Tagesnachrichten 5. August 1998
von ALBANEWS und anderen
weitere Presse-Meldungen
further press news
Tagesnachrichten 5. August 1998
_______________________________________________________________________NEWS: KOSOVA UPDATE, AUGUST 05, 1998
Taken without permission, for fair use only.
Freshly Dug Mass Graves Found in Kosovo
Indication of mass graveis uncovered in Kosovo; Serbs say the victims were hit by crossfire
EU checks Kosovo massacre reports
NATO: Going Easy on Serbs?
SERBS REPORTEDLY USE GAS TO TAKE REBEL TOWN
Thousands of Refugees Flee Serb Mountain Attack
Ethnic Albanian Graves Found
'70,000' flee Kosovo fighting
Kosovo Assault Stepped Up, Making Thousands More Homeless
___________________________________Freshly Dug Mass Graves Found in Kosovo
Anonymous Plots Suggest More Rebel Casualties Than Reported by Serb OfficialsBy R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, August 5, 1998; Page A15ORAHOVAC, Yugoslavia—The 12 thin wooden sticks are barely noticeable near the entrance to the central garbage dump east of this town in the Serbian province of Kosovo. The carcasses of two bloated, foul-smelling cows block the path, but a visitor can get close enough to see markings carved with a knife into each stick that suggest a corpse lies in the ground directly underneath.
The markings read "3 NN," "15 NN" and so on, denoting to Serbian-speakers that the bodies are those of unidentified people. Farther down the path are five more large plots excavated by a red steam shovel, each marked by a series of 21 larger wooden signs bearing a four-digit number and the name of a dead person.
Similar graves also were dug several weeks ago at a cemetery in the Kosovo town of Prizren where ethnic Albanians from the immediate area -- including Orahovac -- traditionally have been buried. Ten markers have been placed in the soil there, but only six bear names.
A witness has reported that three bodies interred at the cemetery were wearing the uniform of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the ethnic-Albanian guerrilla group battling for Kosovo's independence from Serbia, the dominant republic of Yugoslavia. All the bodies in Prizren were buried by the government with no independent observers present.
The existence of at least 33 fresh graves in Orahovac, reportedly dug July 30, is not startling by itself. Nor are the fresh graves in Prizren. Serbian authorities have said 60 people died during three days of fighting between Serbian security forces and ethnic-Albanian separatist guerrillas in and around the town, beginning July 17, that ended with Serbian units overrunning the town.
But the dumping of so many bodies in such apparent haste -- without traditional Muslim rites and with no family members present -- has raised troubling questions among the region's ethnic-Albanian residents. Rumors are swirling among them that far more people died in Orahovac than Serbian authorities have acknowledged.
Several witnesses said they saw tractors roaming the streets of the town to pick up corpses a few hours before police allowed foreign journalists to enter Orahovac on the afternoon of July 21. A Western official who tried to enter that morning remembers that two foul-smelling trucks passed him on the way out of town, and he said he has concluded from various reports by local citizens that they contained corpses.
Two residents have separately told different journalists they have firsthand knowledge that the number of corpses taken from the city after the fighting and buried clandestinely exceeds 100.
But there is no evidence of mass graves containing such a large number of bodies. Journalists and international monitors have been prevented from searching the area because huge portions of the region remain under the control of special army or paramilitary troops, rendering them off-limits.
The graves that have been discovered, which were dug by the red steam shovel still parked at the site, are clearly large enough to contain more than the number of corpses indicated by the markers. But a concrete slab has been pulled across the top of the plot, impeding any effort to probe the freshly compacted soil.© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
___________________________________Indication of mass grave is uncovered in Kosovo;
Serbs say the victims were hit by crossfireAugust 5, 1998
BY PHILIP SMUCKER
SPECIAL TO THE BLADEORAHOVAC, Yugoslavia - Two weeks after Serbian government forces counterattacked Albanian rebels who had tried to seize the town of Orahovac, evidence has emerged that scores of bodies were bulldozed into a garbage dump.
Western officials who visited the town yesterday said they heard reports about the alleged mass grave but had not yet located them.
But the smell of death is nauseating just a few hundred yards from the main police station on the eastern edge of this rubble-strewn town. The road out to the grave is guarded by an armored personnel carrier but reporters slipped past under the guise of a diplomatic delegation.
Below a ridge of corn in a garbage dump are burial sites that have been marked by small wooden stakes.
Some have plaques scribbled with numbers and some names.
"B1 Raba Mala, [His father] Etem," reads one. "T6875 Br3 Silka Ibrahim [Father] Mehmed," reads another. Flesh and bones were evident at the site, though they have not been examined by forensics experts.
Near the grave is a bulldozer that has been used to push the soil over the bodies of what villagers say are several hundred missing Albanian civilians. The Albanians were killed in a battle between ethnic Albanian rebels and Serb security forces.
Just down the road are several more sites with freshly turned soil.
The smell is overwhelming. Serb policemen admitted yesterday that the "mass grave" exists but they insisted that the bulldozed bodies were killed in the crossfire, not massacred at close range or executed point blank as Albanian residents claimed.
The choice of a garbage dump by the Serb authorities for the Albanian bodies is indicative of the hatred and disrespect that Kosovo's six-month guerrilla conflict has engendered.
Residents of Orahovac have talked about the mass grave for days.
Albanian politicians and residents charge that no effort was made to return the bodies to their families. Several citizens said the bodies were transported on a flatbed pulled by tractors and then bulldozed into the earth along with rubble and dead animals from the battle.
"This is the most sickening thing I have ever seen," said a resident of the town, who asked not to be identified. He said he had counted 567 bodies, at least half of them children, as they passed from the city to the outskirts of town and into mass graves.
Christopher Hill, the United States envoy, visited Orahovac yesterday but did not go in search of the grave. He was on a mission to restart Kosovo's stalled peace process. Mr. Hill blamed the ongoing Serb offensive against Albanian rebels for damaging western peace efforts in Kosovo.© Copyright 1998 The Blade. All rights reserved.
___________________________________Wednesday August 5 11:20 AM EDT
EU checks Kosovo massacre reports
By Mark Thompson
PRISTINA (Reuters) - The European Union sent observers Wednesday to check reports of mass graves containing hundreds of bodies in a Kosovo town where Serbian forces routed ethnic Albanian guerrillas last month.
Austrian, German and Swedish newspapers said graves containing more than 500 corpses had been found at a rubbish tip some 700 meters (yards) from Orahovac, 60 km (37 miles) southwest of the Kosovo capital Pristina.
"Shocked gravediggers believe they counted more than 567 people, 430 of them children, in one of the (graves)," Austrian newspaper Die Presse said.
"Survivors from the massacre at Orahovac tell how load after load of corpses were driven here and buried under broken glass, rotting vegetables and gravel," wrote Niclas Lovkvist, a reporter for Sweden's Expressen.
Austrian Foreign Minister Wolfgang Schuessel, whose country holds the EU presidency, said: "We have asked the EU observer mission in Kosovo to verify these reports urgently."
If confirmed, the reports would mark an extremely serious escalation of the crisis which "would have to be dealt with appropriately," he said.
European Union officials visiting a site in Orahovac could not confirm that there was a mass grave there, an EU official told the Cable News Network Wednesday.
Serbian police Wednesday denied the reports, showing reporters a few dozen graves of what were described as terrorists.
"This is not a mass grave. These are the bodies of terrorists, properly buried in accordance with the law at the Moslem cemetery in Orahovac," Police Colonel Bozidar Filic said.
British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said: "If there is any truth in these horrifying accounts we must have a firm and united international response." He planned to speak to Schuessel and U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright later in the day.
Information from the EU team was not expected until late on Wednesday, diplomats said.
The Serbian-run media center in Kosovo organized a convoy of reporters to Orahovac to investigate the reports.
Die Presse said its correspondent, Erich Rathfelder, visited the graves on Tuesday among vineyards near the road to Suva Reka. Bodies were still being buried there.
Rathfelder told Austrian state radio that the numbers he cited were provided by people who took part in the burials.
Thousands of ethnic Albanians, who make up 80 percent of Orahovac's peacetime population of 20,000, fled the town after a bid by guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to take control was beaten off by Serbian security forces.
Western governments, increasingly concerned about the fate of nearly 200,000 ethnic Albanians driven from their homes during five months of fighting in the Serbian province of Kosovo, have urged Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to halt an offensive against the KLA.
Die Presse quoted Orahovac inhabitants who stayed put as saying the Serbs had killed 1,000 civilians between July 18 and July 21.
At the dump, bulldozers had covered the two mass graves with earth but several corpses were still lying above ground and could be smelt from a distance, the conservative broadsheet said. Unusually fierce heat had accelerated the decomposition.
Die Presse also cited "non-Albanian sources" as saying Serbian special security forces used human shields as they drove the KLA out of Orahovac. It said the Serbs then carried out house-to-house searches, exterminating whole families.
The Austrian ambassador in Belgrade would raise the matter with the Yugoslav authorities and discussions were under way with members of the U.N. Security Council, Schuessel said in a statement.
The international war crimes tribunal in The Hague had also been informed.
Expressen's reporter said residents remaining in Orahovac estimated about 200 civilians were killed, with many of the victims then taken to the rubbish tip.
"I estimated there were about 36 marked graves in the tip... marked by simple wood stakes with a number and sometimes a name. The markings were probably to give the impression that the graves were 'normal' rather than buried in a great hurry."
In Belgrade, meanwhile, Russia's deputy foreign minister arrived to meet Yugoslav officials in a new diplomatic effort to stop fighting in Kosovo.
Russian officials were tight-lipped about Nikolai Afanasyevsky, but have said he will go to Pristina after meetings in Belgrade.
Reporters in Kosovo said the clashes of previous days appeared to have calmed down, but ethnic Albanian sources said there was still fighting in central and far western Kosovo.
International observers expressed concern on Tuesday about the number of houses, deserted by ethnic Albanian refugees, they have seen burning as they travel through the province.
U.S. envoy Chris Hill said after he visited Orahovac that he was disturbed by the signs of destruction in Kosovo.
"We observed a number of structures in villages and towns that were burning," he told reporters.
In the closest thing to an official answer to Western demands for a cease-fire, Serbian Prime Minister Mirko Marjanovic said attempts to put down the insurgency were a justified defence of national sovereignty.
"We will suppress any violence in Kosovo... We shall win this battle," he was quoted as saying by the official Yugoslav news agency Tanjug.
Russia, a traditional Serb ally, has been trying to negotiate a peaceful solution but strongly opposes any military intervention by the West, which has threatened to use NATO force if necessary.
German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel, however, was quoted as saying on Tuesday that there should be no outside military strikes against Serbian forces without full United Nations backing.
And that backing, he said, would not come in the near future because of the Russian opposition.
In Brussels, NATO officials said Alliance ambassadors would meet on Friday to discuss Kosovo informally.
___________________________________WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 5, 1998
NATO: Going Easy on Serbs?
• Allowing Serb forces to roll in Kosovo may be a way to force disunited rebels to come to the table under one flag.
Justin Brown
Special to The Christian Science Monitor
PRISTINA, YUGOSLAVIAAn ongoing military offensive by Serbian forces in Kosovo has weakened the position of ethnic Albanians as the international community pushes for peace talks rather than military intervention.
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic last week said he would stop the crackdown on Albanian separatists, but the attacks have continued, forcing thousands to flee and putting Kosovo "on the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe," according to United States diplomat Christopher Hill.
The UN estimates 200,000 Kosovars have been displaced since fighting began in late February. Many of their homes have been torched, and despite promises by Mr. Milosevic, humanitarian-aid access has been limited. Altogether, more than 400 people, mostly ethnic Albanians, have died.
On Aug. 3, NATO reportedly moved closer to approving "contingency plans" to use aerial assaults against the Serbs, but armed intervention is still unlikely, diplomats say. International efforts, spearheaded by Mr. Hill, the US ambassador to neighboring Macedonia, remain focused on initiating talks and negotiating a cease-fire.
In fact, says a Western diplomatic source who asked not to be identified, the West may have "tacitly" allowed the Serb offensive out of frustration with the ethnic Albanians' failure to present a unified front.
In an apparent effort to gain bargaining leverage, Serbian forces have used their superior firepower to overrun several strongholds of the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), including the town of Malisevo, which was once openly run by the rebels. The Serbs now control the main roads, including the crucial east-west artery connecting the provincial capital of Pristina with the city of Pec.
State-controlled media in Belgrade have proclaimed a major victory for the Serbian forces. " 'Dogs of war' in panic after effective actions of security forces in Kosovo," read an Aug. 3 headline in the state daily Politika.
Meanwhile, with much of the land they once controlled having been swallowed by the Serbs, the independence-seeking guerrillas have retreated to the hills and are engaging the Serbs with hit-and-run attacks.
The KLA, which is armed primarily with hand-held machine guns, faces pressure on all fronts. They are losing on the ground; they have alienated mainstream ethnic Albanian leaders; and the international community opposes their goal of independence and the possible formation of a "Greater Albania."
They also have become burdened by the need to care for refugees, some of whom are the relatives of KLA fighters.
At the same time, ethnic Albanians in Pristina grow increasingly weary of what they perceive to be ineffective diplomacy on the part of the West, and particularly the US. Shuttle diplomacy between Belgrade and Pristina has yielded few concrete results, and the fighting has only escalated.
"The general feeling is that the West wanted the Serbian offensive to happen," says Muhamet Hamiti of the pro-Albanian Kosovo Information Center. "They've been looking for this for some time. They want to pressure the weaker side - that's us - and force them to talk."
A Western diplomatic source, who asked to remain anonymous, says the West "tacitly" accepted the Serb offensive and "did nothing to stop it."
"The people who are winning now are the Serbs," says the source. "As long as they can gain another inch, they'll continue fighting. That was the idea of the last two weeks - to put the KLA in their place before negotiating. That's pretty effectively been done."
Analysts say the Milosevic offensive was taken from the Bosnian-war playbook, when the Muslim-Croatian federation launched a major offensive to gain a favorable position before the 1995 Dayton peace agreement.
The international community has been increasingly frustrated with the KLA and its lack of a political wing with which to negotiate - and may have had reason to want it weakened. The KLA has split ethnic Albanian support between the pacifist approach of de facto President Ibrahim Rugova and armed resistance.
The rebels have not yet said whether they will participate in talks with Belgrade. Mehmet Hajrizi, the president of a political party with close ties to the KLA, says the rebels will make a decision on joining a new ethnic Albanian coalition government this week.
Self-styled KLA spokesman Jakup Krasniqi says the rebels are "ready to fight until the final victory."
The US and other Western powers support broad autonomy for Kosovo within Yugoslavia, but not independence. The region, where Albanians outnumber Serbs 9 to 1, was stripped of its self-rule in 1989 by then-Serbian President Milosevic.
___________________________________SERBS REPORTEDLY USE GAS TO TAKE REBEL TOWN
By Guy Dinmore
Special to the Tribune
August 5, 1998VRBOVC, Yugoslavia -- Government forces battling ethnic Albanian rebels in Serbia's Kosovo province used heavy weapons and a helicopter spraying gas to capture one of the last remaining guerrilla strongholds, according to survivors who fled Tuesday.
Officials confirmed that the village of Lausa in the central Drenica region had fallen and said Serbian police "neutralized armed groups of Albanian extremists."
The attack on Lausa added to the exodus of tens of thousands of ethnic Albanian refugees. The UN refugee agency estimates that 200,000 people, a tenth of the province's total population, have been displaced in the five-month conflict.
"I think we are on the edge of a humanitarian catastrophe if people cannot return to their homes in safety soon," warned Christopher Hill, the U.S. ambassador to Macedonia.
Gani Gecaj, a fighter with the pro-independence Kosovo Liberation Army, said that Lausa had come under heavy bombardment and that missiles had left craters several feet deep.
Reporters on Monday heard several powerful detonations from the area of Lausa, much louder than the shelling from tanks and artillery of nearby villages.
Gecaj said a military helicopter flew low over Lausa spraying gas over houses. He described symptoms of stinging eyes, burning throats and nausea.
Yugoslav army tanks backed by infantry and police wearing gas masks then overran the village, which had been besieged since March, Gecaj said.
Officials said there were no civilian casualties in the operation, but Gecaj said 150 to 200 people were missing.
Lausa was of military as well as symbolic importance for the KLA. It was there last November that three fighters of the underground movement appeared in public for the first time, to attend the funeral of a local teacher--a relative of Gecaj who had been gunned down by police.
Since those early beginnings, the KLA has mustered a force of several thousand, and just a month ago it had taken control of large areas of central Kosovo as well as areas along the border with Albania, its main source of weapons and new recruits.
But a weeklong government offensive, which has drawn only muted response from Western capitals that had previously threatened military intervention by NATO, has sent the KLA reeling.
Serbia's official media have proclaimed victory for the government in what it calls a justified response to attacks by "terrorists" on a land revered by Serbs for its ancient Orthodox Christian monasteries.
The KLA and the Kosovo Albanian political leadership accuse Washington and its allies of giving Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic the "green light" to destroy the rebels as a significant force before negotiations begin in earnest on the future status of Kosovo.
No government, not even sympathetic Albania, supports independence for Kosovo, fearing that would lead to a bloody redrawing of Balkan borders.
Plumes of thick smoke rose above Lausa and surrounding villages Tuesday as police carried out what diplomats have called "scorched earth" tactics to dissuade the Kosovo Albanian majority from harboring KLA fighters. Reporters and diplomatic observers were prevented by police from entering Lausa.
More than a dozen villages in the Drenica area have been severely damaged or destroyed by artillery or by police dousing farmsteads with gasoline. Haystacks and fields of corn and wheat have been reduced to cinders.
A steady stream of refugees, most perched on tractor-pulled trailers piled high with belongings, have poured out of the Drenica region.
About 1,000 refugees have set up camp alongside a muddy creek in the Vrbovc valley, just 20 miles from the provincial capital of Pristina, but a long journey for aid workers over twisting hill tracks.
With expressions of exhausted bewilderment, they struggled to find shade from the intense summer sun under makeshift shelters of blankets and leafy branches cut from surrounding forests.
Zemrije, just 1 year old and wearing a 101 Dalmatians T-shirt, tottered in the clearing, wailing. Her mother, Saebahade Ahmede, scooped her up and described how Serbian forces had rained artillery on their village of Izbica.
"They burned our houses and fields. They killed the cows. Four people were wounded going to mill the wheat," she lamented. "We've no food for this winter. What was not harvested, they burned."
Several KLA fighters in camouflage fatigues organized the distribution of a few aid parcels left by relief workers of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
At a nearby rebel checkpoint, a KLA fighter and paramedic said he was struggling to cope with the wounded among the refugees. Naim Bardiqi, who, like many ethnic Albanians living abroad, had returned from Germany to join the war, said that two children and a pregnant woman had died in his care.
Children were often among the victims, he said. "They can't run so fast and don't know how to hide themselves," he said.
___________________________________August 5, 1998
NYTIMESEthnic Albanian Graves Found
Filed at 1:27 p.m. EDT
By The Associated PressPRISTINA, Yugoslavia (AP) -- The graves of dozens of ethnic Albanians have been discovered in a garbage dump in a separatist stronghold of Kosovo overrun by Serb forces last month, ethnic Albanians said today.
The village of Orahovac, 30 miles southwest of Pristina, was the scene of fierce battles in July between Serb forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army fighting for independence for the southern Serbian province.
At least 60 civilians were killed in five days of fighting, according to the Pristina-based Committee for the Protection of Human Rights.
But there were wide discrepancies in reports and claims about victims having been buried in multiple or mass graves.
At a garbage dump about a half-mile outside Orahovac, an Associated Press Television crew today saw about 50 small mounds of earth, marked with sticks, some of them bearing ethnic Albanian names, others just numbers.
A small bulldozer, apparently used to level the terrain, was at the site.
A European Union observer mission that visited Orahovac found no evidence of mass graves, team leader Walter Ebenberger of Austria told the Austrian Press Agency by telephone from Pristina.
The ethnic Albanian Koha Ditore daily in Pristina reported that at least 36 fresh graves had been discovered near the town on Tuesday.
Veton Surroi, a prominent ethnic Albanian politician who visited the dump Tuesday, said as many as 200 Albanians were killed in Orahovac, most of them in a mosque where they had taken refuge.
The Austrian daily Die Presse reported today that fresh graves of more than 500 people, including children, had been discovered in the Orahovac area by journalists.
Serbian Deputy Information Minister Radmila Visic called the report a lie.
A Serb police source confirmed police had buried "a number of bodies" in the Orahovac area after no one claimed them from a morgue after more than a week. He spoke on condition of anonymity.
Fighting continued today between ethnic Albanian separatists and Serb security forces in the central Kosovo region of Drenica, according to ethnic Albanian sources.
Milosevic sent forces to crush the KLA in March. Kosovo has a population of 2 million, of which Albanians outnumber Serbs 9-to-1.
Continued fighting has stymied plans to send international aid convoys to help refugees. Serb police have been barring or slowing aid groups and diplomatic observers from reaching tens of thousands of refugees driven from Kosovo villages.
The International Red Cross has reached a valley in Drenica where many refugees fled, but clashes have stalled their aid efforts.
Qirez, about 15 miles northwest of Pristina, is located in a valley in the western Drenica region that has been a target of a Serb onslaught now in its ninth day.
When aid workers arrived there Tuesday, they found hundreds of desperate people. Refugees crowded around a truck loaded with boxes of infant medicine, food and other supplies. Many have been subsisting on a diet of water and green peppers.
Drenica is the largest area still under KLA control. From the hilltops, smoke was visible Tuesday from burning villages -- including the former stronghold of Lausa -- now overrun by Serb police in a symbolic defeat for the KLA.
___________________________________
NYTIMES
August 5, 1998Thousands of Refugees Flee Serb Mountain Attack
By MIKE O'CONNOR
LIKOVAC, Yugoslavia -- Thousands of refugees, many of them children, lumbered painfully down mountain trails in wagons and tractors and on foot Tuesday, fleeing Serbian government forces but finding almost no place to hide in the broiling heat.
As foreign diplomats pondered how to curtail the offensive without military action by NATO, refugee families trudged under an intense sun, many carrying nothing but jugs of water and bags of food. Those with wagons were packed together so tightly that there was little room for supplies. Few seemed to know where they were going or how they would find shelter.
So many people are on the move, and they are scattered through terrain so rough that international relief workers said there was no way to estimate their number and no immediate prospect of delivering enough food, water or medical supplies. The relief workers said they were worried because many refugees were living in the open without adequate water or food.
Many of the ethnic Albanians on the move appear to have fled the threat of attack from Serbian police units and Yugoslav army soldiers who have embarked on an offensive apparently aimed at cleaning out strongholds of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army in western and central Kosovo.
The rebel force says it will liberate the ethnic Albanian majority from Serbian rule. But government forces, which are far better equipped, have gained the upper hand over the last week.
Government attacks on towns and villages are continuing. In areas that the government has recaptured, Serbian forces were seen looting and burning homes, diplomats and relief workers said.
Fadil Ramaj fled his village, Izbisa, at 2 a.m. Tuesday with as many relatives as he could find. Ethnic Albanian soldiers around the village had told his family that government forces seemed to about to attack.
"We had 15 minutes," Ramaj said. "We ran for the children and for our relatives. We got 60 of us together and we have been coming down the mountain for 10 hours."
Ten from the group and one of the two wagons hid part of the way down. Ramaj and the rest were taking a shelter against a prickly hedge and a thin line of trees. On the trail in front of them was a caravan of tractors, wagons, the occasional farm animal and countless other families.
Of the 50 in Ramaj's group about 40 were children, some in pajamas and many without shoes. The group had no food, and just a little water.
"The army surrounded the village two, or was it three, days ago," Ramaj said. "There was shelling, and if we stayed, I knew we would be killed. We are just sitting now trying to decide what to do. People here think the army will attack here next."
"We started out through the fields that our soldiers said were safe," said Ramaj, who farms a small patch of corn and wheat in a village with fewer than 10 extended families. "Now we are somewhere else and we don't know what to do."
Ramaj admitted his bewilderment and then stopped talking. Two people rounded the hedge, carrying a bowl of deep red fresh tomatoes, long green peppers covered in oil, three loaves of bread and two soda bottles with milk for the toddlers.
They were the owner of the field, Zenil Hajdini, and his daughter. "It is not much," Hajdini said. "It is not enough for them, I know. But people have been coming all day. We will share what we have until it is gone, and then we will be hungry, too. We are all Albanians."
The Ramaj family had hoped to go to Mitrovica, where aid workers say up to 30,000 refugees have arrived in the last three days, taking shelter with volunteer families.
But at midday, ethnic Albanian soldiers near Mitrovica received orders to turn back refugees, saying that there was no more room for them in the city.
More than 40 villages and hamlets in Kosovo, west of Mitrovica, seemed nearly deserted Tuesday. The crops were still in the field, and cows and horses were at pasture. But the people were in hiding or on the road looking for somewhere safe. In a six-hour drive 4,000 to 5,000 people were sighted wandering in search of shelter.
At 3 p.m. in Likovac, the rebel headquarters, the only visible movements were a handful of soldiers, four dogs and three men on a tractor crossing the dust-covered village square.
A spokesman for the rebel command said that all the top officers were safe and that their forces were preparing a counterattack.
"We were expecting this, and worse," the spokesman said. "We have our own plans." The spokesman would not give his name.
With artillery fire close, and with tall columns of black smoke rising from three villages nearby, the confidence of the spokesman seemed somewhat misplaced.
At a government position near Likovac a dark blue armored personnel carrier was pointing a heavy machine gun toward the smoke coming from the village of Lapusnik. A police officer, shirtless, opened a hatch on the vehicle and was removing empty beer bottles when he saw a convoy of troops heading toward him. Lethargically, he waved them forward to Lapusnik.
Foreign diplomats said again Tuesday they were doing all they could to stop the offensive or stop government troops from attacking civilians, but that Yugoslavia's president, Slobodan Milosevic, would not respond to diplomatic pressure unless he knew that failing to do so would bring a NATO military attack.
"Pressuring Milosevic without a military threat is like playing baseball without a bat, it doesn't work," said a senior Western diplomat.
The debate now among NATO officers, said the diplomat, was to choose targets that aircraft could hit without having to destroy Yugoslavia's air defense system.
NATO has been studying what sorts of attacks it could mount against Yugoslavia for several months, and on June 11th announced it had arrived at several acceptable options. Tuesday, a NATO official said despite the earlier announcement, the options were still being discussed within NATO, and final plans were still not ready.
___________________________________International News
Electronic Telegraph
Wednesday 5 August 1998
Issue 1167'70,000' flee Kosovo fighting
UP to 70,000 people have fled fighting in the Serbian province of Kosovo over the past week and urgently need food and water, according to the United Nations World Food Programme.
It said the area around Malisevo in south-west Kosovo, where Serbian forces clashed with ethnic Albanian separatists at the weekend, was "a wasteland of destroyed villages and burned fields littered with dead cattle". People were still fleeing on tractors and on foot to shelter in mountain forests. Some of them had food to last four or five days, but most had nothing.
WFP said the number of people displaced by the latest Serbian offensive, which started in late July, was greater than first thought. The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) had estimated the figure at 30,000. Mick Lorentzen, WFP's emergency co-ordinator in Kosovo, said a relief convoy led by the UNHCR had reached the town of Crnovrane near Malisevo on Saturday carrying biscuits, water and wheat flour.
Speaking in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, Mr Lorenz said: "In the mountains nearby we found about 3,000 people, 90 percent of them women and children. They said there had been five new births there just over a three-day period. A lot of people are still arriving in the forest near Klecka. In the short time we were there, 50 people arrived, and this is just one area. There are other people on the move from other areas."
Mr Lorentzen said the forest was thick and inaccessible, making it difficult to estimate how many people were sheltering there. But he said: "Based on what we saw though, and on what people told us, there are as many as 70,000 people and the number is growing. Obviously we cannot feed the whole population."
___________________________________NYTIMES
August 4, 1998Kosovo Assault Stepped Up, Making Thousands More Homeless
By MIKE O'CONNOR
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia -- Fears grew Monday about the fate of tens of thousands of refugees in the Serbian province of Kosovo who have been fleeing what appears to be a massive government military offensive.
Long columns of terrified civilians emerged from combat zones, and authorities blocked international monitors from the area.
In the last three days, 20,000 to 30,000 ethnic Albanians have fled Yugoslav government forces trying to take areas back from rebels, international relief officials said. They explained that their estimates were imprecise because they, too, were regularly being blocked from most areas of current or recent combat.
Foreign diplomats assigned to monitor the conflict said they believed the government was trying to clear ethnic Albanians from areas of military importance.
"It is a vicious tactic," said a monitor, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "First they are shelling civilian villages and towns to make the people run, then they seem to be going in to blow up or burn the buildings to insure civilians can't return."
Foreign monitors said their observer teams were barred Monday from entering any area of suspected conflict.
"At best," said a foreign diplomat, "we have to assume this is a case of widespread 'ethnic cleansing.' But the fact that we are not allowed in to see for ourselves makes me wonder seriously about what kind of atrocities are being committed."
Another diplomat said: "We hear stories about mass graves and summary executions and the like. Maybe they are not true, but if we can't get past police checkpoints we become suspicious."
The term "ethnic cleansing" was used during the war in Bosnia to describe the practice by competing ethnic groups of expelling civilians in order to secure control over territory.
Government attacks last week may have caused more than 70,000 civilians to flee their homes, aid officials said. The population of the province is 90 percent ethnic Albanian. An unknown number of refugees have found shelter in the homes of others who live near the conflict, while some have been able to reach nearby towns. However, it is estimated that tens of thousands have taken refuge in the mountain forests of central Kosovo.
The government is fighting ethnic Albanian forces of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which wants Kosovo to become an independent country.
With the government keeping relief workers from thousands of people -- many of them hiding in forests without adequate water, food or medical care -- a United Nations official said the refugees were on the brink of catastrophe.
"Even if we could start getting to them immediately," said Mons Nyberg, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, "there will be a very serious problem because the weather is extremely hot, the people are scattered across mountains and there will be health problems very soon. You can't drive trucks with supplies through the mountains."
Nyberg said Yugoslav authorities had repeatedly turned back United Nations survey teams.
He said that in one area the teams had been able to reach, "there were houses burning everywhere, there was artillery fire and gunshots in the distance." He added, "The Albanian villages are completely empty, the people are just gone."
An international aid official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said relief workers had found Monday that several villages without any ethnic Albanian residents had not been touched by government forces and that police officers in those villages were arming civilians. "This is a repetition of what happened in Bosnia and Croatia," the official said. "The army acts first, then Serb civilians are handed guns to keep the other ethnic group from returning to the area."
The military offensive began 10 days ago, announced as a fairly limited operation to reclaim major roads from rebel control. In it, the government may have retaken large areas of Kosovo.
Serbia is the larger of the two republics that remain in Yugoslavia (the other is Montenegro). The ethnic Albanians in Kosovo province once had a measure of autonomy, but Serbia ended it. The fighting has escalated over the past several months, since a government crackdown on rebel activities.
Rebel commanders have boasted that their forces have only withdrawn temporarily and are reorganizing for a counterattack. Rebel soldiers have made scattered attacks on government forces recently.
But Monday the Yugoslav press agency said that government forces had entered the important town of Smonica and were continuing an assault on the town of Junik, where more than 1,000 rebel troops are thought to have taken refuge.
Some rebel commanders say they are getting hundreds of volunteers from among the refugees. But government officials contend that the burden of caring for refugees as well as the embarrassment of having lost much territory is badly hurting the rebels.
Rebel leaders acknowledge that coping with the thousands of refugees is complicating their ability to reorganize. They insist, though, that the offensive has not hurt their forces as much as it has preoccupied them with worry about civilians.
A rebel commander said Friday that by shelling civilians who live behind rebel lines and sending them into flight, government forces had made the rebels fall back from their positions to help the refugees.
Most of the civilians in rebel-controlled areas seem to support the Kosovo Liberation Army, or at least its goal of establishing an independent country. If civilians are cleared from much of the area where rebels operate, it should be easier for government security forces to fight the rebels.
Last week, President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia assured Ambassador Christopher Hill, the American diplomat charged with resolving the conflict in Kosovo, that the government offensive was over and that international monitors and relief workers would have complete access to all parts of Kosovo.
Monday Hill said it appeared that the promises were being broken. "I'm not interested in anyone's assurances," he said. "We don't have facts on the ground as far as I can see."
Government officials in Pristina, the provincial capital, contend that they support free access for diplomats and aid workers. The problem, they say, is getting police forces to follow orders.
"Sometimes these police at the checkpoints just don't do as we tell them," one official said. "We're trying to correct this, but it takes time."
_______________________________________________________________________5 August 98
The Daily Telegraph'70,000' flee Kosovo fighting
UP to 70,000 people have fled fighting in the Serbian province of Kosovo over the past week and urgently need food and water, according to the United Nations World Food Programme.
It said the area around Malisevo in south-west Kosovo, where Serbian forces clashed with ethnic Albanian separatists at the weekend, was "a wasteland of destroyed villages and burned fields littered with dead cattle". People were still fleeing on tractors and on foot to shelter in mountain forests. Some of them had food to last four or five days, but most had nothing.
WFP said the number of people displaced by the latest Serbian offensive, which started in late July, was greater than first thought. The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) had estimated the figure at 30,000. Mick Lorentzen, WFP's emergency co-ordinator in Kosovo, said a relief convoy led by the UNHCR had reached the town of Crnovrane near Malisevo on Saturday carrying biscuits, water and wheat flour.
Speaking in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, Mr Lorenz said: "In the mountains nearby we found about 3,000 people, 90 percent of them women and children. They said there had been five new births there just over a three-day period. A lot of people are still arriving in the forest near Klecka. In the short time we were there, 50 people arrived, and this is just one area. There are other people on the move from other areas."
Mr Lorentzen said the forest was thick and inaccessible, making it difficult to estimate how many people were sheltering there. But he said: "Based on what we saw though, and on what people told us, there are as many as 70,000 people and the number is growing. Obviously we cannot feed the whole population."
The Independent
Torment of Kosovo as Nato dithers
By Katherine ButlerThe western allies were in disarray over Kosovo last night as Serbian troops advanced on the Kosovo Liberation Army and thousands more ethnic Albanians were forced to flee their homes to escape the violence and shelling.
The Serbs kept up their violent onslaught on towns and villages in central Kosovo, ignoring pleas from the European Union and the US for a ceasefire, and warnings from aid agencies of an impending humanitarian disaster. Thousands of civilian refugees were reported to be hiding out in woods near Malisevo, a former stronghold of the KLA.
But sharp political divisions over a military response were also exposed as Nato officials in Brussels contradicted a claim from US state department spokesman James Rubin that contingency plans for armed intervention had been approved. "There has been no approval. There is a plan but it is still being refined and only when that has been done will there be approval. Even then force remains only an option," officials at Nato headquarters in Brussels said.
At the end of May Nato foreign ministers ordered military chiefs to start planning for armed intervention in Kosovo but while the logistical preparations for all the possible options, including air strikes and deployment of ground troops, are advanced, diplomats concede that it has proved impossible to nail down political agreement.
"There is no agreement within the political community either about what is really going on in Kosovo. or what to do," said one senior source.
Pressure from European members of the transatlantic alliance for force to be put on hold as an option has grown since May. Some governments - particularly Germany - believe even limited armed intervention could be disastrously counterproductive.
But the Americans are in favour, and believe it could be done without authorisation from the UN security council, where a Russian veto is expected.
The KLA's guerrilla campaign against the Serbs has also complicated the picture on the ground. "We have got to be realistic," said one diplomatic source. "It is not as easy as saying let's go in there and sort out these cowboys and we'll shoot the guys in the black hats . Who do you shoot, what do you bomb and will any of this help?
"There are no clear borderlines, and what do you do to avoid civilian casualties? None of these questions have been resolved."
The Guardian
Nato stalls as refugee tide grows in Kosovo
By Martin Walker in Brussels and Peter Beaumont near Lausa
Wednesday August 5, 1998Nato is "a long way from any military option", sources at the alliance's headquarters in Brussels said yesterday. Serbian forces continued to shell villages in central Kosovo, amid warnings of a humanitarian disaster involving 70,000 new refugees in the past week.
Warnings by the United States state department this week that intervention could come very quickly were played down by both Nato and British officials.
"Nato has a full range of contingency planning, but before they can be triggered, there has to be a political mandate," a Nato official explained. "That means a decision by the International Contact Group or by the UN. We have no such decision."
Nato's stalling came as ethnic Albanian rebels of the Kosovo Liberation Army were driven from one of their most symbolic strongholds - the village of Lausa - by Serbian troops. That was the site where, last November, the armed secessionists first appeared in uniform in public, at the funeral of a teacher killed by a Serb bullet.
Lausa and its surrounding villages, on a rolling arid plain, are now deserted, their populations sent into flight by the fighting which, the guerrillas say, involved rockets and riot gas sprayed from a Serbian helicopter to disable their fighters.
From a mile outside the village, where reporters were turned back by KLA soldiers guarding the road, all that could be seen of Lausa were columns of white smoke rising from the buildings.
Naim Bardiki, a paramedic, aged 27, who returned from Germany to fight in Kosovo, said: "The Serbs attacked us with too many forces. We tried to resist. We are still trying to resist. They want to clear the area of soldiers and civilians between the cities of Pristina, Pec and Metrovica. They cannot do that until they have killed every soldier in our army."
Not far from Lausa, in a shallow wooded valley near the village of Vrbovc, more than 1,000 refugees were camped out in insanitary conditions, with only a dirty stream as a water supply. Some had spent up to three weeks in the open. Yesterday two carloads of aid arrived from the Red Cross - the first relief agency to reach them.
Nato's plans to intervene in Kosovo are still being fine-tuned, after the secretary-general, Javier Solana, asked for more flexibility. The options range from the full use of air power against Serb forces - with Nato establishing safe zones inside Kosovo - down to preventive deployment in Albania and Macedonia to stop the war spilling over.
But without a political decision to intervene, Nato currently envisages only the long-planned joint manoeuvres in Albania on August 17. These are designed more to familiarise Albanian forces with Nato than to prepare for action in Kosovo.
Yugoslavia's president, Slobodan Milosevic, confident he can continue his war against the rebels with impunity, has called Nato's bluff. He has not been intimidated by the show of force that Nato planes made near Kosovo in April.
The US special envoy, Chris Hill, said yesterday Kosovo was "on the edge of a catastrophe", with 200,000 people fleeing their homes. The UN World Food Programme estimated 70,000 new refugees in the past week.
The Russian deputy foreign minister, Nikolai Afanasyevsky, announced another visit to Belgrade and Kosovo yesterday. But the main diplomatic activity now under way, after an EU team returned last week with Mr Milosevic's assurance that his offensive was over, is the drafting of a range of options for the kind of autonomy Kosovo ought to have as the basis for a lasting settlement.
This should be ready next week, European Union diplomats said yesterday. But it has been ruled out as unrealistic by the KLA and the Albanian government, which said yesterday the war had "gone beyond autonomy". Albania's foreign minister said "the minimum" that would be accepted would be an independent Kosovo in a loose Yugoslav federation.
A devious destroyer
The West must say noLeader
Wednesday August 5, 1998Holiday-makers cram the beaches of the Adriatic and Mediterranean enjoying the sun, and once again - barely 200 miles away in the interior of the continent - tens of thousands of frightened refugees are on the move. They flee artillery shells. They scramble for their tractors. They huddle in heat-soaked ravines without water or food. This is Europe in August, another battle in Slobodan Milosevic's brutal war against the 90 per cent of the population of Kosovo who happen to be Albanian. Using the advantage of the summer break, of media fatigue, and President Clinton's notorious distractions the Yugoslav leader is taking another calculated risk.
Saddam Hussein behaves much the same way with the UN weapons inspectors. A phase of reasonableness is followed by a deliberate ratcheting up of tension. The difference is that while the UN brings its biggest guns - diplomatic with a touch of military menace - to bear on Saddam, Mr Milosevic is under far less pressure. Although the humanitarian disaster he has caused in central Kosovo in the last three weeks is as massive as his attacks on western Kosovo in May, this time the outcry from the outside world is muted. Where is the tough talk of air-strikes which we heard last spring from Western leaders when the offensive around Decani was underway? Where are the crisis meetings of ministers? Where is the UN Security Council?
Mr Milosevic promised everyone he has met over the last two months, including President Yeltsin in Moscow, that he would withdraw his police forces to barracks. He asserted that the Yugoslav army was only there to protect Kosovo's borders. Yet there has been no withdrawal and the Yugoslav army is fully engaged. If it were merely one more case, in a ten-year catalogue of broken promises, of the Yugoslav leader being duplicitous, it would be bad enough. But there is a sneaking sense that the West's ill-considered policies have encouraged him. Anonymous Western officials whisper that they are "privately" pleased that the Kosovo Liberation Army (the military wing of the pro-independence movement) has suffered a defeat. Their views stem from a dangerous recent drift in Western policy which tends to equate the Serb forces with the KLA.
Both sides, it is argued, have to be brought to the negotiating table.
Both have to stop their military action. Obviously a ceasefire is required as soon as possible, but to put the issue in parallel terms is to forget the underlying truth that the KLA represents a majority community and that its tactics are primarily defensive while the Serbs are trying to enforce an undemocratic minority regime by military means. There is no equivalence.
On the political front, the West has also been giving encouragement to Mr Milosevic by its constant insistence that there can be no independence for Kosovo. The Contact Group of five Western governments and Russia has been drafting, under British leadership, a range of possible autonomy options for the Serb-run province. Who would run the police? What sort of electoral system might there be? How can minority rights be guaranteed? All fine and good - except that it rules out the one thing, independence, which Mr Milosevic's brutal war has made the vast majority of Albanians desire. They want out from under the Serb guns, not just now but for ever.
Unless the West changes the political thrust of its strategy and makes clear that it will no longer prejudge the future status of Kosovo, it will only produce what the cunning and deeply-experienced Yugoslav leader is working towards. He wants us first to condone, and then with luck support his position. In this sun- and death-kissed August it is time to say no.--
Kosova Information Centre - London
_______________________________________________________________________Kosovo Update, Tuesday, August 4, 1998, Pristina, Kosovo
Situation Update
Human Misery and a Life-Saving Convoy
Mercy Corps International ran a special convoy today into the municipality of Malisevo/Malisheva, an area hard hit last week when tens of thousands of IDPs fled their homes into the mountains. MCI and the Mother Theresa Society, delivered, along with Hungarian Interchurch Aid, 72 metric tons of flour, 2 tons of milk powder, 2 tons of detergent, 150 cooking stoves, 45 bales of plastic sheeting, 75 sleeping pads, 3,000 jars of baby food and 2,000 sanitary napkins to an area just outside of the village of Terpeze, northeast of Malisevo/Malisheva. Save the Children Fund accompanied the convoy to conduct an assessment of the needs of the children there.
The convoy consisted of three 25-ton trucks, one 10-ton truck and two 4WD vehicles. Permission was received from the police and authorities prior to departure and the convoy left Pristina at 7:00 am. The convoy was allowed to pass the checkpoint at Komoran and turned left about 12 kilometers after that to make it to the villages. Police were professional and courteous, pointing out the correct roads to take.
As the village of Terpeze was virtually empty, the distribution was made outside at a school near the top of the hill. Before leaving the area, tractors had been brought in to make smaller deliveries of the commodities to MTS beneficiaries and IDPs so that the entire distribution would be completed by the evening.
Staff visited IDPs who fled Malisevo/Malisheva last week in a ravine a few kilometers from Terpeze. Off the main road, the group traveled about a half a kilometer and then left the 4WD vehicle and walked along a stream, down a ravine, about another kilometer. Along the stream, families were camped out, scattered along an area estimated to be about one and a half kilometers long. It is estimated that 3,000-4,000 people inhabited this ravine. There are another 10 streams like it in the area with equal numbers of people.
IDPs told staff they had been there for about 10 days. The stream was used for washing while drinking water had to be carried in from a well near the village. Families were grouped, usually two or three families, in make-shift lean-to's built from tree branches, covered with plastic sheeting and often with blankets or sleeping pads on the ground. Stoves, as far as a kilometer down stream, were visible. In the particular area staff visited, two infants and one two year old girl had died in the past week. Most babies had diarreha and children were infected with lice. Commodities most needed included medicines, baby food, flour, and clothing. Conditions in general were filthy with defecation areas being up-hill from living quarters.
The convoy left at 1:40 pm. On the road back, several homes could be spotted with smoke billowing from the roof-tops. Along the entire road, homes and businesses were burned out and shelled. Fields had been burned to the ground, cows and other farm animals wandered about freely while the dead bodies of others lay rotting in the fields.An Invitation to Return
The Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Serbia has issued an invitation to its Albanian citizens to return home. Leaflets, printed in Albanian, have been dropped by plane to tens of thousands of IDPs in the hills. In part, they read:
Invitation
For Albanians to go back to their homes and villagesWe invite you to go back to your homes and villages. We guarantee your safety.
The Serbian government can make a clear distinction between our Albanian citizens and terrorists.
The interest of each citizen is peace in Kosova and Metohija, peace in village and city, peace for your families, women and children.
Terrorist will not bring you any good. Everywhere they bring just ill fortune. They take your villages, they make you take weapons by force, they put shame on your wives and your girls, they take your money for a so-called UCK. They stop roads.We invite you,
Go back to your homes and villages, we guarantee safety for you, for your homes, for your women, children and your families.
Go through the free roads. Show up at the police points found on the roads, show up to the first police station. We will help you to safely arrive to your homes and villages.The Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Serbia.
-----
ju pershendes,
rrezja
NATO Readies Plan for Force in Kosovo
By STEVEN ERLANGER
WASHINGTON -- The United States announced Monday
that NATO has approved plans for the use of military force in the Kosovo
crisis.
The announcement was
intended to push President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia to end the
current offensive against ethnic Albanians in the Serbian province of Kosovo.
"NATO has now approved
a range of contingency plans for the use of military force in this regard,"
the State Department spokesman, James Rubin, said Monday, after American
diplomats in the region said that Kosovo is "on the edge of a humanitarian
catastrophe." Those plans are now being further refined, Rubin said, and
"we expect that work to be done very, very quickly."
At a meeting last week,
the North Atlantic Council, which consists of NATO member representatives,
approved a set of options that are being turned into detailed military
plans, so that NATO forces can act quickly, if required, senior American
and NATO-country officials said.
The planning centers
on air-power options, the officials said, rather than ground troops. NATO
military planners have been asked to draw up a range of more limited targets
for air strikes. The idea, one official said, is to make the potential
use of force more realistic by keeping it more limited, and reducing the
political cost.
"This doesn't mean we're
closer to bombing Serbia Monday than we were a week ago," one NATO-country
diplomat said. "But if Milosevic thinks he can get away with a high level
of violence because NATO would only react to extreme violence, then NATO's
ability to respond to different circumstances will be more subtle and refined."
No official would discuss
what actions by Milosevic would trigger NATO military force. Serbia is
one of two republics that remain in Yugoslavia, and Milosevic was previously
the Serbian leader.
Any use of force would
require a separate political decision by NATO countries, some of which
have said they would prefer U.N. Security Council authorization first.
While not a member of NATO, Russia has said it would veto any such authorization.
Washington says NATO has legal authority to use force, if necessary, without
any further U.N. action.
On Monday, the United
States, the European Union and NATO all demanded a cease-fire in Kosovo
as weekend fighting forced as many as 30,000 ethnic Albanians to flee their
homes in the face of government attacks on their villages. As many as 180,000
people have been displaced since February, said officials of the U.N. high
commissioner for refugees, in a province of about 2 million people that
is 90 percent ethnic Albanian.
Last Friday, the Serbs
said that their offensive against the Kosovo Liberation Army, the ethnic
Albanian rebel group, and its supporters was over. "Their claims," said
Rubin, "are obviously nonsense," describing significant military operations
in at least three areas of Kosovo over the weekend, with the fiercest fighting
in the Decani/Dakovica area, including tanks and artillery.
Since late May, NATO
has been drawing up a series of military options for the Kosovo situation
and warning Milosevic of those plans. In mid-June NATO fighter jets staged
a fly-by over the warring forces in Kosovo, as an aerial show of force
to convince Milosevic to stop the fighting or suffer the consequences.
But as the rebels gained
ground over the last several weeks, NATO officials signaled that they were
reluctant to use military force because that could further help the rebels
in their efforts to win independence from Serbia, which the West does not
support.
In the last two weeks,
the government launched a major new offensive, and NATO planners have been
trying to keep up with the changing situation in Kosovo.
Last week's NATO decision
moves beyond general planning of options -- a land deployment here, or
a set of air strikes there -- to detailed work on how certain options would
actually be carried out.
Rubin's comments Monday
were designed, officials said, to show Milosevic the potential cost of
defying Western opinion and humanitarian standards in his campaign against
the rebel group and the civilian sea in which the insurgency swims. "It
is a reminder, and Milosevic is a person who needs reminding, who often
seems to act against his own interests," a senior American official said.
The West has been frustrated
by Milosevic's pattern of using just enough force to test Western patience,
but then to back off before prompting military intervention. More limited
air options, another official said, would mean "the threshold for using
force is also lowered," presumably making American and NATO threats to
use force more meaningful to Milosevic.
In Manila Monday, Defense
Secretary William Cohen said that military options remained on the table
and warned Milosevic not to engage in "a wanton exercise of power against
innocent civilians."
Among the other military
options are going ahead with scheduled military exercises in Macedonia
and Albania under the Partnership for Peace program, and using ground forces
in Kosovo itself, to save lives or to insure a cease-fire or negotiated
settlement, if one can be reached.
But the early idea of
sending troops to Kosovo's borders, which was a response to fears that
the violence would spread to Macedonia and the entire region, has been
overtaken by a shifting situation in Kosovo.
And there was little
appetite among NATO countries, including the United States, for new troop
deployments in the Balkans, particularly since NATO-led forces already
have an open-ended commitment to insuring a peace settlement in Bosnia.
The focus for military
planning now, officials say, is on a variety of air power options that
could punish Milosevic and his troops or simply try to intimidate them.
Rubin said that while
NATO's political leaders would decide whether military action was needed,
the factors that had made the planning necessary -- the fighting, the refugee
problem and the risk of regional instability -- were getting worse.
The United States had
been endeavoring, through a form of shuttle diplomacy by its ambassador
to Macedonia, Christopher Hill, to start serious negotiations between Milosevic
and a unified team of ethnic Albanian leaders. But the rebel group itself
has at least three regional commands and no clear political leadership
and is dismissive of the major civilian leader in Kosovo, Ibrahim Rugova,
who favors independence through nonviolent means.
The West is also pressing
for a solution -- a form of negotiated self-government for Kosovo within
Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia -- that the ethnic Albanians do not want.
Already, senior Western officials say, the use of the word "autonomy" is
no longer possible with the Kosovo Albanians, who are pressing for an independence
that Milosevic cannot afford, politically, to grant.
Hill said Monday that
Kosovo was on the brink of a humanitarian emergency if the refugees and
displaced people were not allowed to go home in the next week or two, which
are important for the harvest.
"We have an extremely
serious situation here," Hill said in Pristina, the Kosovo capital. "There
have been tens of thousands of displaced people in recent weeks." He added
that the latest offensive against the rebels "has caused even more people
to flee from their homes."
Rubin called on Milosevic
to keep his promises to grant fuller access to the refugees by international
aid agencies. And the NATO secretary-general, Javier Solana, in Warsaw,
urged a cease-fire in Kosovo and the rapid start to serious negotiations
on a peaceful settlement.
The Xinhua General Overseas News Service
AUGUST 4, 1998,
german newspaper reports of mass graves in
kosovo
bonn, august 4;
a german newspaper has reported that four mass
graves have been found near the kosovo town of orahovac where several hundred
ethnic albanian civilians killed by serbian forces about two weeks ago
were buried. a report of the wednesday-edition of the german tageszeitung
newspaper made available ahead of publication quoted eyewitnesses as saying
that more than 560 ethnic albanians, among them about 430 children, were
buried in the mass graves near orahovac some 60 kilometers southwest of
pristina, capital of the conflict-ridden serbian province. the civilians
were said to have been killed by serbian forces at the end of their fighting
with the rebel kosovo liberation army about two week ago. the newspaper
report also said that bulldozers were seen covering two of the four mass
graves with earth tuesday.
----------------------
United Press International
August 4, 1998,
US sees Serb ethnic cleansing in Kosovo
BY SID BALMAN Jr. UPI Diplomatic Writer
The Clinton administration has acknowledged
for the first time that Serbian forces are carrying out the same type of
ethnic cleansing against Albanians in the province of Kosovo that led to
scores of indictments for war crimes in Bosnia- Herzegovina. But
U.S. officials said today that NATO's 16 leaders have not even considered
whether the looming "humanitarian disaster," which could lead to starvation
and permanent homelessness for hundreds of thousands of civilians who have
fled the fighting, would be enough to trigger attacks recently planned
by the alliance against Serbian forces. "It's clear to us the use
of force is directed at one ethnic group," State Department spokesman James
Rubin said. "That looks a lot to us like the kind of ethnic cleansing that
went on before" in Bosnia- Herzegovina. U.S. and European officials
said Monday that NATO military planners have completed a battle plan for
stopping the fighting in the Serbian province of Kosovo that includes a
ban on military flights over the region and the deployment of up to 10,000
soldiers along the borders of Macedonia and Albania. Rubin said today
that the planning had been completed so NATO could jump into action quickly
should the situation on the ground in Kosovo, where the ethnic Albanian
majority is seeking further independence from Belgrade, call for it. But
when pressed on how quickly NATO could act and what would trigger the action,
Rubin said nothing could happen until NATO's 16 leaders discuss the situation
and approve military intervention to end another nation's internal domestic
dispute. Ethnic cleansing is not the only development from
the vicious four- year war in Bosnia-Herzegovina that is being replayed
in Kosovo. The Clinton administration and its Western allies repeatedly
decried the apparent genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina, for which 74 war-crimes
indictments have been issued by a U.N. tribunal in The Hague, but could
not muster the political will to attack until more than 200,000 civilians
died.
------------------- ----
Agence
France Presse
August
04, 1998
Serb forces pillage and burn entire areas of Kosovo
GENEVA, Aug 4 (AFP) - Serb forces
in Kosovo have burned and pillaged entire regions of Kosovo in destruction
which has driven the ethnic Albanian population from their homes, the UN
High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said here Tuesday.
A spokesman for the Geneva-based
refugee agency said Serb tactics were "very much reminiscent of what we
saw in Bosnia.
"Many areas are being de facto depopulated
with some burning and destruction of property which has no military justification,"
said Kris Janowski.
He added the agency "hoped" Serb
forces were not pursuing a policy of ethnic cleansing as was the case during
the Bosnian war at the beginning of the 1990s.
He said that the current offensive
had nevertheless emptied large parts of the troubled province of its population,
without a view to any return in the near future, forcing Serbs and Albanians
into distinct groups.
He estimated the number of displaced
people in Kosovo had reached 200,000, a tenth of the population. Seventy
thousand people have fled their homes during the offensive of the past
days.
"On the one hand", he said, "you've
got the Yugoslav authorities making promises that everybody will be allowed
to go home...The next thing you see, the fighting flares up with double
intensity".
"Whether it's some kind of Machiavellian
policy or just a result of fighting, the outcome is there to see," the
official added.
"Big parts of the country are becoming
empty of people, all there is left is emaciated animals and burning houses.
Under those circumstances there is no way these people are going to go
back any time soon. They are basically terrified."
About 130,000 Albanians are on road
in Kosovo and there are a further 27,000 refugees in Montenegro and 13,000
in Albania. Several thousand Serbs have also left their homes, reaching
the UNHCR's estimated total of about 200,000.
According to Janowski, the number
of refugees increases daily but the fighting is preventing the UN from
mobilising aid locally, and helping those who are displaced.
He pointed out that while 35,000
NATO soldiers were stationed in neighbouring Bosnia to keep the peace,
"another corner of the Balkans is burning and people are on the run". He
did not go as far as to suggest NATO intervention however.
The UNHCR has warned several times
of a repetition in Kosovo of the events in Bosnia, where tens of thousands
of people were displaced and dispersed throughout the countryside while
aid agencies struggled through all kinds of barricades to reach them.
Janowski concluded that almost all
Serbs have now fled the areas which were held by rebel separatists the
Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), while Albanians have left the zones now under
Serb control.
-------------------------------------
The Christian Science Monitor
August 5, 1998,
NATO: Going Easy on Serbs?
Justin Brown, Special to The Christian Science
Monitor
PRISTINA, YUGOSLAVIA
Allowing Serb forces to roll in Kosovo may be
a way to force disunited rebels to come to the table under one flag.
An ongoing military
offensive by Serbian forces in Kosovo has weakened the position of ethnic
Albanians as the international community pushes for peace talks rather
than military intervention.
Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic last week said he would stop the crackdown on Albanian separatists,
but the attacks have continued, forcing thousands to flee and putting Kosovo
"on the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe," according to United States
diplomat Christopher Hill.
The UN estimates 200,000
Kosovars have been displaced since fighting began in late February. Many
of their homes have been torched, and despite promises by Mr. Milosevic,
humanitarian-aid access has been limited. Altogether, more than 400 people,
mostly ethnic Albanians, have died.
On Aug. 3, NATO reportedly
moved closer to approving "contingency plans" to use aerial assaults against
the Serbs, but armed intervention is still unlikely, diplomats say. International
efforts, spearheaded by Mr. Hill, the US ambassador to neighboring Macedonia,
remain focused on initiating talks and negotiating a cease-fire.
In fact, says a Western
diplomatic source who asked not to be identified, the West may have "tacitly"
allowed the Serb offensive out of frustration with the ethnic Albanians'
failure to present a unified front.
In an apparent effort
to gain bargaining leverage, Serbian forces have used their superior firepower
to overrun several strongholds of the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation
Army (KLA), including the town of Malisevo, which was once openly run by
the rebels. The Serbs now control the main roads, including the crucial
east-west artery connecting the provincial capital of Pristina with the
city of Pec.
State-controlled media
in Belgrade have proclaimed a major victory for the Serbian forces. " 'Dogs
of war' in panic after effective actions of security forces in Kosovo,"
read an Aug. 3 headline in the state daily Politika.
Meanwhile, with much
of the land they once controlled having been swallowed by the Serbs, the
independence-seeking guerrillas have retreated to the hills and are engaging
the Serbs with hit-and-run attacks.
The KLA, which is armed
primarily with hand-held machine guns, faces pressure on all fronts. They
are losing on the ground; they have alienated mainstream ethnic Albanian
leaders; and the international community opposes their goal of independence
and the possible formation of a "Greater Albania."
They also have become
burdened by the need to care for refugees, some of whom are the relatives
of KLA fighters.
AT the same time, ethnic
Albanians in Pristina grow increasingly weary of what they perceive to
be ineffective diplomacy on the part of the West, and particularly the
US. Shuttle diplomacy between Belgrade and Pristina has yielded few concrete
results, and the fighting has only escalated.
"The general feeling
is that the West wanted the Serbian offensive to happen," says Muhamet
Hamiti of the pro-Albanian Kosovo Information Center. "They've been looking
for this for some time. They want to pressure the weaker side - that's
us - and force them to talk."
A Western diplomatic
source, who asked to remain anonymous, says the West "tacitly" accepted
the Serb offensive and "did nothing to stop it."
"The people who are
winning now are the Serbs," says the source. "As long as they can gain
another inch, they'll continue fighting. That was the idea of the last
two weeks - to put the KLA in their place before negotiating. That's pretty
effectively been done."
Analysts say the Milosevic
offensive was taken from the Bosnian-war playbook, when the Muslim-Croatian
federation launched a major offensive to gain a favorable position before
the 1995 Dayton peace agreement.
The international community
has been increasingly frustrated with the KLA and its lack of a political
wing with which to negotiate - and may have had reason to want it weakened.
The KLA has split ethnic Albanian support between the pacifist approach
of de facto President Ibrahim Rugova and armed resistance.
The rebels have not
yet said whether they will participate in talks with Belgrade. Mehmet Hajrizi,
the president of a political party with close ties to the KLA, says the
rebels will make a decision on joining a new ethnic Albanian coalition
government this week.
Self-styled KLA spokesman
Jakup Krasniqi says the rebels are "ready to fight until the final victory."
The US and other Western
powers support broad autonomy for Kosovo within Yugoslavia, but not independence.
The region, where Albanians outnumber Serbs 9 to 1, was stripped of its
self-rule in 1989 by then-Serbian President Milosevic.
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: SEEKING SAFETY: Some 70,000 ethnic Albanians from Kosovo's Drenica region fled Aug. 3 and 4 in the face of a Serb offensive some say had 'tacit approval' of the West.
BY OLEG POPOV/REUTERS
-----------------------------------------
August 04, 1998
Financial Times (London)
Balkan bruising
The very ebb and flow of the war
in Kosovo ought to convince both sides that neither is likely to win an
outright military victory. Over the past five months, we have seen, first,
the Serb security forces crack down viciously on the ethnic Albanians,
then the latter's Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) grow in size and gain ground,
and now a sweeping Serb counter-offensive.
These shifts in the tide of war
are partly caused by the outside world. Nato's threat of air strikes initially
appeared to cow the Serbs into showing some restraint, but is now wearing
off as all unfulfilled threats do. Yet for all Nato's hesitation about
intervention, the Albanian separatists probably could count on some form
of direct western assistance if the Serb police and army tried all-out
terror against them.
The outsider might therefore imagine
the moment was ideal for both sides to lay down their arms and start talking,
particularly because the latest bout of fighting has brought the number
of refugees to 200,000. Sadly, it is far more likely that Serb and Kosovar
Albanian will continue to battle it out, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.
Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav
president, has cleverly gauged his counter-offensive to avoid any serious
Nato reaction. He has used weekends to launch operations that just happen
to wind down by the time western diplomats get to their desks on Monday
morning. He has generally restricted his Serb security forces to close-in
attacks on KLA strongpoints, and told European and US envoys last week
that his counter-offensive was over. Yet Serb forces were back in action
over the weekend, and were reported to have reverted to their old habit
of lobbing artillery shells into Albanian villages at long range.
It is not surprising that the western
allies look a bit limp-wristed to Belgrade. In early June they all agreed
to bar JAT, the Yugoslav national carrier, from flying to their countries,
but the European Union countries still have not done so, ostensibly for
procedural reasons.
There is shakiness, too, on the
margin of Nato. Hungary, due to join Nato within the year, has said it
will not allow its soil to be used as a base for any Nato operation in
Kosovo. Hungary, used as a transit base for US troops to Bosnia, is worried
that Mr Milosevic might retaliate against the Hungarian minority in Vojvodina,
a province of Serbia that lost its autonomy at the same time as Kosovo.
The western squeeze on the Kosovar
Albanians is a bit tighter. Switzerland recently became the first country
to prosecute members of the Albanian diaspora for sending money and arms
to the KLA. Meanwhile, the US is continuing to try to pressure the Kosovar
Albanians into fielding a negotiating team that represents the KLA men
in the field as well as the parlour politicians in Pristina.
The west needs to maintain that
pressure on the Kosovar Albanians and to get them to drop their demand
for outright independence. Equally, it must insist Mr Milosevic help refugees
return home as he has pledged to, and that he agree to wide autonomy for
Kosovo. Nothing less will end the war.
----------------------------------------
International Herald Tribune (Neuilly-sur-Seine, France)
August 4, 1998
Kosovo Solution Needs Outside Help;
Q & A /Janez Drnovsek
By Peter S. Green; International Herald Tribune
BODY:
Janez Drnovsek has been prime minister
of Slovenia since 1992. As the conflict between Serbs and ethnic Albanians
in Kosovo approaches all-out war, Slovenia begins a six-month term as chairman
of the UN Security Council. Mr. Drnovsek spoke this weekend with Peter
S. Green of the International Herald Tribune. -
Q. Kosovar militants want Kosovo recognized as an independent state. Slovenia won recognition after its brief war with Yugoslavia. What will you tell the Kosovars?
A. The situation is still very complicated. The main problem is the lack of confidence on both sides, especially on the Albanian side. They don't trust the Serbian leadership. They waited eight years during the Yugoslav crisis for their moment to come. Now they started hostilities, and, if I may say so, it's war. I am quite sure the international community will have to find a solution, not Serbs and Albanians alone. No one can win 100 percent. I think the Albanians in Kosovo will have to accept a certain form of self-governance with international guarantees. What exactly it would be - autonomy or a republic within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia - I can't say at this moment.
Q. And recognition as an independent state? This is what Slovenia asked for and what Bosnia asked for. Why should the Kosovars get less?
A. I do not expect that the position of the international community would be this, at least at the present stage. But it's very legitimate that they claim more, that they claim independence as the Slovenes did. But I must say that I will not say now that Slovenia or I would demand this independence. We would like to find a realistic solution that both sides would accept.
Q. Can Mr. Milosovic be trusted in any dealings with the Kosovars?
A. Only if there is sufficient
power behind (any agreement) that can make it work, so that there will
be consequences if he doesn't follow the agreement. If there is not sufficient
international power and decisiveness behind (it), then it will be
more difficult.
Q. Military power or economic sanctions?
A. He will accept an agreement when he sees that there is no other way, that the international community is united. Then he will accept agreements and also follow them. The economic and financial situation there is very bad, so the question is how long it can go on, especially with the war now in Kosovo. The economic factors are forcing some kind of political solution. I think he needs a solution. He cannot go on with years of war in Kosovo with such an economic situation in Yugoslavia. -
Q. Can you have peace in the Balkans as long as Mr. Milosevic is in any position of power?
A. That's a very difficult
question for me. I don't know if anybody can answer it.
It's true that he started
these politics in the former Yugoslavia, with Kosovo. But he is also pragmatic.
When there is no other choice he accepts pragmatic solutions. So I think
it's possible, and also we see that the opposition in Serbia doesn't have
a very different view about this issue.
Q. Could Slovenia mediate between Serbs and Kosovars?
A. We cannot be directly involved in the negotiations because some people in Serbia still have an emotional approach to who is responsible and who started the war. We always said it was Serbian nationalism, so it would not be a good starting point if Slovenia were a mediator. We could be an adviser to the others.
Q. Slovenia is on the short list for EU membership, but is not in the first round of NATO's planned expansion. Where does that leave you?
A. EU membership is a priority for Slovenia and really it is more important for us. It means a complete economic transformation, and a more far reaching change than NATO membership. And speaking pragmatically, once Slovenia becomes a member of the EU, it's just a formality that it becomes a member of NATO.
Q. What kind of changes do you expect in Slovenia once it joins the EU?
A. First I see that we have no alternative. Seventy percent of our market is in the EU. I don't think there will be a dramatic change. Like other members, we will have some transition periods, but no more than Portugal and less probably than Greece.
04 August 1998
WHITE HOUSE REPORT, TUESDAY, AUGUST 4, 1998
EXCERPTS
(Kosovo, Iraq, Congo, Hispanic Caucus) (770)
White House Deputy Press Secretary Colonel Philip J. Crowley briefed the press on foreign policy issues at early morning and early afternoon sessions.
NATO CONTINGENCY PLANNING CONTINUES ON KOSOVO
NATO contingency planning on Kosovo "continues
and is at a very advanced stage," Crowley said. "We continue to watch a
variety of options on how to deal with the situation. The humanitarian
situation is of increasing concern to us," he said.
He noted that President
Slobodan Milosevic of "the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia" has not honored
a pledge he made late last week. He "pledged to allow greater access for
humanitarian workers to address the situation with respect to displaced
persons. So far his words are not met by actions," Crowley said.
The United States continues
"to believe that the only solution" in Kosovo "is a negotiated one that
provides a political solution that addresses the concerns the Kosovar Albanians
have. Violence is not the answer on either side to resolve the situation
in Kosovo," Crowley said.
.....
________________________________________________
04 August 1998
TRANSCRIPT: STATE DEPT. NOON BRIEFING, AUGUST
4, 1998
EXCERPTS
.......
SERBIA (KOSOVO)
12, 13 NATO finalized options/decision makers/ethnic
cleansing/humanitarian workers/
13, 14 dislocation of people/humanitarian catastrophe/finalizing
plans/political leaders decision
...
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
DAILY PRESS BRIEFING
TUESDAY, AUGUST 4, 1998
(ON THE RECORD UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED)
....
Q: A quick follow up -- do you have any reason to discount -- as you discounted Mr. Milosevic's claims yesterday to halt his offensive - the Rwandan Government's claims to have no involvement in what's going on now?
RUBIN: Well, I would have to check the evidentiary
base on that before I gave you a considered answer. We want to make clear,
however, that we don't believe that governments should be intervening in
the internal affairs of their neighbors. That's not something that we advocate.
...
Q: To take you away from this subject, if you're willing to go to Kosovo or at least discuss it.
RUBIN: Yes.
Q: It may be contrived a bit, but people in Brussels don't think anything really new has happened. This is in reference to what you were saying yesterday about contingency planning. I wondered if we could - I have to challenge what you said because, as I say, what they say doesn't really, to me, seem so different from what you say.
RUBIN: Right. What I was trying to indicate yesterday
is that the process is being finalized, and NATO has taken a look at a
set of options and finalized those options. With the changing situation
on the ground, refinements were sought in recent days to a set of options
that had been finalized. The point of all this is to minimize the time
between a decision by the political decision-makers and the time when NATO
would be in a position to act. So these plans are being both finalized
and operationalized so that NATO will be in a position to act quickly if
a political decision to do so is made.
What I am suggesting
and was suggesting yesterday is that the final touches are being put on
the contingency plans. They do have to be adjusted based on the situation
on the ground; and the situation does change. So I'm familiar with some
of the - how should I say - the technical distinctions between particular
words as used, but the point is the same - we're finalizing the plans.
Q: (Inaudible) - if you use the word contingency, I don't know what the issue is. However, let's just go through a little bit of a checklist - no consultation yet with those political leaders yet on action, right? And you did use the word operational - that seems to move it a little bit.
RUBIN: No, again, it's a term of art for the people who work on the planning, and that means operationalizing the planning so that if political leaders make a decision, you can quickly act rather than when political leaders make a decision then having to be in a position to organize yourself to act.
Q: Those are questions -- (inaudible) -- this really is a bit -- former Yugoslav military spokesman who has written, I guess in a Yugoslav newspaper, that essentially what the West has done is given Milosevic a green light for 30 days -- I don't know if you've seen this - to suppress the really wild, radical liberation secession forces. In a sense, what he's saying is that they have license, the Serbs, to do a little messing up -- provided they don't do ethnic cleansing.
RUBIN: That is a ridiculous claim; the short answer
is absolutely not. The United States and the international community have
publicly and privately demanded that Milosevic cease his offensive operations
in Kosovo. The continuing Serb offensive is exacting an unacceptable toll
on human suffering. We could not condone and would never condone this irresponsible
behavior by Milosevic's forces.
We will continue to
bring that message to him in the strongest possible terms.
Q: Would you say what he's doing is ethnic cleansing?
RUBIN: I gather there are -- Roy Gutman is not
here with us today, but there are many people who have different terms
-- think that term of art has an elaborate set of meanings. What I can
tell you is that it's clear to us that the objective of the use of force
is directed at one ethnic group -- the Kosovar Albanians; and inhumane
and irresponsible and unacceptable means are being taken by the Serb forces
in pursuit of their military objectives against one ethnic group.
But with respect to
making a flat statement about the term "ethnic cleansing," look -- they
are moving people around; they are forcing people to leave their homes;
they are killing people based on their ethnicity.
Q: At one point you -- I think it was you -- said that, at the beginning, it looks a lot like the old movie ethnic cleansing to us.
RUBIN: It does, absolutely.
Q: So is there some hesitation in --
RUBIN: Again, I gather that when you use that term, a bunch of lawyers start examining what its meaning is, and I'm trying to communicate to you in English rather than letting the lawyers nit pick it to death. An ethnic group is being attacked and moved from their homes and killed because of their ethnicity; and that looks a lot to us like the kind of ethnic cleansing that went on before. That is why we are demanding that he stop and that he allow the humanitarian workers the access they need to do their job to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe.
Q: Not to belabor this, but you just sort of said an interesting thing which makes us -- do you then believe that none of these people are being moved or attacked because of their insurgency against the authorities of this region?
RUBIN: No, I don't think that. But what I think is that the disproportionate methods being used to pursue some limited objective like clearing a roadblock is causing massive dislocations of people who live there; and this is an unacceptable action on the part of Milosevic. That doesn't mean that there isn't some ability to clean a road or to clear a roadblock that we could legitimately dispute; but when the tactics are so disproportionate that they're causing this kind of humanitarian suffering and may well cause a genuine humanitarian catastrophe, that is what we are condemning and that is what we regard as unacceptable.
Q: Then why doesn't NATO act to stop this stuff that looks like ethnic cleansing?
RUBIN: I don't believe that was the standard that we've set. What we've said to you all before is that there are two factors that led to the decision to engage in military planning. Let me say this -- Milosevic's failure to respond to the basic demands of the international community for unrestricted access to the displaced persons and stopping the offensive is keeping planning for possible military action on the front burner. So the reasons why the planning began is because of the risks of instability in the region, from refugees spilling over or fighting spilling over, as well as the humanitarian dimension. Those two factors is what generated the military planning and will obviously be important in any decision-making that's made by the political leaders.
Q: I guess what I'm trying to get at is everybody sort of raise it in their stories that appeared today. So what would be the triggering event?
RUBIN: I don't intend to preview that publicly. We are finalizing and working on a set of contingencies, including limited contingencies, that are designed to give us the flexibility; and if we decide that we want to make some specific trigger, we'll decide that ourselves and make that known either privately or publicly. But what I'm telling you is that I don't intend to set that publicly right now, other than to say that we're finalizing the plans.
Q: And you said that the intention in finalizing and operationalizing these plans was so that you could do something quickly if you needed it. But then you're not going to go ahead and try to get the political decision to do it if necessary in advance, which would streamline it - which is probably the biggest hurdle, in my humble opinion - it's the biggest hurdle to any action --
RUBIN: I don't want to prejudge what political leaders will do in terms of triggers and anything like that. Certainly political leaders can make a decision that if x, y or z happens then a, b or c will happen. But I don't want to prefigure in public a discussion of military contingencies like that.
Q: I think we're out of questions. Jamie, we want to say you're going to great strides to let Foley brief, but we want to wish you the very best in what seems to be a very, very long weekend.
RUBIN: Well, I do have a very important personal engagement that is of vital and critical interest to me.
Q: We're going to miss you, but we wish you the very best and one of our confederates here wants to mark the occasion.
RUBIN: Uh-oh --
Q: A little thing for you and a little thing for your about-to-be better half.
RUBIN: Terrific. Well, I'd better wait to open it with her.
Q: Oh, you can open it now.
RUBIN: Thank you very much.
Q: Bye-bye.
(end transcript)
Taken without permission, for fair use only.
NATO OKs Firepower Plans for Kosovo
Kosovo fighting rages, despite West's pleas
Vise Closing on Kosovo, But West Remains Silent
Serbs hail victory over Kosovo rebels
US renews threats over Kosovo
___________________________________
Tuesday August 4 7:56 AM EDT
NATO OKs Firepower Plans for Kosovo
BARRY SCHWEID AP Diplomatic Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Clinton administration says
NATO has approved contingency plans to use firepower against advancing
Serb forces in Kosovo and that a "humanitarian catastrophe" could envelop
tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians who have fled their homes.
The plans, which are
centered on an aerial assault, are in the process of undergoing final "refinements,"
State Department spokesman, James P. Rubin, said Monday. He called the
development important.
A NATO official, speaking
from the organization's headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, said that "by
next week all the planning will be more or less finished."
The NATO Council sought
to demonstrate its resolve to Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic by
postponing its usual August vacation, State Department officials said.
There was no immediate
word on what would trigger an attack by NATO. Nor was it clear whether
the administration was trying mostly to unnerve Milosevic by raising the
threat again publicly.
In Kosovo, a weekend
of fighting displaced tens of thousands of people, some of them forced
to take refuge in forests outside towns and beyond the immediate reach
of relief organizations.
"The living conditions
are clearly deplorable," Rubin said. "What I'm talking about is the humanitarian
catastrophe that could occur in a matter of weeks if we don't get the aid
to the people who are in desperate need."
The offensive broke
a pledge by Milosevic to halt Serb attacks so U.S. and European diplomats
could try to arrange talks for a settlement between Belgrade and ethnic
Albanian insurgents in the Serbian province.
State Department officials
declined to offer analyses on whether Milosevic was trying to strengthen
his negotiating hand by making territorial gains or was trying to rupture
the diplomatic drive.
Instead, they raised
the possibility that NATO may strike the Serbs to assist the beleaguered
ethnic Albanian civilians.
A NATO bombardment helped
drive Milosevic and the Yugoslav Republic into negotiations to end an ethnic
war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995.
But Croats and Muslims
in that conflict had already fought Serb insurgents to a virtual draw on
the ground, proving to Belgrade that it could not win a clear-cut victory
in Bosnia.
A senior U.S. official
emphasized that the current planning is focused on an air attack. The use
of ground forces could be far more controversial and difficult to put in
place.
Rubin said an attack
would not have to be approved by all of the six countries that make up
the contact group on the former Yugoslavia - the United States, Russia,
Britain, France, Germany and Italy. He noted Russia's opposition to using
force against the Serbs was well-known.
___________________________________
Tuesday August 4 3:55 PM EDT
Kosovo fighting rages, despite West's pleas
Mark Heinrich
PRISTINA, Serbia (Reuters) - Serbian security
forces kept up their drive against ethnic Albanian guerrillas in Kosovo
on Tuesday with no sign that the demands of Western powers for a cease-fire
were having effect.
One U.N. agency said
the Serbian attacks were depopulating the province. Another more than doubled
-- to 70,000 -- its estimate of the number of people displaced by fighting
over the past week alone.
But Serbia's prime minister
said the crackdown was justified and vowed to push on to victory.
"We are fighting terrorism
decisively and uncompromisingly," Mirko Marjanovic was quoted as saying
by the official Tanjug news agency. "We shall win this battle."
In central Kosovo, a
Serbian province with a 90 percent ethnic Albanian majority, fighting continued
unabated.
From the center of Donje
Prekaze, a village controlled by Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) fighters
and under sniper fire from Serbian forces, huge plumes of smoke could be
seen along the skyline near neighboring Lausa.
A Reuters reporter in
the village saw houses on fire in the distance and came across hundreds
of refugees, many children, fleeing the violence.
Guerrillas said the
area had been shelled by Serbian forces during the past 18 hours.
Tanjug reported that
"terrorists" -- its term for the KLA -- had been "neutralized" at Lausa,
west of the provincial capital Pristina.
Ethnic Albanian sources
also reported fighting in the far west, near the border with lawless northern
Albania.
The new drive by Serbian
forces, which started on Sunday, came despite a pledge by Yugoslav President
Slobodan Milosevic that a fierce offensive launched late in July was over.
It triggered new demands from the West for a cease-fire.
Western powers have
demanded that Serbia halt its offensive, with the United States warning
that NATO was fine-tuning plans for the crisis which could be ready "very,
very quickly."
U.S. State Department
spokesman James Rubin declined to say what NATO's plans were, but NATO
foreign ministers in late May asked military experts to look at possible
preventive deployments in Albania and Macedonia, which border Kosovo.
Rubin had said that
NATO had already approved the plans, but diplomats in Brussels said they
were still being worked on.
Fearing a humanitarian
catastrophe, the European Union and the United States have both demanded
that Milosevic stick to his promise to end the offensive against the separatists.
The United Nations World
Food Program in Rome said as many as 70,000 people had fled the fighting
over the past week and that many were running out of food and water.
Estimates of the number
of people displaced within the province and fleeing abroad since clashes
began in February are now of the order of 180,000.
In Geneva, U.N. refugee
agency (UNHCR) spokesman Kris Janowski stopped short of accusing Serbian
forces of ethnic cleansing but said the fighting was having the same effect.
"I hope this is not
their goal, because that would be pure lunacy," he said. "But the outcome
of what they have been doing amounts to depopulation in many areas of Kosovo."
Reuters reporters in
the field over the past three days have seen huge numbers of refugees huddled
in farm houses and on hillsides and fleeing across rugged territory from
shelling.
U.S. envoy Chris Hill
said Kosovo was on the "edge of a humanitarian catastrophe" if refugees
were unable to return to their homes in the next week or two.
Russia, a traditional
Serb ally which opposes foreign military intervention in Kosovo, is to
send its deputy foreign minister to Belgrade on Wednesday to step up diplomatic
efforts, the Foreign Ministry said.
Nikolai Afanasyevsky,
a regular visitor to Belgrade in recent months, will also visit Pristina
for talks with ethnic Albanian officials.
___________________________________
Vise Closing on Kosovo, But West Remains Silent
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, August 4, 1998; Page A10
STIMLJE, Yugoslavia, Aug. 3—A group of policemen
had just skittered down the hillside from a brightly burning house south
of here today when several reporters approached them.
Why was the house aflame?
"Because it is wood," one of the policemen said after a long pause.
How did the fire start?
"I don't know; they must have been smoking," he added with a grin.
As scores of ethnic-Albanian
towns burn on the 11th day of a huge assault by Yugoslav army and Interior
Ministry troops in Kosovo province, the government has adopted the policeman's
approach to dealing with repeated Western calls to halt the offensive and
negotiate a peaceful settlement to local separatist demands. Officials
consistently say the artillery, mortar and machine-gun fire that has destroyed
more than a hundred villages, killed hundreds of civilians and pushed more
than 200,000 others from their homes was provoked by "terrorists" with
the Kosovo Liberation Army, an ethnic-Albanian separatist force.
This strategy of blaming
the other guy, an approach that the Yugoslav government honed during the
1992-1995 war in Bosnia, has worked perfectly during the last two weeks
in Kosovo -- a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia's dominant republic. Despite
ferocious attacks by Yugoslav army troops against Kosovo's ethnic-Albanian
majority -- something that Western officials once said would provoke an
angry response -- capitals from Washington to Paris to Moscow have largely
been quiet recently.
A series of demands
made on June 13 by members of the "contact group" of six Western nations
concerned with the Balkans has never been fulfilled, including a call that
the Belgrade government "cease all action affecting the civilian population,"
permit an unimpeded supply of humanitarian aid to the region and allow
continuous monitoring of the events in Kosovo by foreign diplomats.
Two-and-a-half months
later, such Western saber rattling, which culminated in a highly publicized
five-hour demonstration of NATO air power over neighboring Albania and
Macedonia, has not been repeated. And the angry diplomacy of a month ago,
when Britain proposed a U.N. Security Council resolution that would have
cleared the way for possible military strikes, ebbed and never flowed again.
While rhetorical expressions
of Western concern have come and gone, one of the many players in this
diplomatic and military tangle has never faltered: Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic has through diligent but consistent effort been able to place
the military leaders of the insurgency in a vise, and now he is beginning
to turn the handle.
In the past few days,
more than a dozen villages formerly held by the rebels have been shelled
into submission -- or the state of destruction and depopulation that counts
for submission in this conflict. Jablanica and Smonica, villages in western
Kosovo that had been furiously fought over, fell to paramilitary police
units today. A highway between the capital, Pristina, and the town of Prizren
came under police control this afternoon, after a lengthy series of battles
destroyed houses along much of the route.
Ethnic Albanians, who
make up 90 percent of Kosovo's population but control none of its levers
of power, have an explanation for what they see as a recent disastrous
turn of events. It is due, they claim, to "the green light" -- an alleged
secret decision by Western governments to support a vigorous assault on
the Kosovo Liberation Army so its extremist leaders will lay down their
arms and sign a deal that grants Kosovo some autonomy -- but not the independence
that most of the population craves.
U.S. officials deny
that any Western nation could have made such an encouraging offer to Milosevic,
a man who State Department spokesman James P. Rubin recently declared had
"done great damage to the world and his country." They say that the lack
of action to stop the Yugoslav assault cannot be explained so simply; rather,
they say, its roots lie in several factors:
The Yugoslav government
initially said that the principal aim of its current offensive was to regain
control of the major highways in Kosovo, a goal that many Western military
officials said they consider reasonable. "Every nation has the right to
control its highways," said a high-ranking U.S. official as the offensive
got underway.
But in Kosovo, the idea
seems absurd -- or at least impractical. The highways run through remote
canyons and hills that can be readily seized by the rebels, however briefly.
As a police commander on the Pristina-Prizren road said with a sigh today:
"Every day we fight to get it, and then during the night the KLA takes
it back. We are fighting again to get it again."
Moreover, last week's
offensive not only targeted highways but sought to crush every major rebel
headquarters and capture or kill as many rebels and sympathizers as possible.
Serbian forces overran the town of Malisevo, a rebel stronghold; are continuing
the siege of another at Junik; and have arrested hundreds of residents
of the town of Orahovac.
The Serbs have cast
their action as having been provoked by the Kosovo Liberation Army and
as being aimed solely at defeating it. At the outset of the offensive,
for example, rebel units were said to have tried to take over Orahovac,
which the Serbs attacked with overwhelming force. It was hard, one senior
U.S. official said, for the Clinton administration to criticize Milosevic's
forces for merely trying to hold on to the town.
But rebel leaders have
since disputed that they sought to capture the city and that in any event
Yugoslav security forces have responded disproportionately to any provocation,
at Orahovac or elsewhere.
A senior U.S. Defense
Department official who briefed reporters on July 15 noted that "we're
not anywhere near making a decision for any kind of armed intervention
in Kosovo right now." He listed only one thing that might trigger a policy
change: "I think if some levels of atrocities were reached that would be
intolerable, that would probably be a trigger."
No sustained or large-scale
atrocities have been proven in the latest offensive, moving more than one
Western official to comment about the Yugoslav government's restraint.
But independent assessments of damage and casualties have not been possible
because most foreigners have been kept at bay by police checkpoints all
over Kosovo. Access has been provided once the fighting is over, but there
are often indications that special effort has been made to cleanse sites
of any corpses.
Perhaps the chief reason
Western governments have been reluctant to intervene to halt the offensive
is that none shares the aspiration of virtually every ethnic Albanian in
Kosovo -- to win an independent state. The common wisdom in Washington
and allied capitals is that this would provoke a regional disaster by giving
rise to renewed nationalism among ethnic Albanians in the Yugoslav republic
of Montenegro and in neighboring Macedonia. Any attempt by them to unite
would provoke wider bloodshed, U.S. officials have said.
"There is a sense of
not wanting to help a group whose values and goals we don't share," said
a senior U.S. policymaker.
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
___________________________________
THE TIMES
August 4 1998
Tom Walker in Belgrade
Serbs hail victory over Kosovo rebels
THE Serbian state media machine yesterday confidently
predicted the end of the Kosovo Liberation Army as security forces mopped
up the last pockets of guerrilla resistance.
They carried out their
scorched-earth policy against ethnic Albanian towns oblivious to the negative
publicity of Western television pictures showing an ever-larger exodus
of Kosovan villagers.
The United Nations refugee
agency said thousands more were made homeless at the weekend. It put the
total number displaced since the conflict in Kosovo began in March at more
than 180,000.
Despite calls by the
European Union and Washington for an immediate ceasefire, Serbian artillery
continued a bombardment and columns of smoke from burning villages were
visible against the skyline in the territory cut off to the media.
In Belgrade there was
little contrition over the destruction and hardly any mention of the looming
humanitarian catastrophe. The regime believes it has safely circumvented
the threat of Nato intervention and many of those entitled to speak to
the media were away on holiday. The Information Minister was watching basketball
in Greece; the Socialist Party spokesman was on a three-week break, and
neither the Kosovo republic authorities nor Federal Yugoslav ministries
could explain how President Milosevic's apparent willingness last week
to halt the offensive was transformed into fresh attacks along several
fronts.
"The Albanians are in
great confusion," crowed Politika, the main government daily. "They are
nearly entirely defeated." The newspaper praised the police and Yugoslav
Army, and derided the KLA as having only a few units capable of effective
action, usually trained by foreign mercenaries. "Otherwise, they are just
groups of villagers who attack police patrols," it declared.
The paper quoted Ljubisa
Stevanovic, the Mayor of Prizren, as saying: "The Serbian people of Kosovo
and Metohija have shown once more the heroism they have never lacked in
their history."
Checking just what was
going on was too hazardous or rendered impossible by police roadblocks,
which stopped monitors of the five-nation Contact Group, UN personnel,
aid workers and journalists from venturing outside Pristina on either the
main roads west or south.
"The West was naive
in thinking that it could just let [Mr Milosevic] tip the military balance
and then call a halt," said Dejan Anastasievic, a journalist with the Belgrade
independent magazine Vreme. "A military offensive is not a car and you
can't just apply the brakes."
There is intense speculation
as to the KLA's strategy after this series of setbacks. The guerrillas
are thought to have put too much faith in Washington, especially after
Richard Holbrooke, America's leading Balkan peace envoy, visited the KLA
border command at Junik.
The KLA is also bitterly
divided between pragmatists and Marxist-Leninist ideologues who are pushing
for a greater Albania.
The latter faction is
said to have opposed all negotiations, and made the error of electing to
attack Orahovac, the first town targeted by the KLA in Kosovo, two weeks
ago. That gave the Serbs the excuse for a counter-offensive.
"The boat sank for these
Marxist-Leninist types a long time ago," an American diplomat said. "There
are a lot of bitter people out there, some of whom have worked in Europe.
They come back from a shoe factory in Denmark or somewhere as poets and
wannabe warriors."
However, Mr Anastasievic
gave a warning that the ragtag band, far from disappearing, could now emerge
as a real terrorist group, involved in kidnappings and planting car bombs.
"You'll get a type of Kosovo PLO [Palestine Liberation Organisation],"
he said.
In the meantime President
Milosevic is left with the same problem - a Kosovo in which 90 per cent
of the population is ethnic Albanian and hostile to Serb rule.
"Does the state of Serbia
want to keep its Albanian citizens, and does it want to keep Kosovo? There's
a basic contradiction there," Mr Anastasievic said.
___________________________________
Tuesday, August 4, 1998 Published at 10:10 GMT 11:10 UK
US renews threats over Kosovo
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has been
warned that the renewed Serbian offensive in Kosovo may prompt a Nato military
response.
As thousands more ethnic
Albanians fled their homes to escape the Serbian advance, the US State
Department said Nato had approved a range of contingency plans for the
possible use of force.
Without giving details,
spokesman James Rubin said the plans were being fine-tuned at the request
of Nato Secretary-General Javier Solana.
Mr Rubin said they could
be ready "very, very quickly".
He added: "I hope President
Milosevic understands this."
But Austrian Foreign
Minister Wolfgang Schuessel - whose country holds the European Union presidency
- insisted: "There is no military solution possible - only the possibility
of a negotiated solution.
"The earlier Mr Milosevic
gets this idea, the better."
Mr Schuessel said he
feared a humanitarian disaster in the province.
"We have to send a clear
message to President Milosevic.
"What he promised to
do was to end excessive violence against civilians - and he did the contrary.
You cannot trust him."
Mr Rubin said it was
up to Nato's political leaders to decide whether action was needed.
But he said that the
two factors which had made the military planning necessary - the refugee
problem and the risk of regional instability - were worsening.
The United Nations refugee
agency (UNHCR) estimates that at least 30,000 people have fled their homes
over the weekend, bringing the total number displaced to almost 200,000.
Nato foreign ministers
asked military experts in May to look at possible preventive deployments
in Albania and the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia.
But correspondents say
the West has backed away from talk of force since then, partly because
Russia opposes it.
Doubt over ceasefire
Last week Mr Milosevic told EU diplomats that
Serbian military operations in Kosovo would end.
But fighting in the
province flared up again over the weekend.
A BBC correspondent
in Kosovo, Jeremy Cooke, says it is clear the Serbian offensive is continuing
and that Kosovo Liberation Army defences and trench lines have again been
overrun.
Serb authorities have
invited refugees to return.
But the BBC's correspondent
says that several hundred who went back to their homes in the village of
Arahovac found them burned down or destroyed by shelling.
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