, more digestible subject, a feature on the "groundbreaking" digital tricks used to make Disney's $200 million "Dinosaur" movie that's coming out this summer.
But Newsweek should get extra credit this week for sticking it to the Pentagon for fudging (i.e., lying about) the effectiveness of the U.S.-NATO air war in Kosovo.
You remember Kosovo? Come on. That great American military victory a while back?
The nationally televised video game that saved the ethnic-Albanian Kosovars from being cleansed from the countryside by the Serbs so they could later ethnically cleanse the Serbian population?
The war in which, according to our trusty generals and Defense Secretary William Cohen, we "severely crippled" the Serb military by knocking out 120 tanks, 220 armored personnel carriers and about 450 artillery pieces? And we did it from 15,000 feet with smart bombs and without using or losing a single ground soldier?
The trouble is, as Newsweek shows and as some critics have been saying all along, the "air campaign against the Serb military in Kosovo was largely ineffective."
Quoting from a suppressed Air Force report, Newsweek's John Barry and Evan Thomas say the Air Force knew the high-altitude bombing was doing little damage but covered up the reports that proved it.
Why the lies and cover-up? Because the military was under political pressure from Washington to produce positive bombing results so no U.S. ground troops would have to go in.
Our great air victory, like the "genocide" that Serbian police and thugs were supposedly practicing on the Kosovars, turned out to be a big pile of allied propaganda.
It turns out that the Serbs lived up to their rep as masters of camouflage. They lost a lot of fake bridges, inflatable tanks and black logs attached to old truck wheels, but only 14 real tanks, 18 armored cars and 20 pieces of artillery.
It was the terror-bombing of civilians in Belgrade -- something the Air Force and its D.C. bosses do not like to issue press releases about -- that made Slobodan Milosevic cry uncle. His military machine was hardly scratched and, according to a Newsweek sidebar, the Balkan strongman is as entrenched as ever.
The Guardian: Vukovar treasures gather dust in Serb basement
Nick Thorpe in Novi Sad
Friday May 12, 2000
The basement of the city museum in Novi Sad, Serbia, is thick with dust. The director, Djordje Gacic, opens the shutters to a view of the Danube and its bombed bridges. At the end of the vaulted room, the treasures of the Croatian city of Vukovar are stacked in cardboard boxes bearing the names of cigarette brands.
In one box is a black clay pot: "Four thousand years old," says Mr Gacic, an archaeologist. The glaze is crude but perfect, and the pot surprisingly heavy.
Other objects have fared less well on the journey from Vukovar to northern Yugoslavia in December 1991 and January 1992. Some boxes contain just ceramic fragments, and in another room is a large pewter bowl riddled with bullet holes.
"Of course, all these things should go back to Vukovar one day," says Mr Gacic. "That is where they belong."
The siege of Vukovar began in August 1991, following Croatia's declaration of independence from Yugoslavia. At the time the town had four museums. Their treasures included archaeological finds from nearby Vucedol, and the Bauer collection of mainly 19th century oil paintings.
There were also impressive private collections of paintings, as well as the ecclesiastical artefacts in the Franciscan monastery and the Serbian Orthodox Church of St Nicholas.
During the siege, many items were stored in the basement of the monastery. By the time the Croats defending Vukovar realised the importance of moving them, it was too late - all roads out were cut. The city fell to Serb forces in November 1991.
At this point, Serb and Croat versions of the story differ.
According to the Institute for the Protection of Monuments in Serbia, the items were moved to Serbia - mainly to Novi Sad - for their own protection.
"Vukovar was in ruins, we could hardly move for the rubble," says Marko Omcikus, an art historian from the institute who took part in the evacuation of the objects on lorries donated by the Yugoslav army, and in private cars.
The Croatian authorities accuse the Serbs of looting the museums, thereby flouting the 1954 Hague convention. According to Visnja Zgaga of the museum documentation centre in Zagreb, the Croats have not received a single direct communication from the relevant Serb authorities. She also says that inventory lists allegedly provided by the Serbs to a Unesco-Council of Europe fact-finding mission in 1995 never reached Croatia.
"According to the testimony of people who were transporting these objects, a lot of things didn't arrive where they were supposed to," says Ksenija Popovic, head of the cultural department of Novi Sad council. "Which means that during the transportation, there was an organised robbery, and every trace of these objects was simply lost."
Paintings stolen from elsewhere in what was Serb-occupied Croatia have been discovered on sale in Hungary and Germany. Ms Popovic believes that all the objects which have survived should be returned to Vukovar. But she fears that they have already become bargaining chips in a long list of unresolved property issues between Croatia and Serbia.
Tentative negotiations have taken place between the Croatian and Yugoslav foreign ministries on the subject. In 1998, it was agreed that "a future bilateral agreement on cultural cooperation" will be based on the registration and return to Croatia of cultural property.
The Serbs have since turned to Unesco with their own problem - the destruction or disappearance of Serbian Orthodox artefacts from Kosovo.
In the museum in Novi Sad, Mr Gacic points to two huge wooden doors. "When Nato bombed the bridges a year ago, these were blown off their hinges," he says. And the ancient pots from Vukovar nearly perished again.
Serb Reporter Handed Over to Court
NIS, Yugoslavia (AP) - A Serb reporter who was detained by police for writing about alleged atrocities committed by the Yugoslav army in Kosovo was handed over to a military court Thursday and could face espionage charges.
Miroslav Filipovic, a reporter for Belgrade's independent Danas daily, was arrested Monday at his home in the central Serbian town of Kraljevo. On Thursday, he was transferred to the military court in the southern Serbian city of Nis, about 120 miles south of Belgrade.
``Mr. Filipovic has been brought to us and he is in detention ... under suspicion that he committed the criminal act of espionage,'' said Col. Vukadin Milojevic, who heads the court. A decision on whether to charge Filipovic was due by Saturday.
Last month, Filipovic wrote about an alleged secret Yugoslav army intelligence report on soldiers' atrocities against Kosovo Albanians during NATO's 78-day intervention to stop a government crackdown in the Serbian province.
He wrote that the report included testimony from a Yugoslav army commander admitting he watched in horror as a soldier decapitated a three-year-old ethnic Albanian boy in front of his family. Another described how tanks in his unit indiscriminately shelled a Kosovo Albanian village before paramilitary police moved in and massacred the survivors.
Police inspectors searched Filipovic's apartment before arresting him, confiscating documents and articles.
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's regime has been cracking down on independent media, banning and fining newspapers critical of his policies.
Scores of independent reporters and opposition activists were detained Monday and Tuesday, when the government launched a major sweep to block a planned opposition rally in Pozarevac, Milosevic's hometown.
In a further sign of the government's crackdown, a Pozarevac judge was removed from office and the local state prosecutor offered his resignation Thursday, after both officials had attended the opposition rally, the private Beta news agency reported.
Meanwhile, opposition parties announced another anti-government rally in the Yugoslav capital and more protests throughout Serbia, including Pozarevac. Opposition leaders said the protest in Belgrade, scheduled for Monday, was ``a matter of honor.''
The Guardian : Protesters defy Milosevic in his home town
Police arrest demonstrators and seal off Pozarevac in an attempt to prevent opposition rally
Gillian Sandford in Pozarevac, Serbia
The home town of Slobodan Milosevic was the focus of a major clampdown on opposition to the rule of President Slobodan Milosevic across Serbia yesterday.
Police arrested an opposition leader, journalists and members of the youth resistance movement and set up checkpoints on all roads in and out of Pozarevac - where the Yugoslav president grew up and has a home - to prevent opposition supporters and political leaders arriving for a major opposition rally.
But around 100 members of the Youth Resistance Movement, Otpor, and other anti-Milosevic activists slipped past the cordon to interrupt a hastily convened counter-meeting set up by officials in Pozarevac's central square.
By mid-afternoon, it was the scene of an extraordinary stand-off, with the banner-waving anti-Milosevic protesters on one side and Socialist party officials from the city seeking to address 100 or so party stalwarts on the other.
A small group of men in black trousers, black leather jackets and sunglasses - the usual garb of men working as Milosevic family bodyguards - moved to within inches of the jeering protesters.
The demonstrators did not shift or back away, but continued distributing leaflets and brandishing their flags and placards, bearing the clenched fist symbol of Otpor.
One 23-year-old Otpor protester said: "We want to show our resistance to the system. Milosevic is afraid of the youth of Otpor. We have parents. We have relatives. We have so many people who know us and know we are not the terrorists which the regime calls us. We just want to live like ordinary people."
A hundred yards from the stand-off, the Serbian minister of the interior, Veljko Stoiljkovic, watched, as did several dozen young men wearing T-shirts with the Serbian national flag. It was as if they might be waiting for a signal.
Pozarevac is a haven for the Milosevic family and its enterprises. Marko Milosevic runs the Madonna disco, which has the reputation as the hottest nightclub in the Balkans, a cybercafe and coffee shop called Passage in the town.
Many of President Milosevic's friends from childhood in Pozarevac have become significant figures in his regime. The interior minister is among this group, as was Zika Petrovic, the recently assassinated head of Yugoslav Airlines JAP, who was gunned down in Belgrade just over a week ago.
Several domestic and foreign journalists and cameramen, who had also slipped into the town through the police cordon, watched as the stand-off continued. Every minute threatened to explode into violent confrontation, if either side made a wrong move.
The authorities had sought in every way to block the rally, held on Victory Day, which traditionally celebrates the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. A lorry taking stage and sound equipment into the town was stopped en route shortly after midnight yesterday, said Dra gan Curcija, an official from the opposition democratic party in Pozarevac.
An opposition leader, Nenad Canak from the League of Social Democrats of Vojvodina, was arrested early yesterday morning on his way from Novi Sad to Pozarevac.
In Belgrade, opposition leaders held an emergency meeting after coaches they had ordered to take them to the rally failed to turn up or were sent back to Belgrade by police at checkpoints.
The non-government radio station B292 and the Belgrade television station Studio B, controlled by the opposition Serbian Renewal Movement, were taken off the air. Opposition leaders said they would hold a major demonstration in the capital within days to protest at yesterday's events.
The incident that sparked this crisis happened last week in Pozarevac, when three members of the Otpor movement became involved in a fracas with bodyguards of Milosevic's son Marko. They were arrested, held beyond the maximum legal detention period and appeared to have been beaten when they appeared before an investigating magistrate on Monday.
One, Radoje Lukovic, had a 10cm head wound, the other two were in bandages with bloodstained pads around their eyes, said their lawyer, Borivoje Bokovic of the Serbian Renewal Movement.
They had been released, but yesterday they were arrested again, with a freelance reporter for non-government media who works in Pozarevac and is a brother of one of the three.
Reuters : Old Kosovo Foes Move Closer But Still Far Apart
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (Reuters) - Kosovo's Albanians and Serbs drew closer on the political front Wednesday but out on the streets thousands of ethnic Albanians demonstrated against plans to resettle Serbs in their region.
In a move hailed by a top international official as historic, Albanian and Serb politicians issued a statement in which each community condemned crimes committed against the other and urged all citizens not to resort to violence.
The leaders closed ranks at a meeting of a multi-ethnic council set up by the United Nations to foster cooperation after over a year of armed conflict that culminated in the 1999 NATO bombing to drive Serbian security forces out of Kosovo.
``This is the most important meeting we've had,'' said Bernard Kouchner, the French head of Kosovo's United Nations-led administration. ``This is, according to my opinion, the historic statement of the tenth of May.''
The U.N. has been working for months to bring Serbs and Albanians closer after a decade of increasingly violent Serbian repression of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority, which has been followed by a post-war plague of revenge attacks on Serbs.
But a protest in the western town of Istok showed how far the United Nations and NATO, which took control of Kosovo last June, still have to go to achieve genuine reconciliation.
NO SPIRIT OF RAPPROCHEMENT IN THE STREETS
The demonstrators, marching just as the politicians in the capital Pristina issued their statement, carried placards with slogans such as ``Shed blood has not dried up yet,'' ``Don't hurt the wounds of Kosovo'' and ``Stop Serb colonies in Kosovo.''
They were protesting against plans floated by Kosovo Serb leaders and U.S. officials to return Serbs to the area.
``We say this project should be stopped. Even talks about returning Serbs to Kosovo should be stopped,'' said Remzije Zeqiraj, the head of the committee which organized the protest.
A figure estimated at more than 200,000 Serbs and members of other minorities fled Kosovo during and after NATO's air war against the forces of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic last year, fearing revenge attacks by ethnic Albanians.
Some international officials urge bringing the Serbs back to Kosovo quickly, anxious to avoid the charge that they waged war to prevent ethnic cleansing of Albanians but have done nothing about Serbs driven out of the Yugoslav province.
But others, including officials from the U.N. refugee agency, have said Serbs should not be encouraged to return at the moment because Kosovo is not yet safe enough.
Despite the presence of around 40,000 peacekeepers from the NATO-led KFOR force since last June, attacks on minorities or cases of harassment against them are still reported daily.
Protesters at Wednesday's rally, who appeared to number more than 2,000, said Serbs would not be welcome back until a host of conditions had been met, including the release of Albanians detained during the conflict and now in Serbian jails.
EMOTIVE PRISONER ISSUE
The issue of the prisoners is highly emotive for ethnic Albanians, who see it as unfinished business from the conflict. International agencies say at least 1,200 Kosovo Albanians are in Serbian jails.
Wednesday's statement by the Kosovo Transitional Council, agreed by all of the around 35 members present except one who objected on a technicality, demanded the handover of all ethnic Albanian prisoners by Yugoslav authorities.
``We are determined that all the citizens of Kosovo should live equally under a law which treats people equally,'' said Xhavit Haliti, an ethnic Albanian member of the council.
``The declaration of the Serb representatives who condemn the Milosevic regime and crimes committed in Kosovo is a good step forward, as is the joint demand for the release of Albanian prisoners,'' he added.
Also Wednesday, the Balkans envoy for a major international organization said ethnic Albanian leaders were willing to put another contentious Kosovo issue -- the final status of the territory -- on the back burner for the moment.
Albanians overwhelmingly favor independence for Kosovo, which at the moment remains legally part of Serb-dominated Yugoslavia although under de facto international rule.
But Kosovo Albanian leaders are now ready to settle for defining Kosovo's interim status for the moment, Albert Rohan of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said after talks in Vienna with ethnic Albanian leader Hashim Thaqi.
The Guardian: Young Serbs provoke authorities
Gillian Sandford
Wednesday May 10, 2000
Their symbol is the clenched fist of defiance and they are hungry for the overthrow of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
Many young anti- Milosevic activists belong to the resistance movement, Otpor, whichburst on to the political scene in November.
Formed as an underground movement, Otpor now commands support from more than 20,000 young people across the country, particularly in university towns.
Activists claim that Mr Milosevic fears Otpor because of the movement's daring and energy.
The crisis in Serbia yesterday was sparked by the arrest of three members of the resistance movement, but it was just the latest incident in which Otpor supporters have deliberately provoked the regime.
Almost every week in recent months Otpor activists have organised actions: handing out leaflets, holding meetings or anti-Milosevic street theatre and pasting their clenched fist posters on walls across the country.
Almost every week, in response, men in plain clothes have attacked Otpor activists found with leaflets and posters. Police reg- ularly arrest them or call them in for what is termed "an informative talk".
One former student, who slipped through the police net to enter the town of Pozarevac yesterday, said: "I think that Milosevic believes that Otpor has become too strong. Otpor has become now a social movement not just a political movement."
The New York Times: Senators Seek Vote in Congress on Extending Kosovo Mission
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
ASHINGTON, May 9 -- The Senate Appropriations Committee voted overwhelmingly today to require Congressional approval for United States peacekeepers to remain in Kosovo beyond July 2001.
The 23-to-3 vote reflected widespread concern among lawmakers about an open-ended deployment of American soldiers, who make up 5,900 of the 37,000 NATO-led peacekeepers in the breakaway Yugoslav province. Sporadic ethnic violence lingers there, nearly a year after the end of the 78-day air war by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization against the forces of President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia.
The vote came as the appropriations panel approved roughly $8 billion for this year to keep American troops in Kosovo, help the government of Colombia battle drug traffickers, and assist victims of last autumn's Hurricane Floyd and other domestic natural disasters.
The White House budget chief, Jacob J. Lew, criticized the committee for coupling the money with other items the Clinton administration opposes, including environmental provisions and limits on the Justice Department's ability to pursue its lawsuit against the tobacco industry.
The provision threatening the withdrawal of troops from Kosovo was sponsored by Senator Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, one of the most ardent protectors in Congress of its Constitutional powers, and by John Warner, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the Senate Armed Service Committee.
Senator Byrd argued that lawmakers had never approved or even debated whether American ground troops should be stationed in the region. His language would cut off funds for United States troops in Kosovo after July 1, 2001, without the consent of Congress.
Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, one of the three Democrats who voted against Mr. Byrd, said Mr. Milosevic would benefit if the provision becomes law because, "all the butcher has to do is wait until the U.S. withdraws."
The fate of the provision was unclear because the House narrowly rejected a similar amendment in March and the Clinton administration opposes it. The chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, the Alaska Republican Ted Stevens, said that the White House national security adviser, Samuel R. Berger, "is very upset about this."
Senator Byrd's language would also withhold 25 percent of the money for Kosovo in the bill unless President Clinton certifies by July 15 that European countries are living up to their promises to provide reconstruction money for the province.
Though the appropriations panel offered few specific details, some Senate aides estimated that the committee had approved about $1.2 billion for Colombia and about $1.8 billion for American forces in Kosovo, a bit less than Mr. Clinton had requested.
The Independent: Milosevic blocks rally in his 'forbidden city'
By Vesna Peric Zimonjic in Pozarevac
10 May 2000
Serbian oppoition parties were forced to cancel a protest rally in the home town of President Slobodan Milosevic yesterday after police arrested leading dissidents and blocked buses carrying supporters to the demonstration.
Instead, the ruling coalition of the JUL and FPS parties organised its own rally in support of the Milosevic regime, timed to coincide with the opposition protest. Schools and public buildings were closed for the day to allow as many people as possible to attend.
The opposition rally, with the slogan "Stop the terror – For democratic elections", would have been the first in years in Pozarevac, 50 miles east of Belgrade, a Milosevic stronghold known as the forbidden city.
A statement from opposition leaders in Belgrade that announced the cancellation of the march said: "It is a clear intention by the regime to instigate clashes, even civil war. The regime has done everything to prevent the rally."
The meeting was to protest at last week's beating of three anti-government student activists in Pozarevac who had clashed with close associates of Mr Milosevic's son, Marko. Had the rally gone ahead, more violence was expected.
Police were deployed early, in large numbers, at four checkpoints on the outskirts of Belgrade, stopping buses carrying opposition supporters. Four buses taking Serbian opposition leaders to Pozarevac were ordered to undergo "technical inspection" before being allowed to leave.
About 200 would-be protesters whose buses "passed inspection" were again stopped by police. They blocked traffic on the main highway leading to Pozarevac, demanding passage. They sat on the road, stopping hundreds of cars for about two hours before riot police moved them away.
Pozarevac has become something of a fortress town since Mr Milosevic's rise to power a decade ago. Besides housing Serbia's biggest jail for men and only prison for women, it is the base of the President's business empire. Many in the town see Marko Milosevic as a greedy bully who used his parents' position to make himself rich.
On 2 May, five friends and bodyguards of Marko demanded that a well-known local opposition activist publicly renounce membership in his party and join the ruling Socialists. He refused and a fight started. Two other opposition activists and a passer-by were severely beaten by Marko's entourage and arrest-ed. They spent a week in jail and were released on Monday. No charges were brought.
Momcilo Veljkovic, one of the freed activists, said Marko Milosevic showed up during the incident and told his friends: "Kill the bastards."
The attack brought protests from Serbia's opposition parties. Milosevic supporters countered with a smear campaign, calling the protesters "Hitlerjugend" (Hitler Youth), "fascists", "Nato mercenaries" and "creators of chaos that could lead to civil war".
Serb Police Make Arrests Ahead of Protest Rally
POZAREVAC, Yugoslavia (Reuters) - Serb police detained activists and journalists overnight in the hometown of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic ahead of an opposition rally there, the independent Beta news agency said on Tuesday.
In the northern town of Novi Sad, police held the leader of the opposition League of Vojvodina Socialdemocrats (LSV), Nenad Canak, for questioning as he was on his way to the rally in the town of Pozarevac, a party official told Reuters.
Bojan Kostres, LSV deputy president, said police had stopped the car in which Canak and his bodyguards were travelling.
Beta said police had stepped up their presence in Pozarevac, where the rally was due to start at 3 p.m. (1300 GMT).
In Belgrade, opposition officials met to discuss the situation, and one source said the rally may be cancelled because of difficulties in getting equipment and supporters into Pozarevac, about 90 km (55 miles) from the capital.
``I expect the rally to be cancelled,'' the source said.
A Reuters reporter said he saw police checkpoints on the Belgrade-Pozarevac road and that vehicles were randomly checked.
Trucks carrying equipment for the rally were held up at the entrance to Pozarevac.
The B2-92 radio station said police ordered technical checks on four buses getting ready to transport opposition supporters from Belgrade.
The opposition had scheduled the rally under the slogan ''Stop the terror, for free elections'' to protest against the alleged beatings of three anti-government activists in a Pozarevac cafe last week.
It hoped for a repeat of a rally in Belgrade last month which drew 100,000 people, but its officials have also warned that authorities may try to obstruct the demonstration.
COUNTER RALLY?
Pozarevac authorities have announced an event earlier on Tuesday to mark World War Two Victory Day and the opposition fears this may be turned into a counter rally.
Of five people taken into custody overnight, two were activists detained last week on suspicion of attempted murder but released from jail on Monday, Beta said.
They were first arrested after an incident allegedly involving associates of Milosevic's powerful son Marko.
Opposition news media have been hit by a series of fines for their accounts of the May 2 incident in a Pozarevac cafe.
They say associates of Marko Milosevic beat up three members of the Otpor (Resistance) movement who were then arrested. The authorities blamed the Otpor activists.
After their release on Monday, the activists' lawyer, Borivoje Borovic, said legal proceedings against them had been halted for now.
But two of the three -- Momcilo Veljkovic and Radojko Lukovic -- were arrested again shortly after midnight (2200 GMT), about twelve hours after they were freed, Beta said.
Veljkovic's brother Mile -- a Beta journalist -- was also detained, it said. In addition, it said two journalists of the independent Danas daily who had arrived to Pozarevac to cover the rally had been arrested. It did not say why they were held.
Serb authorities have denounced Otpor as a fascist organization, calling them ``Hitler Youth'' and branding the opposition as ``foreign mercenaries'' plotting to destroy Serbia.
The Financial Times : Brussels plans Montenegro aid
By Peter Norman in Brussels
After months of hesitation, European Union finance ministers decided on Monday to provide E20m ($18m) of special budgetary assistance to Montenegro to support the Yugoslav republic's pro-western government.
Hailing the decision as "very, very good for the stability of Montenegro", Javier Solana, the EU's chief foreign policy representative, said the money would be dispersed in the coming weeks before important by- elections in two Montenegrin cities on June 11.
The European Commission will agree to a formal proposal to draw the funds from this year's EU budget on Wednesday so it can be adopted by foreign ministers on May 22.
Mr Solana said he hoped technical difficulties holding up E50m of guarantees for European Investment Bank lending to Montenegro could be ironed out by the next finance ministers' meeting on June 5.
Support for Montenegro has been a high priority of Mr Solana and of Chris Patten, the EU foreign affairs commissioner. Both men see the government of President Milo Djukanovic as providing democratic counterbalance within the federation to Serbia, which is led by President Slobodan Milosevic - an indicted war criminal.
In a meeting overshadowed by the weakness of the euro, ministers also:
• agreed that Jean Lemierre, the head of the French Treasury and chairman of the EU's influential economic and financial committee, should be the EU candidate to head the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. This is the international institution that helps development in the former Communist states of eastern and central Europe. EU diplomats expect Mr Lemierre will be elected EBRD president at the bank's annual meeting in Riga on May 21-22.
• approved an internal market directive laying down procedures for winding up bankrupt banks. The directive, which was first proposed in 1985 and delayed until the recent settlement of the UK-Spanish dispute over Gibraltar, must be approved by the European Parliament.
• told Austria to adopt a more rigorous budgetary policy. Meeting in the "Ecofin" council, the ministers from all member states including Austria urged Vienna to reduce public deficit targets when it next updates Austria's national stability programme.
The Christian Science Monitor : Going home again is difficult for Kosovars
The US plans to return Serb refugees to the Osojane valley as early as June.
Richard Mertens
OSOJANE, YUGOSLAVIA
Little remains of this farming community in northwestern Kosovo. The houses are deserted, the windows smashed, the furnishings scattered or gone. Abandoned stoves sit rusting in the uncut grass. Last year's corn still stands in the fields, weathered gray as barn boards.
The 400 inhabitants, all of them Serbs, fled last June around the time NATO-led troops entered the province. Afterward, ethnic Albanians bent on revenge looted and burned their houses.
For miles along this valley, the view is the same. In two other villages and in the scattered houses in between, no one is left of the Serb families who lived here, farming the rich bottomland.
The United States government hopes to change this. For the past two months it has been working with Serb leaders in Kosovo on a plan to bring Osojane's inhabitants back, perhaps beginning as early as June. If the plan succeeds, it would be the first large organized return of Serbs since NATO-led forces occupied Kosovo 11 months ago. The Americans say it could prepare the way for other displaced Serbs to return to their homes.
But the plan is already running into resistance from people who think it is a bad idea. These include local Albanians, many of whom lost homes and family members in two years of fighting the Serbs. Some Western officials also believe it is too soon to bring Serbs back to Kosovo.
"Our great fear in these situations is always not to provoke a backlash," says Dennis McNamara, Balkan envoy for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. "If you get a backlash, you always set things back."
Pressures of warmer weather
The pressure for Serb returns has been mounting as warm weather returns to the Balkans. About half of Kosovo's 200,000 Serbs are thought to have fled the province last year. Most settled in Serbia proper, where they have not been welcome. Many want to go home, and Serb leaders in Kosovo are eager to help them.
"The Serbs are facing a grave situation," says Oliver Ivanovic, a Serb leader in northern Kosovo. "Time is not on our side. We are getting further away from a multi-ethnic Kosovo every day."
The American plan dates to February, when the leader of the Serb Orthodox Church in Kosovo, Bishop Artemije, discussed Serb returns with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in Washington. After that meeting, a State Department official who is also a Serb Orthodox priest visited Kosovo. He made a dozen trips through the province and looked at scores of Serb villages.
Osojane stood out for many reasons. One was that the valley makes it easier to protect; there is only one road into and out of the village. But also, local Albanian leaders seemed to welcome the idea. The Americans were especially impressed by the Albanian mayor of the Istok municipality, Januz Januzaj, an intelligent, soft-spoken lawyer who was a respected commander in the Kosovo Liberation Army. In recent months Mr. Januzaj has probably done more than any other Albanian leader in Kosovo to reach out to ethnic minorities. He has gone so far as to visit villages where Gypsies, Slavic Muslims, and even Serbs still live. Many Kosovo politicians would find this unthinkable.
"In principle, I'm for the return of people who haven't committed any crimes," Januzaj says. "They are citizens of Istok, of Kosovo. If they want a future here, they can live here."
Local objections
But when other local people heard about the American plan, their reaction was swift and damning. "The people are completely against it," Januzaj grimaces. "This makes it more difficult for my position and the American position." He says local Albanians might accept Serb returns in "two or four years."
Albanian leaders also have imposed conditions on Serb returns that will be difficult to meet. One is that the Serbs apologize for crimes that Serbs committed against ethnic Albanians. They also want progress on one of the most emotional issues for Kosovo Albanians: the continuing imprisonment of more than 1,000 ethnic Albanians in Serbian jails.
In a few places in Kosovo, Serbs are already coming back on their own. But some Western officials say they are reluctant to encourage them to return to a situation where they need to be protected by armed troops. They say Serbs need enough security to move about safely and to have access to jobs, health care, education, and markets. This is lacking almost everywhere in Kosovo. Even the protection of Serb enclaves sometimes fails; two weeks ago, nine mortar rounds were fired into the Serb enclave of Gorazdevac.
US officials concede that bringing Serbs back to the valley will not be easy and that it may not be altogether safe. "There are risks attached to it," an official says. "But I think they can [return] .... I don't see that the average Albanian is going to object."
For now, political imperatives may be pushing other considerations aside. Serb leaders in Kosovo seem to be competing with each other to see who can bring back more people. The US hopes that the plan to return hundreds to Osojane will help Bishop Artemije and other moderate leaders win support among ordinary Serbs. At the same time, the bishop's rivals, including Mr. Ivanovic, say they have their own plan to bring back as many as 20,000 Serbs.
Recently, Spanish soldiers in the Osojane area have been trying to persuade local Albanians to accept the Serbs back. "They are very afraid, because they think Serb criminals will come here," says 2nd Lt. Jose Ortega, who was patrolling one afternoon in an armored troop carrier. "We're trying to tell them there will be no criminals."
He had already talked to Sabri and Beke Kelmendi, two brothers who have houses on one end of the valley, about three miles from Osojane. Last May, they say, Serbs killed both of their wives and one child in each family. Lately they have been working on their houses, which the Serbs burned. When the Spanish patrol passed, Sabri Kelmendi was replastering an inside wall. His brother's house was beyond repair, and workmen were digging the foundation of a new one.
"If the Serbs come back here, I won't stay," Mr. Kelmendi declared angrily as he paused from his work. "Not one Albanian person will stay here. All the Serbs in this region were paramilitaries. All of them were bandits. It's a bad idea."
The New York Times : Gunmen Kill a Former Leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army
By CARLOTTA GALL
RISTINA, Kosovo, May 8 -- A well-known commander of the disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army was shot and killed today outside his home in the southern town of Prizren as he headed to work.
The reason behind the shooting of the former leader, Ekrem Rexha, was not immediately clear, although it was thought to be politically related given his years with the guerrilla army. The commander, who was better known by his war pseudonym, Commander Drini, had headed one of seven regional zones of the liberation army during its war against the Serb military and police forces. And he also had served on the army's general staff during the three months of the NATO bombing campaign.
In his years with the liberation army, Commander Drini was always aware that hard-line ethnic Albanian nationalists in Kosovo did not trust him or like the fact that he was ethnic Torbesh, or Muslim Slav.
His death also comes just three weeks after the killing of another former K.L.A. commander and hero, Besim Mala, who was shot dead in a dispute with a business associate here in the capital of Kosovo. The argument and shooting, in which both men died, was over the ownership of a cafe in downtown Pristina.
Nearly a year after K.L.A. guerrillas came down from the hills as NATO forces arrived and Serbian forces withdrew from Kosovo, old comrades in the liberation army are having major disagreements and even turning their guns on each other in local power struggles. And as the international administration in Kosovo prepares the province for local elections in October, many Albanians say they are afraid that a wave of political violence lies ahead.
The Kosovo Liberation Army was disbanded under an agreement with the NATO-led peacekeeping mission in Kosovo. Since then, several thousand of its members have joined the liberation army's civilian successor and new police force, the Kosovo Protection Force. Many of the liberation army's former leaders have gone into business or politics and have become powerful figures in the community, profiting from cafes and other businesses they seized as the Serbs pulled out of Kosovo.
After leaving the liberation army, Commander Drini had been working in the local administration in his hometown of Prizren as an environment and safety officer, and was thought to be aspiring to be the town's future mayor.
A professional soldier and a former officer in the communist-era Yugoslav People's Army, Commander Drini taught at the army's military staff college in Sarajevo. He fought in the Croatian army during that country's war and returned to his native Kosovo to join the liberation army in the late 1990's as the conflict there escalated.
The Observer : Anger at Kosovo mines contract
Firm accused of human rights abuses wins million-pound Government deal
Antony Barnett, Public Affairs Editor
Sunday May 7, 2000
A private military company accused of human rights abuses has been awarded lucrative Government contracts to clear unexploded mines and cluster bombs in Kosovo, The Observer can reveal.
The decision, taken by International Development Secretary Clare Short, has infuriated MPs, charities and anti-arms trade campaigners.
Since the end of the Kosovo conflict, the Government has awarded two mine-clearance contracts worth more than £1 million to Defence Systems, a London-based firm, founded by former senior SAS officer Alistair Morrison, which has been involved in a spate of human rights controversies.
United Nations' special rapporteur, Enrique Ballesteros, stated in a 1998 report that it was concerned about DSL's alleged 'mercenary' activities in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
DSL's activities in Colombia, where it has been employed by BP to protect its multi-billion pound interests, have long been a concern to human rights organisations. In 1998 it was expelled from Angola for alleged 'illegal activities'.
DSL also recommended Sandline International - the firm involved in the arms-to-Sierra Leone scandal - to the government of Papua New Guinea when it needed mercenary help.
Labour MP Ann Clwyd, a member of the House of Commons International Development Select Committee, will raise questions in Parliament this week. 'Why are we giving taxpayers' money to a firm with a record like DSL so that it can make a profit out of clearing mines in Kosovo?' said Clwyd. 'I want to know what checks were done by the Government.'
Since April 1997, DSL has been owned by US security giant Armor Holdings, which sells body armour and riot control equipment.
Richard Lloyd, director of the UK working group on land mines, is concerned that firms like DSL are using land mine clearance as a way to gain respectability.
Lloyd said: 'The operation in Kosovo is highly sensitive. Aid organisations and charities are experienced and well-equipped to deal with this, but questions have to be asked about whether the same can be said of a militaristic private company with a dodgy track record.'
The Campaign Against the Arms Trade will also protest against the DSL contract.
DSL has used former British servicemen to offer protection against kidnapping, espionage and terrorism to multinationals operating in 'risky' regions.
Nigel Woof, Armor's vice chairman of marketing, dismisses allegations of human rights abuses against DSL.
He said DSL is not only used by private corporations but by the UN, human aid groups and Western governments to protect embassies.
Woof said: 'We have never, and will never be involved in mercenary activities. We are proud of what we do and operate a disciplined and ethical operation.'
However, accusations of human rights abuses have been hard to shake off.
It was alleged that DSL trained Colombian police in counter-insurgency techniques using ex-SAS personnel and fed intelligence on anyone opposed to BP to Columbia's 14th brigade - a group of soldiers with a record of atrocities including the massacre of 43 people in 1988.
A report by the Parliamentary Human Rights Group entitled 'The Business of Killing' said the main concern was that DSL passed on information on environmentalists and community leaders.
Both DSL and BP claimed the only training they gave was defensive. But documents obtained by the Guardian showed that a senior DSL employee, Roger Brown, was in charge of security for the 520-mile Ocensa oil pipeline in Colombia, in which BP is a major shareholder.
Brown was a key figure in a proposed pipeline protection project with the 14th Brigade and Israeli security company Silver Shadow, involving attack helicopters and the 'direct supply of anti-guerrilla special weaponry'. When this came to light, BP suspended Brown, who until recently continued to work for DSL.
DSL is one of five companies to be awarded mine-clearance contracts worth £13.5m in Kosovo.
A spokesman for the International Development Department said: 'We deplore the use of and training of mercenaries, but there was no evidence that DSL should not be granted the contract.'
The New York Times : Voice of Hope in Kosovo Tells the U.S. of Goals
By JANE PERLEZ
WASHINGTON, May 6 -- For all the problems of Kosovo today, Veton Surroi, the publisher of the province's largest newspaper, reminds himself that things could be much worse.
"We could have well ended up like the Kurds and made good posters for Amnesty International," he said. "Or Kosovars could have ended up somewhere else, singing their own songs, getting drunk in cafes and remembering 1999 as a lousy year."
Instead, Mr. Surroi, who is viewed by many diplomats as a voice of reason in a traumatized corner of Europe, is trying to shape what he hopes will one day be a civil society.
Many officials in the international organizations that now run Kosovo -- which has few courts and a primitive economy -- wonder whether Mr. Surroi's goal can be achieved. Mr. Surroi, in an interview during a visit to Washington, insisted that it can, and that Kosovo must start now to shed its dependence on the United Nations, which runs the province's administration.
Mr. Surroi, who spent the duration of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia last year in hiding from the Serbs in Kosovo's capital, Pristina, is critical of the United Nations management of the province but says it is not going to get any better.
For example, the long promised United Nations police force of 6,500 is still only 2,500 strong -- in part, Mr. Surroi said, because some of the recruits had to be sent home because they failed shooting tests, did not know how to drive, or, in the case of several Americans, were so overweight that they could not walk more than 100 yards. Mr. Surroi dismisses as bureaucratic folly the import of high-tech German garbage trucks to pick up trash when it takes weeks to find fuel for them.
"We've reached the peak of United Nations might, Kouchner has spent all his magic," Mr. Surroi said of Bernard Kouchner, the chief representative of the United Nations in Kosovo. "There's not much more the United Nations can do, now is the time for transition."
So Mr. Surroi, who was in Washington to collect an award from the National Endowment for Democracy, did the rounds of Clinton administration officials and Washington reseach groups with a fairly simple message: Kosovo needs a constitution of its own to provide a legal framework to build democratic institutions in a society that has never known them. At the State Department, specialists in constitutions are beginning to write one, although the thorniest question of all -- whether Kosovo, which remains formally a province of Serbia, should or can move to independence -- is still open.
Even as Kosovo continues to count on outside forces for much of its existence -- on NATO for its security, on German banks for its currency, on the United Nations for its international relations -- its inhabitants, overwhelmingly ethnic Albanian, need to assume responsibility internally, Mr. Surroi said. A constitution is needed to help define what Mr. Surroi calls "self-rule" but not necessarily sovereignty.
For many Kosovo Albanians, the war last year was the culmination of many years of debate about how to separate from Serbia, from its dominant leader, Slobodan Milosevic, and from the federation of Yugoslavia, which includes Serbia and Montenegro, of which Mr. Milosevic is president.
Mr. Surroi argues that Kosovo can have its own constitution and define its borders as within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. "This is a kind of virtual reality, because I can't find anyone who considers the Federal Republic as a functioning state," he said, alluding to the fact that Montenegro has largely broken with Serbia politically, although the two remain together in the federation.
Mr. Surroi suggested that it is too soon to push for an independent state -- a goal of almost all Kosovar Albanians not shared by all Western nations and opposed by Russia.
Soon after the NATO bombing, when returning Albanians killed Kosovo Serbs and burned their homes, Mr. Surroi spoke out against the killings, appealing to his fellow Albanians not to force the remaining Serbs to leave. He was publicly denounced for his stand.
During several public talks this week, Mr. Surroi said that Kosovo still had far to go in moving toward tolerance. He argued that this was another reason for a constitution -- to establish individual rights. "You can't build tolerance on goodwill," he said.
For Kosovo to stand on its own feet -- and remove itself from its dependence on the overwhelming number of aid organizations that are tripping over themselves as they try to help schools and medical centers -- the economy needs to be legally defined.
Like Serbia, Kosovo was run as a socialist area. Now, there is a mixture of the old socialism, wild capitalism and strong-arm tactics by Kosovo Liberation Army fighters who believe that having been in the army gives them the right to expropriate property. "The result is not very encouraging, we have to settle the property issue," Mr. Surroi said.
Mr. Surroi is the first to recognize that criminality abounds in Kosovo although he rejects the argument that criminal bosses have taken control. The Kosovo Protection Corps, which is composed of former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the guerrilla fighters that battled Serb control of Kosovo until NATO won the war, is not a band of "angels," he said. But he disputes the notion that Kosovo has become an enclave for heavy drug trafficking. "Kosovars are involved in drug trafficking but not in Kosovo itself," he said. "Kosovo is not a good route."
There is hope in one small fact, he added. "Things are lousy in Kosovo, I know 100 places where I'd have a much better life. But this is a society that has been without courts, police, laws for 10 months, yet people still stop at the red light."
Newsweek : Milosevic, the Comeback Kid
Serbia seems to be rebuilding faster than Kosovo
By Zoran Cirjakovic
Slobodan Milosevic was supposed to be in his final days. The Yugoslav strongman has lost every war he's started since he began fighting his neighbors nine years ago, and he's an indicted war criminal. In the last weeks of the Kosovo campaign, NATO bombers targeted Serbian infrastructure and key government-owned industries controlled by his cronies. At the time, many of his opponents predicted that his government wouldn't be able to provide the basic services necessary to sustain him in power for long. Some predicted that the destruction of Serbia's electrical network, in particular, would create hardship during the winter. With only the heat of their anger to keep them warm, Serbs would throw Milosevic out of office.
It has not turned out that way. If Milosevic lost the war in Kosovo, he's clearly winning the battle for survival in the Balkans. Not only did he manage to pull his army out of Kosovo largely intact, he supplied his people with electricity through the winter. In fact, Milosevic has gone on a rebuilding spree. He boasts that his government has rebuilt 38 road and railway bridges (out of 64 damaged or destroyed during the bombing), 470 housing units, eight schools, five hospitals and two animal farms. The state-run news agency Tanjug reports that 140,000 workers employed in 200 companies worked on the reconstruction, and the regime says rebuilding is underway at 76 more sites. The government-owned Zastava factory that makes Yugo cars and weapons, almost destroyed during the NATO bombing, recently announced that it produced 3,242 cars and 180 trucks in the first quarter of this year. Advertisements for the new Yugos appear daily, emphasizing Milosevic's "victory" more than the company's famously rickety autos.
Some of those reconstruction figures are suspect. But Milosevic's efforts in Serbia may well be outstripping what the United Nations is achieving in Kosovo. It took the United Nations till March to get Kosovo's postal system restarted, and parts of Pristina still suffer electricity and water shortages nearly a year after the war ended.
In surveys, Milosevic's approval rating, while lower than ever—17.2 percent in a poll last month—is still higher than all opposition leaders' combined. Meanwhile, the fragmented Kosovo Liberation Army isn't polling much higher among Kosovars.
How has Milosevic reasserted power and rebuilt—despite his nearly total isolation? Mainly by coercion and imposing "reconstruction taxes." He has also called in chits from rich industrialists close to the regime.The dictator, who recently indicated he doesn't intend to give up power, may also have injected some of his own money from offshore accounts. The Serbian state media, meanwhile, regularly reports on the achievements of "our builders."
Many Serbs, of course, find the propaganda laughable. "People still live very bad lives. Salaries are very small and pensions are late," says Zarko Korac, leader of the pro-Western Social Democratic Union Party. Still, he concedes, "There is always a tendency to underestimate Milosevic." Just about everyone—including NATO—always has.
With Josh Hammer in Pristina
Belgrade confidential
High-profile murders keep leading to Serb police
By Zoran Stanojevic
MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR
BELGRADE, — Police arrested Dimitrije Djakovic last week only hours after he allegedly murdered the man who foiled his attempt to rob the home of Serbia’s finance minister. Such efficiency stands out in Serbia’s police force — all the more so for coming at the end of yet another week of high-profile slayings that stand almost no chance of being solved. That’s because they all involved prominent Serbs with links to President Slobodan Milosevic.
AS APRIL drew to an end, Zivorad Petrovic, the head of JAT, Yugoslavia’s state airline, was shot at close range when he was getting into his car at his parents’ house. A few days later, Belgrade was treated to a Hollywood-style street chase and the shooting of Zoran Uskokovic, a man police believe was involved in the assassination of Zeljko Raznatovic, or “Arkan,” the Serb paramilitary commander gunned down in similar fashion in January.
Petrovic has have joined the long list of politicians, policemen, businessmen and criminals killed since 1991 whose assassins have never been found. In the past nine years, Serbian police haven’t solved a single murder involving a prominent citizen — even the deaths of their own top cop, Gen. Radovan Stojicic, and Yugoslav Defense Minister Pavle Bulatovic.
A lack of manpower is hardly the reason for the Serb police’s backlog of political murders. With close to 100,000 policemen in a country of 8 million, if anything Serbia’s police force is bloated. But it spends much of its time on what might politely be called political errands and very little on pursuing politically sensitive cases.
GOOD COP=BAD COP
“When some bum from (neighboring) Romania kills an old lady over five bucks, we manage to catch him in seven days,” a Serb homicide investigator told MSNBC.com.
The investigator said that senior officials never give approval to speak to suspects key to getting high-profile murder investigations off the ground.
“It should be a regular procedure. You collect suspects, question them hoping someone may leak information which could lead to further investigation,” the homicide investigator said, speaking on condition of anonymity. But he said permission to detain suspects is never approved, and ambitious investigators are told by their bosses to “mind their own business.”
In Yugoslavia today, it is commonly assumed that insiders and government cronies settle scores with bullets and count on the president’s tight control of the police to keep them above the law. Milosevic — himself living under an international arrest warrant for war crimes during the Bosnia and Kosovo conflicts — has his own interest in this kind of law enforcement. Indeed, the president’s police are crucial to the survival of his regime. But they know better than to cross the line into unfettered detective work.
POLITICAL HARASSMENT
The police employ a range of tactics — like beating and detaining opposition members. But their proximity to several recent high-profile murders has many wondering how far they will go to keep Milosevic in power.
Police are turning up in odd places: Paramilitary leader Arkan was in the company of a high-ranking police officer when he was shot in January.
The main suspect in the shooting is Dobrosav Gavric, an off-duty policeman arrested after the shooting, along with a police colleague who allegedly provided backup. The two men were — police sources told MSNBC.com — working for Zoran Uskokovic, a businessman with a criminal record who was himself shot dead recently after a spectacular car chase in Belgrade. His bodyguard, a policeman on sick leave, was also killed.
At a recent court hearing, Gavric, who was shot and wounded by one of Arkan’s bodyguards during the murder, admitted he was present at the scene but denied he was involved in murder.
PRODUCT OF ECONOMY
It may be a coincidence that these officers were involved, or it may be a product of Yugoslavia’s crippled economy after 10 years of international sanctions. Serb police are poorly paid, so they often moonlight as security officers.
Yugoslav businessmen pay good money for “personal protection,” and generally those who need it are at risk. Police have become extremely popular after the new Law on Arms was enacted, banning almost everyone except police officers from carrying weapons. The result was a rise in the involvement of off duty policemen in criminal shootings.
“You start as a bouncer at bars and discos,” one policeman told MSNBC.com on the condition that his name not be used. “Such activities are illegal, and we hide it from our bosses. But they turn the blind eye unless someone files the report, which rarely happens. But some guys feel this is not enough and look for more fruitful engagements.”
HIGH FLYER
The murder of Zivorad Petrovic has unleashed a new wave of rumors about who is behind the latest high-profile killing — and who will be next.
Petrovic’s death has stumped the rumor mill. He was believed to be a close and faithful friend of the Milosevic clan. He had all the right credentials — head of the state-owned airline JAT and born in Pozarevac, the hometown of Milosevic and his wife, Mirjana Markovic.
The day after his murder, officials blamed “terrorist organizations inspired by NATO” — a favorite culprit since the alliance’s Kosovo bombing campaign last year. The quick and predictable official response led many to conclude that Petrovic’s murder was less of a surprise for Milosevic’s inner circle that it was for the public.
CHALLENGING MILOSEVIC
On the other hand, under Petrovic JAT was one of the rare profitable businesses in Yugoslavia and was scheduled for privatization in the coming months. Petrovic’s colleagues at JAT have spoken of his ambition to distance himself from the Milosevic regime — positioning himself for the “post-Slobo” world. Several Belgrade political analysts have deemed his murder part of a fight within Milosevic’s inner circle, a message to anybody whose dares to question Milosevic’s supremacy.
Petrovic’s funeral in Pozarevac was held on Yugoslavia’s National Day. Instead of attending his friend’s burial, President Milosevic held a lavish cocktail party for his close government advisers, the heads of the army and police, and foreign diplomats in Belgrade. With the exception of a few high-ranking officials, everyone had to pass through a metal detector.
Trouble in Balkans dates to 1389 Battle of Kosovo
05/01/2000
By SAM HODGES
Register Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON — Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Mobile, recently traveled with eight other members of Congress to Kosovo, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. They are part of an area of Eastern Europe known as The Balkans, after the nearby mountain range of that name.
It's a region of great natural beauty and variety, but also of centuries-old conflict between ethnic and religious groups. A key date is 1389, when the Turks, Muslims, overran the Serbs, Orthodox Christians, at the Battle of Kosovo.
Some argue that much of the region's history since then, and especially in recent years, can be understood as a resumption of that battle.
There's no dispute that Marshal Josip Broz Tito, an independent-minded communist, enforced a peace on the area as leader of Yugoslavia from the early 1940s until his death in 1980.
Since then, a number of factors - notably the alienating influence of Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic - have caused Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina to declare independence from Yugoslavia. Only Serbia and Montenegro remain as Yugoslav Republics, and many in Kosovo, a predominately Muslim province of Serbia, wish for independence as well because of Serb persecution.
Each secession met with resistance from the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army. There was warfare throughout the early 1990s, most notably in Bosnia, where more than 200,000 people were killed, and many more became refugees.
The 1995 Dayton Peace Accords ended the fighting in Bosnia, but also determined that the country would be divided into a Muslim/Croat portion, and a Serb portion.
A NATO peacekeeping force, including about 5,000 U.S. troops, continues to enforce the Dayton agreement in Bosnia.
Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo had hoped that Dayton would determine a new future for them, separate from Serbia. That did not happen, so in 1996, the Kosovo Liberation Army began attacking Serb targets. The Yugoslav military, at the direction of Milosevic, eventually retaliated by driving many ethnic Albanians from their homes.
The United States and other NATO countries attempted to negotiate with Milosevic, but his failure to accede to their demands led them to begin air strikes against Yugoslavia on March 24, 1999. The campaign lasted 78 days, until Milosevic agreed to pull his forces out of Kosovo. A NATO peacekeeping force entered there last summer and continues to enforce the peace.
Many of the hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees have returned to their homes. Now NATO forces are protecting local Serbs from reprisals. "What we're doing now is presiding over ethnic cleansing of the Serbs," Sessions said recently.
Yugoslavia: Ex-U.S. Secretary Of State Critical Of Clinton's Balkan Policies
By Ron Synovitz
Former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker (1989-92) says he doubts there will ever be a peaceful multi-ethnic society in Bosnia or in Kosovo. In an interview with RFE/RL, Baker -- a Republican -- is critical of U.S. foreign policy in the Balkans since early 1993, when the Democratic Party took over the Administration in Washington.
Prague, (RFE/RL) -- Former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, a Republican, is critical of the Balkan policies pursued by Bill Clinton's Democratic presidency in the last eight years.
As secretary of state for president George Bush from 1989 to 1992, Baker was witness to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the start of Yugoslavia's disintegration. Baker also served as White House chief of chief of staff for both Bush and president Ronald Reagan.
In an interview with RFE/RL's South Slavic Service this week, Baker said Clinton's handling of crises in the former Yugoslavia has weakened the NATO alliance, damaged Washington's relations with Russia and China, and bogged down U.S. troops indefinitely in Kosovo and Bosnia.
"I'm not sure that you'll ever get a multi-ethnic society peacefully established either in Bosnia or in Kosovo. [Bosnia] is not a normal country and there's not a stable peace. We will be there for a very, very long time. What is the exit strategy? President Clinton told us we would be out of Bosnia by Christmas 1997, and we're still there. We will be in Kosovo for a very, very long time. You can argue that what we did [in Kosovo] was morally the right thing to do. It w-a-s the right thing to do. But there is no over-riding national interest, as far as America is concerned, with our intervention there."
Baker said he remains uncertain about how to resolve ethnic tensions in Kosovo and Bosnia. But he suggested that the answer in Kosovo m-a-y be to partition the province into Serb- and ethnic-Albanian controlled sectors:
"I don't know what the solution will be. The people in the region have been fighting each other for many, many, many hundreds of years. It may be that partition is the only solution. But we're certainly not successful in establishing multi-ethnic democracies."
Baker is particularly critical of the impact that intervention in Kosovo has had on U.S. foreign relations and upon the NATO alliance:
"I think that Kosovo has cost America tremendously in our relationships with other countries around the world. On balance, it has been a negative instead of a positive in the United States' relationships with other countries -- Russia, China, India. And our use of force in Kosovo with no international legal authority to bomb downtown Belgrade is resented and feared by many countries around the world. I think there were many wrong assessments involved in the Kosovo operation, not the least of which was taking the most successful security alliance in history, the NATO alliance as a defensive alliance, turning it into an offensive alliance and thereby weakening it significantly. I do not see NATO doing again very soon what it did in Kosovo."
Nevertheless, Baker said he thinks that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic would be wrong to think that NATO will sit back idly if Serbian forces take steps against Milosevic's political rivals in Montenegro, the smaller of the two republics -- with Serbia -- that constitute the rump Yugoslavia. He said intervention in Kosovo and Bosnia show that Western warnings to Milosevic on Montenegro are serious threats.
"I think that [Milosevic] would ignore those warnings at his peril because the decision has been made, rightly or wrongly, to involve U.S. forces in the Balkans. And therefore, having made that decision in Bosnia and Kosovo -- not withstanding the lack of satisfactory results -- it would be easier to become involved were [Milosevic] to move against Montenegro. So I think the warnings are real."
Memory of Ex-Yugoslav Leader Lives
By DUSAN STOJANOVIC, Associated Press Writer
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP) - Twenty years after the death of Josip Broz Tito, graffiti scrawled on a Belgrade wall sums up the feelings many Yugoslavs have for the metal worker turned charismatic leader who kept the ethnically fragmented country united and prosperous for 35 years.
``The locksmith was better,'' it says in comparing Tito's tenure to that of Yugoslavia's present ruler, President Slobodan Milosevic.
When Tito died on May 4, 1980, at 88, Yugoslavia was a multiethnic, six-republic nation whose citizens could travel freely to the West. They earned salaries averaging about $500 a month - 10 times more than the current average wage in Serbia. Along with smaller Montenegro, Serbia now makes up what remains of the federation.
``Those times cannot be compared to the current situation: Today, we are a xenophobic country which only wishes to get rid of its leader who triggered this tragedy,'' Ilija Djukic, a former Yugoslav ambassador to Washington, said Thursday.
An ardent Serb nationalist, Milosevic presided over the violent breakup of the larger Yugoslavia, and is widely blamed at home for economic hardship and international isolation. But he managed to retain Serb loyalties for years by presenting the bloodshed as a battle for Serb survival.
Now, even that support seems to be drying up. Despite Milosevic's crackdown on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, the Serbian province was lost, perhaps forever. Montenegro is threatening to secede, and the growing repression of Serb critics by the regime underscores the sentiment against Milosevic on his home turf.
By contrast, Tito, a Croat-Slovene, tightly controlled intolerance among Yugoslavia's ethnic nationalists and distributed power among its different ethnic groups. He clamped down on both Serb and Croat nationalists in the 1970s, purging them from power in the two main rival republics.
Still, those moves only checked nationalism instead of eradicating it, allowing it to break out in full fury in 1991, when the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia began. And though Tito's economic policies gave Yugoslavs a semblance of good life, they left the country with a $22 billion foreign debt.
Despite the fallout from his policies, even Serbs who resented Tito's stifling of their ambitions now look back with longing to the 35 years of his rule.
Portraits of Tito hang on the walls in many Serbian homes, restaurants or offices. Recent films praising the relatively good times under Tito were box office hits both in Serbia and Croatia.
Tito even topped a recent poll of popular public figures in Croatia's Vecernji List newspaper.
Notices commemorating Tito's death appeared in several newspapers throughout former Yugoslavia on Thursday.
``Twenty years have passed, with sorrow and misery in our hearts,'' said one in the Vecer newspaper, of Macedonia, another former Yugoslav republic.
Another, in the Sarajevo Oslobodjenje daily - set off with a photo of Tito in his trademark marshal uniform - said: ``Thank you for the happy childhood, carefree youth and the life worth living.''
``Ten years of war and destruction in former Yugoslavia show how Tito was right,'' said Gen. Stevan Mirkovic, Tito's former chief of staff. ``If he were alive, nothing like that would have happened.''
Despite his resurgent popularity, the scene was subdued Thursday at Tito's final resting place in Belgrade. For years after his death, up to 20,000 people a day followed the arrows and footpaths leading to the ``House of Flowers,'' Tito's marble tomb in the plush Dedinje district.
On Thursday, Tito's widow Jovanka and a small delegation of Tito's communist comrades were the only visitors laying flowers at the tomb.
Serbs face shortages of cheap food - U.N. report
BELGRADE, May 4 (Reuters) - Serbs are facing shortages of basic food items at subsidised prices, affecting especially vulnerable groups in the impoverished Balkan state, according to a U.N. agency report made available this week.
The U.N's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said the state system of agricultural subsidies was failing because of insufficient resources to pay for it.
In real terms, funds for such subsidies have declined by almost 70 percent in the last three years, creating a situation where farmers are unable to cover production costs.
The government controls prices on some foodstuffs to curb inflation and maintain consumer purchasing power.
But, OCHA added, "the failure to back up the policy of strict price control with adequate subsidies has had serious consequences for consumers."
As a result, disruptions in the regular market supply of subsidised food items became a pattern last September with some basic goods disappearing from shops altogether, OCHA said.
By the end of 1999, milk had become impossible to find in shops, it said. Recently, there were also shortages of basic, cheap bread.
"The only solutions available to consumers are either to devote a lot of time to wait in a long queue early in the morning for subsidised food items or to buy expensive alternatives," it said.
SHORTAGES HIT POOR PEOPLE
OCHA said more than 70 percent of an average salary is needed to meet a family's monthly food needs at prices subsidised by the state. If they had to pay market prices, this cost would rise to 25 percent above the average salary.
"These examples show clearly how difficult -- and often unrealistic -- it is for average Serbian consumers to meet basic food needs, even at state subsidised prices -- let alone at free market prices," OCHA said.
Shortages of basic food items at low prices affect those who have no choice but to rely on subsidised food for survival.
"Realistically, the only way they can cope is by simply not consuming food items unavailable at low prices, such as milk, bread, sugar and oil," the report said.
"This will have an immediate negative impact on the nutritional situation of the vulnerable people," it said.
OCHA warned of worsening shortages as it said producers were unlikely to grow crops whose price is controlled by the state.
Yugoslavia, made up of Serbia and the coastal republic of Montenegro, has plunged into poverty over the last decade as a result of the bloody breakup of the old socialist federation.
Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic, is under economic sanctions over its role in a series of Balkan wars in the 1990s, including an oil embargo and a credit and investment ban.
In a bid to boost agricultural output, the Serbian parliament on Wednesday introduced a new law penalising landowners who keep farms idle.
3 Arrested in Yugoslavia Fight
By KATARINA KRATOVAC, Associated Press Writer
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP) - Three anti-government students have been arrested on charges of trying to kill associates of President Slobodan Milosevic's son following a fight between the two groups.
Dejan Randjic, head of the anti-Milosevic students' group Otpor, or Resistance, said the three - all Otpor members - were beaten up Tuesday evening at an outdoor cafe by employees of the ``Madonna'' disco club, owned by Milosevic's son, Marko. The incident occurred in the Milosevic family hometown of Pozarevac, 50 miles east of the capital, Belgrade.
The chain of events leading up to the fight at the cafe remained unclear, but Momcilo Veljkovic, one of those arrested, claimed Marko Milosevic's associates provoked one of the students.
Veljkovic told the Belgrade-based Beta news agency that when he tried to persuade the Milosevic associates to leave his colleague alone, they hit him on the head. In the struggle that followed, Veljkovic said he grabbed a gun from one of the assailants and fought back.
The fight involved fists and pistol butts. Dozens gathered around to watch, some joining the brawl. There were conflicting reports on whether a gun went off once and who fired it.
Veljkovic and two others from Otpor were later detained by police and charged with attempted murder. One of the three was transported to a Belgrade clinic, suffering from a broken nose and head injuries, Beta reported.
``The fact that Veljkovic managed to snatch away the pistol he was being beaten with is now being used as pretext to charge the three Otpor members,'' Randjic said. He said all three had been transferred to Belgrade prison.
A local police statement said the three Otpor members were ``known as persons of delinquent behavior.'' Yugoslavia's information minister and a high-ranking Communist party official, Ivan Markovic, said a ``group of hooligans with Otpor's fascist symbol'' were the aggressors.
But Vukasin Petrovic, another Otpor leader, rejected Markovic's accusations and said Marko Milosevic and his associates in this town had ``frequently threatened and assaulted Otpor members'' even before the fight Tuesday night.
The back-and-forth accusations reached the national political level.
The opposition Democratic Party issued a statement saying the ``brutal terror by Marko Milosevic and his circle of associates ... has been going on for months,'' while Milosevic's ruling Socialists said the ``heinous attack by Otpor ... constituted a criminal act by people who daily plot all forms of terrorism, up to the murder of honest citizens and patriots.''
U.N. Agency Threatens to Suspend Operations in Kosovo Area
The New York Times
By REUTERS
RISTINA, Kosovo, May 3 -- The United Nations refugee agency said today that it would suspend operations in the Serbian-dominated north of Mitrovica if attacks on its staff and vehicles continued.
Dennis McNamara, the top official for the office of the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, said the agency had been appalled by the latest outbreak of violence last weekend in the ethnically divided city in north Kosovo.
One refugee agency vehicle was destroyed, another was damaged, and a foreign staff member had to flee from a mob into an apartment building, a spokesman for the agency said.
Nine soldiers from the NATO-led peackeeping force, a police officer and four United Nations staff members were wounded in the rioting, Kosovo's international police said. Five vehicles belonging to international agencies were destroyed, and 22 were heavily damaged.
"If the thugs who led that violence continue to target the international community, including our agency and our partners, we would have no choice but to suspend our operations," Mr. McNamara said at a regular news briefing in Kosovo's provincial capital, Pristina.
"Maybe that's their objective, but we're not prepared to be sitting ducks in these situations," he added.
Mitrovica, a city divided into Serbian and Albanian dominated areas, is Kosovo's most dangerous postwar flash point.
Several serious clashes involving Serbs, ethnic Albanians and peacekeepers have broken out there in the last few months.
The violence on Saturday was not the first time the United Nations refugee agency had been the target of violence in Mitrovica, raising questions about the effectiveness of the security provided by the peacekeepers.
The north of Mitrovica is home to the last major urban concentration of Serbs in Kosovo. Serbs have fled from elsewhere in the province in fear of attacks by ethnic Albanians seeking revenge for years of state-sponsored Serbian repression.
At least 240,000 Serbs and other non-Albanians have left the province since June 1999 because of violence or threats by ethnic Albanians.
Many Kosovo Serbs are suspicious of international agencies because of the help they have given to members of the province's ethnic Albanian majority and because of NATO's bombing campaign last year that drove out Serbian forces.
Mr. McNamara noted, however, that the refugee agency's largest program in Europe is in Serbia, aiding Serbian refugees who have fled Kosovo and elsewhere as a result of the past decade's Balkan conflicts.
He said the agency appreciated that the peacekeepers had a difficult job in Mitrovica but made clear he hoped security would improve.
"We certainly realize their difficulties but we also depend on their implementation of their mandate to secure the environment," said Mr. McNamara, a New Zealander who has spent 24 years with the agency.
In Mitrovica today, more than 1,000 Serbs held a rally to demand the swift return of Serbian refugees to their homes.
Mr. McNamara also announced a program aimed at allowing Gypsies who have fled their homes to return. Many Albanians say Gypsies colloborated with the Serbs. But Albanian leaders have recently said that the entire Gypsy community should not be stigmatized.
Serbia ruling parties win Yugo parliament seats
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (Reuters) - The Serbian parliament Wednesday elected 20 members from the ruling coalition to the upper house of the federal Yugoslav legislature after the main opposition party boycotted the session.
The Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO), the only opposition party with significant representation in the Serbian parliament, announced Tuesday it would not take part in the meeting.
That decision cleared the way for the coalition of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to choose its own members for the upper house, where Serbia and its tiny sister republic Montenegro have 20 seats each.
The SPO began boycotting the parliament earlier this year to protest the authorities' failure to track down those responsible for the deaths of four party officials in a mysterious car crash last October.
The party blames the deaths on the state. The authorities have denied any involvement.
In Wednesday's session, 188 deputies present in the 250-seat Serbian parliament voted unanimously for 20 deputies of the three ruling parties -- Milosevic's Socialist party, the ultra-nationalist Serbian Radical Party and the Yugoslav Left.
The four seats in the upper house that belonged to the SPO were split between the Socialist party and the Radical Party, which now have nine seats each in the 40-seat chamber.
The Yugoslav Left of Milosevic's wife Mirjana Markovic will control two seats.
SPO spokesman Ivan Kovacevic said Tuesday that the exclusion of its deputies from the federal parliament would not change anything since the ruling coalition dominated parliament anyway.
Clark, NATO leader in Kosovo, retires from his US command
General sought stepped-up effort
By John Donnelly, Globe Staff,
TUTTGART, Germany - General Wesley K. Clark's career has been a succession of high notes: No. 1 in the West Point class of 1966, a Rhodes scholar, key peace negotiator in the Bosnia accords at Dayton, the NATO war hero who won the alliance's only war in Kosovo.
But bittersweet is this retirement. Clark stepped down yesterday as head of US European Command and its 109,000 US troops, and will leave his post today as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander. General Joseph W. Ralston, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, takes over both posts.
While a military band played the West Point march as Clark inspected the troops one final time, the decidedly subdued atmosphere was due to how Clark is leaving.
Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and General H. Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had arranged for Clark to leave his post a few months early. The official explanation was that it was the doings of bureaucracy: Ralston's term as vice chairman had ended Feb. 29, and unless he was appointed to a new post within two months, he had to retire.
But Pentagon officials quietly acknowledge a different reason as well: that Clark for too long wouldn't take no for an answer as he argued several positions contrary to those held by top Defense Department brass. The most important disagreement centered on whether a limited air war against Serbia would force Serb troops from Kosovo. Clark wanted to use much more firepower, a decision that in hindsight was largely correct; his superiors, including President Clinton and many European leaders, often disagreed.
''Clark's incredibly bright, but he's stubborn,'' said a Pentagon official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. ''His biggest error may have been he forgot who was boss.''
Both immediate bosses, Cohen and Shelton, shared the stage yesterday with Clark and Ralston. They spoke only kind words.
''No one should ever doubt either your service or your success,'' Cohen said to Clark. ''Faced with an adversary who manufactured a vicious humanitarian nightmare, you responded with compassion and speed.''
Since the war's end, Clark has spent most of his time trying to keep peace in Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians have carried out many revenge attacks against Serb villagers. But Clark said he is beginning to see some hope.
On Monday, he visited Kosovo and said there was an ''increasing sense of security, the indicators of recovery from strong-arm ethnic cleansing and even some first budding signs of willingness to tolerate ethnic differences and cooperate among ethnic groups.''
When the ceremony ended, Cohen departed almost immediately, skipping Clark's reception. The two men will see each other again today in Mons, Belgium, at the NATO command change.
Watching the ceremony yesterday was Jeffrey H. Smith, a West Point classmate of Clark's, a former general counsel to the Central Intelligence Agency and now a Washington lawyer.
''This was very emotional,'' Smith said later, his suitcoat off, revealing West Point cufflinks. ''I think of all those years, and all that has happened, and to see Wes succeed.''
Smith said he expected the four-star general to enter a second career after 34 years in the military.
''Knowing Wes, I think he would like to try something very different for a while,'' he said.
Clark declined to speak to reporters after the ceremony. A spokesman said it was traditional for the departing commander not to overshadow the new leader.
Ralston said he would now focus on NATO's relationship with Russia and the European Union.
''I think we have an opportunity to see what we can do with our relationship with the Russians and the Russian military,'' Ralston said. ''Perhaps we have a window of opportunity now with President Putin taking over,'' referring to the new Russian leader, Vladimir V. Putin.
The Independent : Britain trains new elite for post-Milosevic era
By Adam LeBor in Budapest
3 May 2000
British diplomats are training a Yugoslav élite-in-waiting to oversee the country's transformation to a civil society after the Milosevic regime falls.
Senior Serbian figures in professional fields such as the military, law enforcement and academia are being brought to Budapest in neighbouring Hungary to design a blueprint for post-Milosevic Serbia, and prepare for the country's re-integration into Europe.
The New Serbia Forum, an initiative funded by the Foreign Office, focuses on key issues to shape the future Yugoslavia such as instituting civilian control of the military, punishment for those who committed atrocities under President Slobodan Milosevic and reconstruct- ing a stable economy.
Many of the Serb participants held senior posts in Yugoslavia before the country began to implode in the 1991 Croatian war of independence. Their refusal to participate in Mr Milosevic's nationalist drive forced them out of their jobs.
British officials want to prevent a repeat of the post-1989 transitions from Communist dictatorship of eastern Eur-ope's new democracies.
Sir John Birch, former British ambassador to Hungary, said: "In 1989 there was no action plan for a new democratic government and a lot of time was wasted arguing over inconsequential questions such as flags and anthems, instead of coping with the budget deficit or thinking about how to deal with people from the old regime.
"We are not a subversive organisation, talking about how to get rid of the Milosevic regime. We are looking at Serb solutions to Serb problems, with outside assistance, about what Serbia needs to reintegrate."
Forum participants, including Dr Miroslav Hadzic, a former colonel in the Yugoslav army, said they wanted to learn from other ex-communist nations. "It is very important for us to be in touch with modern democratic experts which have experience of issues such as civilian control of the army, in transition countries such as Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovenia," said Dr Hadzic, now a research fellow at a Belgrade institute.
The Western policy of isolation and sanctions had supported Mr Milosevic, by strengthening his position, said Dr Hadzic. "The Serbian people have no hope and without hope you cannot do anything. All sanctions should be lifted now and Yugoslavia should be admitted to all international organisations.
"The Serbs are paying the price of 10 years of a bad choice, and it is a high price."
Budapest, capital of Hungary, which borders three states of the former Yugoslavia – Croatia, Slovenia and Serbia – has long been a key meeting place for nationals of the south Slavic nations, now divided into independent states.
Bosko Colak-Antic, a former journalist with Tanjug, the Yugoslav state news agency, said: "We do not have free and open expression, to meet experts and clarify our attitudes and opinions. This [forum] brings together the élite of people who can express their opinions about what should happen after the fall of Milosevic."
Attending the forum is not without risks. Participants are often called in by the police on their return home and questioned. One Serb delegate said Belgrade officers asked him who he met, and what the forum was about, then verbally abused him.
The role of the army and the police in the transition to a post-Milosevic era is a key question. Analysts are not certain the army will support Mr Milosevic; nor can he rely on police.
But many analysts expect the end of the Milosevic regime to be protracted and bloody. Internationally isolated, its domestic support crumbling, riven by factions and threatened by armed organised crime gangs it unleashed during the Bosnian war, the regime is likely to end not with a whimper, but with a Serb Götterdämmerung.
One delegate said: "There is too much at stake for government circles and they have no way out. They will fight until the last drop of our blood."
The Christian Science Monitor : A new hospital but few patients
A nearly vacant hospital in Kosovo epitomizes the divisions between the remaining Serbs.
Richard Mertens
GRACANICA, YUGOSLAVIA
Sasa Ivic is an anesthesiologist's assistant at a new hospital that opened five weeks ago in this Serb enclave in central Kosovo. The problem for Mr. Ivic is that there is no anesthesiologist to assist. And without an anesthesiologist, there can be no operations.
The hospital's operating room, with its gleaming tiles and shiny new machinery, sits dark and unused. Down the hall is a delivery room, but no obstetrician. The hospital has only three doctors, barely enough to stay open.
"We have patients, but we don't have doctors," complained Mr. Ivic. And not that many patients, either.
This near-vacant Serb hospital is a casualty of the growing struggle for power among the Serbs who have remained in Kosovo. It also illustrates how long the reach of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is. His Army and police were driven from Kosovo last June, but his regime continues to exert powerful influence from afar. The struggle is of deep interest to Western officials, who are trying to encourage leaders who are willing to work with them. So far they have not succeeded.
The Gracanica hospital was meant to be part of a much-larger effort by the international community to improve the living conditions of Serbs who still remain in Kosovo, and thus to encourage them to stay. Since NATO-led troops occupied Kosovo last year, half of the province's 200,000 Serbs have fled. Of the 100,000 or so who remain, most have retreated into all-Serb enclaves, where peacekeeping troops give them protection.
For political reasons, a hospital is badly needed. In purely medical terms, it's superfluous. Normally, seriously ill medical patients would go to the state hospital in Pristina, 10 minutes away. But since last summer, Serbs have no longer been welcome there. For anything that the local clinic cannot handle, Serbs have gone to a Russian military hospital about 15 minutes away, or traveled outside Kosovo.
Financed by the Greek government and Doctors of the World, the Gracanica hospital was meant to change this. But it was soon caught up in a different conflict than the one between Serbs and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, this time among the Serbs themselves.
Serb doctors who might have worked in the new hospital were warned not to by the Yugoslav Ministry of Health in Belgrade. They were told they would lose their Yugoslav pensions and health insurance if they did. In some cases, says the hospital's medical director, Dr. Rada Trajkovic, they received personal threats. "They all want to work here," says Dr. Trajkovic. "They call me almost every day. But the [Milosevic] regime is threatening them."
The hospital is at the nexus of a struggle with at least three sides. On one side are moderate Serbs, including the leader of the Serb Orthodox Church in Kosovo, Bishop Artemije. These Serb leaders have expressed a willingness to cooperate with the West. They have frequent contact with the Western officials, including American officials like Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. They have denounced the Milosevic regime and have tried to foster connections with Serbia's political opposition.
They are opposed in part by more defiant Serb leaders in northern Kosovo, where Serbs live in an enclave that adjoins Serbia proper and is virtually cut off from the rest of Kosovo. These leaders have less to gain by cooperating with Kosovo's UN administration. While their relation to Mr. Milosevic remains unclear, they have resisted Western efforts to integrate northern Kosovo with the rest of the province.
On the third side are Milosevic and the Yugoslav regime. In February, American and NATO officials accused Milosevic of using his police to stir up trouble in the town of Mitrovica. In fact, Milosevic's influence reaches almost everywhere in Kosovo where there are still Serbs. Kosovar Serbs read the regime's newspapers and watch its television broadcasts. Because Kosovo is still officially a province of Serbia, Kosovar Serbs also are eligible for Yugoslav social services. Because of Yugoslavia's dire economic conditions, such benefits are not generous. But the prospect of losing them, and of being cut off from the Yugoslav state, was one of the things that made Todorka Slavkovic, a nurse, think twice before she went to work at the Gracanica hospital.
"We're all afraid," she says. "But we want to work here."
The Kosovo Serbs have always been divided between those willing to cooperate with the West and those determined to defy it. But the split widened last month when the moderate Serbs, led by Bishop Artemije, agreed to participate in an administrative council made up of Kosovars and international officials. This council, formed late last year, is part of the United Nations effort to share power with local officials. Until recently, the Serbs boycotted it.
After the agreement, a mob of more than 100 Serbs attacked the 14th-century monastery in Gracanica where Bishop Artemije makes his headquarters. Church officials blamed the attack on extremists sympathetic to Milosevic, but it reflected a broader lack of support for Serb moderates. "We don't have any political influence," Bishop Artemije acknowledged recently.
The West is trying to change this. It is importing opposition newspapers into Kosovo and is trying to help moderate Serbs start a radio station. "This is a really important struggle, a struggle for truth, a struggle for the souls of people, who are in danger of being taken in by a very brutal regime ..." says the Rev. Sava Janjic, a spokesman for the bishop.
The West also is trying to help the moderates by showing Serbs that cooperating with the West yields results. Kosovo's UN administration has begun to offer special services to the Serbs, including buses that travel between the enclaves. It is giving more help to Serb schools and health clinics. "It's very important to be able to demonstrate that there are other Serbs willing to help them, that they don't have to depend on Belgrade," a Western diplomat says.
For now, Milosevic and the more defiant Kosovo Serbs have the upper hand. The primary-care health clinic in Gracanica is run by doctors still loyal to Belgrade. It is a dingy place, but it is amply staffed and busy. "A hospital is a good idea, for the Serbian people and no one else," Dr. Mice Popovic, the senior doctor at the clinic, says brusquely. "But it should work under the Serbian government and not under the UN."
The Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty : Missing Persons Issue Looms Large
By Robert McMahon
A UN Security Council mission back from Kosovo says the problem of missing persons is one of the main obstacles to reconciliation between Serbs and Albanians. And despite lingering differences over the visit of two council members to Belgrade, the head of the mission is hopeful the Kosovo trip will provide a badly needed boost to the UN mission there. RFE/RL's UN correspondent Robert McMahon reports.
United Nations, 2 May 2000 (RFE/RL) -- The trip by eight UN Security Council representatives to Kosovo was intended to provide insight into the challenges facing one of the United Nations' most ambitious operations. A report delivered yesterday (Monday) by the council team fresh back from Kosovo indicates that the council did gain a new appreciation for the work of the UN Mission in Kosovo, known as UNMIK. But the trip also showcased a fundamental difference among some council members concerning how to treat Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. The Russian and Chinese representatives on the mission -- Russia's UN ambassador Sergei Lavrov and China's deputy ambassador Shen Guofang -- met with Milosevic in Belgrade before the mission started last Thursday (April 27). They were representing their nations, which are supportive of Yugoslavia in the council, but several of their council colleagues said the visit was inappropriate.
Milosevic has been indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal for Yugoslavia as a war criminal. UN resolutions call for all countries to cooperate with the tribunal. Ambassador Robert Fowler of Canada, last month's council president, expressed disappointment on Friday about the meeting with Milosevic. He was joined yesterday by U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and by the leader of the council mission to Kosovo, Ambassador Anwarul Chowdhury of Bangladesh.
But Chinese diplomat Shen defended the visit. He told reporters yesterday it is necessary to engage Yugoslavia in order to help with the administration of Kosovo as laid out in Security Council resolution 1244, [which set up UNMIK]:
"It is very necessary for us to send a message to the government of Yugoslavia and in my view in order to implement Resolution 1244 we have to involve the government of Yugoslavia." Ambassador Chowdhury called the visit with Milosevic "regrettable." But he said the Russian and Chinese representatives fully participated in the council mission.
Russia and China were the only permanent council members on the Kosovo mission. Representatives from the other permanent members -- the U.S., Britain and France -- are taking part in a visit to the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo this week to assess conditions for UN peacekeeping operations there. In a news conference on Monday, Chowdhury said the Kosovo mission found three main problem areas. They involve cases of thousands of missing persons and detainees, tens of thousands of displaced people and refugees who have not been able to return to Kosovo, and the ongoing ethnic violence in the province. Chowdhury said that in virtually all meetings with Kosovo residents, the mission was faced with pleas about missing relatives and loved ones.
"It's a great humanitarian issue which needs our attention. The council cannot maintain credibility unless we address this issue. And I'm saying [this] about all missing persons, irrespective of ethnicity. This issue needs our attention." The mission's report says there is strong support for the appointment of a special UN envoy for missing persons in Kosovo. The UN Secretary-General recently appointed a similar representative to look into cases of missing Kuwaitis in Iraq, and Chowdhury says a missing persons envoy in Kosovo could function in the same way. The U.S.'s Holbrooke, speaking outside the council chamber yesterday, endorsed the idea of a missing persons envoy:
"I think the missing persons issue is of enormous importance in Kosovo. With thousands of people missing in a small population base, almost every family in Kosovo is directly affected by it. The emotions on this issue run as deep as any I've experienced in the Balkans in the last six years. "
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