6/13/99 Itar-Tass "....Russia proceeds from a principle of no direct subordination to NATO in the deployment of its contingent in Kosovo, First Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Avdeyev said in the RTR Zerkalo television program on Sunday. "The most complicated diplomatic work is behind a possible agreement to deploy the Russian contingent," he noted. It is necessary to achieve at the diplomatic level worthy conditions for the Russian contingent in Kosovo. "The worthy conditions are not only the maintenance but also the political significance that must be attached to the introduction of our troops," he said....."

Xinhua News Agency 6/13/99 "....Russia on Sunday accused NATO of not observing the provisions of the UN Security Council resolution on Kosovo or the military technical agreements with the Yugoslav military leadership. A high-ranking Defense Ministry official said NATO does not observe the provision "on the impermissibility of security vacuum and the disarmament of the Kosovo Liberation Army," the Interfax news agency reported. The ministry believes that such a violation of obligations "is creating an explosive situation and threatening the lives of Russian troops that entered Pristina." ..."

6/13/99 AFP "...Three Serb soldiers were killed Sunday in the southern Kosovo town of Prizren by German members of the Kosovo peacekeeping force in an exchange of gunfire, witnesses told AFP...."

Associated Press 6/13/99 "....German troops came under heavy sniper fire Sunday in this southern Kosovo city and killed at least one armed man and wounded another in the firefight. A German soldier suffered an arm wound. Other German peacekeepers had been greeted earlier by cheering ethnic Albanians when they entered Prizren, Kosovo's second-largest city, in Germany's first major military deployment on foreign soil since World War II. In the shooting incident, a German convoy was moving down a road along the Bistrica River near the main square when sniper fire crackled from a hill and houses. German soldiers took cover and began shooting back. The Germans' heavy fire blasted a yellow Lada car with two occupants. One was slumped dead over the steering wheel and the other was badly wounded and screaming for help before he was evacuated by German medics...."

6/13/99 UPI "...At least three people have died in connection with the NATO peacekeeping operation in Kosovo as the alliance continued to bolster its forces. A Serb policeman, a German journalist and a Yugoslav civilian were all shot to death in separate incidents in the province, where ethnic Albanians are welcoming the arrival of the KFOR military operation...."

6/13/99 AFP "...German forces on Sunday entered Kosovo from Albania, at times literally pushing the Yugoslav army before them as Serb civilians in packed cars squeezed in between light and armored vehicles from both sides..."

UPI 6/13/99 "...Two senior British ministers have voiced strong opposition to a partition of Kosovo amid the standoff over Russia's peacekeeping role in the Yugoslav province. "We are having discussions with the Russians on their aspirations but there is not going to be any partition," Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told GMTV today. "We are not going to tolerate an East German solution,"..."

ITAR-TASS 6/12/99 Freeper jimbo123 "....Russian general Viktor Zavarzin and KFOR operation commander general Mike Jackson met late on Saturday to discuss interaction in the peacekeeping opeartion in Kosovo. They discussed variants of joint use of Slatina airport which is under control of Russian troops now, but in prospect can be used for common purposes of stabilisation, he noted...."

stratfor.com 6/12/99 "...2225 GMT, 990612 - A meeting between NATO commander Lt. Gen. Michael Jackson and Russian Col. Gen. Viktor Zavarzin has resulted in the partitioning of the Pristina airport. After emerging from the meeting, officials announced they had reached a compromise. The agreement leaves control of the southern portion of the airport to British troops, while Russian forces will occupy the rest...."

Reuters 612/99 Freeper jimbo123 "...NATO troops massed outside the Kosovo capital Saturday night as their commanders haggled with the Russians over control of Pristina airport where the alliance plans to set up its headquarters. The main NATO column made up of British troops stretched for miles as it trundled through tunnels and over bridges on the main southern highway cutting through the mountainous Kosovo countryside to Pristina. The column drew to a halt for the night just six miles (10 km) outside of Pristina to await further orders...."

Electronic Telegraph (U.K.) 6/13/99 Andrew Gilligan "...THE horrors awaiting Nato troops in the next few days are "far greater than anyone thinks", according to Britain's most senior official in charge of war crimes. David Gowan, who has access to some of the latest surveillance and intelligence information, said: "The scale of the criminality is enormous. The number of people who have been murdered is greater than we think by far. It is going to be chilling." Mr Gowan, Kosovo war crimes co-ordinator at the Foreign Office, will reach Pristina as early as tomorrow to lead Britain's war crimes effort. The Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, has said catching war criminals will have the highest priority....The worst criminality is believed to have taken place in south-west Kosovo, near the Albanian border, with the northern region the least affected. Mr Blewitt said that there was "no evidence" so far of organised concentration camps inside Kosovo, with most murder victims apparently killed in or near their home villages...."

Reuters 6/12/99 via NewsEdge Corporation "...The FBI is sending teams of forensic experts to Kosovo to examine sites of suspected massacres for evidence of war crimes, Federal Bureau of Investigation director Louis J. Freeh said Saturday. ``The FBI will use its entire range of resources to gather any evidence of atrocities in Kosovo and present any such findings to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICT)'' Freeh said in statement. The first contingent of 25 FBI personnel was scheduled to fly to Europe Saturday and will begin to identify possible massacre sites in Kosovo once those sites can be secured by NATO forces, Freeh said....."

AP via Newsday 6/1/2/99 Candice Hughes "...Streaming into Kosovo's capital, almost unopposed by retreating Serbs, NATO peacekeepers came face-to-face Saturday with the Russian troops who beat them to the city. A U.S. official said the meeting heralded ``a coordinated occupation,'' but some reports described tense moments between the NATO and Russian forces...."

Strator.com 6/14/99 "...0045 GMT, 990614 - Yugoslavia's Prime Minister announced that the state of war in Yugoslavia would not be lifted until after the situation in Kosovo has been stabilized. Momir Bulatovic said that "Security structures as provided for by the UN Security Council resolution must be in place and security must be guaranteed for all citizens." He also said that Yugoslavia had accepted a compromise and had not surrendered: "The aggressors, too, accepted compromises and the UN Security Council resolution protects the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and rules out any possible independence of Kosovo." ...."

STRATFOR.COM 6/13/99 "...0410 GMT, 990614 - British Defense Secretary George Robertson has threatened Russia with financial retaliation if it did not back down on Kosovo. Robertson said on the BBC that ``A continued disunity...on display in Moscow...would hardly encourage the financial community next week when they are looking to financially help Russia'' at the G8 meeting...."

Stratfor.com 6/13/99 "...2225 GMT, 990613 - According to a source outside of the NATO air base at Aviano, NATO aircraft sortied on Sunday, June 13, between 6:45 pm and 8:30 pm local time. This included 2 E-6 Prowlers, 6 F-16s, 2 F-18s, loaded with full ordinance packs. Three A-10s also took off. The planes returned without ordinance. One F-15 appeared to have been damaged and was approached by fire and ambulance immediately upon landing. The observer reported extremely heavy security, in excess of any seen during the war itself. We cannot confirm or deny this report but are passing it on as it is sufficiently detailed to be credible and will provide NATO spokesmen an opportunity to confirm or deny the report. It seems to indicate that combat sorties have resumed or that intense training is going on during a period one would expect to be devoted to R&R...."

Drudge 6/2/99 XINHUA "...The supreme commander of NATO, Wesley Clark, said Wednesday in the Macedonian capital of Skopje that NATO troops will enter Kosovo in just a few days. He made the remark after meeting with Macedonian President Kiro Gligorov. Clark said that he discussed with Gligorov the issue of increasing NATO troops in the country and the situation in Kosovo...."

REUTERS FoxNews 6/2/99 "...Kosovo rebels engaged in a major offensive have received their first known NATO air support in an unsuccessful bid to seize Serbian territory along the Albanian border, the Washington Post reported Wednesday. Quoting unidentified U.S. intelligence and military officials, the newspaper said Operation Arrow, involving up to 4,000 Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas, was launched last week. ..... A senior U.S. intelligence official told the newspaper the offensive - the rebels' first major assault in a year - also was meant to show NATO and Yugoslavia that the rebels were ''still in the fight.'' The assault was foiled, however, by heavy Yugoslav artillery and agile counterattacks by Yugoslav troops, the officials reported...."

WorldNetDaily 6/2/99 Linda Bowles "...The realization is beginning to seep into the consciousness of a majority of Americans that the United States is engaged in something senseless and tragic. A new USA Today/CNN Gallup Poll finds that 57 percent of those surveyed oppose the use of U.S. ground troops in Kosovo as part of a NATO invasion force. A resounding 82 percent support a bombing pause to help bring about negotiations for peace. However, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, speaking for the president, says we will not negotiate. In effect, Yugoslavia must agree to our demands or be bombed out of existence, period...."

WorldNetDaily 6/2/99 Linda Bowles "...The realization is beginning to seep into the consciousness of a majority of Americans that the United States is engaged in something senseless and tragic. A new USA Today/CNN Gallup Poll finds that 57 percent of those surveyed oppose the use of U.S. ground troops in Kosovo as part of a NATO invasion force. A resounding 82 percent support a bombing pause to help bring about negotiations for peace. However, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, speaking for the president, says we will not negotiate. In effect, Yugoslavia must agree to our demands or be bombed out of existence, period...."

6/2/99 UPI Freeper Thanatos "...Macedonia appears to have thrown a monkey wrench into NATO's contingency plans for imposing a settlement in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo. The prime minister of the tiny Balkan nation to the south of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Ljubco Georgievski, informed Secretary of State Madeleine Albright today that NATO could double its presence in Macedonia to 30,000 troops. The alliance agreed Tuesday that 50,000 soldiers would be needed for a peacekeeping mission in Kosovo if Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic accepted NATO demands for a settlement. American military planners say the remainder of the force would be deployed in Albania and possibly Hungary. But NATO officials said the Macedonian prime minister flatly rebuffed efforts to win permission to launch a ground invasion from its territory, telling Albright such action would require a political decision by the government backed by an act of Parliament...."

Itar-Tass 6/12/99 "...U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott "played for time by dodging the concrete question of Russian participation in the KFOR operation," a source said on Saturday, commenting on the overnight talks between the American envoy and generals and their Russian colleagues. The U.S. generals "insistently tried to convince" their Russian partners that NATO was not going to enter Kosovo earlier than Saturday evening. However, Russian military officials said it was nothing but misinformation. The Russian Defence Ministry had received creditable information by 2.00 a.m. Saturday (2200 GMT Friday) that the Alliance had begun the KFOR operation. NATO troops had begun moving towards Kosovo, while special units were already there. "In this situation, we could no longer trust our partners and decided to send a forward unit of Russian paratroopers into Kosovo," the source said...."

Sky News 6/15/99 "...Tension over the Russian presence in Kosovo is growing, with reports that more paratroops are on the way. One news agency reported that as many as 7,000 more Russian soldiers could join the token force of 200 or so Russian special forces already there. The RIA news agency quoted "Serb sources in Pristina" as saying between 5,000 and 7,000 Russian paratroops would be flown to Pristina in the next four days. Officials in Moscow could not confirm the RIA report....."

Itar-Tass 6/15/99 "..... Russia has a priority right to discuss the location of its peacemakers in Kosovo, Chairman of the Duma Committee on Nationalities Vladimir Zorin told Itar-Tass on Tuesday. "Being an active participant in the peacemaking process, Russia has the priority right to negotiations with all parties to the conflict, both NATO and Yugoslavia, on the location of its peacemaking contingent in Kosovo," the Duma deputy said...."

The Washington Times/Drudge Report 6/15/99 Bill Gertz "... "Either this is a covert operation by the Russians, or the civilian leadership can't control the military. Neither one of those is good for the West." Pentagon officials said the pro-Serbian Russians have complicated the peace deal in a major way. For example, they said if the Serbs were to refuse to pull out their troops from Kosovo on schedule, resuming the NATO bombing with even a small Russian presence in the province would not be possible. entagon officials explain privately that, adding to concern about tension within Russia's military and control over the nuclear arsenal, is confusion over who is calling the shots in Kosovo, the military in Russia or Russian President Boris Yeltsin and his advisers. A U.S. intelligence official familiar with the standoff over the Russians in Kosovo said yesterday there are no signs Russian nuclear forces went on a high-alert status -- a move that would have signaled heightened tensions with the West....Reports from Russia indicate military units have been forced to sell off weapons and equipment to earn cash. Even food is in short supply.....Military preparedness is also declining sharply because of a lack of money for operations and maintenance and the failure to replace old equipment. And as a further result of funding shortfalls, the military has combined some elements and discharged several hundred thousand people. A 1996 CIA report that looked at the unauthorized use of nuclear weapons by the Russian strategic forces stated that the military is "demoralized and corrupted." It raised the prospect that civilian leaders could lose control of the nuclear arsenal to the military, which continues to view the United States as its "main enemy." .....Clinton administration officials have sought to play down the dangers with the Russian nuclear arsenal. They insist Moscow retains control over the thousands of strategic nuclear missiles, bombers and submarines. But there have been other signs reported in intelligence channels over the past two months, showing that Russia's military is adopting a new hard line against the West because of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia...... As analysts see it, a worst-case scenario is that Moscow planned all along to upset NATO's peacekeeping operation by sending the troops and intentionally to mislead U.S. leaders and the world as part of the plan...."

Associated Press 6/15/99 Judith Ingram "...A second column of Russian troops arrived in Kosovo on Tuesday, increasing pressure on NATO to resolve the impasse over Moscow's role in peacekeeping. The deployment came as Russia's top military commander and chief diplomat prepared for tough talks with their U.S. counterparts, who are negotiating on behalf of the alliance. Russia wants its own sector of authority and for its troops not to be placed under NATO command. Though the second column was small - just 29 soldiers, according to NATO - it was large enough to dramatize those demands...."

Stratfor 6/15/99 "...1554 GMT, 990615...Russian President Boris Yeltsin has reportedly approved agreements reached at the meeting of the Russian Security Council, which state that the Foreign Ministry will coordinate all of Russia's future Kosovo activities with other government offices. According to Russian Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin, "Synchronization of the performance of the Foreign Ministry, the military, and the government is the rigid algorithm whose performance started today." First, this is a very public, clear, and appalling admission on the part of Stepashin and Yeltsin that a massive rift opened inside the Kremlin over Russian foreign policy. Despite the personal assurances of Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov that Russian troops would not enter Kosovo without first coordinating with NATO, Russian troops did just that, sweeping in ahead of NATO forces and seizing Slatina airbase near Pristina...."

Itar-Tass 6/14/99 "...Mass exodus of the Serb population has been reported to begin in the Kosovo city of Prizren. The refugees are leaving their homes in the presence of the German KFOR contingent in the city, British sources said on Monday. The German KFOR troops who entered Prizren were followed by militants of the Liberation Army of Kosovo (OAK). The OAK militants have surrounded the residence of the Orthodox Archbishop of Prizren, but the German troops are not taking any measures, the Sunday Times said. Not attempting to disarm the OAK, NATO paves the way for another round of ethnic cleansing, the newspaper said...."

Itar-Tass 6/14/99 "...The Russian Defence Ministry has expressed concern over "inactivity of the NATO KFOR contingent towards armed units of Kosovo Albanians." A spokesman for the Russian Defence Ministry told Tass on Monday that "both the military and diplomats are concerned over the situation in Kosovo where Kosovo militants of Albanian descent have been entering Kosovo practically on the shoulders of the NATO KFOR contingent." "If the situation does not change in the near future, Russia will be compelled to put forward an initiative to discuss this problem at the UN Security Council," the Russian spokesman said. "Ensuring disarmament of the so-called Liberation Army of Kosovo (OAK) is of the main task of the KFOR determined by the UN Security Council resolution," he stressed...."

CNN 6/14/99 "...NATO troops on Monday were guarding what they believed were mass graves in Kosovo, as more alliance military units poured into the Serb province on the heels of retreating Yugoslav forces. Not all has gone smoothly for the 14,000 NATO peacekeepers, who have been hindered since Saturday by sporadic deadly violence and a tense impasse with Russian troops occupying the airport in Pristina. British Maj. Gen. Richard Dannatt, the commander of British forces in Kosovo, said British soldiers had discovered what they believed were mass graves in the southern Kosovo town of Kacanik. About 100 mounds were counted in the grassy field between Pristina and Skopje, Macedonia...."

Reuters 6/14/99 "...Serbia's ultra-nationalist Radical Party (SRS) voted on Monday to pull out of the Serbian government and all the ministers will resign....."

6/15/99 Itar-Tass 6/15/99 "...British troops deployed in Kosovo have begun to arrest gunmen from the "Kosovo liberation army" (KLA) for provoking armed clashes between Albanians and Serbs. Five KLA extremists, who fired at Serbs in Pristina, were arrested on Monday night, British TV reported on Tuesday. As a result of the KLA operation, a Serb was taken hostage and then killed...."

Itar-Tass 6/15/99 "...Unknown attackers after Tuesday midday shelled Pristina airport, where Russian paratroopers are staying deployed for the peacekeeping operation...Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas earlier had said the KLA would pledge no guarantees of security of Russian peacekeepers in Kosovo...."

Itar-Tass 6/15/99 "...The British troops, integrated in the Kosovo peacekeeping force (KFOR), have been attacked by militants of the "Kosovo liberation army", a spokesman for the British command said in Pristina...."

Itar-Tass 6/15/99 "...Militants of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) will begin executions of Serb soldiers if they do not leave Kosovo capital Pristina before midnight, Sali Mustafa, the KLA commander in Pristina, told the Daily Telegraph on Tuesday. According to the newspaper, Mustafa was "a self-confessed terrorist hitman who personally murdered the Serb chief of police and whose authority was growing by the hour."...."

Itar-Tass 6/15/99 "...The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry is "actively looking for a possibility for the Ukrainian peacekeeping force to join an international peacekeeping contingent on the territory of Yugoslavia," Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Vladimir Belashov told Tass on Tuesday. According to his information, "consultations are being held both with the U.N. and with the countries, which have already announced their readiness to take part in peacekeeping operations in Yugoslavia." He said there are about ten such countries....."

Stratfor 6/14/99 "...0019 GMT, 990615 - NATO has adopted an interesting strategy for dealing with the unwelcome presence of Russian troops at Slatina airbase in Kosovo. It is ignoring them. Certainly, high level talks are continuing, but without any apparent urgency on NATO's part. Rather, NATO has successfully closed off the routes for Russian resupply and reinforcement and has declared that it didn't really want the airport, anyway....."

Stratfor 6/14/99 "...2202 GMT, 990614 - The KLA, understanding Russia's presence in Kosovo for what it is, has grown increasingly bellicose about the issue, declaring the Russians unwelcome and refusing to guarantee their safety. Russian forces in Kosovo are there to guarantee ultimate Serbian sovereignty over the province. The KLA has fought, and continues to fight, for nothing less than an independent Kosova...."

Electronic Telegraph (UK) 6/15/99 Boris Johnson "...THE red flag with the black eagle yesterday flew openly from the roof of the school. There were guards at the gate, Albanians with arm bands reading UCK (KLA) and the same initials were spelt out in petals on the playground. Processions of children presented posies of roses and kissed the cheeks of the swarthy goons, and inside was a self-confessed terrorist hitman, who personally murdered the Serb chief of police, and whose authority was growing by the hour. Whatever Nato thinks it has agreed with the KLA, it may shortly have to revise. Sali Mustafa has ideas of his own. For one thing, said the KLA's commander in Pristina, the Serb troops would not only have to be out by midnight tonight, they would face execution if they hung around.....Looking at this young man, it was hard to believe that he had cold-bloodedly killed Pristina's top policemen; but, so he confessed. "I was in charge of a unit and, well, they were our enemy, and I was shooting at them. Me and two other guys, we shot Misha Lahocevic. Zoran Iovanovic found his death. I shot him dead." And having created this job vacancy, he was now thinking of applying because, as he understands the Nato agreement, he and his lads are going to be the police. With every hour that passes, the arbitrary power of the KLA is growing in Kosovo, and Nato seems momentarily clueless how to deal with it....Three more fleeing Serbs were reportedly shot dead, and Albanian gunmen had taken the lives of at least one Albanian who worked for the Yugoslav militia, as well as three other Serb policemen. "Dead right," said Sali Mustafa, smiling seraphically. "Three Serb paramilitaries were killed yesterday because they were going round and stealing from the houses, and we have an agreement with Nato which says we can defend ourselves." Of course, the Nato agreement does not condone the shooting of looters, but then what is the Nato policy towards the KLA? ...."

AFP 6/14/99 "....Outmaneuvered by Russia whose small contingent of troops in Kosovo defiantly kept NATO forces at bay outside the Pristina airport Monday, the United States pressed efforts to break the deadlock without undermining the alliance's command of the operation. US President Bill Clinton spoke to his Russian counterpart, Boris Yeltsin, for the second time in less than 24 hours in what the White House described as a "constructive" conversation....."We have made real progress today," Albright told reporters at a White House briefing though neither she nor national security adviser Sandy Berger was able to describe any progress achieved beyond the agreement to meet in Helsinki......"

AP 6/14/99 Edith M. Lederer "....Secretary-General Kofi Annan unveiled the U.N. peace-building plan for Kosovo on Monday, giving European organizations primary responsibility for reconstructing the shattered Yugoslav province..... Each component was assigned to a lead agency: -The European Union was given responsibility for rebuilding Kosovo's "physical, economic and social infrastructure ... and supporting the reactivation of public services and utilities.'' -The 54-nation Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe will train judges and local administrators, set up a police academy, develop political parties and local media, organize elections and monitor human rights. -The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees will help the 860,000 ethnic Albanian refugees return and will also be responsible for protecting and assisting "minority groups'' - presumably Serbs remaining in Kosovo. -The U.N. civilian administration will include three offices to oversee police, judicial and civil affairs. The civil affairs branch will take charge of the civil service, economic and budgetary affairs, and restore basic services such as health, education, utilities, transport and telecommunications. An international civilian police unit, probably numbering 1,000 or 2,000, will oversee the civilian police operation and establish a Kosovo police force, Frechette said....."

Itar-Tass 6/15/99 "...Commander of the KFOR international peacekeeping mission in Kosovo General Michael Jackson actually admitted the inability of NATO troops to guarantee at present security of the Serb civil population in Kosovo. The general stated that his troops had been doing all in their power to ensure security of all residents of Kosovo, however under the present conditions there was a limit to everything as the deployment of troops had not been completed yet...... The Serb population does not trust NATO troops which bombarded civil objects and killed civilians...."

Stratfor 6/15/99 "...1546 GMT, 990615 - The United States has announced it will contribute 750 officers to an international police force designed to bring stability to Kosovo after peacekeepers leave. The commitment comes after yesterday's presentation of a United Nations plan allowing for the replacement of the peacekeepers by a force of 3000 police officers...."

Reuters 6/15/99 "...A leading member of the Serbian opposition said on Tuesday there would be trouble in Kosovo unless NATO peacekeepers began disarming ethnic Albanian guerrillas as well as Serb forces. Milan Bozic of the Serbian Renewal Movement said ethnic Serbs were afraid of the peacekeeping force and felt that it was backing the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guerrillas. ``(There will be a) problem if NATO doesn't make some visible moves to disarm the KLA,'' he told BBC radio. ``On the one hand, you see the pictures of NATO disarming the Serbian troops or policemen, at the same time, you see the KLA people or soldiers with weapons,'' he said. ``Such pictures, and I do believe in Kosovo they can be seen numerous times, are somehow convincing the people that NATO is part of the support for the KLA.'' ..."

CNN 6/15/99 "...NATO peacekeepers reported Tuesday finding at least 20 burned bodies in the ruins of a house near the Albanian border. Meanwhile Yugoslavian forces seemed on schedule to meet a midnight deadline (2200 GMT/6 p.m. EST) to withdraw from Pristina and the southern third of Kosovo, according to the alliance. German soldiers with the NATO-led KFOR mission cordoned off the gruesome scene in Mala Krusa, called Krushe Emadi by Albanians...."

UPI 6/15/99 "...The clock has struck midnight in Kosovo, marking the deadline for Serb troops to be out of the southernmost part of the province that includes the capital, Pristina. However, NATO has recently softened its initially hard stance on the retreat, citing traffic jams and Yugoslav equipment troubles...."

STRATFOR.COM 6/15/99 "...2200 GMT, 990615 - British paratroopers from the 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment were ordered to back down from a confrontation with Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) rebels who refused to disarm. No reason was given why the British troops were ordered to allow the KLA rebels to keep their weapons...."

UPI 6/15/99 Paul Basken "...With U.S. and NATO officials still seeking a solution to Russia's surprise military foray into Kosovo, Russian leaders demanded NATO make a greater effort to demilitarize ethnic Albanian rebel forces. Amid scattered reports of armed Kosovo Liberation Army troops taking up positions in the republic, Russian national security adviser Vladimir Putin complained by telephone to his U.S. counterpart, Sandy Berger, that the KLA was posing a threat to Kosovar civilians. Putin, the head of the Federal Security Service and secretary of Russia's Security Council, also argued that NATO's disagreement with Russia over the makeup of the peacekeeping operation could be resolved by "including Russian representatives in the command structures" of the KFOR peacekeeping force...."

Times of London 6/16/99 Stephen Farrell "...THE Kosovo Liberation Army will not hand over its weapons to Nato forces and intends to turn itself into a national army with the eventual goal of an independent Kosovo, a senior KLA commander said yesterday. Directly contradicting the KLA's public support for the agreement reached at Rambouillet, Rustem Mustafa, one of seven regional commanders, said he expected Nato to train its 50,000 soldiers, to provide weapons to replace their old ones and to share security for Kosovo with the KLA...."I believe that we will not give up our weapons. We will collect them all in one place and they will be in our barracks," Mr Mustafa said. He claimed that the decision not to give up guns was official KLA policy. Asked what would happen if Nato demanded their surrender, he replied: "Nato has not done this and I hope they won't ask this thing from us. We are co-operating with them and I believe they will help us in the construction of the army." ..."

Electronic Telegraph 6/16/99 Philip Smucker "...THE Kosovar rebel army that never won an important battle said yesterday that it had taken control of southern Kosovo after a 600-year-old struggle to gain self-rule. The city of Prizren would be a "model of the KLA's role in a new Kosovo", it said. "From today, Prizren is 100 per cent in our hands," said Rexha Ekrem, who is also known as 'Commander Drini", from the porch of a hotel in the city. "We are taking on policing duties and those things related to the internal life of the city," he said. "We handed over six fire trucks to Nato today." Most Albanian residents say that the fighting men of the Kosovo Liberation Army are heroes who deserve their new authority. However, the few hundred Serbian residents remaining after an exodus of more than 10,000 in the last two days disagree...."

Stratfor 6/16/99 "...0300 GMT, 990616 - The United States announced it would allow the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) a few days grace period before it is required to demilitarize. A U.S. spokesman said that not all KLA units would necessarily be disarmed. Army Brigadier-General John Craddock, commander of Task Force Falcon, the U.S. contingent, said that only KLA units that provoke withdrawing Serb units and refuse instructions to back off will be disarmed...."

The Indian Express 6/15/99 "...Beta, quoting eyewitnesses, said six KLA gunmen intercepted a column of Serbs leaving the village of Kojlovica, some five km north of Pristina. It said two brothers from the Krstic family and a man identified as Dragan Jovanovic were extracted by the KLA from the column and shot dead on the spot with automatic weapons. Beta quoted the mother of the Krstic brothers as saying they were slain in the presence of their children and wives. In Pristina, a Serb employee of radio Pristina was shot dead in front of his home and three other Serbs were abducted, Beta said. It had no further details...."

New York Post 6/15/1999 Uri Dan "....THE Serb villagers fleeing Kosovo want it known that the Albanians aren't the only refugees of the troubled province with horror stories to tell. Lubomir Lakic's story goes this way: His father went to the Serbian Orthodox church in their village Sunday morning to pray, and was horrified to find the young priest inside with his throat slit. "He also saw 10 Kosovo Liberation Army people coming out of the church," Lakic said. "The KLA knifed and slaughtered the priest of our village." Like many accounts of atrocities being told now by Serbs, this remains unverified in the chaotic aftermath of the retreat by Slobodan Milosevic's forces from Kosovo. But, true or not, it contributes to the panic sweeping Kosovo. Lakic said after he heard how ethnic Albanians "stabbed to death two farmers in their homes," his family decided to run for their lives. The Lakic family proudly traces its roots in Mousoutiste back to the 14th century - when the sacred Church of Saint Bogoroditza was built. "We wanted to stay in the village, but we were terrified by the assassination of Father Atza," Lakic said yesterday as he drove a tractor on the clogged road that was taking him, his father, wife, son and daughter out of Kosovo....."

New York Post 6/15/1999 Uri Dan "...."All of us, about 350 families, decided to leave" their homes in Mousoutiste, 50 miles from Pristina, he said. Just as they reached the outskirts of their village, they encountered NATO forces - who were clearly on the side of the KLA, Lakic charged. "I don't know if they were British or French. I was too shocked to identify them because they stopped us. "They told all the men to lie on the road and they took our guns and our pistols, while the KLA were standing on the other side of the road armed and stoning us," said Lakic, 33. "For me, it was the worst sign that these NATO forces came here to push the Serbs out of Kosovo because [NATO] sided, on that terrible part of our road, with the KLA." ...."

Times 6/14/99 Richard Boudreaux "...-On Day One of NATO's peacekeeping mission in Kosovo, Dragan Radakovic stood at the edge of Serbia's largest coal mine and watched it pass from one army's control to another's with clockwork precision. Serbian infantrymen who had guarded the Belacevic open pit mine during 16 months of guerrilla war pulled out at 8 a.m. Saturday. Their army's withdrawal from Kosovo was supposed to be tightly synchronized with the arrival of NATO-led troops to pacify the province. Instead, the advancing foot soldiers the mine director saw in his binoculars were from the Kosovo Liberation Army. Much to his alarm, the ethnic Albanian separatists who looked all but defeated several weeks ago had returned in force to seize one of the mine's two giant pits, its administration building and four employees. The swift takeover of a strategic economic target shows the KLA's determination to move into the vacuum between the departing Serbs and a lumbering, 48,000-strong NATO-led force already slowed by scattered Serbian resistance and feuds with Russian peacekeepers. About 350 guerrillas are believed to have participated in the mine takeover six miles northwest of the provincial capital, Pristina...."

Original Sources (www.originalsources.com) 6/16/99 Mary Mostert "…"The KLA has set its check points and controls the town. KLA groups have besieged the Bishop's Court with bishop Artemije, monks and priests inside. In the church yard, monuments of emperor Dushan and Russian consul Yastrebov are destroyed. The German contingent cannot guarantee safety and security neither for the Serbs, nor for the priests and the monks, and officers advised the Bishop, the priest and monks to leave Prizren tomorrow with the remaining Serbs." And thus the destruction begins - a destruction reminiscent of the Barbarian Assault on Rome, in the 5th Century, A.D.: "THE HOLY ARCHANGEL MONASTERY (XIV century - 2 km from Prizren) This morning KLA has kidnapped one monk and some Serbs from Prizren. Their fate is uncertain. "THE HOLY TRINITY MONASTERY- MUSUTISTE ( XV century) Today the monastery church has been burnt down, few days ago the monastery residence was burnt down. The nuns have escaped to the Gracanica monastery. "THE SAINTS KUZMA AND DAMIAN MONASTERY -ZOCISTE (XIV century) The monks have been evacuated to Prizren. The fate of the monastery is unknown. VELIKA HOCA and surrounding villages are deserted. Line of 400 people are on the way to Pristina, although no safe evacuation has been guaranteed. "THE VISOKI DECANI MONASTERY (XIV century) During Yugoslav Army pullout, 150 Albanians from Decani had found safety in the monastery and spent 2 days there, together with a group of 17 Serbs that had escaped earlier. The Italian troops are stationed near the monastery, and their officers are cooperative, and guarantee safety and security Serbs and Albanians alike. "PEC - THE PATRIARCHATE OF PEC (XIII century) The Italian forces are in the town, relations are good. There are no more than 50 Serbs left in the town. The nuns at the Partriarchate are well. "THE DEVIC MONASTERY (XV century) There is no information. The arrival of the French contingent is expected tomorrow. "THE GORIOC MONASTERY (XIV century) No presence of KLA is registd. The arrival of the French contingent is expected." And so we watch as NATO helps IMPLEMENT the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Kosovo, just as we watched the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Croatia in 1995 with the help of US bombers, while the media, who MUST know it is lying, talks about "Serbian War Crimes."…"

UPI 6/16/99 "…Although the Yugoslav army has assured NATO it has marked all its minefields, "there is no indication that has been done," said a NATO peacekeeping force official (Wednesday). The borders with Albania and Macedonia, the most heavily traveled routes of returning refugees, are heavily mined, the official said. Four have died from encounters with mines so far…."

AP 6/16/99 "…Killings, beatings, sexual assaults and torture by Serb forces of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo were widespread and far more than just isolated attacks, according to a survey by a physicians' group. Physicians for Human Rights interviewed 1,180 refugees and found that one in every three households endured some kind of physical abuse. ``What our study clearly speaks to was this was part of a wide-scale, methodical, brutal pattern of abuse,'' said Dr. Allen Keller, one of the study's authors and director of the Center for Health and Human Rights at the New York University School of Medicine….Combined, the refugees detailed 598 separate incidents of torture, killing and physical abuse…."

Agence France-Presse 6/16/99 "… Kosovo separatist guerrillas are expected to agree in the next few days to demilitarise, NATO said Wednesday, but warned this does not mean a total disarming of the rebels. British Lieutenant General Michael Jackson, head of the international peace-keeping force in Kosovo, KFOR, said: "The UN Security Council resolution makes it absolutely clear that this organisation (KLA) is to be demilitarised." "I expect that in the next two to three days the leadership of this organisation will sign an agreement which is being worked out between them and the representatives of our (KFOR) force," he added. In Brussels, NATO said the aim of the June 10 Security Council resolution was to demilitarise and not disarm the Kosovo Liberation Army. That would mean confiscating its heavy weapons but leaving fighters with their lighter arms to allow them to eventually carry out police functions…."

Reuters/RUSSIA TODAY 6/16/99 "…Russia's Duma urged President Boris Yeltsin on Thursday to sack his special Balkans envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin, whom it accused of betraying Moscow's national interests in Yugoslavia. In a non-binding resolution, the opposition-dominated Duma said an agreement between Russia and the Western powers paving the way for an end to the Yugoslav war amounted to capitulation by Belgrade and the occupation of Kosovo by NATO troops. "The defeat of a strategic ally of Russia in the Balkans has sharply worsened Russia's geopolitical position and created a serious threat to its national security," the resolution said…."

Itar-Tass 6/16/99 "…Threats issued by the so- called Kosovo Liberation Army to Russian peacekeepers confirm the terrorist nature of this organisation, a high-ranking Russian Defence Ministry official said on Wednesday. Under the U.N. Security Council resolution, KLA should be demilitarised simultaneously with the withdrawal of the Yugoslav army and police units from the province in order not to create a security vacuum, the official said. Having assumed an essential role in the operation, NATO has been flouting its obligations, the official said, adding that there is open NATO connivance for Albanian guerrillas in Kosovo. If KLA is not disarmed, this will inevitably lead to the creation of other armed groupings in Kosovo in order to protect other ethnic groups in the province, the official said…."

6/16/99 AFP "…The designation of Russian peacekeepers by the Kosovo Liberation Army as an "enemy force" was a "declaration of war" on Moscow's Kosovo contingent, a foreign ministry spokesman said Wednesday. "It is an unprecedented declaration, it can only be taken as a declaration of war on Russian peacekeeping forces," said the official, who asked not to be named…."

UPI 6/16/99 Beth Potter "…A KFOR officer says ethnic Albanians coming out of hiding from the hills near the town of Stimlje, in Kosovo, are breaking into Serb homes. Cpl. Harry Tyman, a spokesman for the British Fourth Armored Brigade, said today the ethnic Albanians were stealing televisions to sell them for food. KFOR met with Kosovo Liberation Army forces in the town to put a stop to the looting, however, the incident was enough to convince several Serb families to leave town by midday…All stores remained closed today except for one controlled by the Kosovo Liberation Army. Most have been completely looted and destroyed. Heaps of twisted metal fill the broken windows of some stores. Others have empty shelves and are filled with rubble…."

Associated Press 6/16/99 Robert Burns "…Defense Secretary William Cohen ruled out any compromise with Russia that would permit Moscow's troops to patrol in Kosovo under their own command, but he promised on Wednesday to be "as creative as we can'' in resolving the dispute over Russia's role. His Russian counterpart, Marshall Igor Sergeyev, struck an optimistic tone as he and Cohen met to begin an expected two days of negotiations. Sergeyev predicted the problem would be resolved by the weekend, and comments by officials in Moscow seemed to hint at a compromise…."

Macedonian Press Agency 6/16/99 "…The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) yesterday expressed its deep concern over the exodus of thousands of Serbs from Kosovo. The UN agency said it was witnessing the same pattern of displacements of Serbs seen in Western Slavonia in December 1991, in the Krajina and August 1995 and in Sarajevo after the 1995 Dayton peace agreement. According to a UN press report, The High Commissioner's Special Envoy, Dennis McNamara, discussed the outflow of Serb civilians with Lieutenant General Michael Jackson, the commander of the Kosovo Force (KFOR), who confirmed that his troops would do their best to provide security for all of Kosovo's citizens, but stressed that under the circumstances, there was unfortunately a limit to what could be done. …. UNHCR estimates 13,000 Serbs have crossed into Montenegro since Thursday but it is not known how many Serbs are crossing directly into Serbia. The Serb population of Kosovo is estimated at between 100,000 and 200,000 people……. "

Fox News (Reuters) 6/16/99 "…The Kosovo Liberation Army will not disarm in northern Kosovo until Russia agrees to place its troops under a unified command with NATO forces, a KLA representative said Wednesday. The ethnic Albanian guerrillas would "react militarily'' if Russian forces tried to enforce a partition of the Serbian province, the KLA's political representative in London, Pleurat Sejdiu, told Reuters. "They could find themselves in an Afghanistan situation again,'' he added…."

American Spectator Online 6/14/99 Wlady Pleszczynski "…The short of it was that the administration had been caught completely unprepared by the Russian incursion. If not for CNN it still might not know what happened. Meanwhile, the British press was filled with reports that U.K. leaders were furious at the U.S. for not allowing its genuinely prepositioned troops from moving right in, forcing them instead to allow U.S. troops to be first. These troops, of course, weren't ready to move, which is how it came about that the Russians moved in first. Evidently Kosovo, like nature, abhors a vacuum. In foreign policy power squandered is power lost…. The Independent's man in Kosovo, Robert Fisk, in the concluding paragraph of his Sunday story offered this: "As I drove back into Pristina, it occurred to me how much the Russians would like to control the air base, with its massive underground taxiways and nuclear-blast-proof conference rooms. And how easy it would be to open the base to Russian aircraft to bring in thousands more troops, with not just the blessing but the positive encouragement of Belgrade. I remembered what it said on the back of the Russian armoured vehicle leading [the Russian] convoy. The word on the back was: 'Airborne.' …"

Itar-Tass 6/16/99 "…The Russian paratroopers stationed at the Pristina airport have begun to build defensive positions, the British newspapers report. The construction jobs are proceeding chiefly in the southern part of this strategic objective. Judging by everything, the Russian peacekeepers are expecting provocations from men of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army, who refuse to disarm and are not duly treated by NATO contingents in the province. …."

Itar-Tass 6/16/99 "…NATO has not begun to disarm the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army, whose men are in the meantime perpetrating alarming terroristic acts in Kosovo. The stepped up terroristic actions of the KLA are a "powder keg", which is apt to blow up the entire settlement process in Kosovo, Russian Defence Minister Igor Sergeyev told Russian journalists in Helsinki on Wednesday after his meeting with Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari. A spokesman for the Russian delegation noted that, for his part, Ahtisaari stressed that the NATO nations should honour the reached agreement to disarm the KLA…Obviously encouraged by such veiled connivance, KLA commanders are openly declaring now that they will not disarm. Moreover, they will not do it until the Russian troops in the province remain outside the single command of the international force, which NATO wants to control. This was confirmed to the Japanese newspaper Mainichi on Wednesday by KLA official representative in London Plerat Sezdiu. He unequivocally stated that the Kosovo separatists want to exploit the presence of NATO troops in the province to split it away from Yugoslavia in spite of the intentionally declared need to preserve the territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia…."

Itar-Tass 6/16/99 "…Large units of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) have begun to enter Pristina on Wednesday. The Albanian separatists are capturing the administrative centre of Kosovo in violation of the preliminary agreement, under which armed gunmen should not enter the city. According to reports of the London mass media, the command of the British contingent of the Kosovo peacekeeping force (KFOR) prohibited the gunmen from entering the city, but the KLA ignored its orders. The impression is that the KFOR units of the NATO countries are unprepared for the peacekeeping operation, or for the fulfilment of the U.N. Security Council resolution, which demands the disarmament of Albanian separatists. This was confirmed in an indirect way by General Michael Jackson, commander-in-chief of the NATO troops integrated in KFOR, who said that NATO units could not be in all parts of Kosovo at the same time…."

Itar-Tass 6/16/99 "…The so-called Kosovo Liberation Army has already established control over all the towns and villages in the southern part of the province and has set up its own checkpoints there, Albanian refugees told the Japanese Kyodo Tsushin News Agency in Macedonia. After the Nato troops were moved into Kosovo, the refugees tried to go home, but were turned back and are now languishing again in their refugee camps in Macedonia. According to eyewitness accounts, NATO troops are tightly controlling only the main roads to Pristina. The police functions in the minor localities are discharged only by KLA men. They are controlling everybody who enters and leaves the province, are checking their identity papers. The Kosovo Liberation Army, eyewitnesses say, is promising to shortly issue special identity cards to the local Albanian population…."

The Washington Times 6/16/99 Philip Smucker "…Leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army, basking in triumph without having ever won a battle, proclaimed themselves in control of all of southern Kosovo yesterday and pledged to make the region a "model of the KLA's role in a new Kosovo." Reports from across the region verified that members of the ragtag guerrilla force had taken control of towns, villages and border crossings as Yugoslav army forces withdrew with their tanks and trucks northward ahead of a midnight deadline imposed by NATO last week. "From today, Prizren is 100 percent in our hands," said Rexha Ekrem, also known as "Commander Drini." The claim appeared to contradict the terms of the agreement under which NATO ended its bombing campaign in Yugoslavia. That agreement called for the "demilitarization" of the rebel army…."

Associated Press 6/16/99 Tom Raum "…U.S. forces in Kosovo detained two suspected war criminals today, a Pentagon spokesman said. Navy Capt. Mike Doubleday had no details about the arrests or the men's alleged crimes, but said the two remain in U.S. custody…."

The Guardian 6/17/99 Richard Norton-Taylor "…Civilians and K-For troops face a serious threat from unmarked mines laid by the Kosovo Liberation Army, whose leaders may have no idea where they are, it emerged yesterday. Major Andy Philips, a bomb disposal expert from 33 Regiment Royal Engineers, said both sides had been cooperative, but there were no reliable records of KLA minefields. "The main KLA elements are cooperating, but we don't know what fringe elements have been out there, and we don't know what they have put out. ..."

Reuters 6/16/99 Brian Williams "...Serb civilians, fearful of ethnic Albanian reprisals, flooded out of Kosovo Wednesday and NATO troops disarmed Kosovo guerrillas and arrested some of their chiefs after they refused to hand over their weapons. As Serb soldiers and paramilitaries pulled back, separatist Kosovo Liberation army (KLA) rebels roamed some vacated areas, set up checkpoints and conducted house-by-house searches like a new occupation power..."

stratfor.com 6/16/99 "...NATO's decision to exploit the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) during Operation Allied Force to maintain pressure on Serbian forces on the ground is coming back to haunt it. While Albania helped create the KLA, NATO nurtured it, and now that the KLA is running amok, NATO must tame or destroy it. Much to NATO's chagrin, the KLA did not simply accept NATO control over the province, lay down its arms, and join the UN sponsored political process. Rather, seizing the opportunity and the initiative, the KLA has poured into the province ahead of NATO and on the heels of withdrawing Serbs - filling the power vacuum and establishing de facto control. KLA forces have seized control of two border crossing points into Albania, as well as most of the towns and villages of southern Kosovo including nearly all of Prizren. The KLA has presented its own "interim government," and has as yet refused to disarm. Worse, multiple sources report the KLA are carrying out reprisal attacks against Serbs, burning Serbian homes and setting in motion a mass exodus of Serbs from the province......In the meantime, NATO continues to explain its inability to control the KLA and defend ethnic Serbs by arguing that it does not have sufficient forces in place to control the province. In fact, refugees report that NATO controls little more than the main roads to Pristina. And to be more precise, it is not simply that NATO does not have enough troops to establish a presence throughout Kosovo. NATO does not have enough troops to confront and forcibly disarm the KLA throughout Kosovo...."

Washington Post Foreign Service 6/17/99 Molly Moore and John Ward Anderson "...With ethnic Albanian guerrillas establishing offices, erecting checkpoints and occupying police stations in Kosovo as Yugoslav forces have withdrawn, NATO commanders moved for the first time today to rein in the newly empowered rebels and allay concerns among Serbian civilians here about possible reprisal attacks. In the first major confrontation between Kosovo Liberation Army rebels and allied forces, U.S. Marines today stripped weapons from about 200 guerrillas in the Kosovo village of Zegra. The action followed a tense standoff in which the KLA members refused at first to surrender their weapons, then complied when the Marines used armored personnel carriers and Cobra helicopter gunships to intimidate them. The Marines then led away six rebel leaders in handcuffs...."

Sydney Morning Herald 6/16/99 Geoff Kitney "…Watching Russian preparations to send more troops into Kosovo where 200 paratroopers continue to hold the main airport, Western leaders are still worried about the strength of Moscow's new commitments not to make further deployments without NATO's agreement. President Boris Yeltsin and other senior Kremlin figures told United States President Bill Clinton and other Western leaders that Russia would defer plans to send a larger force to Kosovo…."

USA Today/AP 11/29/98 "…The man accused of orchestrating the U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa operates a terrorist network out of Albania that has infiltrated other parts of Europe, The Sunday Times reported. The newspaper quoted Fatos Klosi, the head of the Albanian intelligence service, as saying a network run by Saudi exile Osama Bin Laden sent units to fight in the Serbian province of Kosovo. Bin Laden is believed to have established an Albanian operation in 1994 after telling the government he headed a wealthy Saudi humanitarian agency wanting to help Albania, the newspaper reported. Klosi said he believed terrorists had already infiltrated other parts of Europe from bases in Albania. Interpol believes more than 100,000 blank Albanian passports were stolen in riots last year, providing ample opportunity for terrorists to acquire false papers, the newspaper said…."

Venic 6/17/99 Reuters AFP UN ITAR-TASS "…In 1998 the KLA carried out 2,018 armed attacks against residents of Kosovo, during which 199 civilians and 128 police officers were killed. The KLA was also responsible for 292 kidnappings in the province during the same year. Out of 199 civilians killed by the KLA 46 were Serbs, 77 ethnic Albanians and 76 residents of other nationalities…."

Venic 6/17/99 Reuters AFP UN ITAR-TASS "…During the civil war in Yugoslavia from 1987 to 1991 over 300,000 Serbs became refugees. More than 14,000 Serbs were exterminated by Croatian and Kosovar extremists. In 1995 over 250,000 Serbs were expelled from Krajina by unified military forces of Croatia, NATO, the United States, and Muslim extremists. Thousands of Serbian civilians died during the exodus…"

Venic 6/17/99 Reuters AFP UN ITAR-TASS "…In 1995 NATO conducted a bombing campaign against Serbian villages in Bosnia, killing 500 residents. In 1999 NATO bombed Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which became a home to over 700,000 Serbian refuges, who escaped systematic ethnic cleansing campaign by Croatian military, Muslim terrorists, and NATO only a few years earlier. The exact number of civilian casualties resulting from NATO's latest bombing campaign against Serbian civilians is not yet known, but is believed to exceed 2,000…."

Meanwhile, evidence of Serb atrocities during NATO's bombing campaign continued to mount. The discoveries were all too familiar: a well filled with decomposing bodies; a prison filled with apparent instruments of torture. Villagers in Dragacin, north of Prizren, told German troops that the well was filled with the bodies of 11 elderly men killed in late April. There have also been reports of atrocities against Serbs, with a couple found dead on their home's doorstep and a 16-year-old killed in an ambush on a country road. In a report that could not be independently confirmed, the Serb Media Center said KLA rebels killed three Serbs in central Novo Selo and southern Kosovska Kamenica and kidnapped 18 Serbs in villages near Pristina. NATO peacekeepers arrested 25 Kosovo Liberation Army rebels Friday after German peacekeepers rescued 15 battered Gypsies and ethnic Albanians in what they said might be a KLA torture chamber for alleged collaborators in Prizren. They also found the corpse of an elderly man chained to a chair. He appeared to have died shortly before the Germans arrived, said German army spokesman Lt. Col. Dietmar Jeserich…."

The New York Times 6/19/99 John Kifner "…The tenuous and volatile nature of NATO's balancing act was illustrated here this afternoon when German troops swooped down on a former Serbian police headquarters taken over by the K.L.A., briefly held 25 of the guerrillas and seized a pile of weapons. Inside the station, the German troops found 15 people who had been taken prisoner, including an elderly man who was found dead, handcuffed to a chair and badly beaten, according to a German spokesman, Lieut. Col. Dietmar Jeserich. The prisoners included Serbs, Albanians and Gypsies. It was not clear why they had been arrested, but some onlookers said the prisoners included informers and thieves. One man had red welts across his back, an old man had a bandage on his head and cuts on his face and another man said he had been stabbed in the leg. "Not even your worst enemy could do such a thing," said Jankovic Janko, an elderly Serb with head injuries. He said he had been seized outside his house on Wednesday…."

AP 6/18/99 "….Accounts of brutality in Kosovo emerged Thursday in different tones - the stunned, flat voice of a teen-age girl and the measured sentences of a British official - but they both told of irrational savagery mixed with careful planning. Just six days into the international military presence in Kosovo, officials have discovered so many mass graves and killing sites and heard so many wrenching accounts of atrocities that they now estimate at least 10,000 people were killed in the Serb crackdown against Kosovo Albanians which began shortly before NATO began its 78-day air bombardment March 24. The mounting evidence is likely to add to calls for the arrest of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who has been indicted by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague. But President Clinton said Thursday that peacekeepers will take a ``wait and see'' approach toward Milosevic's arrest….. One of the most grisly reports of slaughter so far came Thursday from the village of Poklek, 20 miles west of the provincial capital Pristina. The killings were, by residents' accounts, methodical. Elhame Muqolli, 14, told of how she and scores of friends and neighbors were herded into a room by Serb police, who threw in a hand grenade, raked the room with machine guns and then set it on fire to kill anyone who might have survived. Muqolli (pronounced Moo-CHO-lee) and five others had managed to jump out a window, but 62 others died in the April 17 incident. Their blood dripped through the floor to stain the ceiling of the room below….."

The Associated Press 6/19/99 Donna Bryso "…Concerned about reports of revenge attacks by ethnic Albanian rebels, NATO has pledged to put more military police on the streets of Kosovo to make the shattered province safe for Serbs fleeing by the thousands. In a further effort to keep order in Kosovo, NATO intended to sign an agreement today with the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army specifying terms of its demilitarization, alliance spokesman Maj. Jam Yoosten said…..The United States, France, Britain, Germany and Italy have divided Kosovo into five sectors for peacekeeping. Russia had wanted its own sector. Under the agreement, 3,000 Russian troops will serve under Russian command and control, but Russians will work with NATO commanders in the sectors controlled by the United States, France and Germany. The Pristina airport will be opened to all nations…."

Reuters 6/19/99 Deborah Charles "…A senior Serbian official on Saturday urged Serbs who have fled Kosovo to return to their homes within the next 48 hours, saying the government would accompany them, provide fuel and organise their return. Milovan Bojic, deputy prime minister of Serbia, said institutions in Kosovo were still working and the KFOR international peacekeeping force had guaranteed the safety of all citizens in Kosovo, regardless of their nationality. ``We should make the most of this moment to go back to Kosovo in numbers in the next 48 hours,'' Bojic said in an address shown on Serbian state television (RTS) and reported by the official news agency Tanjug…."

The New York Times 6/19/99 John Kifner "…The Kosovo Liberation Army is setting up interim governments in a number of cities, moving rapidly to fill the civic vacuum. In at least one case of exerting their self-appointed authority, the rebels arrested and apparently beat several prisoners, one so severely that he died. The troops are moving into city halls and makeshift municipal buildings, with their own black-uniformed police at the doors, trying to get electricity, water and other basic services working. Their major problem is that there is virtually no food and tens of thousands more refugees are on the way. The United Nations, under the terms of the agreement with the Serbs, is to set up a civil authority but has not done so yet. The rebel forces are acting without any legal mandate, but NATO commanders appear to have found it convenient to allow the rebels to deal with some local matters. The agreement with the Serbs calls for the K.L.A. to be demilitarized by the allied troops but that has yet to be enforced…."

The New York Times 6/19/99 Ian Fisher "…A few days ago, the Serbs here made a brave and unusual decision: They would stay in this Kosovo hillside town, nearly 4,000 of them, and try to live again beside Albanians, even as their fellow Serbs fled the province in the tens of thousands. That all broke down Friday, and with it one small pocket of hope for re-creating a multi-ethnic Kosovo. Friday afternoon, heavily armed young German soldiers were reduced to escorting scared Serbian women to their homes so they could pick up a few things and leave town, probably forever. One woman walked down the street grasping a soldier's hand ….The Serbs' reasons for leaving town are particularly disturbing to NATO, because they seem closely linked to the peacekeeping mission. Serbs here allege that guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army kidnapped seven men Wednesday and Thursday as they went house to house confiscating weapons. And as the guerrilla force only came out of hiding since the arrival of the peacekeepers Sunday, the Serbs here say they believe that the peacekeepers are cooperating with the former rebels….. From the start, the Serbs have eyed the peacekeepers, under NATO command, with distrust for a reason that is hard to overcome: It was NATO, after all, that bombed the Serbs for more than two months, with some degree of cooperation with KLA forces on the ground. But since the peacekeepers arrived, that distrust has only deepened as the KLA has tried to step in to become the new civil and administrative force in Kosovo. NATO insists that it is the only real power in Kosovo and that it is completely even-handed with Serbs and Albanians alike….."

New York Post 6/19/99 Uri Dan "…Three days after NATO troops refused a mother superior's pleas for protection, Kosovar rebels looted her monastery and raped a young nun, officials said yesterday.

French commandos and members of the French Foreign Legion arrived as the Kosovar Liberation Army guerrillas were leaving the isolated mountain religious community in Devic, about 30 miles northwest of the Kosovo capital of Pristina. The Post reported Monday how Mother Macaria drove to Pristina on Sunday to plead with arriving British troops for protection for herself, a priest and nine nuns at Devic. "Please come and save us. You have the guns, all I have is a cross," she told an Irish Guard lieutenant. But she was told that no protection was possible until NATO reinforcements arrived. Three days later the unguarded medieval monastery was raided by KLA members, French officers confirmed yesterday. The French gave few details but a spokesman for Serb Orthodox Patriarch Pavle said the guerrillas showed no mercy. "They desecrated the church, including the altar and icons, and humiliated the nuns," Deacon Luka Novakovic told The Post. He said a 24-year-old nun was taken to a back room and raped. The rebels looted the building of anything valuable and fired guns into the air as they left, just as the French arrived Thursday…"The monastery had been stripped bare," a French officer told CNN. He added that the priest had been beaten. Novakovic said: "They even desecrated the tomb of St. Joanikije…."

Creators Syndicate Toronto Sun Author: Matthew Fisher 6/19/99 "…As a seething mob of several hundred Albanians looked on, nine guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army in battle dress were ordered out of their cars at gunpoint yesterday and spread-eagled against a wall by U.S. Marines in the middle of town. This was one of many "in-your-face" weapons searches carried out this week by the Marines' 26th Expeditionary Force in the American sector in southeastern Kosovo. Many of the confrontations produced results. undreds of assault rifles, belt-fed machineguns and grenades, as well as a few rocket-propelled grenade launchers were confiscated…… The U.S. Marines' uptight behaviour can partly be explained by American paranoia caused by the deaths of U.S. Army troops in Somalia, by terrorist bombings of U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia and, going back a while, in Lebanon….Unlike the other NATO forces here, which have no air cover, the Marines always have Super Cobra and Apache helicopters flying low over their positions. Unlike other NATO commanders, Marine officers have also been very reluctant to send their soldiers out on foot patrols.

Groups of 15 or 20 leathernecks have been moved around together on top of mammoth amphibious armoured vehicles, in the back of dump trucks or have been stationed at checkpoints bristling with concertina wire. Albanians were incredulous that the Marines, whom they hailed as liberators, would so publicly humiliate their home-grown heroes by lining them up against a wall like criminals. But they are slowly awakening to the reality that, while NATO saved them from further atrocities from the Milosevic regime, it is an army of occupation that is as determined to protect Serbians as well as Albanian civilians….That the KLA's ragtag army can be just as vile as the Serbian forces has been known for a long time, but what they have tried to get up to over the past week suggests that NATO's problems are far more likely to come from them than from Serbian malcontents…. Already frustrated by the sudden departure of virtually the entire Serbian minority in their sector because of fears of KLA reprisals, the Germans announced late yesterday that the KLA had until midnight last night to surrender their weapons and until Sunday to get rid of their uniforms…."

European Stars & Stripes 6/18/99 Jon Anderson "…Top Marine Corps leaders in the U.S.-protected sector of Kosovo say tensions are rising in their area after six ethnic Albanians were wounded by gunfire Wednesday night. The shootings occurred after an incident earlier that day in which Marines forcibly detained six Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas after a daylong standoff with more than 100 of the rebel fighters….. In the latest incident, the wounded Kosovars showed up at a Marine base camp asking for help. They said they were shot by Serbs from atop a building. The Albanians were treated and are expected to recover. The actual events are disputed. Serbs told Marines the Albanians picked the fight. "It was just one long string of accusation and counteraccusation," said one Marine major…."

STRATFOR 6/18/99 "…1715 GMT, 990618 - The UN High Commissioner for Refugees reports that as of June 18, two-thirds of the ethnic Albanian refugees sheltered at the Kukes, Albania camp have left for the return trip home. UNHCR spokesman Rupert Colville said between 11,000 and 12,000 refugees still remain….1640 GMT, 990618 - Several ethnic Albanian doctors and nurses, accompanied by KLA members at Pristina's main hospital, demanded that the all-Serbian medical staff leave so that they might be replaced. One of the ethnic Albanian doctors said, "The Serb doctors don't look after Albanian patients. Now, there are no Albanian doctors. Before the war, we worked here. But now the Albanians don't have a right. We're not considered to be human." KFOR troops blocked the doors to the facility and tried to resolve the confrontation, but there are conflicting reports on whether the KLA members were armed or not….. 1611 GMT, 990618 - AFP reports that the KLA held nine nuns and one priest hostage and inflicted "psychological violence" at a Serbian Orthodox church near Mitrovica. An advance contingent of French troops arrived at the site June 16 at the request of church authorities, and has been guarding the area since then…..

Stratfor.com 6/18/99 "…Sure, Russia holds the strategic Slatina airbase, but the token Russian force can not both hold the base and establish a broader presence in Kosovo. NATO, not Russian, forces are overseeing the return of Kosovar Albanians and the spreading presence of the KLA. NATO, not Russian, forces are securing the sites of alleged atrocities. NATO, not Russian, forces are simultaneously urging Serbs to remain in Kosovo while regretting that they are as yet unable to defend the Serbs from the KLA. Every day that passes means that the Russians, when they finally are given a formal role in Kosovo, will find their role that much more marginal and strategically weak…."

FOX News 6/18/99 Donna Bryson, AP "…NATO pledged to put more military police on the streets to reinforce its authority and make the troubled province safe for Serbs who are fleeing by the thousands. Adding reinforcements to protect Serbs represents an ironic reversal of the role NATO has played up to now: fighting on behalf of ethnic Albanians facing repression by Serbs. Now the Serbs are clamoring for protection, reporting attacks across the province by the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army…..Up to 50,000 Serb civilians have already left Kosovo and the rest are increasingly fearful as Serb troops pull out to comply with last week's peace deal. Already, three-quarters of the 40,000 troops once in the province have left and the remainder are due out by midnight Sunday….In the eastern town of Pasjane, after KLA members pulled two Serbs from their car and beat them savagely, a group of Serbs surrounded a U.S. Marine checkpoint where the men were taken, demanding that the peacekeepers protect them. "You made the security leave -- now you have to replace it!'' one Serb shouted…."

CHICAGO TRIBUNE 6/18/99 Paul Salopek "…Yet another group of miserable civilians may soon be streaming out of the wretched killing fields of Kosovo. This time it is the Roma, or Gypsies, who are being blamed by the province's surviving ethnic Albanians for siding with their Serbian oppressors. The beginnings of a backlash against the Roma have been taking shape here over the past two days, ever since ethnic Albanian guerrillas began pouring into town in the wake of occupying NATO troops. The guerrillas, members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, have been conducting weapons searches in the two tiny Roma neighborhoods of the city. More ominously, ethnic Albanian men - both in and out of uniform - have been taking away individual Roma for ''interrogations,'' presumably about collaboration with the Yugoslav forces who have turned much of Djakovica into a pile of scorched rubble. ''A KLA guy put a gun to my daughter's neck and said, 'Where is your ID?''' said Samile Avduli, 34, who was still trembling from the tense encounter two hours earlier. ''He told us to get the hell out, to go to Serbia.'"…The Roma's biggest worry, though, remains the KLA, whose fighters were swarming through the city armed with automatic rifles. ''We want to live in peace here as we always have,'' said Lulzim Xerxa, 36, a Roma mechanic. ''I don't think the KLA will let us. We are afraid.'' …."

Reuters 6/17/99 "…NATO supreme commander General Wesley Clarke said on Thursday it was unclear if all Serb paramilitaries were pulling out of Kosovo. Clark told the BBC that disarmament in the Balkans of both the Serbs and the Kosovo Albanians would never be complete and was fraught with difficulties.

``It is not clear whether all the paramilitaries have pulled back or not and we will be watching this very closely,'' Clark told the BBC. ``We are never going to disarm everyone in the Balkans, There are weapons buried all over the Balkans,'' he added….."

Yahoo! News 6/18/99 AFP "…Separatist Kosovo guerrillas inflicted "psychological violence" on nine nuns and a priest of the Serbian Orthodox Church they held captive in a convent here for two days, the convent's Mother Superior told AFP Friday. Mother Anastasia, the head of the 15th-century Devic convent 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the northern Kosovo town of Mitrovica, said 30 fighters from the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) seized the convent on Sunday, before French troops moved into the area. Church authorities alerted the French military controlling the northern zone, who sent advance troops to the site on Wednesday and have been protecting the establishment since then. French troops moved into Mitrovica on Thursday. Anastasia denied an unconfirmed French military report that the youngest of the nine women being held had been raped, but said the guerrillas had inflicted "psychological violence" during their stay.

Pictures and glass protecting icons in the convent's chapel were smashed, and the KLA insignia was scratched on one of them. The tombstone of a Serbian Orthodox saint, St. Yonikos, was broken while graffitti was daubed on ancient murals and chandeliers were smashed, although most of the artwork was left intact. The one priest who was held hostage said nobody had been beaten but "they fired their machine guns behind our heads." The rebels also made off with the convent's four tractors, two cars, electric generators and money, the priest said….Two medieval Serbian Orthodox monasteries were also burnt down this week by KLA rebels and a priest was kidnapped, the archbishop of Kosovo said Thursday…."

AP 6/18/99 "….Accounts of brutality in Kosovo emerged Thursday in different tones - the stunned, flat voice of a teen-age girl and the measured sentences of a British official - but they both told of irrational savagery mixed with careful planning. Just six days into the international military presence in Kosovo, officials have discovered so many mass graves and killing sites and heard so many wrenching accounts of atrocities that they now estimate at least 10,000 people were killed in the Serb crackdown against Kosovo Albanians which began shortly before NATO began its 78-day air bombardment March 24. The mounting evidence is likely to add to calls for the arrest of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who has been indicted by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague. But President Clinton said Thursday that peacekeepers will take a ``wait and see'' approach toward Milosevic's arrest….. One of the most grisly reports of slaughter so far came Thursday from the village of Poklek, 20 miles west of the provincial capital Pristina. The killings were, by residents' accounts, methodical. Elhame Muqolli, 14, told of how she and scores of friends and neighbors were herded into a room by Serb police, who threw in a hand grenade, raked the room with machine guns and then set it on fire to kill anyone who might have survived. Muqolli (pronounced Moo-CHO-lee) and five others had managed to jump out a window, but 62 others died in the April 17 incident. Their blood dripped through the floor to stain the ceiling of the room below….."

The Associated Press. Tom Walker 6/17/99 "…SENSING growing Nato disquiet about its future role in the province, the Kosovo Liberation Army yesterday scaled down its patrols in the second city of Prizren. Most of its soldiers were carrying only side-arms and truncheons. The main commander in Prizren, Ekrem Rexha, said that discussions on his guerrillas' disarmament could gather pace once it was verified that all Serb forces were out of Kosovo….. At the Rambouillet peace conference he was assured by American negotiators that Nato would find a way of allowing the KLA to keep its arms, probably by taking the guerrillas into Kosovo's new police force….."

ORIGINAL SOURCES 6/17/99 Mary Mostert "…The New York Times Reported yesterday that the "Kosovo Liberation Army will not hand over its weapons to Nato forces and intends to turn itself into a national army with the eventual goal of an independent Kosovo, a senior KLA commander said yesterday. "Directly contradicting the KLA's public support for the agreement reached at Rambouillet, Rustem Mustafa, one of seven regional commanders, said he expected Nato to train its 50,000 soldiers, to provide weapons to replace their old ones and to share security for Kosovo with the KLA." In a helpful description of the KLA the Times notes: "The KLA is a shadowy organization whose structure and leadership is unclear. Its headquarters during the war was near Malisevo, southwest of Pristina, and Mr. Mustafa's officials claim the military structure is divided into seven operational zones, each with its own commander and brigade. These in turn are divided into battalions of 500 men, companies of 100 and platoons. Political links are at brigade level."…. The United Nations resolution recognizes and promises to protect the Sovereign rights of Yugoslavia over Kosovo, which has been Serb for more than 1000 years….. He said Serbs with "clean hands" could continue to live in Kosovo, but gave a clear hint that reprisals could follow against those deemed to have helped Serb forces. "We were here all the time so we know who has done what. We have information," he said. Clearly, the report shows, a group tagged as a "terrorist" group, financed via crime and extortion, expects to become the accuser, judge and executioner of any and all Serbs remaining in Kosovo - and they expect that NATO will assist them by giving them new weapons….. "

The New York Times 6/20/99 "…With the last Yugoslav forces streaming out of Kosovo ahead of schedule, NATO commanders here have reached a tentative agreement with leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army to disband the rebel force gradually, NATO officials said Saturday. Under the agreement, which must still be signed by both parties, the rebels will withdraw from fortified positions held during their civil war against Yugoslav forces, turn over their heavy weapons, shed their uniforms and cease any organized military activities within 30 days…."

The Washington Post 6/20/99 Molly Moore "....With the last Yugoslav troops scheduled to depart Kosovo on Sunday, NATO forces are preparing to escalate the disarming of ethnic Albanian guerrillas who are taking over increasing police and governmental roles, often including violence and intimidation of rival Serbian communities. Even though NATO and Kosovo Liberation Army officials still have not signed an agreement setting the timetable for demilitarization of the separatist rebels, allied forces already have confiscated hundreds of weapons from KLA members and intervened in numerous conflicts involving Serbian citizens, whom the guerrillas consider sympathetic to the Yugoslav forces that brutalized ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. U.S. forces, which include the Marines and the 82nd Airborne Division, have been the most aggressive of the NATO troops in stripping KLA members of their weapons, arresting recalcitrant rebels and interceding in incidents of violence and threats against Serbs...."

Washington Post 6/20/99 Daniel Williams "...At bottom, the Kosovo conflict was a civil war. It was originally between forces of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav government and ethnic Albanian rebels of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) who wanted independence for Kosovo, a province of Serbia, which is the dominant republic of the Yugoslav federation. As is often the case in civil conflicts, the foundations were well laid for a dirty war full of brutality and atrocities. Serbs are taught that the ethnic Albanians are interlopers, people who infiltrated Kosovo by stealth and have no legal right to be here. Moreover, 50-year-old grudges are alive. During World War II, some Albanians sided with the Italian and German occupation armies in Yugoslavia as a way of freeing themselves from the Serbs. The Germans slaughtered tens of thousands of Serbs, so this war became a kind of revenge...... The sad history of Yugoslavia in the past decade also played a role. Serbs see themselves as a main victim in the breakup of Yugoslavia. They resent that tens or hundreds of thousands of Serbs were expelled from Croatia in 1995 in the Croatians' own "ethnic cleansing" campaign of forced deportations, yet no one indicted the Croatian leadership for war crimes. Serbs are endlessly mystified by attention paid by the West to Albanian refugees. "No one cared anything about the Serbs when we were driven out," said Vesna Markovic, a refugee from the Krajina region of Croatia. "We were suffering and no one cared."...."

Reuters 6/20/99 "....British Prime Minister Tony Blair suggested on Sunday that the people of Serbia should bear some share of responsibility for war crimes committed in their name in Kosovo. ``They cannot walk away from these crimes,'' Blair said in an interview with the BBC recorded at the Group of Eight summit, where Kosovo has been top of the agenda. He accused Serbian paramilitaries of killing thousands of innocent people in Kosovo. Blair said it was a fact that no country would give reconstruction aid to Serbia while President Slobodan Milosevic remained in power. He countered the argument that the Serbs should not be punished for the actions of their leaders. ``The more that we see what has happened in Kosovo, the more we see that the Serbian people have got a responsibility to make Milosevic be culpable for these crimes. They cannot walk away from these crimes.'' ..."

Reuters 6/20/99 "...NATO troops have found 60,000 ethnic Albanian refugees held by Serb forces in five ransacked northern Kosovo villages that were turned into concentration camps, The Sunday Telegraph reported. The refugees told Telegraph journalists they had been taken prisoner by Yugoslav forces, to be used as a human shield in the event of a ground war with NATO...... It said all refugees older than six months were given identity cards bearing their name, a registration number and the name of their prison village...."

http://www.globe.com/dailyglobe2/171/nation/Serbs_in_Kosovo_suffer_reprisalsP.shtml 6/20/99 Charles Sennott "...Just off the main road that runs through Mitrovica, Yugoslav Nasic, 64, and his wife were shaking in fear as a NATO armored personnel carrier dropped them in front of their home. The Serb couple pleaded with NATO French peacekeeping forces, which are responsible for the area, to protect them from KLA soldiers, who they said had threatened to kill them if they remained. Nasic said KLA soldiers burst into their home yesterday and ''seemed polite at first.'' Then he said one of the soldiers wrenched his wife's left forefinger, apparently breaking it. ''I am too afraid now. I have to go. NATO cannot sit and wait here in front of our house all night. We are going to have to go,'' said Nasic, his hands trembling, his wife wincing in pain. ''They will kill us,'' he said..... The French troops grew impatient and moved on. The Nasics then left their home and walked away toward the Serbian forces on the edge of town that were preparing to pull out. They took nothing with them. Minutes later, two KLA soldiers emerged from the elderly couple's backyard. Sola Zahiti, a commander of KLA special forces in the town, was dressed in full camouflage, armed with a pistol and a grenade. When asked if he had forced the couple to leave their home, Zahiti replied, ''Why not? Look what they did to their neighbors' houses.'' He pointed to the charred remains of ethnic Albanian homes that dotted the neighborhood. Only those homes marked with a Serbian Orthodox cross and symbol of Serb solidarity drawn in chalk were left untouched....."

Reuters 6/20/99 Matt Spetalnick "...Yugoslav forces completed their withdrawal from Kosovo 11 hours ahead of schedule Sunday as Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton agreed to put disagreements over NATO's air war behind them. NATO promptly declared an official end to the air strikes launched on March 24 and suspended since June 10, when Belgrade agreed to withdraw from the southern Serbian province and let NATO troops protect returning ethnic Albanian refugees..."

Associated Press 6/20/99 DUSAN STOJANOVIC "...With Slobodan Milosevic's rule shaken by Serbia's withdrawal from Kosovo, an even more extremist and anti-Western politician is bidding to take his place. After quitting Milosevic's government when NATO-led troops marched into the southern Serbian province, Vojislav Seselj is now poised to mount the greatest political challenge to the Yugoslav president since he came to power 10 years ago. If Seselj succeeds, it will put into place a nationalist leadership even more strident and anti-Western than the regime NATO just tried to bomb into submission...... Seselj once declared his men would ''take out the eyes of Croatians with rusty spoons.'' NATO-led peacekeepers in Bosnia deemed his outbursts threatening enough to expel him from the country late last year. When Western officials recently accused Serb troops of raping Kosovo women, Seselj denied it by saying they were too ugly for Serb men. On the eve of NATO strikes against Yugoslavia, he threatened that when ''the first allied bomb'' fell on the Serbian soil, ''there will be no Albanians left in Kosovo.'' His prophecy nearly materialized, when hundreds of thousands Kosovo Albanians were forced to flee Kosovo and thousands were killed by Serb troops......"

The Associated Press Donna Bryson 6/20/99 "...The United Nations raised its light blue flag over Kosovo Sunday, and with it hopes for order and democracy in the bitterly divided region. But the red-and-black flag of Albania, which flies over their headquarters on the hilly outskirts of Pristina and elsewhere in Kosovo, represents a serious challenge to U.N. authority. The separatist Kosovo Liberation Army is occupying town halls the United Nations says it should administer and intervening in disputes the world body says it should mediate, raising concerns that plans for a multiethnic Kosovo will be hijacked...."

Stratfor.com 6/20/99 "...While, at least as far as the Russians are concerned, there are no "zones of control in Kosovo, the province is to be divided into five "sectors," which will be controlled and patrolled by NATO members Germany, France, Italy, the United States and the United Kingdom. Under the deal struck between Russia and NATO, 3,000 to 7,000 Russian troops will patrol alongside NATO forces in the German, French, and U.S. sectors. The politics behind teaming Russians with these particular countries is clear. More than others in NATO, France and Germany have attempted to cooperate with Russia throughout the Kosovo conflict, and are attempting to establish the foundation for further post-conflict cooperation. The U.S. has a symbolic obligation to compromise....In short, Russia is absent in what are perhaps the two most significant sectors - those of Italy and the UK. The presence in the German sector and at the airport is significant, but the troops deployed with French and U.S. forces are basically exiles. The U.S. and Russia, so key to Kosovo developments to date, are effectively marginalized in the province. Italy and the UK have been handed the greatest control over developments on the ground in Kosovo. Italy has a vested interest in limiting the influence of Tirana and the KLA in Kosovo, and its troops are geographically placed to do so, but Italy may not have committed the forces necessary to take on the KLA. So the UK is the key player, and its interests are far less clear...."

Stratfor.com 6/20/99 "...0140 GMT, 990621 - Participants at the G-8 summit in Cologne, Germany announced that relations strained by the crisis in Kosovo have been largely restored. The meeting "was a bridge of understanding between Russia and the West," according to British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Russian President Boris Yeltsin declared that he was "among friends," and said, "After this quarrel we should all have a reconciliation - that is the main thing."..... 2200 GMT, 990620 - British forensics experts have begun the investigation of Velika Krusa, a town that is the location of an alleged Serbian atrocity and a location mentioned specifically in the war-crimes indictment of Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic...."

The Associated Press 6/21/99 ALEKSANDAR VASOVIC "...Several hundred Serb refugees from Kosovo protested Monday in downtown Belgrade, demanding better protection before they heed the government's appeals to return to Kosovo. The police ordered the protesters to disperse. Angry both with a government they feel has abandoned them and with peacekeepers who they say cannot ensure their safety in Kosovo, the Serbs demanded that the U.N. Security Council address their plight. ``We demand that the U.N. Security Council stop the rampage of the terrorist gangs ... who destroy Serb property and historic monuments in Kosovo,'' a leaflet handed out by the protesters read...."

Reuters 6/21/99 Mark Heinrich "...``Life in Kosovo is an elemental struggle for existence...carried out in relentless obedience to nature's law, which says, 'There is no place for you both. You must kill or be killed,''' wrote Balkans scholar Edith Durham. That was in 1908....."

Stratfor 6/21/99 "...1557 GMT, 990621 - A group of 30 Russian architects and builders flew from Moscow to Belgrade on June 21 to aid in the restoration of buildings and bridges destroyed by NATO airstrikes. Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov and Belgrade Mayor Voislav Mihailovic talked last week about the restoration of several facilities in and around Belgrade...... 1509 GMT, 990621 - The UN High Commissioner for Refugees said June 21 that around 135,000 ethnic Albanian refugees have returned to Kosovo since NATO's airstrikes were suspended 11 days ago. On June 20 alone, over 34,000 refugees crossed into Kosovo from Albania and Macedonia..... "

The New York Times 6/21/99 Steven Lee Myers "...The agreement reached early Monday to disband the Kosovo Liberation Army included, at the insistence of its commanders, a pledge by the NATO allies to consider letting the rebels form a provisional army for Kosovo modeled on the National Guard in United States. The agreement, signed in the dead of night after a frenetic weekend of military and political wrangling from a mountainous rebel redoubt in central Kosovo to the capitals of Europe, gave no timetable for creating an army and no details of its size or mission. But the inclusion of the pledge insures that even after laying down its arms, the Kosovo Liberation Army can pursue its ambition to remain an organized political and military force in the Yugoslav province. For their part, the rebels agreed to a phased demilitarization, an immediate cease-fire and a cessation of hostilities. ..."

The New York Times 6/22/99 David Rohde "...For the third consecutive day, several dozen Serbs in civilian dress who call themselves "warrior citizens" prevented ethnic Albanians from entering the predominantly Serbian sector of this northern Kosovo industrial town on Monday, jeering and threatening any Albanian who dared to enter. In a direct challenge to NATO authority, the Serbs are declaring their neighborhood, about a third of the city, and the predominantly Serbian towns to the north a "Serbian zone." The area stretches the width of a valley 30 or so miles from here ..."..."

Stratfor.com 6/21/99 "... 2330 GMT, 990621 Russia/U.S./NATO - Duma speaker Gennady Seleznyov said the ratification of the START III treaty will depend on the state of relations between Russia and NATO. Seleznyov added that ratification will hinge on what the U.S. does in regard to the ABM treaty. Seleznyov went on to say, "Whether the Americans withdraw from this treaty or not will be clear already this autumn." ...."

AFP 6/20/99 "... British Prime Minister Tony Blair suggested Sunday that Kosovar Albanian desires to see their province move beyond autonomy to actual independence from Yugoslavia might be discussed in the future. It was a rare expression of willingness to consider moving beyond the terms listed in the G8 peace plan agreed to by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and later ratified by a UN Security Council Resolution....Speaking on the ABC television program This Week, Blair, in Cologne for the G8 summit, said the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) knew "all the way through that what we decided at the Rambouillet peace accords was that there would be a substantial measure of autonomy for them." ...."

The Associated Press 6/21/99 Laura King "...An explosion in a school outside Pristina killed four people today, including two Gurkha soldiers in the British peacekeeping force, NATO said. A fifth person was injured, the first casualties since the allied peacekeepers entered Kosovo on June 12. The blast that killed two civilians as well as the two soldiers from the 69th Gurkha Field Squadron was caused by a mine or booby-trapped device on school grounds west of Kosovo's capital, the allies said...."

UK Independent 6/21/99 Robert Fisk "..." NATO killed far more Serb civilians than soldiers during its 11-week bombardment of the country and most of the Yugoslav Third Army emerged unscathed from the massive air attacks on its forces in Kosovo, according to evidence emerging in Yugoslavia. Nato officers have been astonished that thousands of Yugoslav tanks, missile launchers, artillery batteries, personnel carriers and trucks have been withdrawn from the province with barely a scratch on them. At least 60,000 Yugoslav troops - rather than the 40,000 estimated - were waiting to fight the Western armies in Kosovo. Yugoslav military sources said that more than half ..."

Reuters 6/23/99 "...The United States has no credible evidence the Kosovo Liberation Army engaged in drug trafficking to support its armed struggle against Serbia, State Department spokesman James Rubin said Wednesday. "The U.S. government has never identified credible evidence of these drugrunning charges,'' he told reporters. "We've seen reports in newspapers and elsewhere,'' Rubin said. But although American intelligence agencies have looked into the issue, "we have not never developed credible evidence of our own,'' he said...."

AP 6/21/99 "...President Clinton on Monday defined what type of U.S. financial aid should go to rebuild NATO-bombed Yugoslavia while President Slobodan Milosevic is still in power. World leaders have agreed that only humanitarian help should be allowed in order to provide comfort to the Serbian people, but not the government. In Clinton's view, it's okay to rebuild hospitals and power plants, but not roads and bridges, he said in Bonn, Germany, where he attended a U.S.-European Union conference. ``In terms of rebuilding the bridges so people can go to work, I don't buy that,'' the president said. ``That's part of their economic reconstruction, and I don't think we should help, not a bit, not a penny...."

The Associated Press 6/22/99 "...In an apparent change of tone, China said Tuesday that ``a serious investigation'' is needed to prove whether ethnic cleansing occurred in Kosovo. China previously played down evidence of atrocities in the Serb province, instead blaming NATO's bombing campaign for creating a humanitarian crisis. Since entering Kosovo on June 12, international peacekeepers and reporters have found mass graves and other apparent signs of atrocities. Asked about the discoveries and whether they strengthened the case for war crimes charges against Yugoslav leaders, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue said more research was needed. She did not rule out putting Yugoslav leaders on trial. ``Whether this ethnic cleansing has happened or what is the concept of ethnic cleansing, a conclusion can only be drawn after a serious investigation,'' Zhang said at a briefing. The United Nations should discuss how the investigation should proceed, she said....."

New York Times 6/22/99 Elisabeth Bumiller "... The 22-year-old woman, married four months ago, said she was taken from this small southern village by Serbian forces, held for a day in the local police station, beaten, then threatened with death. But she was not, she said, raped. Her husband, Behan Thaqi, thinks differently. "I am 100 percent certain that they raped her," said Thaqi, 34, a farmer imprisoned by the Serbs for supplying weapons to the Kosovo Liberation Army, the Albanian guerrillas who fought Serbian forces. "I know that when women get in their hands, there is no chance to escape." ...."

Stratfor.com 6/22/99 "...1531 GMT 990622 - Russian presidential envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin said that the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) should be both disarmed and disbanded, and that he was concerned over the vague wording of the UN-brokered peace resolution. Chernomyrdin said that the resolution called for the demilitarization of the KLA, but not its disarmament. According to the resolution signed by NATO Commander General Sir Michael Jackson and KLA leader Hashim Thaci, KLA members must surrender all but their smallest weapons.....1255 GMT, 990622 - Malaysia will send troops to Kosovo at UN expense and command, said Defense Minister Abang Abu Bakar. The country will provide 10 military liaison officers and 50 police for a one-year mission, most likely at the UN command headquarters, Bakar said. Bakar called the invitation to serve "a big honor for Malaysia," as it recognized the professionalism of its troops.

AP breaking 6/23/99 "...NATO troops have pledged to do their best to keep revenge-minded ethnic Albanians from looting and burning Serb homes, but they were too late for this village. Crackling fire ate into wooden beams Wednesday morning. A roof collapsed. Tiles were strewn about. Stucco fell from walls. ``They burn our houses, we burn theirs,'' said Shpetim Shijaku, a skinny ethnic Albanian 10-year-old who came from a nearby village to grab whatever fleeing Serbs had left behind. The looting of this Serb settlement of 50 houses in southwestern Kosovo began Tuesday, locals said, after villagers fled, fearing reprisals from Kosovo Liberation Army rebels...."

Stratfor.com Global Intelligence Center 6/23/99 "... 2031 GMT, 990623 Yugoslavia/United States - In fulfillment of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and the Support for East European Democracy Act of 1989, a comprehensive security package moving through the U.S. Senate proposes $150 million in aid for Kosovo, "of which $20,000,000 shall be available for training and equipping a Kosova security force." There is no indication whether this is refers to a new security force or aid for the Kosovo Liberation Army...... "

Stratfor.com Kosovo Crisis Center 6/23/99 "...1922 GMT, 990623 - Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon announced the U.S. believes that Russian mercenaries participated in the Kosovo conflict on the Serbian side, and that they may have been involved in committing atrocities. Bacon insisted that any Russians would have been acting on their own accord, although Newsday had reported that dozens of Russian volunteers had participated in a massacre near Prizren. Bacon said that his information was based on reports from the Kosovo Liberation Army and that he was not aware of any groups of the size described by Newsday. He emphasized that the individuals were acting alone and that there was no evidence they were linked to the Russian government. 1647 GMT, 990623 - In a statement released June 23, the UN said it plans to bring the ethnic Albanian signatories to the Rambouillet Agreement and a local Serbian political leader together to negotiate a compromise on political administration for Kosovo. The UN says it plans to form an advisory council to discuss the interim arrangements, headed by UN acting special representative Sergio Viera de Mello. Viera de Mello has met for the past two days with Kosovo Liberation Army leader Hashim Thaci in regards to the political situation in the providence...."

Associated Press - via canoe.com 6/23/99 Donna Bryson "...Ethnic tensions are straining the U.N. peace plan for Kosovo, with Serb houses burning in one Kosovo city and Serbs barring ethnic Albanians from crossing a bridge in another. The foreign ministers of Italy, Britain, Germany and France are visiting Kosovo today to meet with U.N. special representative Sergio Vieira de Mello and NATO's Kosovo commander, Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson. Smoke from burning houses in the divided city of Pec rose up into the mountains Tuesday. Ethnic Albanians watched one Serb house burn and claimed the Serbs had set the fire themselves. The residents couldn't be found. Italian peacekeepers sent in soldiers to remove a Serb family that said a KLA fighter had come into their home and robbed them. While soldiers on the street and in the courtyard provided cover, other troops stormed the house and escorted the men and women out. In the northern city of Kosovska Mitrovica, French peacekeepers looked on as Serbs menaced those wanting to cross a bridge to the other side of town -- an area containing the main hospital, many ethnic Albanian homes and almost the only open food shops. "I just want to go home," said 69-year-old Hasan Jashari, crying....."

The Associated Press Laura King 6/24/99 "...If there was a defining moment in Hashim Thaci's transformation from a mystery-shrouded rebel chieftain - code named ``The Snake'' - to a politician with all the right moves, this might have been it. As the 30-year-old ethnic Albanian leader emerged Wednesday from a meeting in Pristina with visiting European foreign ministers, the crowd at first chanted, ``NA-TO! NA-TO!'' ...But that was swiftly drowned out by louder, far more impassioned shouts: his name (pronounced THAH-chee) repeated over and over, and rhythmic yells of ``U-C-K!'' (pronounced OOH-CHAY-KAH), the Albanian-language initials for the soon-to-be-disbanded rebel army. Women held babies up for him to kiss. Teen-age boys clustered around him, speaking earnestly. Younger boys pushed close and beamed when they were rewarded with a long arm draped for a moment around their skinny shoulders....."

Reuters 6/24/99 "..." The United States on Thursday offered a reward of up to $5 million to encourage the arrest of alleged Yugoslav war criminals, including President Slobodan Milosevic. State Department spokesman James Rubin said the money would go to ``those who provide information that leads to the transfer of indicted war criminals'' to the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague. Washington has provided evidence and support for the Hague court to pursue cases against those responsible for atrocities in Kosovo in recent months, when Serb forces forced hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians to flee ..."

Stratfor 6/24/99 "...Now that NATO forces are on the ground in Kosovo, they finally have an opportunity to observe the effects of the 79 day bombing campaign. Readily apparent is that NATO was successful in targeting buildings, fuel depots, and other fixed infrastructure. This comes as no surprise, since there was ample video footage of the damage available throughout the conflict. What has also become apparent is that NATO's bombing campaign did strikingly little damage to Yugoslav military equipment, troops, and capacity to wage war. Despite NATO claims that it had damaged or destroyed some 40 percent of Yugoslavia's main battle tanks and 60 percent of Yugoslav artillery and mortars, KFOR troops have thus far found only three damaged, and outdated, T-55 tanks left behind in Kosovo. The Yugoslav military admits to an additional 10 damaged tanks, though they were considered sufficiently repairable to be removed from the province on trailers. What NATO did find was a massive amount of decoys - fake tanks, trucks, artillery pieces, missile launchers, roads, and even bridges - on which NATO had expended its weaponry. NATO troops entering Kosovo also described the Yugoslav Army's defensive fortifications as "formidable." NATO's attacks on fixed infrastructure, while successful, were of questionable value. Yugoslav forces quickly abandoned their known headquarters, and both Serbian and KLA sources reported through the campaign that NATO was attacking empty buildings - repeatedly. And while NATO repeatedly struck Yugoslavia's limited number of petroleum infrastructure targets, reports late in the conflict indicated that the Yugoslav Army still retained ample stockpiles of fuel to facilitate armor and aircraft combat maneuver. Strikes against the hardened airbase at Pristina were also evidently less successful than NATO had hoped. On June 11, six MiG-21s flew out of Pristina airport, and on June 12, what NATO initially reported as eleven MiG-29s but later called MiG-21s departed Pristina. And despite NATO assertions that its bombing campaign had crushed the spirit of the Yugoslav Army, the 47,000 troops that withdrew from the province appeared to observers to be in good shape and high spirits...."

stratfor.com 6/24/99 "...1655 GMT, 990624 Yugoslavia - U.S. Marines based around Fort Monteith in southeastern Kosovo were placed on high alert after a column of Serbian tanks and armored vehicles penetrated a three-mile buffer zone around the province June 23. The column was spotted by a British helicopter, and a Cobra attack helicopter was scrambled to intercept. Additionally, combat engineers on the ground prepared tank traps to stop the incoming Serbian armor, but the Serbian column disappeared....."

New York Times 6/25/99 Chris Hedges "...The senior commanders of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which signed a disarmament agreement with NATO, carried out assassinations, arrests and purges within their ranks to thwart potential rivals, say current and former commanders in the rebel army and some Western diplomats. The campaign, in which as many as half a dozen top rebel commanders were shot dead, was directed by Hashim Thaci and two of his lieutenants, Azem Syla and Xhavit Haliti, these officials said. Thaci denied through a spokesman that he had been responsible for any such killings. Although the United States has long been wary of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the rebel group has become the main ethnic Albanian power in Kosovo. Rebel commanders supplied NATO with target information during the bombing campaign. Now, after the war, the United States and other NATO powers have effectively made Thaci and the rebel force partners in rebuilding Kosovo. The agreement NATO signed with Thaci, for example, envisions turning the rebel group into a civilian police force and leaves open the possibility that the Kosovo Liberation Army could become a provisional army modeled on the United States National Guard. While none of the rebel officials interviewed saw Thaci or his aides execute anyone, they recounted -- and in some cases said they had witnessed -- incidents in which Thaci's rivals had been killed shortly after he or one of his aides had threatened them with death...."

UPI 6/22/99 "...Unexploded NATO ordnance was blamed for the deaths of two Gurkha British soldiers of the international peace implementation force KFOR and two civilians in a village near Pristina Monday, Belgrade media reported. The incident occurred at the village of Nekovce, 30 km southwest of Pristina, when the Gurkhas were reported clearing the village school. More than 50 pieces of unexploded ordnance had been placed in a ditch and one device went off, the reports said....."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_375000/375660.stm 6/23/99 Caroline Wyatt "..." Two elderly Serb civilians have been attacked and killed in their homes in the Kosovo town of Prizren, in what appear to have been revenge attacks by Kosovo Albanians. The pair - a man and a woman - were attacked in their homes near the town centre, apparently by ethnic Albanian civilians armed with an axe. Both bodies had been badly mutilated by the time German K-For troops arrived on the scene. One eyewitness said the woman had been virtually decapitated. The motive appears to be revenge for what happened to ethnic Albanians at the hands of the Serbs ..."

Human Rights Watch 6/18/99 "...Accompanied by a local villager, a Human Rights Watch researcher yesterday inspected the site of a mass killing in Meja, northwest of Djakovica, and found the decayed remains of several men. The men were apparently killed by Serb security forces on April 27, 1999, victims of a massacre in which Human Rights Watch believes at least 100 men were killed. The site appears to confirm testimony that Human Rights Watch collected earlier, in interviews with Kosovar refugees in northern Albania.....There were four recently dug graves located in a small Catholic cemetery further up the hill. According to the villager, the remains of four local men who were killed in the massacre are buried there. After nineteen separate interviews with eyewitnesses who had passed through Meja on April 27 (See Flash # 34), Human Rights Watch concluded that at least one hundred, and perhaps many more, men between the ages of sixteen and sixty were taken out of a convoy of refugees by Serbian forces and systematically executed in Meja on that day. The refugees who were interviewed had been systematically "cleansed" from neighboring villages by Serbian special police, paramilitary units, and soldiers of the Yugoslav Army (VJ). The refugees were then forced to follow the road to Meja, which many of them passed through around midday. They reported seeing security forces holding "hundreds" of men at gunpoint. Those who passed through Meja later in the afternoon reported having seen a "large pile of bodies." ..."

Stratfor.com 6/22/99 "...1247 GMT, 990622 - The two British soldiers killed in Kosovo yesterday died while transporting NATO cluster bombs away from a school were they had been collected by locals, said a British military spokesperson. Both men were from the 6th Gurkha Field Squadron of the 36th Engineering Regiment. They had been asked by local residents to move the piles of bomblets away from the school so that they could be detonated without damaging the building. After moving the bomblets away from the building and placing them into three piles for detonation, two of the piles exploded, killing the two soldiers and two civilian bystanders...."

Associated Press 6/23/99 Robert Burns "...U.S. Marines manning a checkpoint in Kosovo were shot at today by unidentified assailants and then returned fire, killing one person and wounding two, U.S. officials said. The commander of U.S. forces in Kosovo, Army Brig. Gen. John Craddock, said no Marines were injured..... Craddock said he had not yet learned whether the assailants were Serbs or ethnic Albanians. After the interview, Pentagon officials said they learned that the assailants had surrendered. They apparently numbered about a half dozen, were dressed in civilian clothes and were armed with AK-47 weapons...."

Reuters 6/24/99 "...Three Kosovo Serbs were found killed in the provincial capital Pristina on Thursday, witnesses and KFOR peacekeepers said. The bodies of a professor, a night guard and a canteen manager were found inside the building of the economics faculty of Pristina University...."

AFP 6/24/99 "...- The murder of three Serbs at Pristina's economics faculty on Wednesday night did little to reassure the thousands of Serbs already packing and leaving their homes in Kosovo's capital, many of them saying they had been expelled from their appartments by armed ethnic Albanian groups. .... "The talk about security for all in Kosovo is just rhetoric," Zoran Pavlovic, 36, a Serb, said. "The reality is that Serbs in Pristina do not have any protection and they are being terrorised by armed or unarmed Albanian groups.". ...Father Sava, a Serb Orthodox priest, told a press conference on Thursday that an estimated 20,000 Serbs had left Pristina since the withdrawal of Yugoslav security forces from Kosovo began on June 10. He also said that at least 50 Serbs had been killed and 140 kidnapped in the same period throughout Kosovo. .....Already, hundreds of Serbs said they have had their appartments confiscated by armed Albanian groups who give them deadlines of up to 48 hours to vacate the premises...."

Los Angeles Times 6/23/99 CHRISTOPHER LAYNE "....Although it was NATO's ostensible ally against Yugoslavia, it is hard to grasp why U.S. and NATO policymakers have concluded that the KLA forces are the "good guys." * First, the KLA is a nasty and thuggish lot. This is a coalition of the despicable: a radical right wing (descendants from the numerous ethnic Albanians who fought for the Nazis in World War II), a radical left wing (communist hard-liners), liberally mixed with Islamic fundamentalists and drug traffickers and other criminals. * Second, the KLA's ideology is inconsistent with America's postwar vision for the province, which, as President Clinton reiterated this week, calls for creation of a multiethnic democracy. The KLA is hostile toward democracy.... * Third, the KLA's long-term political ambitions are antithetical to those of the United States and NATO. Washington and the alliance seek a postwar Kosovo that enjoys substantial self-rule as an autonomous province within Serbia. The KLA, however, is committed to attaining independence for Kosovo and ultimately to uniting Kosovo, by force if necessary, with Albania and with the ethnic Albanian portion of Macedonia, which could trigger a wider Balkan conflict.... * Fourth, the KLA craftily orchestrated events in Kosovo in order to draw the U.S. and NATO into the conflict against Serbia. Early this year, the U.S. intelligence community warned the Clinton administration that the KLA would attempt to force NATO's intervention by staging provocations designed to elicit brutal Serb reprisals and thereby gain the West's sympathy and support. The KLA's strategy worked: The U.S. intervened in Kosovo's civil war, absolving the KLA insurgents and naively concluding that the Serbs alone were responsible...."

Washington Post 6/27/99 Anna Husarska "...The Kosovo Albanian spotted the New Republic logo on my cap and broke into a broad smile. "Hey, we are now from a new republic, too," he announced triumphantly. Everywhere I went in Kosovo this month, the name of my home magazine made me popular. I gradually gave away all the paraphernalia I owned with the logo on it: first the cap, then the polo shirt, then the sweat shirt. Even my business cards were a hit among ethnic Albanians who believe that theirs is the only new republic that matters. The U.S. government and, indeed, the entire international community begs to differ, of course: An independent republic of Kosovo is not being contemplated as a possible outcome of the U.N./NATO operation. But amid the general chaos here as local factions vie for power, this lack of agreement over the final status of the province does not seem to matter, at least not for now. It doesn't matter to Kosovo Albanians, who act as though this were indeed their new republic; their representatives are taking power in municipalities abandoned by the Serb-dominated administration, which has withdrawn with the Yugoslav army....."

Stratfor.Com Kosovo Crisis Center 6/26/99 "...1455 GMT, 990626 Yugoslavia - A Russian Ilyushin 76 and a French C130 landed at the Slatina airport June 26, the first aircraft to arrive there since the Allied air war ended. The Russian jet was carrying paratroopers and technicians for the Russian field force, while the French plane carried parts and personnel to bring the airport back to full operational status. Colonel General Viktor Zavarzin, the Russian commander who led his troops into Kosovo to the airport, commented that this was "the start of the air bridge which will serve in the future as a delivery point for all the things we need." 0142 GMT, 990626 Yugoslavia - The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) reports that the Serbian government has released over 166 ethnic Albanians who have been kept in Serbian prisons. The organization will see to the safe return of the men back into Kosovo in the coming days and made it clear they intend to continue efforts to locate other ethnic Albanians being held in Yugoslavia. Questions remain though, according to the ICRC, over how many are being detained and where they are located...."

BBC 6/27/99 "...The United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has warned against the creation of "another humanitarian disaster" in Yugoslavia. In an interview with the BBC, Mr Annan said aid should be offered to Yugoslavia, irrespective of whether President Slobodan Milosevic stays in power. Nato countries like the US and the UK have ruled out any money to rebuild Yugoslavia without a change of government. But Mr Annan said: "We have to make sure that the Serbs, who in some ways are victims of their own leadership, should not be twice punished." ..."

New York Times 6/27/99 John Broder "...President Clinton acknowledged Friday for the first time that he had underestimated Serbia's ability to withstand the NATO bombing campaign. In a lengthy news conference, Clinton said he had believed that President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia would submit to allied demands after "a couple of days" of bombing and halt the Serbian assault on Kosovo. NATO and the administration were initially criticized for that miscalculation of Serbian stamina, and then for failing to have a strategy for a prolonged air war, a campaign that ultimately lasted 78 days...."

Stratfor 6/25/99 "...It is becoming harder by the day to justify NATO's continued collaboration with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). A front page article in the June 25 New York Times cites KLA commanders, former Albanian government officials, and Western diplomats who claim KLA leader Hashim Thaci and two of his lieutenants led purges of the KLA ranks, to root out and kill potential challengers to Thaci's leadership. No one has come forward to say they witnessed Thaci or his associates, Azem Syla and Xhavit Haliti, personally carrying out the killings, though reports to this effect have circulated for years. Moreover, there have been numerous documented accounts of people killed shortly after criticizing or being threatened by Thaci and his associates, whose reputations for ruthlessness and intimidation are legendary....What Thaci and Rubin have not been able to deny is the wave of reprisals against Serbs carried out by Kosovar Albanians, including members of the KLA. Serbs have been kidnapped, beaten, and killed, their houses and businesses looted and burned, and NATO has been unable to stop the campaign....The problem is, NATO simply has no options. It has so elevated the KLA throughout Operation Allied Force, so marginalized Rugova and the moderates, and so demonized the Serbs, that it can not now tear down Thaci's organization..... NATO is now learning that it is impossible not to take sides in a conflict. Unless it is now willing to combat the KLA and take complete and sole military and political control of the province, it has just handed control of Kosovo to a group no more nor less ethical and humane than Arkan's Tigers. NATO attempted to wage an even-handed humanitarian war to impose a peaceful tie between hostile camps engaged in a very messy, centuries-old blood feud. Now, too late, it learns what it stepped into...."

Stratfor 6/24/99 "...Now that NATO forces are on the ground in Kosovo, they finally have an opportunity to observe the effects of the 79 day bombing campaign. Readily apparent is that NATO was successful in targeting buildings, fuel depots, and other fixed infrastructure. This comes as no surprise, since there was ample video footage of the damage available throughout the conflict. What has also become apparent is that NATO's bombing campaign did strikingly little damage to Yugoslav military equipment, troops, and capacity to wage war. Despite NATO claims that it had damaged or destroyed some 40 percent of Yugoslavia's main battle tanks and 60 percent of Yugoslav artillery and mortars, KFOR troops have thus far found only three damaged, and outdated, T-55 tanks left behind in Kosovo. The Yugoslav military admits to an additional 10 damaged tanks, though they were considered sufficiently repairable to be removed from the province on trailers. What NATO did find was a massive amount of decoys - fake tanks, trucks, artillery pieces, missile launchers, roads, and even bridges - on which NATO had expended its weaponry. NATO troops entering Kosovo also described the Yugoslav Army's defensive fortifications as "formidable." ...""

Reuters 6/23/99 "...The United States has no credible evidence the Kosovo Liberation Army engaged in drug trafficking to support its armed struggle against Serbia, State Department spokesman James Rubin said Wednesday. ''The U.S. government has never identified credible evidence of these drug-running charges,'' he told reporters. ``We've seen reports in newspapers and elsewhere,'' Rubin said. But although American intelligence agencies have looked into the issue, ``we have never developed credible evidence of our own,'' he said. Charges that the KLA -- outgunned and outmanned in its fight against Belgrade until NATO waged a 78-day war over Kosovo that ended last week -- trafficked in narcotics to buy weapons appeared periodically in the media over the past year and were often used by critics to undermine the rebel group. The United States has increasingly looked to the KLA for the political leadership to help rebuild Kosovo, the Serbian province now a de facto international protectorate....Rubin said that in recent discussions with Hashim Thaqi, the KLA political leader, he raised U.S. concerns about incidents in which KLA members reportedly defaced a church or retaliated against Serbs. But drug trafficking was not brought up because the United States has no credible evidence of KLA involvement, he said...."

Reuters 6/25/99 Matt Spetalnick "... Thousands of Gypsies are fleeing their homes in Kosovo because of revenge attacks by ethnic Albanians who accuse them of collaborating with their Serb oppressors. Across the embattled Yugoslav province, Gypsies -- who call themselves Roma -- have begun streaming out of towns and villages in the third wave of refugees spawned by Kosovo's bitter ethnic conflict. NATO sources say renegade members of the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army have joined in the violent reprisals. Dozens of Gypsy homes have been looted and burned, and there have been increasing reports of abductions, beatings and killings. About 3,000 frightened Gypsy refugees from across Kosovo have sought sanctuary in the past few days at a dilapidated schoolhouse in the town of Kosovo Polje, on the outskirts of the provincial capital Pristina....."

Stratfor 6/25/99 "...1442 GMT, 990625 Yugoslavia - The New York Times reports that top leadership in the KLA have ordered the execution, arrest and purge of internal rivals as a means for strengthening their hold on power. According to KLA commanders and western diplomats, six senior KLA leaders were shot on the commands of Hashim Thaci and two lieutenants, Azem Syla and Xhavit Haliti. Rifat Haxhijaj, a former KLA member, told the Times, "When the war started, everyone wanted to be the chief. For the leadership, this was never just a war against the Serbs. It was also a struggle for power." The U.S. State Department has not yet confirmed the assassinations, and Thaci is denying the accounts through a spokesman...."

AP 6/25/99 Ron Fournier "...President Clinton said today he's not surprised that ethnic Albanian are engaging in revenge attacks on Serbs ``after what they've been through,'' but he said NATO is doing its best to stop the violence as refugees return home....."

Reuters 6/25/99 Anatoly Verbin "...At least 14 Kosovo civilians were killed in the provincial capital Pristina during the most violent 24 hour-hour period since NATO troops moved in to the region two weeks ago. ``Yesterday was a very busy day with a lot of overnight activity,'' Lieutenant Colonel Paul Watton of the British force which controls Pristina told a news conference on Friday. ``There are tremendous challenges here,'' he said. Another NATO spokesman, Major Jan Joosten, said an Italian soldier was wounded a weapon was accidentally discharged. He was taken to hospital in Pristina and died on Thursday night. The civilians included three Serbs whose bodies were found at Pristina University on Thursday morning. Two people died in a hospital, one of them of wounds and one who was killed there. A nurse was wounded in the hospital. The bodies of the other civilians were found in the city, the spokesman said, but he declined to give their nationalities -- a typical NATO practice to avoid stoking ethnic tension in Kosovo. ``They were all Kosovans,'' he said. ...."

Truth In Media 6/24/99 Bob Djurdjevic "...Albanian terrorists have abducted at gun point at least 140 Serbs in Kosovo during last 12 days, our sources say. Most of the kidnapped Serbs are men (36 to 40 in age) from the territory of the Glogovac municipality. All the citizens of the village of Slivovo escaped to the Gracanica monastery on June 22 after the Kosovo Albanians attacked them. In addition, about 300 Serbian refugees "ethnically cleansed" from Bosnia in 1995, who had been put up in the Velika Reka camp near Pristina, fled after a large group of the KLA terrorists broke into the settlement. Bodies of six massacred Serbs were found also on June 22 in the village Mazgit. These Serbs were kidnapped June 16 in front of their houses in Obilic. Also the ANSA reported Albanian retaliations in Kosovo continue. Four Serbian shepherds were killed yesterday in Novo Brdo and bodies of six Albanians killed by KLA have been found. ..."

Reuters AFP 6/28/99 "..."Two people were shot dead over Saturday night in the Kosovo capital Pristina and at least one of them had links to an international organisation operating in the province, officials said yesterday. The latest killings highlighted the vacuum created when Serb forces withdrew from Kosovo earlier this month, leaving the region without a civilian force to maintain law and order...."

Truth In Media - bulletins@truthinmedia.org (TiM GW Bulletins) 6/27/99 Bob Djurdjebic "...When the NATO troops entered Kosovo on June 11, we were told by the likes of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair that they were their to ensure security of all civilians - Serb and Albanian alike. It must have been a delayed reaction April Fools Day joke. In the last 24 hours alone, 14 Serb civilians and one Italian soldier were killed, allegedly by the KLA terrorists, the Macedonian News Agency has reported...."

AFP 6/28/99 "...US troops fought an intense firefight with two suspected ethnic Albanian guerrillas after they spotted four Serb homes set on fire, troops said Monday. The firefight late Sunday lasted around one minute but involved hundreds of rounds of automatic weapons fire, grenades and heavy machine gun fire, US troops said early Monday after returning from a patrol. At one point four helicopters -- Apaches and Blackhawks -- hovered at the scene outside the town of Vitina in southern Kosovo. The event followed a wave of arson attacks in the US sector on Saturday night that destroyed at least 14 houses, including one in the same neighborhood outside Vitina. ..."

Associated Press 6/29/99 Ellen Knickmeyer "...Incense covering the acrid smell of smoke from the city below, Serb Orthodox Metropolitan Amfilohije Radovic sought to fortify the remaining Serb flock in this city: a few dozen old men and women. Outside the 13th-century stone church, other white-haired Serbs bundled their belongings in blankets Monday or sat by their suitcases, waiting for the next NATO-guarded convoy that would take them out of Kosovo, and into exile. Women shrouded in black wept beside two fresh graves, dug within the safety of church grounds for two Serb women found the day before with their throats slashed. In the two weeks since Kosovo's latest war, revenge attacks by ethnic Albanians have driven almost all Serbs from the western city of Pec, the center of Serbia's church-state during the medieval zenith of its kingdom. Today, as few as 50 Serbs remain of the 20,000 to 30,000 here before the war; another 150 are holed up in an isolated village outside town, guarded by 200 Italian NATO troops..... Monday's service commemorated the 610th anniversary of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo Polje, a touchstone of the Serb culture. To Serbs, the anniversary marks the day the Serbian kingdom sacrificed its fighting force to hold back the invading Muslim army of the Ottoman Empire, thereby safeguarding Western Europe and Christianity itself. In 1999, the most fervent nationalists see the Kosovo war as having been fought to save this birthplace of Serb culture from a growing majority of predominantly Muslim ethnic Albanians. As it stands now, they lost their war - Pec Serbs lost their homeland, and they lost their homes..... "

AP 6/28/99 "...Although ethnic cleansing won't be tolerated, NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia shouldn't be considered a precedent for future intervention by the alliance elsewhere, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said Monday. "Every circumstance is unique,'' Albright told the Council on Foreign Relations. "NATO is a European and Atlantic - not a global - institution.'' Her comments reflected a subtle shift in the White House's thinking about the role of NATO in the aftermath of its 11-week bombing of Yugoslavia. Before the Kosovo crisis, the administration had been pressing NATO members to consider expanding the defensive alliance's reach beyond Europe as a way of maintaining an important post-Cold War role in the world....."

AP 6/29/99 "...The United States and NATO not only fell short of their goals in Kosovo but made the situation worse, Senators Craig Thomas and Mike Enzi said. The senators, both R-Wyo., were in Sheridan on Friday. Enzi became the second Wyoming native to receive a Distinguished Eagle Scout Award from the Boy Scouts, while Thomas attended a Wyoming Mining Association Convention luncheon. "Our kids and grandkids will probably spend the next 25 years (in Kosovo) trying to keep the peace," Enzi said...."

New York Times 6/29/99 Blaine Harden "...Fearing vengeance from returning Kosovo Albanians, about a quarter of the Serbs in Kosovo -- more than 75,000 -- have fled the province in the 18 days since Serbian forces began pulling out of the province, according to officials from the Yugoslav Red Cross. Those officials said they were running short of food and other supplies to care for a flood of refugees that they did not expect and are not prepared to handle. The senior official in Belgrade for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said the plight of the Serbs who have become refugees inside Serbia is urgent, although not yet desperate. He said, too, that the world has an obligation to act quickly to help the homeless Serbs this summer, just as it acted in the spring to help Albanians chased out of Kosovo. "There is a risk the international community will not maintain its objectivity and sensitivity," said Eduardo Arbleda, the representative here for the refugee agency....."

AFP 6/29/99 "...The situation in Kosovo is catastrophic, Serb opposition leader Vuk Draskovic said Tuesday, and blamed the leading world powers for the problems. "It is false to say that KFOR does not have the strength to prevent the expulsion of Serbs. If that were the case, it would be its duty to call on our security forces to help it stop these expulsions," the head of the Serb Renewal Movement (SPO) said, according to the Beta agency. Draskovic said that "the situation in Kosovo is catastrophic and could serve as the basis of charges brought against the most powerful countries of the world." "We have had occasion to see KFOR soldiers calmly observe the looting and murder of Serbs in Kosovo," he said, referring to television news footage. "Thousands of bandits entered Kosovo after the withdrawal of the Yugoslav army and are burning and looting Serb houses," he fulminated...."

AP 6/29/99 "...NATO must quickly get its full 55,000-strong peacekeeping force into Kosovo to flush out Serb paramilitaries who remained behind in defiance of the peace agreement, Defense Secretary William Cohen said Tuesday. Cohen told reporters that NATO had expected some remnant Serb forces to try to disrupt the peacekeeping operation, but that so far they have not presented a major obstacle to stabilizing the Serb province.....``In a number of locations, it is clear that Serb paramilitaries, some with connections with intelligence organizations, and others have remained behind,'' Clark said. He said they might form ``the seeds for future conflict, to contest control of the province,'' although their intentions remained unclear.....The movement of U.S. forces into Kosovo has gone more smoothly than anticipated, in part because there was less damage to roads and bridges from NATO bombing than had been expected, he said. ``We were able to move fairly freely,'' McDuffie said. There now are about 8,700 Albanian refugees in the United States, and none has returned since the end of the war, he said....."

Itar-Tass 6/29/99 "...The bringing of Russian peacemakers to Kosovo "was the smart and only possible decision," Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky said in a live program of the Echo of Moscow radio station on Tuesday. That move showed the might of the Russian army, and "its potential of making fine actions on the European theatre of operations," Zhirinovsky said...."

Stratfor 6/29/99 "...1425 GMT, 990629 Yugoslavia - KFOR reported June 29 that the Kosovo Liberation Army has successfully met its first key deadline for disarmament and demilitarization. Spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Louis Garneau said, "We're very pleased with the KLA's compliance." The combatants are also now forbidden from wearing uniforms or insignia in public..... 1144 GMT, 990629 UN/Yugoslavia- UN Secretary General Kofi Annan will hold talks June 30 in an effort to speed the deployment of UN police officers to Kosovo. Annan has reportedly formed a "friends of Kosovo" group which includes interested industrialized nations. U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright and British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook are expected to attend. A spokesman said that Annan called the meeting due to slow international response to the UN request for a desperately needed 3,000-member police force in Kosovo...."

National Review 6/28/99 Andrew Bacevich "...As with Operation Desert Storm in 1991, Operation Allied Force has the appearance of a decisive victory won cheaply. And as with that earlier war, events will expose this as an illusion. With the American economy rocketing along and the federal budget in surplus, the war's immediate costs- estimated at $1.7 to 2.6 billion for the United States-might seem little more than pocket change. But add to that an estimated $2 to 3.5 billion in peacekeeping expenses annually (a sum that excludes the cost of reconstructing either Kosovo or Serbia as a whole) and within a few years you're talking about real money. For that investment, the United States can anticipate only modest returns. In part this stems from that most fundamental of blunders: misidentifying the objective. Because of that miscalculation, the victory just achieved is partial and incomplete. Its war aims held hostage by the imperatives of consensus, NATO never faced up to the fact that a politically meaningful outcome would require a change of regime in Belgrade. Calling off the war because Yugoslav authorities have agreed to withdraw from Kosovo is the equivalent of FDR and Churchill's declaring victory once the Wehrmacht had evacuated Paris....."

National Review 6/28/99 Elliot Abrams "...Steven Rosenfeld, writing in the Washington Post, offered this extraordinary analysis: "It turned out that the principal shortage . . . was of viable military and economic targets. Serbia being . . . a small, middle-level country, the number of these began to run short. The gap was made up by verging into targets that could be hit only by putting civilians at extra risk. Still, the end of the war came before the NATO publics revolted against the collateral civilian kill." This is strong language, but it points to the fundamental humanitarian problem of the Kosovo war: How was it that an intervention whose goal was to prevent ethnic cleansing and the creation of refugees from Kosovo failed so miserably at that, then became a campaign to inflict pain on Serbia's economy rather than on its army? In a total war such as World War II, these questions barely arise: Germany's and Japan's armies and economies were equally legitimate targets. But Kosovo was that new breed, the "humanitarian intervention." How did we get from stopping ethnic cleansing in Kosovo to bombing bridges and electric plants in Serbia?..."

Original Sources, (www.originalsources.com) 6/29/99 Mary Mostert "...One of the tragically ironic aspects of what has, and is, occuring in Kosovo, has been a wholesale ignoring of minority rights, which are supposed to be the hallmark of the Clinton-Gore administration. To hear them describe themselves, liberals believe that the rights of minorities ought to be defended. Apparently, however, there are glaring exceptions - such as the minorities who live in Kosovo - Serbs, Gypsies, Montenegrins....... "

Chicago Tribune 6/29/99 "...In recent days, sometimes in full view of NATO peacekeepers, ethnic Albanians have pillaged Serb neighborhoods, burned Serb houses and, occasionally, slaughtered Serb civilians. Since NATO forces took control two weeks ago, they have failed to put an end to a continuing backlash by ethnic Albanians. Granted, the peacekeeping forces, known as KFOR, do not yet number even half their target strength of 55,000 or more, and that's part of the problem. And the retaliation, while still on a small scale, may be understandable, even predictable, given the systematic massacre of an estimated 10,000 ethnic Albanians by Serbs. But it is still utterly unacceptable, and NATO must halt it now...."

AP 6/28/99 Aleksandar Vasovic "...Serb discontent with President Slobodan Milosevic and his regime boiled over into a sprawling opposition rally Tuesday, as 10,000 chanting protesters demanded a new government for Yugoslavia. In Kosovo, meanwhile, ethnic Albanian rebels gathered at NATO-designated assembly points and began handing in weapons under a demilitarization deal with international peacekeepers...."

Beograd.com 6/99 "...Due to total destruction of industrial facilities throughout the country, more than 600,000 workers have become jobless. As a result almost 2.5 million citizens have no means to sustain minimal living conditions..... Several thousand civilians were killed and more than 6,000 sustained serious injuries, while a large number of them will remain crippled for life. Children make up 30% of all casualties as well as 40% of the total number of the injured, while 10% of all Yugoslav children (approximately 300,000) have suffered severe psychological traumas and will require continuous medical monitoring, care and treatment...."

Stratfor 6/30/99 "...0135 GMT, 990630 Yugoslavia/UK - ITAR-TASS reports that a British KFOR contingent shot a man dead near Pristina on June 29. The soldiers opened fire on the man in Liplian when he appeared with a pistol drawn and aimed in their direction. A KFOR spokesman later said the soldiers acted in strict accordance with instructions...."

Washington Times 6/29/99 Ben Barber "....The U.S. government and the United Nations said yesterday they have no plans to investigate the Kosovo Liberation Army for possible war crimes, arguing that a wave of revenge against Serbs in the province does not appear to be coordinated by the KLA leadership. "Clearly, there is no organized KLA effort to retaliate against the Serbs," said a Clinton administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. And while the killing of Serbs continues at the rate of a few dozen per week, a spokesman for the United Nation's International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia may not consider the new slayings as part of the tribunal's mandate. "Our mandate is to investigate crimes that occur during war, during armed conflict that involve members of armed entities," said Paul Risely, spokesman for the tribunal.....Serbs have not decided to leave Kosovo but they are being forced to -- and it is all happening under the protection of the United Nations," he said at ceremonies marking the Serbs' epic defeat by Ottoman forces 610 years ago. He said that, with Serbs being killed, churches ransacked and priests threatened, Serbs are now the ones being ethnically cleansed...."

New York Times 6/29/99 John Kifner "...When a French forensic team working for the international war crimes tribunal arrived here [alleged mass grave site] at 8 a.m. Monday, they expected to find the bodies of about 160 Kosovo Albanians who other villagers said were killed by Serbian forces on March 28. There were none. The Serbs seemed to have been here first, dug up the grave and carried the bodies off somewhere, apparently in an effort to destroy evidence before any war crimes trial could take place. "The bodies are gone now," said Yves Roy, an investigator on the scene for the tribunal, which is located in The Hague. But he said there was still plenty of evidence. This site was listed as a count in the war crimes indictment of President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia and three of his top aides. There was satellite reconnaissance imagery, photographs of which were displayed by the State Department, and a videotape, shown on CNN, made by a villager, of the bodies and the burials by Albanian relatives and neighbors. The satellite photos showed neat rows of graves, aligned to point to Mecca, in keeping with Islamic tradition. The ground was featureless, churned earth. Disappearing bodies, however, are only one problem for the war crimes investigators, who have six teams here now, an official said, with six more soon to be in place. In some areas the bodies are proliferating, with the killing here apparently far greater than anyone had thought, even given the very specific accounts of refugees...."

AP 7/299 "...Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic still has firm control of his army, is trying to rebuild a political base and is capable of moving against pro-Western Montenegro at any time, NATO's supreme commander said Thursday. NATO's supreme commander, Gen. Wesley Clark, gave the Senate Armed Services Committee an update on peacekeeping efforts in Kosovo in Washington, D.C., on Thursday. "Milosevic retains formidable power in Yugoslavia and he's an expert at dividing the opposition," Gen. Wesley Clark told the Senate Armed Services Committee. In his first appearance on Capitol Hill since the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia, Clark said that he sees little evidence that Milosevic's authority is ebbing or that he might be overthrown or forced to step aside. "He still has his hands on the sinews of power in Serbia," Clark testified. His political opposition is "fragmented and weak." ..."

UPI 7/2/99 "...A soldier with the U.S. KFOR peacekeeping force was shot and critically wounded when a machinegun manned by a fellow soldier preparing to go out on patrol accidentally discharged. A KFOR spokesman says the soldier was immediately treated for a shoulder wound and is in stable condition...."

The Associated Press 7/2/99 ".... When President Bush prevailed in Iraq, his popularity rating soared to 91 percent. By contrast, President Clinton got no such bounce in the polls from the Kosovo campaign, even though his goals were achieved without a single U.S. combat casualty. The American people paid much more attention to the Gulf War and seemed to give scant applause to the outcome of the Clinton-led campaign against Serbian forces clearing Kosovo of its ethnic Albanian population..... Clinton's approval numbers hover near the 50 percent mark. This situation has so puzzled the White House that it has given up trying to spin the success in Clinton's favor and decided to act as if the lack of recognition is no big deal. ..."

boston.com dailyglobe 7/2/99 Charles Sennot John Donnelly "...America's triumphant general in the Kosovo war received less than a hero's welcome yesterday from US senators, who criticized the lack of readiness for a ground invasion, poor intelligence estimates, and the now open-ended mission of American peacekeepers. In his first extensive public assessment of NATO's 11-week air war, General Wesley K. Clark, the alliance's supreme allied commander in Europe, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that his troops believed the war was a ''very just cause.'' He called the battle ''a testament to political unity and the will of NATO members to stand up to the humanitarian tragedy'' inflicted on ethnic Albanians by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. But the four-star general said the future of the Balkans depends on whether Milosevic remains, and his assessment was the Yugoslav leader retained ''formidable power.' In his review of the lessons of the war, Clark underscored what he described as potential difficulties when politicians interfere with generals. In perhaps the most dramatic example, Clark disclosed that political leaders prevented NATO forces from intercepting about 200 Russian troops who seized control of the Pristina airport on June 11, causing a diplomatic and military impasse...."

Stratfor.Com Kosovo Crisis Center 6/30/99 "...0242 GMT, 990701 Russia/NATO - Russian Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin said June 30 that he believes relations with NATO will begin to normalize after being "frozen" by the recent bombing campaign in Kosovo. He said, "We have passed through the most difficult stage - a serious cooling [of relations] with NATO, especially at the time of the bombings. But we must draw our conclusions from that situation." Stepashin also allayed fears that Russia might develop new weapons in response to the Kosovo conflict by saying his country will steadfastly adhere to the principles of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. ....

New York Times 7/1/99 ALEKSA DJILAS "...Does Serbia without Kosovo inevitably mean Kosovo without the Serbs? President Clinton and other NATO leaders have repeatedly said no and promised that Kosovo would be a multi-ethnic democracy. While they fought Serbian nationalism with more than 1,000 combat aircraft, however, they use mostly words against Albanian extremists. As a result, many units of the Kosovo Liberation Army have not been disarmed, even though the K.L.A.'s leaders said they would comply with the peace deal. Since the armistice on June 10, several Serbian civilians have been killed every day, and more than 50,000 Kosovo Serbs, close to a third of the province's Serbian population, have already left. In the general climate of fear, other, smaller ethnic groups like Roma Gypsies are also fleeing. Serbia already has more refugees than any other country in Europe. There are more than 600,000 of them -- mostly Serbs expelled from Croatia and the Muslim part of Bosnia. Both President Slobodan Milosevic and NATO leaders pretend not to notice them. Mr. Milosevic knows that Serbian refugees are an irrefutable proof of his failure to "solve" the Serbian national question through war in Croatia and Bosnia. And NATO prefers not to be reminded how it failed to reverse the ethnic cleansing of the Serbs...."

Stratfor.Com Kosovo Crisis Center 7/1/99 "...0135 GMT, 990702 Yugoslavia - A spokesman for Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's Socialist Party, Ivica Dacic, said July 1 that the government should be reorganized to include all parties represented in parliament, with the exception of Alliance for Change. This announcement is the first indication by the Milosevic regime that it may be willing to cooperate with opposition parties on at least some level. Similarly, the leader of the Serbian Radical Party, Vojislav Seselj, stated a coalition government is "necessary in order to prevent U.S. intentions to further break up Yugoslavia." 1611 GMT, 990701 Yugoslavia/Russia - In an interview with the Russian newspaper Kommersant, Russia's ambassador to Belgrade indicated that Moscow will likely try to circumvent a UN arms embargo on Yugoslavia. He said, "The UN resolution ... is still in effect, but I think a legal framework for supplying weapons (to Yugoslavia) will be created soon." He also pointed out that Russia had "insistently urged Belgrade to upgrade its air defenses and other systems" prior to the NATO bombing campaign, but that the "recommendation was not heeded." ....."

Itar-Tass 7/1/99 "...A launching party of the White Book, providing evidence of NATO's crimes committed during the first month of its aggression against Yugoslavia, was held at the Belgrade-based Institute of International Politics and Economics on Thursday. The book, compiled by the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry legal adviser Professor Rodoljub Etinski and Ambassador Djordje Logincic, contains numerous documents, photos and witnesses' reports proving that the NATO countries leaders and NATO command are responsible for human casualties and destructions in Yugoslavia during the air war from March 24 to April 24, 1999...."

http://www.serbia-info.com 7/1/99 Milka Milovanovic "...KFOR troops on Tuesday could not guarantee to inhabitants of Orahovac the safety for evacuation. Therefore the evacuation of 5 000 Serbs from Orahovac, who received aid in food and medicines three days ago, was postponed again. Ethnic-Albanian terrorists, who somewhat calmed down last night, starting from Tuesday apply a new tactics for driving Serbs from Kosovo and Metohija. Dressed in uniforms of peacekeepers they enter into apartments of Serbs and drive out their owners. In Pristina on Tuesday morning, as we acknowledged in the Center for peace and tolerance, 50 such cases were recorded. The real peacekeeping forces intervened for several times and took the false ones out....."

AP 7/1/99 "...In an unprecedented intervention, the U.N. secretary-general and 18 nations undertook Wednesday to revamp judicial and civil rule in Kosovo Province less than three weeks after the NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia forced out all Serb troops and special police. With hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians returning to their homes, Secretary-General Kofi Annan organized key international figures to plan for a new civil administration and to elicit pledges of interim police to support a peacekeeping force in trying to keep order among ethnic communities divided by hate and atrocities. "What we must do today is make sure, having won the war, we are now in a position to build the peace, working with the local population and working with the international community," British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said. Britain volunteered $1 million for a U.N.-run trust fund. The United States, with $1.3 billion in assistance contained in pending legislation, made no additional commitment. A donors' conference is to be held July 27, probably in Brussels, Belgium....."

Russia Today 7/1/99 "...Insisting Kosovo remain an integral part of Yugoslavia, Russia said on Wednesday it feared Western nations were trying to take over the United Nations' role in rebuilding the war-devastated province. "Tendencies have appeared to ... dilute the United Nations' role in the restructuring of Kosovo and make the U.N. and its secretary-general a mere executor of someone else's initiatives and efforts," Moscow's deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Avdeyev told reporters...."

http://www.villagevoice.com/features/9926/vest.shtml 6/30-7/6/99 Jason Vest "...It was late in the day when the industrial contractor called. "We're ready to do business in Kosovo," he told the senior administration official on the other end of the line. "Who do we talk to?" The official paused. "I haven't the faintest idea," he said. "My advice: call Brussels." That was not the counsel the official had expected to give, but, he said, unlike the situation at the end of the Gulf War, it doesn't seem that the U.S. government has made ensuring U.S. companies a piece of the rebuilding action in Kosovo a high priority. Nor does it seem probable, say numerous European observers, that the European Union- the body largely responsible for underwriting and overseeing Kosovo's physical reconstruction- is going to look favorably upon American bidders, as most EU members are still quietly disdainful of the U.S. for essentially forcing them into military conflict with Yugoslavia. In fact, they say, the contracting process could be a crucial part of Europe's continued efforts to assert its independence from American authority...."

USA TODAY 7/1/99 Steven Komarow "...Many of the figures used by the Clinton administration and NATO to describe the wartime plight of Albanians in Kosovo now appear greatly exaggerated as allied forces take control of the province. "Yes, there were atrocities. But no, they don't measure up to the advance billing," says House intelligence chairman Porter Goss, R-Fla. Instead of 100,000 ethnic Albanian men feared murdered by rampaging Serbs, officials now estimate that about 10,000 were killed. 600,000 ethnic Albanians were not "trapped within Kosovo itself lacking shelter, short of food, afraid to go home or buried in mass graves dug by their executioners" as President Clinton told a veterans group in May. Though thousands hid in Kosovo, they are healthy. Kosovo's livestock, wheat and other crops are growing, not slaughtered wholesale or torched as widely reported. Kenneth Bacon, spokesman for Defense Secretary William Cohen, says the best estimates available were used..... Then why exaggerate? "In order to justify this thing, they needed to tap that memory of the Holocaust," says Andrew Bacevich, professor of International Relations at Boston University....The "missing men" -- young Albanians who were believed killed -- are home with no jobs. NATO forces are struggling to keep them from seeking retribution.....Mike Hammer, spokesman for the National Security Council, says there was no effort to mislead. The administration found that "as you go through a campaign like this, there is a great deal of uncertainty." Even lower numbers justify action, he says. "We needed to move because of the campaign of ethnic cleansing that could not be allowed to stand."...."

AP 7/4/99 "...For a place where many government offices have been bombed and most of the rest have been looted, Kosovo suffers from an odd affliction: too many governments. There's the government of Hashim Thaci, the Kosovo Liberation Army chief who says a coalition of political parties picked him as ``prime minister'' to lead the province to freedom. There's the government of Bujar Bukoshi, since 1991 the ``prime minister'' of the unrecognized ``Republic of Kosovo.'' And there's the government of Zoran Andjelkovic, the Yugoslav governor of Kosovo before the bombing started. And then there's the U.N. administration of Sergio Vieira de Mello, backed by an international peacekeeping force, which says none of the others has any claim to power at all. ``A number of politicians in Kosovo have self-styled titles such as prime minister,'' said Brig. Jonathan Bailey, the peacekeeping official in charge of making sure both Serbia and the rebels stick to their pledges...."

New York Times 7/4/99 Eric Schmitt "... Toward the end of the Balkans air war, rarely a day passed when NATO did not triumphantly declare that allied warplanes had destroyed several more Yugoslav tanks or artillery pieces with precision-guided bombs or missile Now it turns out that perhaps one-quarter of those weapons that looked fearsome from 15,000 feet up were nothing more than artfully designed decoys meant to fool allied pilots. Indeed, the Serb military, outgunned by a technologically superior foe, proved to a master of camouflage, concealment and deception. Yugoslav commanders built "tanks" of wood and plastic sheeting, sometimes draping them with camouflage netting. To trick thermal sensors, they put metal tape or plates on some decoys and even set trays of water inside them that heated up in the sun, just like a real tank would. Some suspected artillery revetments turned out to be disguised pits, empty but for a long tube protruding toward the sky. And to the dismay of the NATO air commanders, several Yugoslav MiG-21 fighter jets emerged from hidden caves once the war was over...."

AP 7/3/99 Mort Rosenblum "...But if Kosovo was destroyed, Kosova is arising in its place. Departing Serbs took with them not only their version of the province's name but also their historic domination of an ethnic Albanian majority. In every direction, former refugees are cleaning up the mess. And virtually anyone who pauses to talk echoes the same point: A reborn Kosova must be ethnically cleansed, but at the other extreme from that sought by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. ``Maybe before all this we might still have lived together in peace,'' said Gani Krasniqi, an ethnic Albanian standing in a pasture where he hopes wandering cows will eventually find any land mines. ``Not now. I no longer want to see any Serb, in any form.''...The next steps remain to be determined. Under accords that stopped the hostilities, Kosovo remains as an autonomous province of Serbia, Yugoslavia's main republic. It has no government, and the only policing is done by NATO soldiers from a handful of countries. Some towns and villages are crumpled beyond recognition. Other parts escaped with only peripheral damage. Power and communications function only sporadically. Roads are pitted, with some crucial bridges in ruins...."

Macedonia Press Agency 7/2/99 "...Maps depicting the so-called Greater Albania are being distributed by members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, to foreign journalists crossing the Yugoslav-FYROM borders...."

Philadelphia Daily News 7/2/99 George Cotner "...So Sandy Grady thinks it's a shame that no one will give Bill Clinton a parade for his victory in Kosovo (column, June 24). Let's take a closer look at Bill's triumph: By the admission of the Clinton administration, the number of Kosovar Albanians killed in 1997 and 1998 was under 2,000. Between January and the start of the bombing, German courts were unable to find evidence of atrocities against Albanians solely because of ethnicity; any violence was related to the low-grade civil war between federal Yugoslavian forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army. It was falsely reported that Slobodan Milosevic was unwilling to accept an outside force in Kosovo....The NATO pressure to force Yugoslavia to accept Rambouilett violated international law, which prohibits threat of force to compel a country to sign a treaty. The Kosovo action violated the NATO charter, which allows for military action only if a member country is attacked. International monitors were withdrawn and the bombing started even though intelligence reports stated that both actions would lead to widespread atrocities against the Kosovo Albanians..... "

UPI 7/2/99 "...A soldier with the U.S. KFOR peacekeeping force was shot and critically wounded when a machinegun manned by a fellow soldier preparing to go out on patrol accidentally discharged. A KFOR spokesman says the soldier was immediately treated for a shoulder wound and is in stable condition. The incident occurred at midday today at Camp Bondsteel, a location of a task force headquarters for the U.S. military sector in Kosovo. This is the second such accident of the peacekeeping mission. ..."

Strategic Policy - Defense & Foreign Affairs 4/99 Gregory Copley "... The 20th Century, the most bloody in human history, was a century of human progress in many ways; a century of optimism, of stabilization of concepts of civilization and recognition of fundamental human needs. But, as noted, it was the most bloody. There is a belief that, even when the 200-million or so casualties caused by domestic and interstate wars in the 20th Century are acknowledged, mankind is becoming "more civilized", and that violence is now only applied by barbarians, or in response to barbarians. In the Balkans, there may have been poor judgment and even inhuman actions on the part of Yugoslav President Slobodan Miloševiæ, but we have also seen "civilized" NATO states retaliate by undertaking exactly the kind of inhumanity of which they accuse the Yugoslav leader: collective punishment of whole peoples (banned, supposedly, by international law); mass hate; and indiscriminate killings....3. The evaporation of NATO's military and moral high ground as a result of the US Clinton and UK Blair administrations in the late 1990s, means that the People's Republic of China will gain significantly as a strategic power, and this will affect the relative positions of Japan, the Koreas, South-East Asia, India, Australia, and so on. And within that context, US trade and economic wealth will decline. The only question is to what degree. 4. NATO states (North American and European) will face hostility from Russia and its rebuilt alliance of partners over the coming decade as a direct result of the refusal of NATO leaders to take advantage of their Cold War victory over the Soviets. This time, however, although Russia may be disadvantaged economically vis-à-vis the West, the actual economic gap will begin to close, provided Russia maintains a path toward a market economy..."

Yahoo AFP 7/3/99 "...British soldiers early Saturday shot and killed two men and wounded two others here following a demonstration by thousands of Kosovars to celebrate an unofficial declaration of independence in 1990. The shooting took place in front of the Executive Council building, the former seat of Serb government where 50 Serb Kosovars now live and which was protected by British soldiers serving with the Kosovo peacekeeping mission (KFOR)...."

Itar-Tass 7/7/99 "…Addressing journalists in the town of Kosovska-Mitrovica Clark said, commenting on the results of his visit to the French KFOR contingent, that servicemen of the international forces would arrest all those who carry unlicensed guns. " There is no room for militarized formations in Kosovo," Clark said. He did not specify whether the Serb or Albanian armed formations were at issue….."

AFP 7/8/99 "…The feared Albanian mafia has moved into Kosovo on the heels of the deployment of NATO troops and is already running lucrative operations smuggling drugs, cars, petrol and cigarettes, local people say...."

UPI Wire 7/8/99 "…The leader of the opposition New Democracy (ND) party says the choice facing Serbia and Yugoslavia is simple - either Slobodan Milosevic and his deputies resign and a transitional government is brought in or unrest and an attempted military-police coup will follow…."

UPI 7/12/99 "…As NATO tries to pacify Kosovo after a 79-day war, Hungary's prime minister hinted at a future battleground for NATO in the Balkans over Vojvodine, Yugoslavia's northernmost province. Prime Minister Viktor Orban today said the minority groups in Vojvodine deserve the same level of autonomy that will eventually be restored to Kosovo, and says NATO ought to guarantee it….."

Anchorage Daily News 7/2/99 George Wilson "…There are no military lessons to be learned from NATO's bombing campaign against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic because it was not a war at all, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, said Thursday. The World War II bomber pilot told defense reporters over breakfast that "we never had an engagement" with the Yugoslav military. "They never came to war with us," Stevens said. "We just bombed the hell out of them until they signed an agreement. "We had 780 million people (in the NATO alliance) attacking 20 million people, and they finally came to their knees after (NAT0 forces) bombed for four months. What's the precedent out of that? There's no precedent out of that. I don't see it having any relationship to the ability of the Army on the ground in a war….."

7/12/99 Itar-Tass "…A journalist from the Japanese newspaper Asahi who watched mass expulsion of the Serbs from Kosovo, said in his report from Pristina that despite a UN resolution on preservation of territorial integrity of Yugoslavia the process of creating "a state for the Albanians only", which is actually independent of Belgrade, has been in full swing in Kosovo at NATO's connivance. Notes such as "A property of the Albanian. Don't touch" can been seen in almost all the cafes and restaurants in Pristina, which used to be one of the busiest cities in Kosovo. ..."

The New American 7/19/99 "…Addressing a May 18th Washington, DC conference entitled "NATO's Balkan War; Finding an Honorable Exit," James George Jatras, a foreign policy analyst at the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee (RPC), offered a compelling glimpse into the Clinton Administration's mindset just prior to the outbreak of the Kosovo War. Jatras pointed out that "Appendix B" of the so-called Rambouillet "peace" accord (which was rejected by Serbia) provided that "NATO personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia], including associated airspace and territorial waters." This amounted to a blank check for the occupation not only of Kosovo, but all of Yugoslavia, by NATO. Not surprisingly, the Serbs rejected this ultimatum-just as they were expected to. Citing an account provided by a witness to the event, Jatras informed his audience that "one senior Administration official told the media at Rambouillet (under embargo), 'we intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply…."

VOICE OF RUSSIA 7/12/99 "…This country continues an operation to dispatch peace-keepers to Kosovo. One more planeload of personnel and equipment reached the provincial capital Pristina today a little over 20 hours after two similar planeloads arrived there on Sunday. Five Russian landing barges are in the Aegean Sea under sail to Salonika in northern Greece from where the troops and armour on board will proceed to Kosovo by road. There should be a total of 36 hundred Russian soldiers in Kosovo, They will serve in sectors controlled by American, British, French and German units of the Kosovo Force but fully retain their national chain of command. The Russian commanding officer in Kosovo says his men will treat members of the Serb and the Albanian communities quite equally in operations to prevent clashes between them….."

USA Today 7/12/99 Jack Kelley "…Officially, they don't exist. And every effort is made to conceal them and keep them quiet. Police checkpoints prevent them from leaving, and gas stations refuse to sell them fuel in case they try. Businesses are barred from hiring them. Schools won't enroll their kids. "They're hostages in their own country," said Kraljevo city council president and government opposition member Zvonko Obradovic, 32. "Their existence is being kept secret. (Yugoslav President Slobodan) Milosevic is afraid of them." They are the more than 33,000 Serb refugees from Kosovo who have arrived in this Serbian town and nearby areas since the end of NATO airstrikes in June. Some live in factories, others in parks in makeshift housing. But officials from Milosevic's Socialist Party are working overtime to make sure no one knows they're here. The reason for that is simple, refugees and opposition leaders say: If the rest of Serbia finds out that tens of thousands of Serbs have angrily left Kosovo, they won't believe Milosevic was "victorious" over NATO and preserved the sovereignty of the province, as state media asserts daily…."

Reuters 7/13/99 "…The former commander of United Nations troops in Bosnia has dismissed NATO's Kosovo bombing campaign as a tragic failure. Britain's General Sir Michael Rose said NATO and British politicians were running a propaganda campaign to persuade people that the air war met its objectives. The alliance had been forced to redefine the objectives of its air war against Yugoslavia after it "manifestly" failed to accomplish its initial aims…."

UPI 7/13/99 "…The leaders of the Serbian ethnic community in Kosovo have formally informed the Kosovo peacekeeping force KFOR and the U.N. civil mission that they are temporarily suspending mutual cooperation. … The Serbian leaders, Trajkovic and the orthodox bishop Artemije, had expressed their alarm at reports of Serbs in many Kosovo places being murdered and kidnapped and their homes burned by militant ethnic Albanian refugees coming home from neighboring Albania and Macedonia…."

UPI 7/13/99 "…The Clinton administration says (Tuesday) it will focus its humanitarian assistance on communities in Serbia that do not support President Slobodan Milosevic and that are attempting to pursue democratic policies. The State Department says the policy is intended to hasten the day when Milosevic and his regime are no longer in power…." Freeper dirtboy adds "…

Startfor.Com CIS/Eastern European Intelligence Center 7/7/99 "…2036 GMT, 990707 Yugoslavia/NATO - According to Agence France-Presse, 5,000 Kosovar Albanians proudly crossed a re-opened bridge in Kosovoska Mitrovica as 200 Serbs taunted them. The Serbs became increasingly violent as the Albanians entered the Serb neighborhood, and police were forced to blockade the bridge two hours after it was re-opened. The bridge had previously divided the town in two, and was a symbol of ethnic separatism in the area. Claude Vicaire, head of the French police patrolling the area, said "The bridge is open, but people's minds are closed."…. "

TIME 7/5/99 "…President Clinton has authorized the CIA to help topple Yugoslavia's President Slobodan Milosevic, Time magazine reports today. CIA computer hackers will try to meddle with Milosevic's private financial transactions and electronically siphon funds from his overseas bank accounts, possibly in Switzerland, Cyprus, Greece, Russia and China, Time says in its July 5 issue, citing unnamed sources. The CIA also is trying to deposit cash with opposition organizations in Yugoslavia and recruit dissidents in the Belgrade government and the Yugoslav military…."

BBC 7/11/99 "…Russian K-for troops met British counterparts on Sunday near Pristina Nato peacekeeping troops in Kosovo are reported to have stepped up operations against armed ethnic Albanians with an operation against two suspected illegal jails for Serbs…."

Reuters 7/11/99 Andrew Gray "…A U.N. spokesman said its mission in Kosovo had received informal notification of the Serbs' decision, which had taken Special Representative Sergio Vieira de Mello by surprise. "He had a meeting with them on Friday which seemed to have gone quite well," mission spokesman Kevin Kennedy said. "The U.N. is not going to give up trying to put something together that will bring the communities together," he added….. "There has been ceaseless and systematic violence against Kosovo Serbs inflicted by Albanian terrorists and members of the so-called KLA geared at creating an ethnically-clean Kosovo and Metohija while KFOR and the U.N. mission are present," said the statement, quoted by Serbia's Beta news agency….An estimated 100,000 Serbs have fled Kosovo since Yugoslav forces withdrew and the ethnic Albanian refugees they pushed out began to return. Looting and arson attacks targeting the homes of Serbs and Gypsies -- who the Albanians accuse of siding with the Serbs -- have become commonplace…."

Itar-Tass 7/10/99 "…The scale of murderous terror against Serbs, Gypsies and representatives of other national minorities in the Kosovo province of Yugoslavia, unleashed by Albanian extremists is so large that the United Nations no longer rules out their possible evacuation from the province to save their lives. If these people will continue to remain in the situation threatening their lives, probably the U.N. representatives will resort to this measure, official representative of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refuges Kris Janovski said in reply to a question by Itar-Tass here on Friday…."

UPI 7/11/99 "…Two Kosovo Liberation Army rebels were killed and several others injured in an exchange of fire with American peacekeeping troops in the Kosovo town of Gnjilane, Yugoslav media reports. The KLA rebels had attacked a Serb-occupied house late Saturday, reports said today, and American troops got caught in the middle. No casualties among the American soldiers or Serbs were reported…."

AP 7/17/99 Daniel Wakin "…British forensic experts in Kosovo have uncovered the bodies of 11 children, some as young as 2 years old, shot at close range by Serb forces, Britain's foreign secretary said Tuesday. The revelation came as a top U.N. war crimes prosecutor said it was possible that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic could be charged with genocide for the Serbs' campaign of atrocities in Kosovo, on top of other war crimes charges he already faces. British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said the bodies of the children - aged 2 to 16 years old - had been discovered among 20 corpses found in the southwestern village of Celine…"

The Daily Republican 7/16/99 Dr Jan Oberg "… Perhaps the biggest lie in all this was the statement that 'we are not at war with the Yugoslav people.' But NATO destroyed 300 factories and refineries, 190 educational establishments, 20 hospitals, 30 clinics, 60 bridges, 5 airports; it killed at least 2,000 civilians and wounded 6,000 and many will die and suffer because of the health infrastructure destruction. To this you may add the sanctions since 1991 and the burden of more than 700.000 refugees from other republics and now from Kosovo. Only 12-15 tanks of 300 main battle tanks and some planes were destroyed, the rest seem to have been dummies! ….. In terms of human rights violations, war-caused deaths and degree of "dictatorship," Kosovo is a minor conflict. Between November 1998 and March 1999 no evidence of systematic ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, OSCE monitors have confirmed this. Germany sent back 11,000 Kosovar refugees. No humanitarian organization present in Kosovo reported a grand plan, or signs of it, to cleanse Kosovo of its 1,5 million Albanians…."

Original Sources (www.originalsources.com) 7/16/99 "…I called the office of a Republican senator who shall be temporarily nameless, and inquired if the Senator knew of a provision recently voted on which, according to an e-mail I received, "names Yugoslvia a 'terrorist state'. The aide, who had a Croatian name, said without hesitation that I was referring to S 1234, Foreign Operations, Export Financing, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2000, section 525 of the bill which did indeed list Yugoslavia as a terrorist state, along with Cuba, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Iran, Sudan, or Syria….. These draconian sanctions, which are guaranteed to kill hundreds of thousands of people in a nation which is now about 90% unemployed because American bombers destroyed most of its means of production, will remain in place, according to the bill, until the President "certifies" that: 1. The representatives of the successor states to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia have successfully negotiated the division of assets and liabilities and all other succession issues following the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia; ….In effect these provisions destroy totally the G-8 agreement that Milosevic and the NATO nations signed in early June…. We eagerly dismembered a socialist system to transform Yugoslavia into a cluster of weak extremist principalities incapable of charting an independent course of self-development. The International Monetary Fund will help to complete the process by making all of the natural and mineral wealth of Yugoslavia accessible to multinational corporate exploitation. Impoverished, Yugoslavia still has a proud record of a 90% literacy rate and a very skilled Serbian population - who will now be forced to work at subsistence wages…."

New York Times 7/14/99 Chris Hedges "…Farm workers, plunging their fingers into the earth, say they come away with rashes that burn and blister. Those who eat the river fish and vegetables or drink the tap water, which trickles out of faucets because of the damage to the purification plant, come down with diarrhea, vomiting and stomach cramps. Children, many of whom were sent away to Slovakia by local Red Cross officials for several weeks to escape the clouds of noxious gasses that hovered for days over Pancevo, still suffer headaches and dizziness. The war's lingering, ghoulish touch could be affecting even the unborn. There are twice as many miscarriages as during this period last year, doctors here said….This official said that the environmental damage caused by the attack was taken into consideration. "When targeting is done we take into account all possible collateral damage," she said, "be it environmental, human or to the civilian infrastructure. Pancevo was considered to me a very, very important refinery and strategic target, as important as tactical targets inside Kosovo." …"

Don Feder 7/14/99 Boston Herald quoted in Newsmax.com "…When is ethnic cleansing not ethnic cleansing? When the victims are Serbs. As many as 60,000 of Kosovo's 200,000 Serbs have already fled. Each day brings news of calculated atrocities. Human Rights Watch reports "investigations in Orahovac, Prizen and Pec revealed KLA soldiers' involvement in five murders, four abductions, one rape and 12 ... beatings." Since the war in Bosnia, Serbs have been so effectively demonized that not only will Western opinion believe almost anything of them, no one seems to care about the fate of the most vulnerable among them….."

BBC World Service 7/8/99 "…The president of the International Federation of the Red Cross, Astrid Heiberg, has warned that many people in Serbia are on the verge of starvation because of the effects of the recent NATO air raids and international sanctions. Dr Heiberg told the BBC that it was not only Serb refugees from Kosovo who were suffering, but also many elderly people on fixed incomes…"

Yahoo News 7/14/99 Shaban Buza Reuters "…Ethnic Albanians in western Kosovo told NATO Supreme Commander Gen. Wesley Clark Wednesday that 60,000 of them would flee their villages if Russians were deployed there as peacekeepers. ``If the Russians come, all 60,000 people who live in the Orahovac area will leave for Albania and we will not return until they leave,'' Ismet Tara, a commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), told Clark in this Kosovo village…."

BBC 7/16/99 "…Kosovo Albanians are waging a systematic campaign to kill, kidnap and expel Serbs from the province as they wreak revenge for past atrocities, the UN refugee agency has said. UNHCR spokesman Kris Janowski said protection of the Serb minority in the province was now the "most critical issue"….. The BBC's Claire Doole: Aid workers are shocked at the scale of anti-Serb violence…"

AFP 7/16/99 "…In a rare display of post-cold war cooperation, US and Russian troops of the Kosovo peacekeeping forceconducted joint patrols here Friday, hoping to convince Serbs and Albanians to consider them as comrades-in-arms…."

Itar-Tass 7/16/99 "…A commission of the State Duma which collects and summarizes information about NATO crimes against Yugoslavia is intent on continuation of its activities. One of the goals of the commission is to "help bring criminal charges against NATO leadership and leaders of a number of NATO member-states who bear a personal responsibility for military crimes against Yugoslavia," the commission said in its statement signed by its Chairman and leader of the "People's Power" bloc, Nikolai Ryzhkov…."

The Daily Republican 7/15/99 Stephen Abbott "…Britain's General Sir Michael Rose said NATO and British politicians were running a propaganda campaign to persuade people that the air war met its objectives. NATO had been forced to redefine the objectives of its air war against Yugoslavia after it "manifestly" failed to accomplish its initial aims…. NATO had therefore been forced to redefine the purpose of the war as being that of allowing Kosovo's ethnic Albanian refugees to return to their homes. "Its success in achieving this lesser task should not be allowed to obscure the fundamental message that it is not possible to safeguard a people by bombing from 15,000 feet," Rose said…."

AP 7/17/99 "…Italian minesweepers trolling the Gulf of Venice found 34 bombs during the past eight weeks, nearly all of them dropped by NATO jets on bombing runs on Yugoslavia, the Italian navy said Saturday. All the bombs were destroyed, the navy said, reporting that the mine-hunting operation was winding down…."

Stratfor.com 7/18/99 "...0012 GMT, 990718 Yugoslavia/KFOR - The Yugoslav state news agency Tanjug reported July 17 that the commander of the Italian KFOR sector, Brigadier General Mauro del Vecchio, said July 16 that a mass grave in the village of Ljubenic reported to contain over 350 bodies, contained only seven. Del Vecchio said that a full exhumation had been completed at the request of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, and that as a result the grave was not considered a mass grave...."

USA Today 7/19/99 AP "...At the edge of a cemetery overgrown with flowering weeds, local authorities exhumed 19 bodies Monday from a mass grave - including an 80-year-old man who went missing months ago. Survivors say they were massacred by Serbs...."

The New York Times 7/17/99 John Kifner "...At least 10,000 people were slaughtered by Serbian forces during their three-month campaign to drive the Albanians from Kosovo, according to war crimes investigators, NATO peacekeeping troops and aid agencies struggling to keep up with fresh reports each day of newly discovered bodies and graves....Saturday afternoon, for example, tribunal investigators and British troops rushed off to a grassy roadside near the village of Lukare, a few miles northeast of here, where three grave sites were reported by local Albanians to contain possibly 100 or more bodies....By late Saturday afternoon, four bodies, all extensively decomposed, had been exhumed and Lieut. Col. Robin Hodges, a British spokesman, said the work was likely to continue all day. On Friday, villagers returning to Goden, a settlement near the western town of Djakovica, discovered 20 bodies, along with Yugoslav Army log books describing how soldiers had emptied the village and killed people...." By Thursday afternoon, Williamson, the tribunal official, said the numbers had grown to 280 grave sites with more than 6,100 reported bodies. Colonel Clifford, among others, warned that even those numbers underreported the actual number of deaths....Of 44 villages in the district around Decani, for example, 39 had dead bodies in their wells, one of this week's daily internal situation reports from the field to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said..... "It was very emotional," said Chief Superintendent John T. Bunn of Scotland Yard, who said he identified at least 60 victims in the village of Bela Crkva...."

The Daily Telegraph, UK 7/18/99 Julia Strauss ".... Last week she sat on a wooden bench gently stroking her nine- month-old daughter and told how she was gang-raped by five soldiers of the Kosovo Liberation Army because her brothers-in-law served as Serbian policemen. ..."

BBC 7/18/99 "...The BBC's Claire Doole says reprisals were expected, but aid workers have been shocked by their scale. She says the Nato-led peacekeeping force, K-For, is having to guard Serbs around the clock, but is increasingly unable to protect them and other minorities. In one incident, two Serbs were abducted from a UNHCR-run centre in Pristina by five men dressed in black and carrying radio handsets. The remaining Serbs were so frightened the UN agency had to evacuate them. In some places, churches have become sanctuaries and parts of several towns have been turned into Serb ghettos...."

Orlando Sentinel 7/18/99 Charley Reese "...First, NATO violated its own charter. It was a defensive alliance and made an offensive war against a sovereign nation. Second, it violated the United Nations Charter, which forbids making war on a sovereign nation at peace with its neighbors. Third, it destroyed the credibility of NATO. This happened not only because of the above-mentioned violations but also because NATO got caught in so many fibs during its propaganda briefings....So the facts are that, contrary to NATO propaganda, the air campaign caused minimal damage to the armed forces and maximum damage to Yugoslav civilians and civilian infrastructure. Of course, the root cause of the conflict -- the feud between Albanians who want an independent Kosovo and Serbs who want Kosovo to remain Serbian territory -- was aggravated, not resolved.... Finally, there is an even more morally heinous aspect of this -- it wasn't necessary. The so-called negotiations at Rambouillet in France appear to have been nothing more than a setup. The Serbs were willing to grant Kosovo some form of autonomy. They were willing to have it monitored by a force of international observers. But the United States insisted that they agree (this wasn't announced but was contained in a now-infamous Appendix B) to the military occupation by NATO soldiers of all of Yugoslavia -- Kosovo, Serbia and Montenegro. Furthermore, there were, in fact, no negotiations. The United States presented it as an ultimatum -- sign or we bomb you. That, too, by the way, is a violation of international law...."

London Telegraph 7/17/99 Ben Fenton "....The United States defence secretary had to cancel a trip to Albania earlier this week because of fears that supporters of Osama bin Laden, the Saudi millionaire terrorist, would try to kill him. William Cohen was due to stop in Albania for only five hours to visit American troops still stationed there and meet local politicians as he inspected the remaining refugee camps close to the border with Kosovo.... Albania is known to have attracted a number of extremist Islamic fighters to the cause of Kosovo's liberation and therefore could already be unwittingly playing host to bin Laden sympathisers...."

Toronto Sun 7/18/99 Lorri Goldstein "...One of the problems with selective outrage against immorality is that it is immoral in and of itself. Ever since NATO's victory in Yugoslavia, we have been witnessing one of the most sustained examples of selective moral outrage and demonization of a people ever recorded in the modern era. Day after day after day after day the media are filled with stories of Serbian atrocities that left an estimated 10,000 innocent Kosovar Albanians dead - down from allegations during the war by NATO officials and U.S. President Bill Clinton that more than 100,000 had in fact been killed..... - Refugees? World-wide there are, conservatively, an estimated 13.5 million people who fit the definition of someone in genuine need of protection and/or assistance, excluding those who have been permanently resettled elsewhere. Meanwhile, the hundreds of civilians killed by NATO bombs during the 78-day air war and an estimated 100,000 Serbian (and Gypsy) refugees fleeing Kosovo in fear of retaliation by returning ethnic Albanians, are treated as a footnote to this ongoing human disaster, barely worthy of mention. But given our record of indifference to human suffering, often on a far greater scale than what occurred in Kosovo, the true motives behind our "humanitarian" bombing of Yugoslavia require scrutiny.... Whatever the motives, could we at least tone down the self-righteous chest-pounding over Yugoslavia, given that the atrocities we said we wanted to stop only began in earnest after NATO began bombing in what up to then had been a civil war, where there were atrocities on both sides. As it is, our selective moral outrage is exposing our own hypocrisy...."

Associated Press Writer 7/19/99 Anne Pandolfi "...Television news was less critical of President Clinton during the Kosovo campaign than of predecessor George Bush during the Gulf War, according to a study. Six in 10 on-air comments on the Kosovo air campaign contained praise for Clinton's efforts, said the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a nonpartisan research organization that has analyzed television, print, and radio coverage for more than 10 years...."

The National Post 7/21/99 Anthony Daniels "...But by far the most powerful sense of deja vu I experienced in Serbia was in the southern town of Kraljevo. The population of this town has swelled by 13,000 recently, with 500 more arriving each day according to the local Red Cross: Serb and Gypsy refugees fleeing the ethnic cleansing that is now taking place under NATO's benevolent gaze in Kosovo. What I saw and heard was a mirror image of what I had seen and heard in the Albanian Kosovar refugee camps in Macedonia in May. The stories were the same, told with the same emotion. The main differences between the two cleansings are the greater ease with which minority populations are cleansed, and the tacit approval of our governments for the removal of the wicked Serbs. Thus a war whose justification was to prevent forced population movements has resulted in two ethnic cleansings in four months; something of a record for Western policy....."

Jane's Defence Weekly 7/21/99 Lawrence Freedman "...The Kosovo War ended on NATO's terms ­ terms which were more stringent than those established by the contact group at Rambouillet and offered to Yugoslav officials in February. Opponents of this opinion say that somehow the June agreement leaves Kosovo more firmly a part of Serbia. Assertions such as these are founded on a flawed history of the Rambouillet Accords. It is striking how many commentators now stand history on its head and say Rambouillet contained a promise of a referendum and this is why it was rejected by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. It was, in fact, the Kosovo delegation to Rambouillet who objected to the lack of a clear commitment to independence and the absence of a promise to hold a referendum as part of the agreement. Milosevic was not overly concerned about the provisions in Ramouillet for greater autonomy and the eventual consideration of the future status of the province. His primary objection to the contact group's plan was the prospective role of foreign, and particularly NATO, troops in Kosovo. This is presumably because without foreign troops the provisions could not be enforced.... Great human dramas are being played out within the former Soviet Union and in North Africa but few of them are likely to present themselves in a form that calls for military rather than diplomatic or economic action by the West..... "

Washington Post 7/21/99 William Booth "...Just as the scorched and looted landscape of Kosovo is a legacy of the late war, so too are the oil refinery, fertilizer plant and petrochemical complex of Pancevo, which were heavily and repeatedly bombed by NATO warplanes. From their ruptured storage tanks, they bleed a toxic witch's brew of ammonia, crude oil, liquid chlorine, hydrochloric acid, mercury and vinyl chloride monomers--a component of industrial plastics. .... The environmental damage at the site will take months, and perhaps years, to assess--along with its potential threat to human health. Moreover, it will be difficult to determine specific effects of the bombings here, since Pancevo has had problems with lower-level pollution for years.....Simon Bancov, Belgrade's inspector for the protection of the human environment, has warned against eating vegetables produced in the immediate area of Pancevo. He also has issued a temporary ban on fishing in the nearby Danube because of the potentially large quantities of toxic chemicals that continue to seep into the river--already one of the most polluted in Europe...."

Wall Street Journal Europe 6/22/99 "...This weekend, Kosovo Liberation Army leader Hashim Thaci left Pristina and went on a whistle-stop tour of the war-ravaged province. Kosovo's traumatized ethnic Albanians understandably treated the KLA leader as a hero and liberator, their jubilation palpable in the cheers and warm welcome he received. However satisfying this victory lap might have been one month after NATO forced the withdrawal of Serbian forces, it should also have brought some discomfort. NATO has all along insisted that Kosovo belongs to Serbia, and NATO's political and military leaders have genuinely pleaded with local Serbs not to abandon their province, and with those who have done so to come back home. But Mr. Thaci called for independence, to thunderous applause, and declared that "we guarantee that those who destroyed Kosovo will never return."..."

UPI 7/22/99 "...The Serbian Orthodox Church and other groups are consulting on the formation of a transitional government to replace the ruling coalition of Serbia's Socialist and Radical parties and the Yugoslav Left Party (JUL), independent Belgrade media reports. The proposed government would launch reforms of the economic and legal systems, bring Yugoslavia into the Pact for the Stability of Southeast Europe, negotiate mutual relations between Serbia and Montenegro and pave the way for free elections at all levels...."

National Review 7/26/99 Mark Almond "...Slobodan Milosevic's forces have retreated from the smoldering ruins of Kosovo. But the replacement for Belgrade's brutal misrule has not been a NATO- led force imposing Western standards of democracy and human rights-the ideals proclaimed by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair during the war. Deployment of the full contingent of NATO peacekeepers has been painfully slow. And the U.N.-sponsored police force for the province is even more notional. Instead, the force on the ground is the Kosovo Liberation Army. The KLA is the big winner in NATO's war against Milosevic; its leaders are now determined not to lose the peace. Even as NATO troops moved into Kosovo, the KLA was rushing its forces ahead of them to seize the political initiative. KLA representatives have occupied the administrative posts vacated by Serb officials, and also filled the positions that might have been taken by the forces of local Albanian rivals like the pacifist Ibrahim Rugova, sidelined by the war....."

Electronic Telegraph 7/22/99 Tim Butcher and Patrick Bishop "....NATO's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia had almost no military effect on the regime of President Milosevic, which gave in only after Russia withdrew its diplomatic backing. This is the gloomy assessment of a private, preliminary review by Nato experts of the alliance's 78-day Operation Allied Force bombing campaign against Yugoslavia over Kosovo..... The main finding of the Nato inquiry is that despite the thousands of bombing sorties, they failed to damage the Yugoslav field army tactically in Kosovo while the strategic bombing of targets such as bridges and factories was poorly planned and executed. Changes are being considered within Nato, including the radical overhaul of how strategic targets are identified and considered for attack Any future operation by Nato is likely to involve heavier, more ruthless attacks on civilian targets such as power stations and water treatment plants at an earlier stage of the campaign...."

Itar-Tass 7/23/99 "...- Russian ambassador in Yugoslavia Yuri Kotov returned from Kosovo on Thursday dissatisfied with UN mission chief Bernard Kouchner explanations about Albanian repressions against the Serbs in the province. "I received an unconvincing answer. The French representative tried to calm me down with strange statistics which showed that if earlier three-four Serbs were killed each day, now only four-five Serbs are killed each week. I responded that, according to such a logic, there will be nobody to kill soon", the ambassador told Tass. "The situation in the province is extremely difficult. All reports about the murders, burglaries and repressions of the Serb and other non-Albanian population are true", the ambassador said...."

New York Times 7/22/99 Judith Miller "...Stung by U.S. charges that the United Nations is moving too slowly in creating a police force and civil administration in Kosovo, a senior U.N. official suggested Wednesday that it was NATO members who were at fault for not fully deploying all their soldiers. Assistant Secretary General John Ruggie, the senior ranking American adviser to Secretary-General Kofi Annan, said the United Nations was moving "according to plan" in Kosovo. Indeed, he added, people and resources were being sent to the region at an "unprecedented" pace...."

Stratfor.com 7/22/99 "...Serbian opposition leaders have postponed a major march on Belgrade due to admitted lack of interest, suggesting NATO's claims of the impending collapse of the Milosevic regime are a bit optimistic. The Yugoslav opposition is plagued by disunity, and by resentment of their Western sponsors. They also lack the vital support of the military and police apparatus. As long as Milosevic remains in power, Western Europe cannot hope to achieve its already fantastic goal of bringing peace, stability and prosperity to the Balkans. Milosevic is banking on this, and with little current threat to his regime, may just last long enough to cut a deal for his resignation. ..."

Washington Post 7/23/99 By R. Jeffrey Smith and Peter Finn "...The Kosovo Liberation Army missed a deadline today for certifying that a third of its weapons had been turned over to NATO-controlled stockades, as top NATO officials concluded that the ethnic Albanian rebel force had underreported its total arms holdings and needed to make a new accounting. NATO played down the missed deadline and gave the rebels a 48-hour extension. But some NATO and KLA officials acknowledged that fighters and local commanders were resisting giving up so many weapons...."

London Times 7/23/99 Eve-Ann Prentice "...The Nato bombing campaign caused $29.6 billion (£18.8 billion) damage to the Yugoslav economy, according to an independent Serb study. The vast majority of the costs, $23.2 billion, is the estimated loss to Yugoslavia's GDP over the next ten years. In a bleak forecast of future economic woes, the group of Serbian economists says: "Because of the war and its consequences, industrial production in Yugoslavia will fall by 44.4 per cent in 1999..."

Itar-Tass 7/23/99 "...Yugoslavia can send its troops to Kosovo any moment to protect the population if the United Nations fails to keep its obligations, Commander of Yugoslavia's Third Army Colonel-General Neboisa Pavkovic said on Friday...."

New York Times 7/25/99 Chris Hedges "…The mutilated bodies of 14 Serbian farmers who had been fatally shot were discovered on Friday night grouped around their harvesting machine in the worst single assault against the dwindling pockets of Serbian civilians left in Kosovo since NATO troops arrived last month. The killings, in which several of the men's bodies appeared to have been disfigured with blunt instruments, seemed likely to undermine still further the effort by the international community to keep the Serbian minority from fleeing Kosovo. More than 80,000 of the estimated 200,000 Serbs living in Kosovo when NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia ended have left since alliance troops arrived in mid-June. The soldiers have proved so far powerless to stop what Kosovo Serbs say is daily harassment, with repeated rumors of kidnappings and killings. The discovery of the bodies seems certain to accelerate the exodus. …"

AP Tom Cohen 7/25/99 "…NATO and the United Nations tried Sunday to bolster confidence in their Kosovo mission, shaken by the massacre of 14 Serb farmers in what officials called a deliberate attempt to wreck peacekeeping efforts. Belgrade demanded an urgent meeting of the U.N. Security Council on ways to stop ethnic violence in Kosovo and insisted Yugoslav forces be allowed back into the Serbian province, the state-run Tanjug news agency reported Saturday….The daily Glas, published in the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, cited a Serb human rights group in Kosovo as saying that the body of a Serb farmer was found Saturday in the Gnjilane area. Tanjug reported that Kosovo peacekeeping troops had detained five ethnic Albanians suspected of trying to blow up the apartment of a Kosovo Serb publisher. There was no immediate confirmation from NATO…."

Reuters 7/25/99 "…Full-scale anarchy threatens to engulf Kosovo and could trigger off new international conflict, Yugoslav state-run news agency Tanjug said on Sunday. Its comments followed Friday's massacre of 14 Serb farmers, the single most serious incident in Kosovo since NATO troops occupied the province last month and Serb forces left. ..."

Stratfor.Com - CIS/Eastern Europe Intelligence Center 7/25/99 "…2235 GMT, 990725 Yugoslavia/UN - UN officials made a statement July 25 hinting that a massacre of 14 Serb villagers in Gracko on July 23 might have been an attempt to upset the maintenance of peace in the area. British Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson said, "A number of possibilities are being considered concerning the motive for the attack ... from something like local revenge to something more sinister in terms of an organized way." The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has sent forensic experts to help with the investigation. 1543 GMT, 990725 Russia/Yugoslavia - Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov told reporters July 25 that over 140,000 Serbs, Gypsies and people of other nationalities were forced to flee their homes as a result of violence against non-Albanians in Kosovo. Ivanov said the violence was becoming "increasingly audacious" and "large scale" and called for the international community to act "resolutely and without bias" to correct the situation…1522 GMT, 990725 Yugoslavia/UN -Yugoslavia has demanded that an urgent session of the UN Security Council be held, following the massacre of 14 Serbs in the village of Gracko in Kosovo, according to Yugoslav state news agency Tanjung. The Yugoslav mission head to the UN, Vladislav Jovanovic, sent a letter to Security Council President Hasmy Agam of Malaysia calling for the body to take "urgent and concrete measures" to protect non-Albanians in Kosovo. Jovanovic's letter said the UN was "fully and exclusively responsible" for the incident and demanded Yugoslav troops and police be allowed to return to Kosovo as stipulated in the June 9 military technical agreement…."

Chicago Sun-Times 7/26/99 Julius Strauss, London Daily Telegraph "…NATO forces stepped up patrols in Serb villages and erected dozens of fresh checkpoints in Kosovo Sunday in an attempt to prevent further violence following the killings of 14 Serb farmers Friday. The moves were designed to calm Serb fears amid growing ethnic tension and stop retaliation…..The attack on the farmers was the worst incident of violence since NATO deployed forces in Kosovo six weeks ago and it has threatened to derail a fragile peace…."

The Washington Post 7/27/99 Colum Lynch "...The chief of the U.N.'s refugee agency today chided the world's richest countries for neglecting Africa while pumping billions of dollars into the refugee crisis in Kosovo. Japanese diplomat Sadako Ogata, speaking before the U.N. Security Council, said there are 6 million refugees and internally displaced people in Africa, several times more than in Kosovo. Failure to deal with Africa's humanitarian problems, she warned, would give the appearance that the council has a double standard, one for Europeans and another for Africans...."

AP 7/27/99 "...Police in Albania arrested a top Italian mob boss Tuesday with the help of investigators from southern Italy, Italian police officials said in Rome. Authorities allege that Giuseppe Muolo leads a clan of the United Sacred Crown, a crime syndicate based in Puglia, the region that makes up the ``heel'' of the Italian mainland. For years, investigators have said mobsters from southern Italy have enjoyed a cozy relationship with criminals across the Adriatic in Albania...."

Washington Times 7/25/99 Andrew Gillagan (London Sunday Telegraph) "...Serious failings in intelligence, training, weapons and other hardware lay behind NATO's disappointing performance in Kosovo, according to extracts from a British Royal Air Force study seen by the London Sunday Telegraph. Intelligence reports about Serbian troop and equipment locations took up to three days to reach front-line attack squadrons, by which time the Serbs had changed position. Many pilots found themselves "bombing old tank tracks" or civilians as a result, the document says. U.S. intelligence "bureaucracy" is blamed...."

The Independent 7/27/99 Laura Rozen "...Fehmi Mucolli stood amid the charred ruins of his home yesterday and mourned the 44 members of his family massacred there by Serbian police. The toll is agonising, starting with his wife Hasime, son Avdulla, sister Nexhmije, sister-in-law, niece, and two nephews. ..."

Long Island Newsday 7/29/99 Mark Simon "...MORALITY? As I have read over the last few weeks of NATO's "moral victory" over Serbian dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, I've reflected on the almost simultaneous, allegedly CIA-aided capture, subsequent conviction and death sentence in Turkey of Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan and the moral imperative in U.S. foreign policy. The United States and NATO took nine long years to confront Milosevic over Kosovo, nine years in which the Kosovo Albanians mounted a truly remarkable, nonviolent campaign against Serbian apartheid, aggression and the beginnings of ethnic cleansing-that is, routine harassment, beatings, torture and murder. The Kurds in Turkey, by contrast, don't even have the dubious benefit of a NATO military intervention. Striving for a measure of autonomy, they are up against the Turkish military, with the second largest army in NATO-and the worst human rights record. Why does the West turn a proverbial blind eye? The answer has little to do with morality..... "

Washington Post 7/30/99 Peter Finn "...-Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright received a rapturous reception from Kosovo Albanians here today, but a U.S. official said she cautioned their leadership that the Kosovo Liberation Army is moving too quickly to assert control over the battered Serbian province...."

newsmax.com 7/29/99 Chris Hedges, NY Times News Service "...The Kosovo Liberation Army has taken sweeping political control in Kosovo, establishing a network of self-appointed ministries and local councils, seizing businesses and apartments, and collecting taxes and customs payments in the absence of a strong international police presence. Despite a peace agreement that calls for an administration appointed by the United Nations and the fact that the ethnic Albanian militants have no legal standing, they have created a fait accompli. These days they talk not of ceding power to the United Nations but of cooperating as if they were equals.... What is happening in Kosovo is more than just liberation from Serbian rule, and the ramifications for Kosovo and the international powers that have set up a NATO protectorate are immense. The raw, often unschooled fighters have as their political patrons the government of Albania and seem to care little for the civilities of Western-style democracies. Violence has been rising steadily, especially against the remaining pockets of Serbian civilians. The looting and burning of Serb homes, as well as dozens of assassinations and kidnappings of Serbs and a few Albanians, including the massacre of 14 Serbian farmers Friday, speak of a province spinning into the kind of gunslinging and anarchy that has characterized Albania in the past few years...."

AP 7/29/99 "..."I hope that today we may pledge that here in Kosovo never again will people with guns come in the night, never again will houses and villages be burned, and never again will there be massacres and mass graves."

USIA 7/16/99 Wendy Lubetkin "....The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says it is increasingly alarmed by the number of attacks against Serbs and Roma [gypsies] in Kosovo, including killings, kidnappings and forced expulsions, and by what appears to be a "systematic campaign" to destroy Serb homes. "There have been a string of incidents this week involving minorities," said UNHCR spokesperson Kris Janowski. "Two refugees -- a Bosnian Serb and a Krajina Serb -- were abducted Monday from a refugee collective center in downtown Pristina. We had to move the entire collective center to another safer location." In Pristina earlier in the week, about a dozen homes and an Orthodox church were set on fire, and three Serbs were reported to have been shot, Janowski told a July 16 press briefing. In the Mitrovica region, a group of 29 mostly elderly Serbs and Roma turned up after being expelled from their homes and walking 80 kilometers through the mountains. In Prizren, in the space of less than one week, nearly 50 houses were set on fire in what UNHCR said appears to be "a systematic campaign" to destroy Serb homes...."

Reuters 7/28/99 Mark Heinrich "...A Kosovo Albanian family said NATO troops raided their home at dawn on Wednesday and ``acted like the Serbian police'' in detaining the head of the household and a son in a hunt for the killers of 14 Serbs. Relatives said the arrested son had been a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and had an automatic rifle and grenade which were seized by British military police. But they denied that anyone in the family or the ethnic Albanian inhabitants of their village, Veliki Alas, were implicated in Friday's ambush massacre of Serb farmers outside the neighbouring hamlet of Gracko...."

The Washington Post 7/29/99 William Booth "...The NATO bombs that crumpled the bridges of this Danube River city did more than disrupt road traffic; they severed the river. Now the government of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is vowing that it will not clear the waterway, or allow other European countries to do so, until the West rebuilds every one of the bridges destroyed during the Kosovo war. The Danube is not just a river; it is a continental artery through which 100 million tons of goods flow by barge. It is a crucial economic passageway that, with the help of canals, connects the ports of Northern Europe through Germany all the way to Sulina, Romania, on the Black Sea. But with three bridges destroyed here and another five disabled elsewhere, the Danube is blocked by debris and possibly unexploded ordnance. Thus, Milosevic has yet another trump card to play...."

Stratfor.com 7/29/99 "...The UN High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) reported July 27 that more than 173,000 ethnic Serbs, Gypsies and Montenegrins have fled Kosovo since the arrival of KFOR troops last month. The UNHCR estimated that almost 100,000 of those had moved into southern Serbia, with 41,000 more in the Belgrade area. The report said that while the situation in the area was not critical at the moment, it needed to be addressed before winter. UNHCR said it would need $20 million to secure food and shelter this winter for Serbs and Gypsies who have fled Kosovo. Eduardo Arboleda, acting UNHCR representative in Kosovo, said the major problem now facing the organization was the uncertainty involved in the amount and dispersal of the refugees in Serbia. The U.S. and its NATO allies have refused to send reconstruction aid to Serbia, and while they have not ruled out humanitarian aid, they have not dispatched much either...."

New York Times 7/31/99 Carlotta Gall "...The NATO police are holding three Kosovar Albanians as suspects in the murders of 14 Serbian farmers on July 23 in the village of Gracko, and NATO has sent weapons, ammunition and clothing to Britain for forensic analysis, officials said Friday. House-to-house canvassing and raids resulted in the arrests on Wednesday, said Col. Ian Waters, Provost Marshall and chief of the military police in Kosovo..."

Reuters 7/31/99 "... The Kosovo Liberation Army said Saturday Russian troops had attempted to arrest its chief of staff, General Agim Ceku, and branded the incident a premeditated political act. Hashim Thaqi, the KLA's political leader and head of a self- proclaimed Kosovo provisional government, said Ceku had been stopped by Russian soldiers in the town of Kijevo Saturday afternoon. ``It was an attempted arrest...I am very upset at what was done to him by the Russians,'' Thaqi told a news conference. ''As the interim government of Kosovo, we condemn this act as premeditated, with a political aim...."

UPI 7/31/99 Lisa Burgess "...Three separate units of U.S. soldiers came under heavy fire near the Kosovo village of Zitinje, U.S. Army officials said. No one was hurt in the attacks Friday night, or in the U.S. response, said, Maj. Carl Mahnken, a spokesman for Task Force Falcon, the U.S. military's 7,200-troop contribution to NATO's KFOR peacekeeping force in Kosovo. ..."

The Associated Press 7/31/99 "...More than 1,000 illegal immigrants in an old tugboat landed in southern Italy on Saturday under Italian military escort, the biggest single arrival in a weeks-long influx of Gypsies from Yugoslavia. Authorities said 489 of the 1,010 aboard were children. The would-be refugees burst into applause when they docked at the southern port of Bari...."

AP 7/31/99 "...A large explosion damaged a Serbian Orthodox church in the central of Kosovo's capital early Sunday, a NATO spokesman said. The blast at 1:20 a.m. local time (23:20 GMT) was heard throughout Pristina, setting off car alarms and sending a large cloud of smoke and dust into the air. ..."

Electronic Telegraph (UK) 8/1/99 Andrew Gilligan and Christina Lamb "...ALBANIANS in Kosovo are behaving as violently as the Serbs before them and taking advantage of Nato's presence to settle scores, Lt Gen Sir Mike Jackson, alliance commander, has told The Telegraph. In an exclusive interview, Gen Jackson said: "Too many Albanians haven't realised we're trying to do something new and different here. Some Albanians have behaved in a very similar way to those who have just left."..."

Electronic Telegraph (UK) 8/1/99 Philip Smucker "...THE Kosovo Liberation Army is fast establishing itself as the de facto government of Kosovo while the United Nations fails to set up a civilian administration and police force in the province. Despite being forced by Nato to surrender weapons, the KLA has formed an "interim government" which has seized control of government buildings and businesses. Ethnic Albanians are being helped to take over cafes, bars and small businesses previously owned by Serbs and gypsies...."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_408000/408122.stm 7/30/99 Alex Kirby "...A British scientist says the Americans' use of depleted uranium weapons in the war with Serbia is likely to cause 10,000 extra deaths from cancer. A British biologist, Roger Coghill, says he expects the depleted uranium (DU) weapons used by US aircraft over Kosovo will cause more than 10,000 fatal cancer cases. Mr Coghill, who runs his own research laboratory in south Wales, was speaking at a London conference called to discuss the use by American and British forces of DU in Iraq in the 1991 Gulf war....."

Agence France-Presse 8/1/99 "...Despite a series of visits by senior western officials urging them to stay, Kosovo's Serb population has steadily lost faith in the ability -- and the will -- of NATO-led peacekeepers to protect them. Since the entry of KFOR soldiers on June 12, the number of Serbs in Kosovo has plummeted from 150,000 to an estimated 30,000. And every day more leave, running away from intimidation and violence at the hands of ethnic Albanians seeking vengeance for the deaths and repression they themselves suffered from Serb soldiers, police and paramilitaries ..."

Reuters/FOX 8/1/99 "...The U.N. chief in Kosovo condemned the bombing of a new Serbian Orthodox cathedral Sunday and a church leader alleged it was part of a systematic campaign by ethnic Albanian extremists... Kouchner said it appeared four of six explosive charges placed at the site had gone off. Father Sava, a senior member of the Orthodox Church in Kosovo, said more than 30 Orthodox churches or monasteries had been damaged or destroyed since Serb forces withdrew from Kosovo in June....."

Reuters · UPI 8/2/99 Mark Heinrich "...Thousands of ethnic Albanians have fled into Kosovo from other parts of Serbia, complaining of persecution by security forces, U.N. staff said Monday. It said Serbian troops forced by NATO bombing to withdraw from Kosovo in June were reliably reported to be harassing Albanians living just outside the province in other areas of southern Serbia. Ron Redmond, spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR, said its workers had investigated the situation on both sides of the boundary on July 22-23. "There are some 4,500 ethnic Albanians who have crossed into Kosovo from the municipalities of Presevo, Bujanovac and Medvedja since the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces from Kosovo," he told a news conference...."

Electronic Telegraph 8/2/99 Andrew Gilligan Christina Lamb "...ALBANIANS in Kosovo are behaving as violently as the Serbs before them and taking advantage of Nato's presence to settle scores, Lt Gen Sir Mike Jackson, alliance commander, has told The Telegraph. In an exclusive interview, Gen Jackson said: "Too many Albanians haven't realised we're trying to do something new and different here. Some Albanians have behaved in a very similar way to those who have just left." ..."

Reuters 7/31/99 "...A Serb farmer was shot dead while picking plums in southeast Kosovo on Saturday, a U.S. peacekeeping force spokesman said. Captain Pat Sweeney said U.S. troops rushed to the scene of the 11 a.m. (0900 GMT) shooting in Stanisor, a village outside the regional hub of Gnjilane, but apprehended no one. U.S. military police launched an inquiry...."

ZNet - British Independent 6/99 Robert Fisk "...NATO killed far more Serb civilians than soldiers during its 11-week bombardment of the country and most of the Yugoslav Third Army emerged unscathed from the massive air attacks on its forces in Kosovo, according to evidence emerging in Yugoslavia. ....Yugoslav military sources said that more than half the 600 or so soldiers who died in Serbia were killed in guerrilla fighting with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) rather than by Nato bombing. ....Wartime statistics are notoriously unreliable, but investigations by Western correspondents and humanitarian agencies of Nato bombing incidents appear to confirm the official civilian casualty toll of around 1,500. At least 450 of these died in Nato's repeated "mistakes", when alliance aircraft bombed a train at Grdelica, a bridge at Varvarin, housing estates at Surdulica, Aleksinac and Cuprija, a bus at Luzane, an Albanian refugee convoy in Kosovo and made other attacks on civilians. Many others died in what Nato referred to as "collateral damage" in attacks around Belgrade, Kraljevo, Kragujevac, Nis and Novi Sad...."

Reuters 8/2/99 "...A U.S. soldier was electrocuted in southeast Kosovo when the radio antenna on his armored patrol vehicle touched an overhead power line, a spokesman for the NATO-led peace force said Monday... "

Boston Herald 8/2/99 Don Feder "... The families of 14 Serb farmers murdered in Kosovo must take comfort in National Security Adviser Sandy Berger's response to the massacre, ``It is profoundly wrong and unacceptable'' - harsh words, indeed. The bodies were found grouped around farm equipment in the village of Gracko. Victims' faces had been mutilated beyond recognition. ....Are Berger and his boss Bill Clinton shocked by this turn of events? Opponents of NATO's crusade predicted that if the West won the war, returning Albanians would purge the province of Serbs and Gypsies....Each day brings new reports of atrocities against Serbs - the murder of a professor at the University of Pristina, the killing of a married couple near the town of Gnijlane, Orthodox monasteries destroyed, 15 houses a day torched in Prizren, kidnappings, torture, beatings and evictions...."

Jane's Defence Weekly 8/4/99 Zoran Kusovac "...According to unsubstantiated reports Russia or elements in Russia are believed to have supplied air defence units of the Yugoslav Air Force with elements of between six and 10 S-300PM (NATO Codename: SA-10b 'Grumble') long-range surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems just weeks before NATO launched its bombing campaign on 24 March. Several unrelated sources claim the systems were delivered incomplete, without the 36D6 ('Clam Shell') target designation and tracking radar. Sources within Serbia claim the S-300 deliveries were interrupted by the bombing, and the radars never reached Serbia...."

Air Force Magazine 8/4/99 John Tirpak "...Two months after the bombs stopped dropping in Yugoslavia, the Lessons Learned industry in Washington is cranked up and in full swing. The debate over the victory in Operation Allied Force--how big it was, what the decisive factors were, who gets the credit, and what could have been done better--will probably rage on for some time. Indisputable are these facts: For the first time in history, the application of airpower alone forced the wholesale withdrawal of a military force from a disputed piece of real estate. The US Air Force was the chief engine of the campaign, carrying out more strike and support missions than any other service or any Allied partner. Precision guided weapons and stealth met or exceeded expectations. The 78-day operation was successfully conducted with the loss of only two Allied aircraft and no Allied combat casualties. A greater percentage of the active and reserve components of the Air Force was committed to the air campaign than was called on for either Vietnam or Desert Storm. DoD's own lessons learned apparatus is already in place....."

Stratfor.Com CIS/Eastern Europe Intelligence Center 8/2/99 "...2037 GMT, 990802 Yugoslavia - An influential group of Serb economists, politicians, clergy and intellectuals have proposed an anti-government rally for later this month in Belgrade..... This will be the first anti-government rally to be held in the capital city, another sign of the increasing pressure on Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to step down from office...."

Reuters 8/3/99 "...Jane's Defence Weekly said in a report to be published on Tuesday that Russia was believed to have supplied Serbia with air defense missiles before NATO started its bombing campaign against Kosovo in March.

"According to unsubstantiated reports, Russia or elements in Russia are believed to have supplied air defense units of the Yugoslav Air force," the report said. The weapons would have been received while a United Nations arms embargo on Yugoslavia was in force. A preview of the report was released on Monday. Russia has denied the claims, it said...."

USA Today 8/3/99 Jack Kelley "...Despite the presence of NATO troops and U.S. appeals for tolerance, ethnic Albanians in Kosovo have stepped up what appears to be an increasingly organized and violent campaign to force out the 30,000 Serbs still living in the province. Ethnic Albanian men, armed with guns and carrying expulsion orders stamped by Kosovo Liberation Army officials - the de facto government leaders - are going door-to-door, assaulting Serbs and giving them only hours to leave. Monday, they began distributing leaflets with the same message. "Serb dogs: You are in Albanian land and should leave if you want to live," read the leaflet written in Cyrillic and distributed in Serb areas of Mitrovica, northwest of Pristina. Muje Gjonbalaj, installed by the KLA as Kosovo's deputy minister for reconstruction and development, said, "The Serbs need to understand that they are in our country now." His office is distributing the expulsion orders. "They should go back to where they belong," he said....Many ethnic Albanians, including members of the KLA, say they are no longer bent on revenge, but they concede they will not be satisfied until all Serbs have left Kosovo and it can be established as an "independent and pure" ethnic Albanian homeland. "The Serbs have a choice: leave or be killed," says Ali Kelmedni, a 21-year-old KLA fighter. "We have every right to do what we want to them. No one is going to stop us. No one is going to tell us we can't." ..."

Original Sources (www.originalsources.com) 8/2/99 Mary Mostert "..." 'The only political group that has any structure is the K.L.A.,' said Baton Haxhiu, the editor of Koha Ditore, an Albanian-language daily. "It is using it to take power, backed eventually by a police and a national guard force it alone will control. It will be very hard to turn Albania into Kosovo, but I expect very easy to turn Kosovo into Albania. Each day it is becoming more dangerous to think and speak independently.... Hedges reports, "In Prizren, German soldiers on Friday stumbled onto a cache of 10 tons of ammunition squirreled away by the rebels. There is an average of one murder a day, most often of a Serb, and three or four lootings and house burnings in Prizren, which is in many ways a typical city in postwar Kosovo. In Prizren the city hall and municipal buildings have been commandeered by the Kosovo Liberation Army. Former fighters sit in the offices and run the city. "In Pristina several large buildings have been taken over by the group and turned into ministries. Small cafes, shops, apartments and the huge shopping center in Pristina are in the hands of a rebel cadre. Most of these new entrepreneurs come from rural areas and have nothing but disdain for the Kosovo Albanian urban elite, who, they say, failed under Ibrahim Rugova to drive away the Serbs. Rugova, the nonviolent political leader of a faction of Kosovo Albanians, remains in exile in Italy after a brief visit to Kosovo, saying he has delayed his return because of concerns about his security in rebel territory..... Hashim Thaci, the KLA commander who was wined and dined by an adoring Madeleine Albright following the Rambouillet meetings in February, has "appointed himself Prime Minister and his friends and relatives to head various departments, including his uncle Azem Syla to the post of Defense Minister." Hedges reports. "Thaci's orders are usually delivered by bands of sunburned young men, many carrying concealed pistols. The orders are handed over with warnings that failure to comply will lead to beatings or death. "Thaci says he will govern Kosovo until parliamentary elections, which are expected to be scheduled sometime during the next nine months. But he does not speak of disbanding the structures that have been set up to allow the United Nations to assume responsibility. ...."

New York Times 8/3/99 Carlotta Gall "...The murders, abductions, threats and beatings of Serbs and Gypsies in Kosovo have largely been the work of members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, says Human Rights Watch in a report, asserting that neither the guerrilla army's leaders nor the international force are doing enough to stop the violence..."

NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE 7/29/99 Chris Hedges "...The Kosovo Liberation Army has taken sweeping political control in Kosovo, establishing a network of self-appointed ministries and local councils, seizing businesses and apartments, and collecting taxes and customs payments in the absence of a strong international police presence. Despite a peace agreement that calls for an administration appointed by the United Nations and the fact that the ethnic Albanian militants have no legal standing, they have created a fait accompli..."

Washington Post 8/4/99 Peter Finn "...Zoran Vujovic found his mother's body in her stylish two-bedroom apartment in the Sunny Hill section of Pristina. Her fully dressed corpse lay over the edge of the bathtub, her feet on the ground, her head in the water, where someone had held her until she drowned. Ljubica Vujovic, 78, was a lifelong resident of Kosovo. She was also a Serb, and in the new Kosovo that is enough to get you killed..."

American Spectator 8/99 Jeremy Rabkin "...As the air war continued without success, NATO became more aggressive in its targeting. It dropped cluster bombs from high altitudes, which guaranteed civilian casualties. Dozens of hospitals, schools, and churches were hit, so many as to raise reasonable questions about NATO strategy. Oil refineries and chemical plants were also bombed, allowing toxic wastes to spill into rivers and farm fields, again raising questions about the degree of caution in NATO targeting. In deliberately destroying electric power plants and water pumping stations, NATO seemed to be pursuing a strategy designed to impose suffering on civilians--knowing that such hardships could have particularly devastating consequences for children, the ill, and the elderly. The Geneva Convention on protection of civilians in wartime (signed by all NATO states) clearly condemns such actions..... The case against NATO's bombing campaign doesn't rest merely on a hostile interpretation of small details in the relevant Geneva Convention. By the end of the air campaign, Serb authorities reported at least 2,000 civilian deaths, with many thousands more injured. That is greater than the number of Albanians killed in Kosovo in the months preceding the air war. Serb forces committed many more murders under cover of the air campaign, perhaps over 9,000. But deaths attributable to NATO bombing are at least as many as the initial killing NATO intervened to stop. It is hard to dismiss demands for international scrutiny of NATO tactics as a mere propaganda ploy...."

http://asia.yahoo.com/headlines/030899/world/933671460-90803091157.newsworld.html 8/3/99 AFP "...The head of the UN interim administration in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, on Tuesday backpedalled over comments he made the day before that "11,000 people died" in the province in the Serb military operation against ethnic Albanians. His spokeswoman, Nadia Younes, said Kouchner's "statement reflected what many people believe to be the potential number of victims, based on reports of mass graves in Kosovo received to date from all sources." She added: "Most of these reports are, as yet, unconfirmed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). ..."

Itar-Tass 8/4/99 "...Head of the U.N. mission to Kosovo Bernard Kouchner said he had made a big mistake by overestimating casualties in the Kosovo war. Two days ago Kouchner said that 11,000 people died in the Kosovo war by quoting the International Criminal Tribunal on the former Yugoslavia. "I had had so many meetings with peoples and it seems to me that this number corresponds to reality, but I was wrong," he recognised. On Monday, the U.N. mission head visited one of the mass burials in the north of Kosovo. An official of the International Criminal Tribunal on the former Yugoslavia, Paul Risley, said that it is too early to name the total number of killed Kosovars, adding that according to certain international organisations, a total of 7,000 people died in the Kosovo war...."

Stratfor.com 8/4/99 "...1834 GMT, 990804 Yugoslavia - Bernard Kouchner, head of the UN mission to Kosovo, has retracted statements made on August 2 that as many as 11,000 ethnic Albanians had been killed in Kosovo, saying the figure was an overestimation. He stated, "I had had so many meetings with people and it seems to me that this number corresponds to reality, but I was wrong." An official of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Paul Risley, said it was premature to give a solid figure, but that some international organizations had put the number at a total of 7,000. ...."

http://originalsources.com/OS8-99MQC/8-5-1999.1.shtml 8/5/99 Mary Mostert "...In a recent commentary, we discussed a report of NBC's Andrea Mitchell in which she said that the number of Albanians killed in Kosovo during the war appeared to be in the three to six thousand range, not 100,000 as Secretary of Defense William Cohen and others were predicting." Even before the bombing started, I warned that the public was not being told the truth by the Clinton Administration. (See: http://originalsources.com/OS3-99MQC/3-11-1999.1.shtml-Peacekeeping: Albanians Terrorize Kosovo, Clinton Threatens to Bomb Milosevic)The Serbs had been demonized by the Clinton Administration and by CNN especially, once again taking the Muslim, Nazi, Nationalism side of an argument, while CLAIMING to be supporting "humanitarianism." Coming just as the Cox report was about the be released, the bombing of Yugoslavia seemed an easy way to get Clinton's reprehensible behavior in a variety of situations off the front pages. Obviously, Clinton and Albright thought a couple of days of bombing would make the Serbs give up. It didn't. .....In fact, I was threatened a few times that all kinds of things would happen to me if I didn't stop my skepticism of those numbers. My favorite number, which not even NATO is now defending, was Jamie Shea's statement that "100,000 babies" had been "born in refugee camps to Albanian women." (See: http://originalsources.com/OS5-99MQC/5-26-1999.1.shtml- NATO Says 200,000 Albanian Women Gave Birth to 100,000 Babies in Two Months?) ....The FBI sent a team over to investigate two of the seven sites listed in the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes, one where the indictment said six persons were murdered and the other 20. The team included 65 persons and including graphic artists and demolition experts. They took 107,000 pounds of equipment, but we have seen no reports that they discovered any new mass graves in the few weeks that they spent there. "Although there have been reports that a hundred or more other sites have been reported, the FBI team came home on July 1. This suggests that there was not as much demand for their services as the news stories suggest. An AP story on June 18 said that at least 10,000 Albanians were killed in more than 100 massacres, but as yet very few mass graves in addition to those listed in the Milosevic indictment have been have been identified in news stories...."

Stratfor.com 8/6/99 "...Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported August 5 that a power plant in Bulgaria was unexpectedly shutdown August 4, leaving Kosovo without electricity. AFP cited officials with the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) stating that the power outage began on August 4 and could last until August 6. ...Stratfor has worked diligently to confirm this story independently, although no other media outlets have reported it thus far....

First, the story is entirely genuine, and a Bulgarian power station has been shut down. This is possible, although it fails to explain why the power is not off in Serbia as well... The second possibility is that the power from Bulgaria is being terminated in Nis, effectively blacking out Kosovo. The Serb government may have been in control of this switch for quite some time, and has now decided to flicker the lights in Pristina. Again, the motivation behind this move is unclear, because it is only a temporary tactic and could have been used more effectively during the NATO bombing campaign or earlier in the NATO occupation. Still, the idea that the Serbs shut off the lights would explain the extent of the blackout in Kosovo, in that Serbia could shut off more than just the Bulgarian feed. Finally, the power cutoff could have occurred in Pristina itself, although whose aims this would serve is unclear.... 2310 GMT, 990806 Kosovo [http://www.stratfor.com/CIS/commentary/c9908052340.htm], BBC and Macedonian radio have both reported that most of Kosovo is without power due to a shutdown at a Bulgarian power plant. Officials at the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. State Department said they had no knowledge of the outage. Further attempts to contact the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and the KFOR headquarters in Pristina have been unsuccessful. The lack of power in Kosovo is deemed by Stratfor to be a serious matter, especially considering that Agence France-Presse reported KFOR troops were being kept "busy" by irregular forces exploiting the darkness, although the story has been strangely absent from media reports coming from the region...."

UPI 8/5/99 "...Pekka Haavisto, the former Finnish environment minister, said today after a nine-day inspection trip to damaged industrial sites the panel found "lots of mercury, several hazardous or toxic substances" and added that groundwater might be contaminated at several sites. "There are certain environmental impacts and risks for health if immediate action is not taken," said Haavisto, chairman of the joint U. N. Environment program/U.N. Center for Human Settlements (Habitat) Balkans Task Force. But, he said, "Everybody is waiting for reports and scientific results before taking any action," adding, "It's safe to wait a couple of months." ..."

AP 8/6/99 "...Violent flare-ups involving NATO troops injured a Russian soldier and an ethnic Albanian and prompted a peacekeeping spokesman to express concern today about attacks on Kosovo peacekeepers. The violence overnight included three attacks on Russian soldiers at checkpoints in eastern Kosovo, an exchange of gunfire with people trying to attack a Serb home in the southern city of Urosevac, and three cases in which shots were fired at other NATO checkpoints or patrols. One Russian soldier was wounded in the thigh, and an ethnic Albanian was seriously injured in the incidents. NATO forces detained a total of 15 suspects, said Maj. Jan Joosten, spokesman for the peacekeeping force in Pristina known as KFOR. ``KFOR is very concerned about the current attacks against its soldiers,'' Joosten said, adding that the rules of engagement allow the foreign troops a robust response to any attack The violence came amid a series of attacks on minority Serbs by ethnic Albanians. More than 160,000 Serbs have fled the province as a result, and Belgrade has protested that the NATO forces are failing to protect both sides equally. ..."

Stratfor.Com 8/6/99 "...Montenegro's Social Democratic Party (SDP) leader Zarko Rakcevic said on August 6 that the country would not pursue independence in the blood-letting manner of Croatia, Bosnia or Kosovo. At the same time, Rakcevic also pointed out that the United States and other countries had "no right to eliminate the right of self-determination to Montenegro." Both of these statements follow yesterday's adoption by a six-party coalition in Podgorica of the Platform on the New Relationship Between Serbia and Montenegro, a 15-page proposal defining the terms for a union of the states of Serbia and Montenegro. Montenegrin Prime Minister Vujanovic said the document would be forwarded to Slobodan Milosevic for consideration within six weeks, after which time Montenegro will begin a referendum on independence if declined. ..."

Reuters 8/3/99 "...Jane's Defence Weekly said in a report to be published on Tuesday that Russia was believed to have supplied Serbia with air defense missiles before NATO started its bombing campaign against Kosovo in March. "According to unsubstantiated reports, Russia or elements in Russia are believed to have supplied air defense units of the Yugoslav Air force," the report said. The weapons would have been received while a United Nations arms embargo on Yugoslavia was in force. A preview of the report was released on Monday. Russia has denied the claims, it said. The author told Reuters the information came from military and political sources in Russia and four countries in the region...."

ALL THINGS CONSIDERED NPR NETWORK 8/4/99 "... SIEGEL: Now, your story in "Jane's Defense Weekly" acknowledges that the Russian government denies this altogether. As you understand it, was it the Russian government that was making such a shipment or was it elements of, perhaps, the former Russian military who were selling them independently? BEAVER: Well, the real problem you have with these sort of sales, particularly of what appears to be second-hand equipment, is you just have no idea where they may have come from. Personally, I do not believe that President Yeltsin is foolish enough to break a U.N. arms embargo. I believe it when the Russian embassy tells us, and when the Russian government tells us that they did not violate international law. However, that doesn't stop groups within Russia from supplying equipment. We know that already in the last five years that dissident groups in Russia have supplied the Bosnian Serbs with surface-to-air missiles, including one called the SA-16, the "Strela", which was used to shoot down a British C-Harrier jet and possibly a French Mirage jet, as well. So we know that weapons got through to Bosnia, there's no reason why they shouldn't have got through to Yugoslavia...."

Los Angeles Times 8/5/99 Scott Glover "...Offering chilling new evidence of widespread, calculated revenge slayings by ethnic Albanians, a top NATO investigator said Wednesday that the majority of killings under investigation in and around Kosovo's capital are apparent executions in which the Serbian victims had their hands bound and were made to kneel before being shot in the head. These characteristics were common in "dozens" of slayings committed since NATO-led peacekeepers occupied Kosovo on June 12, said British Maj. John Wooldridge, a senior investigator with the Royal Military Police. Wooldridge deemed the killings "executions" by Albanians in which ethnic hatred is the presumed motive...."

Associated Press 8/8/99 Anne Gearan "...The Clinton administration, dismayed by the success of anti-American propaganda worldwide, is striking back with an information offensive of its own: a State Department unit that will control the flow of government news overseas, especially during crises. The new International Public Information group, or IPI, will coordinate the dissemination of news from the State Department, Pentagon and other U.S. agencies.....In the recent Kosovo war, the Pentagon, State Department and White House poured out information each day but no single agency tried to assemble it so that the United States spoke with a coordinated message overseas. The group came about partly in response to the spread of unflattering or erroneous information about the United States received abroad via electronic mail, the Internet, cellular telephones and other communications advances. ...President Clinton signed a directive April 30, in the thick of the Kosovo war, that set out plans for IPI, although the White House did not formally announce the group's existence or role. An unclassified mission statement obtained by The Associated Press described IPI's role: ``Effective use of our nation's highly developed communications and information capabilities to address misinformation and incitement, mitigate inter-ethnic conflict, promote independent media organizations and the free flow of information, and support democratic participation will advance our interests and is a critical foreign policy objective,'' the document said...."

Reuters 8/7/99 "...NATO troops raided a house being used by Kosovo's self-styled public order minister and several aides, seizing weapons in a crackdown on criminal intimidation in the capital Pristina, the KFOR peace force said on Saturday. Friday night's action came two days after ``Minister of Public Order'' Rexhep Selimi was briefly detained for threatening a peacekeeping patrol with a pistol and driving around in a vehicle with a flashing blue light... But the Kosovo Liberation Army has formed a provisional government that has apparently been used as a cover by shadowy factions with paramilitary muscle to persecute opponents, both ethnic Albanians and Serbs, critics say. ..."

New York Times 8/8/99 Chris Hedges "...Kosovar Albanians, along with their ethnic kin in Albania, Macedonia and Serbia, have long dreamed of a "Greater Albania." The departure of the Serbian border police, opening up the frontier, has given most a taste of what such a state might be like. Not many seem to like it. "Girls are kidnapped, taken we expect to work as prostitutes in Italy, cars are stolen or hijacked, houses are looted and there are shootings at night," said Masar Shala, the Mayor appointed by the Kosovo Liberation Army, known as the K.L.A. "The refugees who are coming home, many of whom have driven from Germany with their families, are systematically stopped just before they enter Kosovo and robbed of all their money," he continued. "Apartments in the city have been seized by Albanian gangs and rented out. The only thing we lack is drug dealing, but that will probably arrive shortly." ...."

AP Tom Cohen 8/8/99 "...On a sun-drenched afternoon surrounded by thousands of supporters, former guerrilla commander Hashim Thaci promised Kosovo's ethnic Albanians that one day their will would decide the future of their homeland. For now, though, Thaci's Kosovo Liberation Army is trying to impose its will on the Serbian province and grab as much power as it can in the postwar disorder. As the United Nations struggles to set up a civil administration to run Kosovo and more than 35,000 NATO troops provide security, the KLA has appointed its people to fill local leadership positions throughout the province, taken over former state-run property and requisitioned apartments and vehicles....U.N. spokesman Kevin Kennedy acknowledged that a KLA attempt to assume authority could be a problem, but expressed optimism that the province's international administrators would offer a better alternative. ``You're going to have in here a civil administration that draws on experience from many countries in areas that the KLA cannot match,'' he said...."

Stratfor.com 8/8/99 "...1536 GMT, 990808 Yugoslavia - A forceful explosion shook Pristina the night of August 7. Afterward, gunfire was heard, and KFOR patrols began to police the streets in heavy numbers. 1515 GMT, 990808 Yugoslavia - Armed ethnic Albanians attacked a Serb residential area in the city of Kosovska Mitrovica on August 7. The French peacekeepers called to the scene reported a grenade attack in addition to the use of light arms. The event occurred after ethnic Albanian protestors attempted to cross a bridge that divides the city's ethnic Albanian and Serb populations. ..."

FoxNews 8/8/99 Reuters "...The head of the international KFOR peacekeeping force in Kosovo said Monday that attacks on his soldiers at the weekend could mean the KLA guerrilla group had lost control over hard-liners. Lieutenant-General Sir Mike Jackson told the Scotsman newspaper in an interview that the KLA leadership needed to convince its ethnic Albanian supporters not to carry out revenge attacks against Serb civilians and peacekeepers trying to protect them......"

Boston Globe - anitwar.com 8/6/99 Joe Lauria "... ''We have found that on many of these targeted sites there are serious environmental consequences and probably also serious health consequences,'' said Pekka Haavisto, a former Finnish environmental minister, who heads the UN Environmental Program/Habitat Balkans Task Force...."

Washington Post 8/8/99 Peter Finn "...For months now, the small republic of Montenegro has been the next explosion waiting to happen in the Balkans. As the Kosovo war came to a close in early June, many thought the pro-Western Montenegrin government was sure to clash with Serbia, its dominant partner in the uneasy Yugoslav federation headed by President Slobodan Milosevic. But it has not happened yet. And last week--in a strangely significant way--people here began to think it might never happen. The government of President Milo Djukanovic, which had already infuriated Serbia by declaring neutrality during NATO's war against Yugoslavia, on Thursday presented Belgrade with a plan to redefine the relationship between the sister republics, abolishing the federal entity called Yugoslavia and creating, instead, a union of two equal states with separate defense, foreign policy and monetary structures...."

Reuters 8/9/99 "…NATO peacekeepers arrested 59 people in 24 hours and seized several arms caches in a mounting struggle against violence in Kosovo in which a girl was seriously injured by a grenade, officials said on Monday. Peacekeeping soldiers have also been assaulted and shot at in recent days in what analysts say appears to be a creeping challenge to Kosovo's transitional international authorities by armed nationalists operating in various guises…."

The Associated Press 8/9/99 Tom Cohen "... Surrounded by the charred hulks of other homes deserted by Serbs, flames and smoke poured from a house Monday in the Kosovo village of Zitinje. The burning of every Serb remnant in the village except for a small church - along with a third day of scuffling between French soldiers and ethnic Albanians trying to march to the Serb part of the town of Kosovska Mitrovica - showed the hatred that persists in Kosovo eight weeks after the end of NATO's bombing campaign. Most of the province's estimated 200,000 Serbs have fled since the war ended. The 250 Serbian residents of Zitinje, 25 miles southeast of Pristina, left last week, and U.S. troops moved in to protect their belongings and houses from revenge-minded ethnic Albanians. But when NATO forces decreased their presence on Friday, ethnic Albanians struck quickly. By Monday, every house with a Serbian Orthodox cross painted on it was destroyed...."

WorldnetDaily 8/10/99 Stephan Archer "...The lawsuit filed against President Clinton, the Department of Defense and Congress for their part in the bombing of Yugoslavia was thrown out of northern New York State's U.S. District Court after Judge Frederick Scullin decided the plaintiffs lacked standing. Robert Schulz, a former New York talk show host, and three other co-plaintiffs -- Gary Loughrey, Stephen Oughton, and Milan Pavlovic -- initially had filed the lawsuit calling on President Bill Clinton to stop the war in Yugoslavia. After the war ended, Schulz and the other plaintiffs continued to pursue the lawsuit demanding the court to order the troops -- many of who are still in active duty in Yugoslavia -- home. Now the plaintiffs will have to appeal to a higher court -- the Federal Court of Appeals -- after finding out yesterday that Judge Scullin has ordered the case be dismissed. According to the judge's decision, in order to establish standing, "Plaintiffs must show personal injury fairly traceable to Defendants' conduct, which would likely be redressed by the requested relief." The decision further explains that "review of the standing requirement becomes especially rigorous where a federal court is asked to decide whether an action taken by either the Legislative or Executive branches of the federal government was unconstitutional." Although all the plaintiffs have standing as U.S. citizens and taxpayers, the court early on decided these two claims on their own weren't enough to assert standing...."

Fox News Channel Web site 8/10/99 Tom Cohen "...More than 80 policemen sent from Nepal and Bangladesh to work in Kosovo don't have the basic equipment or training for the province's hostile environment, the commander of the U.N.'s international police force said Tuesday. The 50 officers from Nepal and 36 from Bangladesh are "on hold" for now, said Col. Michael Jorsback of Sweden. Jorsback is chief of staff of the U.N. International Police Force in Kosovo, which was created to help fight ethnic violence and rampant crime...."

Stratfor.com 8/10/99 "....On August 8, French troops clashed with ethnic Albanians on the bridge in Mitrovica, that divides the ethnically Albanian and Serbian parts of the city. In the third day of clashes in Mitrovica, about 150 Albanian protesters, yelling anti-French slogans, were pushed back by French soldiers armed with rifles. The past weekend saw numerous incidents of anti-Serb violence conducted by ethnic Albanians, some of whom were directly involved in the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In addition, according to KFOR spokesman Major Roland Lavoile, KFOR continued to discover illegal arms caches along with uniforms and supplies linking the finds to the KLA. Most recently, on August 8, British troops found a number of weapons in a house in Lipljan searched in connection with a wave of grenade attacks. Along with weapons, "KLA Interior Ministry Police" identification cards and uniforms were found in the house. The evidence linking the KLA to violent activities and the series of clashes between the KLA and KFOR in Mitrovica illustrate both the continued threat posed by the KLA and, significantly, the rising tensions between the KLA and NATO peacekeepers....."

UPI 8/10/99 "...House and Senate have challenged President Clinton to say whether NATO's new "strategic concept" - security enforcement even beyond the alliance's traditional European borders - is binding on the United States, says Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan. If it is, Roberts says, it should be submitted to the Senate as a treaty to be ratified. If it's not, "What the heck are we doing in Bosnia and Kosovo and all those other places? He's stuck between a rock and a hard place," ..."

The Times of London 8/10/99 John Laughlin "...'Since law enforcement is probably the single most important sovereign power, it is threatened if it is transferred to unaccountable bureaucrats' At least Louise Arbour never minces her words. The Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia believes that she and her court have usherd in a new era in international relations. "We have passed," she intoned last week, "from a regime of co-operation between states to a regime of constraining states." Miscreants can now be punished, was her triumphant cry. This followed the decision, announced, on July 28, to refer Croatia to the Security Council of the UN for "failing to comply with its international obligations". This serious charge is the culmination of a long dispute over Operation Storm, the police and military action in August 1995 which resulted in the "ethnic cleansing" of hundreds of thousands of Serbs from the Krajina region of Croatia....."

UPI 8/11/99 "...Yugoslavia has accused NATO countries, including Canada, of committing war crimes during their bombing campaign over its territory this spring. The accusation is contained in a report released by the Yugoslav Embassy in Ottawa today. The report carries pictures of mutilated bodies and damaged buildings, which the embassy says is evidence of attacks on Yugoslav civilians during NATO's 78-day bombing campaign. An embassy official says the damaged buildings included schools, hospitals and residential houses. She says damage to military targets was "minimal."..."

International Action Center Ramsey Clark 8/11/99 The Indictment 8/5/99 "...Charging William J. Clinton, The Government Of The United States, NATO And Others With International Crimes And Violations Of International And Domestic Laws Causing Deaths, Destruction, Injury And Suffering. The Charges (1)Planning and Executing the Dismemberment, Segregation and Impoverishment of Yugoslavia. (2)Inflicting, Inciting and Enhancing Violence Between and Among Muslims and Slavs. (3)Disrupting Efforts to Maintain Unity, Peace and Stability in Yugoslavia.

(4)Destroying the Peace Making Role of the United Nations. (5)Using NATO for Military Aggression Against, and Occupation of, Non Compliant Poor Countries. (6)Killing and Injuring a Defenseless Population Throughout Yugoslavia. (7)Planning, Announcing and Executing Attacks Intended to Assassinate The Head of Government, Other Government Leaders and Selected Civilians. (8)Destroying and Damaging Economic, Social, Cultural. Medical, Diplomatic and Religious Resources, Properties and Facilities Throughout Yugoslavia. (9)Attacking Objects Indispensable to the Survival of the Population of Yugoslavia. (10)Attacking Facilities Containing Dangerous Substances and Forces. (11)Using Depleted Uranium, Cluster Bombs and Other Prohibited Weapons. (12)Waging War on the Environment. (13)Imposing Sanctions Through The UN That Are A Genocidal Crime Against Humanity. (14)Creating An Illegal Ad-Hoc Criminal Tribunal To Destroy And Demonize Serb Leadership. (15)Using Controlled International Media To Create and Maintain Support For the U.S. Assault And To Demonize Yugoslavia, Slavs, Serbs and Muslims As Genocidal Murderers. (16)Establishing The Long term Military Occupation Of Strategic parts of Yugoslavia By NATO Forces. (17)Attempting to Destroy the Sovereignty, Right to Self Determination, Democracy and Culture of the Slavic and Other Peoples of Yugoslavia. (18)The Purpose Of The U.S. Being To Dominate, Control and Exploit Yugoslavia, Its People and Its Resources. (19)The Means Of The U.S. Being Military Force and Economic Coercion...."

International Herald Tribune 8/12/99 Cornelio Sommaruga "...GENEVA - The writer is president of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Fifty years ago this Thursday, representatives of some 58 countries gathered in Geneva, with the ghastly memories of World War II still vivid, to place their nations' names at the bottom of a new treaty. Like the world around, this treaty, composed of four different ''conventions,'' was born of the flames of war. ...... This principle - the separation between causes of war and rules of war - became increasingly validated. In 1977, two additional protocols were added to the conventions to reaffirm the sanctity of civilian populations in both international and internal armed conflict. The means at the disposal of the warrior are not to be unlimited. Indiscriminate destruction is not permissible. Targeting civilians is prohibited. The environment must not suffer lasting damage. Of late, though, this fundamental principle has come under attack. Wars, or at least some of them, are now said to be fought for ''humanitarian reasons,'' meaning that one side is humanitarian and the other diabolical. This caricature of war could lead to discrimination against the victims, since there will be the ''good'' victims of the ''humanitarian'' side and the ''bad'' victims among those who oppose the ''humanitarian'' intervention. In strange and unforeseen ways, the conventions are suffering from an overdose of popularity, since it is because the world at large is so disgusted by acts of barbarity that governments and supranational bodies see it as their duty to intervene more and more to try to curb some of the more lurid atrocities that emerge here and there. The intention of the International Committee of the Red Cross is not to say that the international community should refrain from embarking on missions, including military missions, to try to counter acts of terror. The intention is to say that such endeavors must not be wolves in sheep's clothing. War remains war, and humanitarian operations must remain humanitarian missions. A victim of war is a victim of war...."

Agence France-Presse 8/11/99 "..."Thugs" have rid the Kosovo capital of Pristina of virtually all its Serbian minority, the UN refugee agency UNHCR said Wednesday in its strongest condemnation yet of the reverse ethnic cleansing that has hit the province. "UNHCR views with increasing alarm the situation of the remaining Serb minority in the city," agency spokesman Ron Redmond told journalists here. He added that there were now only an estimated 1,000-2,000 Serbs left in Pristina. That compares with an estimated population of around 40,000 before the NATO-Yugoslavia conflict, according to Serbian media, he said, and 27,000 according to a 1991 census...."

Reuters 8/11/99 "...(Reuters) - The top U.S. officer in Kosovo's peacekeeping force said Wednesday that ethnic Albanian intimidation of minority Serbs appeared organized and systematic in his operating sector. But Brigadier General John Craddock, commander in the southeast military zone, stopped short of blaming the erstwhile guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), the only domestic group with broad coercive means, for a spate of murders and arson. ``Rogue elements'' whose links with the KLA were unclear as well as ``disaffected former KLA members'' had been factors in armed violence, he told a news conference in Pristina.....

Chicago Sun-Times 8/12/99 Bob Novak "...It was pitch-black in much of NATO-occupied Kosovo the night of Aug. 4 as irregular Albanian forces took advantage of an unexplained, unannounced power outage to cause trouble. Such trouble is nothing new for Kosovo Force soldiers. Also customary is lack of information and even interest in official Washington about how and why the lights went out. Assaults by Albanians on Kosovo Force troops are increasing. Lt. Gen. Sir Michael Jackson, the British officer commanding the NATO troops, said this week that "I can't say I am fully confident" that the Kosovo Liberation Army commanders "are in full control" of Albanian hard-liners. With nearly all Serbs driven out of the province, NATO has broken its promise to follow a blood-and-iron policy in Kosovo that empowers the Albanians with peacemaking that protects the Serbs The fruits of "victory" for the Western alliance are bitter. Chaos in Kosovo belies NATO's unkept pledge to ensure ethnic peace and threatens serious trouble with Russia. In Washington, attention--much less criticism--is minimal. Those Republicans who had opposed intervention in the Balkans are not willing to challenge a victorious President Clinton. An exception is Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, a longtime critic who told me: "I think the situation in Kosovo today is worse now than it was a year ago."...."

Stratfor.com 8/12/99 "....0125 GMT, 990812 Yugoslavia - A border confrontation between Macedonian border guards and a group of Kosovar Albanians erupted on August 11, leaving one Kosovar Albanian wounded. The incident occurred near Skopje, an area plagued by border conflict, when Kosovar Albanians opened fire on the Macedonian patrol after it was discovered two of the Kosovar Albanians were without documents..."

Pacific Stars And Stripes 8/13/99 "...A NATO ally apparently leaked secret targeting information to Yugoslav officials during the U.S.-led air war, said Gen. Wesley Clark, the American four-star Army general who heads NATO. Clark, who declined to speculate about who had tipped the Yugoslavs to NATO's targets, said the security breach was "as clear as the nose on your" face. He declined to say what evidence led him to this conclusion or to describe the steps taken to stop the leaks. "I can't go into it," Clark, the supreme allied commander for Europe, said in an interview this week. "I have to just say it apparently happened and we are concerned about this."...."

Inside The Pentagon 8/12/99 "...Now that the Kosovo Implementation Force, known as KFOR, has largely secured the breakaway Serbian province following the June withdrawal of Yugoslavian army and paramilitary troops, U.S. military forces are beginning to turn their attention more to humanitarian assistance, according to Pentagon officials. Although destruction was not heavy in villages located in the southeast area of the province, which is now the U.S.-run sector, there is likely still work to be done repairing roads, bridges, and electricity and water supplies there, sources said. More damage may have been done in Kosovo by NATO bombs than the Yugoslavian military, which experts say appeared to have wanted to preserve the Serbian province rather than destroy it...."

The Guardian 8/12/99 Andrew Gray "...The United Nations refugee agency said yesterday it believed the Serb population of Kosovo's capital, Pristina, had shrunk to under 2,000 from an estimated 40,000 a few months ago. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees office said it was alarmed by the situation of Serbs in Kosovo, forced to flee by ethnic Albanian gangs using tactics similar to those used by Serbs earlier this year. ..."

Itar-Tass 8/13/99 "...The task of ensuring equal safety to all ethnic groups in Kosovo calls for an accelerated disarmament of the Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army /KLA/ and the deployment of Serb police forces in the province, according to Russian deputy ambassador to the United Nations Gennady Gatilov. "It is extremely actual to ensure equal safety to all the ethnic groups in Kosovo in order to stop the continuing mass exodus of the non-Albanian population", he told Tass on Thursday and regretted that KFOR cannot fully cope with the task... "

Reuters 8/13/99 "...Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) political leader Hashim Thaqi said in an interview on Friday that the organisation would establish a defence force in the Yugoslav province, now ruled by an interim U.N. administration. He told Austria's Die Presse newspaper that the KLA, an ethnic Albanian group which fought a 16-month guerrilla campaign against Serb rule in Kosovo, would be split into three parts. The group signed a formal agreement with NATO in June under which its fighters were supposed to give up most of their main weapons within 90 days. ``We will form a political party, KLA members will take part in a new police force and we will have a military formation, a defence force, in Kosovo,'' the newspaper quoted him as saying...."

Wall Street Journal 8/13/99 Matthew Kaminski "...A hundred Serbs pile into a dusty schoolhouse for their first American-style town meeting. Capt. Tyrone Clifton of the U.S. 82nd Airborne stands ramrod straight at the head of the room, clutching his helmet tight against his chest. In the stern voice of a schoolmarm, he says he knows departing Yugoslav soldiers handed out machine guns and grenades to some of those assembled here. "Give them up," he barks...."

Cleveland Plain Dealer 8/7/99 Alex Dragnich "..."A propagandist cannibalizes an already existing stream; in a land where there is no water he digs in vain." - Aldous Huxley - I was reminded of Huxley's remark when it was recently disclosed that President Bill Clinton had set up a new group designed to influence "foreign audiences" in support of U.S. foreign policy and to counteract propaganda by enemies of the United States. It is of more than passing interest that Clinton issued the secret directive ordering the creation of the International Public Information group in the midst of his bombing of Yugoslavia. By that time it was clear to him that nearly all countries around the globe were critical of what we were doing. Not only the world's largest countries - China, India, Russia - but also medium and small nations were condemning the unprovoked attack on the Serbs. Even in the NATO countries much of the public disapproved. And in the United States, while it did not get on the evening newscasts, columnists across the political spectrum called the bombing an aggression against a sovereign state. It is in the Kosovo blunder where the Huxley quote is particularly apt. Enemy propagandists were able to "cannibalize an already existing stream." Our policies provided them with the ammunition that IPI, if it had existed, could have done little or nothing to counter. On the other hand, if U.S. actions had been seen as just and fair, enemy propagandists would "dig in vain." ..."

From AFIO [Association of Former Intelligence Officers] 8/11/99 "...In London, General Sir Michael Rose, former Commander of UN troops in Bosnia, dismissed the NATO bombing campaign as a tragic failure. Rose said that British politicians and NATO were running a propaganda campaign to persuade people that the air war met its objective. In the UK as well as in continental Europe and the US there are deep differences of opinion on many levels concerning the unilateral war on Yugoslavia, including the efficacy of airpower alone versus the need for ground forces or combined arms. The NATO air war strategy is said to have made the Yugoslav anti-guerilla campaign worse and expanded the humanitarian tragedy in Kosovo while doing next to nothing to interfere with it. The bombings were said to have been the trigger for much of the ethnic cleansing as well as many of the refugees. In Washington, the Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the Hon. Porter Goss, recently stated that, although there was no doubt that brutal actions and massacres took place, many of the figures used by the Administration and NATO in describing the wartime plight of Albanians in Kosovo now appear to be greatly exaggerated. "Yes, there were atrocities. But no, they don't measure up to the advance billing." For example, "600,000 Albanians were not trapped within Kosovo lacking shelter, short of food, afraid to go home or buried in mass graves" (President Clinton). Though thousands hid in Kosovo during the Yugoslav anti-KLA insurgent operations, they are found to be healthy. Kosovo's livestock, wheat and other crops are growing, not slaughtered wholesale or torched as reported earlier. Also, most of the "missing men," the 100,000 young Albanians who were reported to have all been killed, can be found at home - - but without jobs, sometimes engaged, along with KLA elements, in terrorism against Serb and Gypsy minorities as well as moderate Muslims in the province...."

Itar-Tass 8/13/99 "... Prosecutors of Belgrade, Nis and Novi Sad and of Kosovo's cities of Pristina and Prizren on Friday filed war crime charges against leaders of five Western states and NATO commanders. They sent the charges to district courts that are entitled by Serbian legislation for criminal investigations. Prosecutor-General Dragisa Krsmanovic told reporters that charges had been brought against US President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, French President Jacques Chirac, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, their foreign and defense ministers, NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana and NATO's Supreme Commander Europe Wesley Clark...."

Washington Times 8/11/99 Nikolaos Stavrou "... With the apparent toleration of KFOR a "state within a state" is fast becoming a reality in Kosovo, while porous borders with Albania assure an uninterrupted flow of weapons. Secure under the NATO umbrella, some enterprising KLA elements have reverted to lucrative smuggling activities, while others are busy setting up parallel administration in Western Macedonia -a prelude to a liberation movement there. Leaving little to chance, KLA's Washington supporters hold fast to the victim image to assure "understanding" of its murderous activities. When it comes to blond Balkan Muslims, Western journalists have shown a great deal of understanding. Rapes of Serbian nuns are reported as "assaults," and daily murders, abductions and disappearances are packaged as "understandable" acts of revenge...."

Miami Herald 8/9/99 "...NATO must stop the carnage against Serbs or lose its credibility. NATO's dubious victory in Kosovo would be hollow indeed if, in the end, it succeeds in saving ethnic Albanians but at the cost of driving all Serbs from the region. No, there's no evil twin of Slobodan Milosevic exhorting Kosovar Albanians to ``ethnically cleanse'' Serbians the way that the Yugoslavian dictator did against the Albanians. Milosevic was barbaric and efficient in his goal of ridding Kosovo of ethnic Albanians during NATO's 78-day bombing campaign. He drove 1.5 million people out of the province, killed 11,000, and sanctioned the rape and torture of others. Now the tables have been turned. Many returning Kosovar Albanians, though not all, have been on a vicious rampage of revenge and retribution. The violence is sickening: Fourteen farmers massacred as they returned from the field; villages emptied of every able-bodied Serbian; businessmen robbed of their cars, apartments and stripped of their businesses; families terrorized by rapes, kidnappings and tortures...."

New York Times 8/14/99 Carlotta Gall "...The U.N. administration gave its troops and police extra powers Friday to detain and even expel troublemakers from town or from Kosovo altogether, in a new attempt to control the violence and ethnic tension in the province. The regulation, which was signed by the U.N. special representative, Bernard Kouchner, is a direct reaction to the tussles French troops have had with noisy demonstrators in this divided city over the last week, according to a spokesman for KFOR, the NATO force in Kosovo...."

The Independent (UK) 8/15/99 "....FORMER Serbian police and paramilitaries, several of whom are under investigation for war crimes, have taken control of a slice of northern Kosovo and are using it as a base for illegal arms dealing, drug running and gang warfare, according to Nato military intelligence officials. While tens of thousands of Serbs have fled the rest of Kosovo in fear of their lives, elements of the former administration have clung on in the northernmost tip of the province, part of the French sector. They have divided the town of Mitrovica into Serbian and Albanian zones, and have blockaded the only road leading north out of Mitrovica towards Serbia, in effect sealing off a mineral-rich northern enclave in Kosovo. ..."

The Times 8/15/99 "..."PRO-SERBIAN hackers attacked more than 170 organisations worldwide, including some in Britain, in a cyber war directed at shutting down key computer systems in Nato countries during the Kosovan conflict, writes Maeve Sheehan. The Black Hand, a notorious Serbian paramilitary group, and its sympathisers in Russia, Latvia, Lithuania and eastern Europe, targeted banks, internet service providers and media organisations in revenge for Nato bombing campaigns. More than 30 British companies, including the BBC, ITN, Sky News and internet service providers, suffered partial shutdowns or were denied access to their computer systems after being bombarded with virus-infected e-mails., ..."

Itar-Tass 8/15/99 "...Four young Serbs were wounded on Saturday night by Albanian militants in the town of Kosovska-Mitrovica. Several Kosovo Albanians, driving a car, managed to cross an old bridge over the river Ibar, which divides the town into two parts, and opened fire on the Serb youths. French peacekeepers, whose zone of responsibility includes Mitrovica, although they reached the scene belatedly, nevertheless managed to detain five Albanians suspected of attacking the Serbs...."

Reuters 8/15/99 "...More than 40 Serbian Orthodox churches and monasteries in Kosovo have been destroyed by ethnic Albanians since the NATO-led KFOR mission took control there, a. spokesman for the Church was quoted on Sunday as saying. Bishop Atanasije Rakita also told the daily newspaper Glas that more than 200 Serbian villages had been systematically destroyed in the southern Serbian province. ``It is especially worrying that these things are taking place in front of KFOR,'' the bishop, who runs the Church's information service, was quoted as saying. ..."

Reuters 8/13/99 "...General Wesley Clark, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander, said Friday he had no evidence the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was behind attacks on Serbs that have occurred since a peace plan was signed in June. Clark, on a visit to the province, said KLA leaders had consistently backed calls for Serbs to remain in Kosovo. ``I'm not going to point fingers at the KLA. The KLA leadership has been very co-operative with us at the top level,'' the U.S. Army general told reporters at the headquarters of KFOR, the NATO-led international peacekeeping force. Several international officials have recently said they suspected the KLA, or rogue elements, must be behind some of the ethnic Albanian revenge attacks which have driven up to 170,000 Serbs from Kosovo in the past few months. But Clark said much of the violence seemed spontaneous or, particularly in southeastern Kosovo, was linked to organized crime...."

Washington Post 8/14/99 Peter Finn "...It hasn't taken long -- eight weeks -- for the bloom to come off liberation. With Kosovo purged of nearly 80 percent of its Serbian population and with many of the remaining Serbs, particularly those in urban areas, now viewing international peacekeepers as their last and only protection, the NATO-led peacekeeping operation is confronting an unexpected phenomenon: ethnic Albanian hostility. The peacekeepers' determination to maintain a multi-ethnic society here has led to violent confrontations with ethnic Albanians bent on revenge against the Serbs or the looting of their property. And the United Nations' insistence on the primacy of its authority has increased tension with the Kosovo Liberation Army, an ethnic Albanian militia that is attempting to establish its own parallel system of control in Kosovo, which formally remains a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia's dominant republic. ....The KLA's so-called Minister of the Interior, Rexhep Selimi, was detained by British troops after he waved a gun at them while driving a car with a flashing police light. A later raid on the offices of Selimi -- an uncle of the KLA's former military commander -- produced several weapons and identity cards giving the bearer the right to "to conduct illegal activities, including carrying and using weapons, entering and confiscating property without warning," British troops said....."

New York Times 8/15/99 Carlotta Gall "...The international peacekeeping force in Kosovo is clamping down hard on the Kosovo Liberation Army, seizing arms caches almost daily and confiscating documents and even cash from premises, in what some officials say is a determined effort to break the movement. NATO and United Nations officials maintain that the tougher action is routine, and part of an agreement signed almost seven weeks ago that aimed to dismantle the rebel operation completely within three months. Yet until now, the NATO-led peacekeeping force here has given the guerrillas a fairly wide berth. With the recent crackdown, the NATO force is demonstrating that it will no longer tolerate violations of the agreement and that it expects the rebels to turn over their weapons and come to heel behind NATO and United Nations authorities Members of the Kosovar army and the provisional government of Hashim Thaci, who is the political leader of the movement, are growing increasingly unhappy as many of their aspirations are brushed aside. Those include forming a kind of national guard and being incorporated within any police force for Kosovo, as well as gaining social respect that they feel they have earned...."

Agence France-Presse 8/16/99 "...- KFOR's peacekeepers have got their hands full with a major crime wave in Kosovo, in addition to their main duties keeping civil order in the Yugoslav province. They are having to deal with pillaged houses, old persons turned out of their homes, stolen cars, racketeering, murders, kidnappings, rapes, black marketeering: all carried out either by the Kosovars themselves or the Albanian mafia...."

The Independent (UK) 8/15/99 "...WEAPONS FROM the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) that were supposed to have been surrendered to Nato troops are on sale in Britain. The Independent has learnt that arms dealers in the United Kingdom have been offered up to 140 tons of high explosive as well as rocket-propelled grenades, automatic weapons and illegal anti-personnel mines. Inquiries in London and Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, have confirmed that the trade in arms is thriving, in spite of a commitment made by KLA leaders at the end of the Nato campaign to hand in their forces' weapons...."

The New Australian No 130 16-22 8/99 James Henry "...Sometime ago I wrote that if NATO succeeded in driving the Serbs out of Kosovo it would only plant the seeds of a future Balkan conflict. What would NATO do to protect an Albanian controlled Kosovo against a revanchist Serbia? Clinton, Blair and Schroeder being what they are have not given this dismal prospect any serious thought. But the war against Serbia raised other important questions that need to be answered. A very important one being: Who invaded whom? Put another way, how does a country deal with people from a different cultural and religious background who having settled into the host country now decide to annex part of it on the curious grounds that they are now a majority in that region. Like it or not, this is what Kosovo Albanians have done. They have sliced away a huge portion of Serbia. This could not have been done without the aid of Clinton and Blair, who certainly won't be around to pick up the pieces from the next Serbian-Kosovo conflict, not that they are picking up any pieces now. Does anyone think for one moment that if Britain's 1 million plus Moslem population decided to annex a portion of the UK on the novel grounds they are the majority in that area that Blair would stand for it...."

Itar-Tass 8/16/99 "...The position of ethnic minorities and, above all, the Serbs and gypsies in Kosovo, is getting worse day by day. According to reports provided by representatives of the UN High Commissioner for Refugee Affairs, the Serb population is on the verge of extinction from starvation. Acts of repression continued by the "Liberation Army of Kosovo" and different bandit formations arouse fear among the Serbs who cannot go out of their homes and have practically turned into hostages held captive by the separatists...."

UPI 8/16/99 "...Albanian miners and students from the southern part of Mitrovica say they plan to march on the northern Serbian sector. The attempts by the Mitrovica Albanians to enter the northern sector, where many of them claim to have homes and jobs, have been thwarted by French KFOR troops. Because of the attempts, the Serbian national council for the Mitrovica district have suspended negotiations with local Albanians and representatives of the international community. Council president, Vuk Antonijevic, commenting on the planned march, told Belgrade radio B2-92 that the northern enclave was less than 20 percent of the Mitrovica area...."

Los Angeles Times 8/15/99 Scott Glover "... Initially, the widespread slayings of Serbs, and the torching of their homes and churches, were seen as individual acts of revenge for atrocities carried out by Serbian troops during the war--crimes that claimed the lives of an estimated 10,000 ethnic Albanians. But as the days pass since NATO-led troops began occupying Kosovo on June 12, and the crimes against Serbs continue, patterns in the violence are beginning to emerge: * Here in the provincial capital, "a disturbing pattern has arisen in the method of intimidation used against Serbs still in the city," the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has found. "First, a warning letter is received ordering them to leave their homes, then the threat is delivered in person, followed a few days later by physical assault, in some cases even murder." * Dozens of Serbs have been slain execution-style in Pristina, military police have said. Evidence shows that the victims were commonly bound at the wrists and made to kneel on the ground before being shot in the head. Many were blindfolded. * In dozens of Serbian villages throughout Kosovo, Serbs have fled after repeated threats and acts of violence, only to have their villages burned behind them. In at least one case, authorities suspect that a Serbian village was raided at night and that all its residents were slain before it was destroyed. * At least 40 Serbian churches in the province have been vandalized and burned, Serbian Orthodox Church officials say. Many were then bombed to complete the destruction. "It's not that we think, we simply know it's organized activity and systematically performed," Bishop Artemije, head of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Kosovo, said...."

Jerusalem Post 8/15/99 "…It may be that misconception on the part of the KLA that NATO came into Kosovo in support of its rebellion that is fueling the growing tensions between the international guardians and the movement. The KLA is accusing the peacekeepers of betrayal by their efforts to protect the Serbs, and by ignoring the self-styled provisional government it set up. NATO is accusing radical elements in the KLA of responsibility for organizing attacks on Serbs, and even on the peacekeeping troops. They also are ignoring orders to disarm, they are hiding weapons, and allocating themselves official powers. Despite the 35,000 NATO-led troops and a 3,100-strong UN police force, violence between ethnic Albanians and the few remaining Serbs has remained remarkably persistent. A Russian soldier has also been shot and wounded and rebels opened fire on German peacekeepers.This is intolerable and will require swift international coordination to bring home to the KLA that Western troops will not be used to support, or even tolerate, any reverse ethnic cleansing in Kosovo…."

UPI 8/16/99 "…Kosovo's ethnic conflicts are not always clear-cut divides between ethnic Albanians and Belgrade- backed Serbians. There are true outsiders, including a Gypsy group camped in squalid conditions in a former bus junkyard in the Kosovo town of Djakovica. The community of about 550 says it is prepared to leave, but not without fear. They claim that every day, Kosovo Liberation Army soldiers harass them…"

Agence France-Presse 8/16/99 "…Yugoslavia formally asked the United Nations to expel "foreigners who are staying illegally" in the southern province of Kosovo, in a letter to Secretary General Kofi Annan, Tanjug news agency reported Monday. Foreign Minister Zivadin Jovanovic called for the expulsion of "foreigners who are staying illegally in Kosovo, gangs of brutes and looters, drug and arms dealers, and other criminals who entered Yugoslav territory from Albania with the permission of KFOR," the agency said. It quoted a communique issued Monday by the Yugoslav foreign ministry which detailed Jovanovic's letter to the UN secretary general. Belgrade also demanded "the disarmament without delay of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), and other criminal gangs," and asked that "the security of citizens and their property be guaranteed." …."

London Daily Telegraph 8/16/99 Philip Smucker "…THE head of the United Nations mission in Kosovo has warned leaders of the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army of imminent confrontation with them over the forced expulsion of Serbs from the province. Bernard Kouchner told an Athens newspaper, Eleftherotypia: "In the future, I will not allow the homes of 10 or 15 Serbs to be burnt down every night, even if that means confrontation with the KLA. I have told Thaci [the KLA's leader] that my patience has run out." Mr Kouchner said the exodus - if allowed to stand - would be a clear defeat for the international community. He did not, however, outline the UN mission's plan to force the KLA to co-operate….. The UN refugee agency says that at least 170,000 Serbs - out of a pre-war population of up to 200,000 - have fled Kosovo since Nato-led peacekeepers arrived in mid-June. More people left at the weekend, including 110 tractors, lorries and cars containing Serbs from the Gnjilane area. Nato's KFOR mission also reported that an 80-year-old Serb man had been found shot dead in Pozaranje. More than 200 villages and 41 Serb churches have been destroyed since KFOR peacekeepers entered the province, a Belgrade newspaper, Glas Javnosti reported yesterday. It quoted the Serbian Orthodox Bishop Atanasije Rakita as saying that ethnic Albanians in Kosovo were "systematically destroying" Serb villages and places of worship. …."

US Government 8/18/99 "…Text of Presidential Determination on War Crimes Tribunal U.S. Newswire
17 Aug 17:46 "…Presidential Determination No. 99-35 MEMORANDUM FOR THE SECRETARY OF STATE THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE SUBJECT: Determination to Authorize the Furnishing of Commodities and Services for the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal Established with Regard to the Former Yugoslavia Pursuant to the authority vested in me as President of the United States, including section 554 of the Foreign Operations, Export Financing, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 1999, as enacted in Public Law 105-277, I hereby: (a) determine that a drawdown of up to $5 million of commodities and services from the inventory and resources of the Department of Defense will contribute to a just resolution of charges regarding genocide and other violations of international humanitarian law; and (b) direct the drawdown, pursuant to section 552(c) of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, as amended, 22 U.S.C. 2348a (the "Act"), of up to $5 million in commodities and services from the inventory and resources of the Department of Defense for the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal established with regard to the former Yugoslavia by the United Nations Security Council, without regard to the ceiling limitation contained in section 552(c)(2) of the Act. The Secretary of State is authorized and directed to report this determination to the Congress and to arrange for its publication in the Federal Register. WILLIAM J. CLINTON…"

Los Angeles Times 8/14/99 Paul Watson "…By the end of the Nato bombing campaign, more than 800,000 ethnic Albanians had fled into neighboring Albania and Macedonia, and most said the Serbs had ordered them to leave. As many as 11,000 ethnic Albanians died after the bombing began -- more than five times the estimated 2,000 ethnic Albanians and Serbs who were killed in the single year of civil war that preceded Nato's airstrikes. Although the veterans might have been lying to cover up, maybe even lying to themselves to rationalize mass murder, they claimed that they were under orders not to harm civilians as they drove them from their homes. None of the veterans said they saw Serbs kill civilians, but a few spoke of Serbian "volunteers," possibly paramilitary groups, who didn't answer to regular commanders and even threatened soldiers who got in their way……"

Reuters 8/17/99 Kurt Schork "…Armed ethnic Albanian thugs locked an elderly Serb woman in her Pristina kitchen early on Monday evening while they beat, robbed and tried to rape her daughter-in-law in the next room. The victims told reporters that the incident, which occurred before dusk and within metres (feet) of a busy street in the Kosovo capital, had frightened them so much that they both wanted to get out of the war-ravaged southern Serbian province. Such brutal tactics, employed widely against Serb targets of opportunity by ethnic Albanian men in the two months since NATO-led peacekeeping troops replaced departing Serb security forces, has led to an exodus among the province's remaining minority Serb population…."

8/18/99 Electronic Telegraph Philip Smucker "…SERBS blamed American Nato soldiers for failing to protect them yesterday as they buried a man and woman killed by mortar fire from a nearby Albanian village. Tihomir Radic, 24, was strolling alongside Silvana Svilanovic, 23, on Monday evening when at least nine artillery shells were fired from Radivoc. Nato officers said the attack was the third on Banja Klokot in seven days. Several homes in the village of some 1,300 Serbs took direct hits and six villagers were injured. Nato forces are trying to track down suspected Albanian extremists responsible for such attacks but have been hampered by a state of fear that keeps Albanians from naming suspects. Senior United Nations officials fear that a complete exodus of Serbs, whose population has dwindled by 80 per cent to no more than 30,000 civilians, will spell defeat for the international peacekeeping efforts in Kosovo…."

The Hindustan Times (My Title) 8/16/99 Vijay Dutt "…The western countries and Britain are alarmed at the scale of arms sales by certain elements in the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The authorities fear that the sales from Kosovo, which is awash with all sorts of deadly arms and ammunitions, will boost gang wars and other crimes in west European cities. More alarming is the fact that terrorist organisations and Islamic fanatics have enough money to buy these KLA weapons, being sold quite cheaply. In the Midlands, money has been regularly raised in mosques and some militant mullahs had been, during the Kargil conflict, exhorting the young to take to arms and volunteer for jehad in Kashmir. India has to be wary. According to a report in The Independent, Kalashnikovs are being offered for £52 and M2HB Browning semi-automatic pistols are available in London for around £28. These arms can easily be sent to Northern Ireland where street-violence has erupted again. In London, there has also been an increase in gang wars, of the West Indian style. The well organised arms dealers have networks through Middle East and Afghanistan which can be used for supplying arms for flaring up terrorist activities in Kashmir. A source points out that Osama bin Laden, with his huge financial resources, can be the biggest buyer and he is a danger to India as well. …."

Washington Times 8/19/99 Philip Smucker "…Gypsies in Kosovo have retreated into squalid camps, encircled by stone-throwing ethnic Albanians who cry out for summary justice to avenge both real and imagined crimes committed during this year's war. They have little hope of returning to mainstream society or even escaping to a third country. Yet, they say, the Albanian-led Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) is trying to expel them forever from Kosovo. Ahmet Greku, 47, a father of seven, showed off the scars on the back of his head that he said were inflicted during five days of detention in a secret "KLA prison" set up alongside British bases in central Kosovo. "First, five men came to my house and said I was a thief," said Mr. Greku. "I said, 'Come in and have a look,' and they said that everything I had was theirs. Then, they said I had carried away Albanian corpses during the war."

Mr. Greku, tired and traumatized, lives now with his children and wife as one of 1,400 Gypsies in a refugee camp guarded by British troops just a few miles from the capital, Pristina…."

BBC 8/20/99 Imogen Foulkes "…The Swiss Government says it may have to cut back its aid programme to Bosnia-Herzegovina if $1m of Swiss aid to the country does not turn up soon. The move comes following reports that officials from all three ethnic groups in Bosnia-Herzegovina have been fraudulently misusing international aid money. Switzerland is the first country to react to the publication of reports that aid money to Bosnia-Herzegovina is being misused, but it appears the Swiss Government has been concerned for months at the apparent disappearance of Swiss aid to the country…."

AP - via canoe.com 8/20/99 "…Kosovo Liberation Army leaders said they have met NATO's deadline for turning over 60 per cent of their weapons by today and are not responsible for continued violence in Kosovo. Under a disarmament accord the KLA signed in June, the group must turn over its heavy weaponry, most of its arms and uniforms in stages to NATO troops. Disarmament must be complete by Sept. 19. "We've fulfilled all our obligations," KLA military commander Gen. Agim Ceku said Thursday. NATO did not confirm the claim…."

Los Angeles Times 8/19/99 Christopher Layne "… The first shots in Kosovo's next war--pitting the KLA against its erstwhile liberators--already have been fired. The unraveling of the post-conflict settlement in Kosovo was easily foreseeable--except, of course, by the Clinton administration. The Clinton foreign policy team bears a heavy responsibility, because the looming disaster in Kosovo is the cumulative result of the serial miscalculations that have been the hallmark of its Balkan policy the past 18 months. The fundamental problem confronting the U.S., NATO and the United Nations is simple: Their postwar objectives in Kosovo and those of the KLA are wholly antithetical…. as U.S. and NATO military officers on the ground now admit, the brutal expulsion of Kosovo's Serb population is not the result of random acts of revenge, but rather "systematic and organized."…. The president and his advisors never realized their policy was based on a fatal contradiction: It was impossible for the U.S. to align itself with the KLA without furthering the KLA's objectives of an independent, Serb-less Kosovo. ."

AFP 8/20/99 Yahoo "… The Kosovo Liberation Army defended its commitment to disarm, ahead of a key deadline of midnight (2200 GMT) Friday, after KFOR peacekeepers voiced scepticism of the effectiveness of progress so far. The deadline marks the start of the third phase of the KLA's handing over of weapons, the 60th day of a 90-day process mapped out in an undertaking signed June 21 by KLA leader Hashim Thaci and KFOR commander Lieutenant General Mike Jackson. …"

The Guardian (UK) 8/18/99 Chris Bird "…The violence against Kosovo's dwindling Serb population increased on Monday night when nine mortar rounds were fired at a village in the US sector, killing two young Serbs and injuring five. Sylvana Spasic, 24, and Tihomir Radic, 26, who were buried yesterday, died when shrapnel from one of the mortar rounds hit them in Klokot, in the south-east of the province. "The people behind this are Albanians, they harass the population to get them to leave," said Lieutenant Ryan Leigh of the US 1st infantry division, which has a command post in Klokot. "As to who's actually doing it, I couldn't really say." The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, estimates that only a tenth of Kosovo's Serb and Gypsy population now remain in the province, two months after K-For's arrived. The agency has begun to evacuate Serbs from the province despite opposition from Nato, arguing that it is now the only way to avoid reprisals against them…."

Long Island Newsday 8/18/99 Philip Smucker "…Angry Serbs scolded U.S. NATO soldiers for not protecting them yesterday as they buried a young couple killed by mortar fire blamed on militants in a nearby ethnic Albanian village. "Are the Americans here to keep the peace?" shouted Danica Stankovic, 70, who watched several hundred of her fellow villagers wind up a hill toward a graveyard beside a small U.S. military base. "We have nowhere to go and no one to help us. They'll kill us all right in front of NATO and no one is going to shed a tear." Tihomir Radic, 24, was strolling with Silvana Svilanovic, 23, shortly after nightfall Monday when a barrage of at least nine mortar rounds struck. "The male was dead immediately, and we did what we could for 10 minutes to save the woman but it wasn't enough," said U.S. Army Cpl. Mike Sibert…."

Original Sources 8/17/99 Mary Mostert "…Clearly the unspoken concern here is that the International Criminal Court, which is designed to do on a international basis what the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has been doing - targeting military and elected leaders of the former Yugoslavia for war crimes - could end up a indicting and trying Bill Clinton. Moves to indict him, Madeleine Albright and Tony Blair for their bombing of Yugoslavia and for allowing the KLA to implement its long held desire to seize control of Kosovo and evict or kill all non-Albanians, are gathering steam. On 22 February 1993 the Security Council, on the insistence of and with the promised financial support of the Clinton Administration, decided to establish the 'International Tribunal for Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia Since 1991' (short: International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia). Its task is to try people "suspected of war crimes and violations of international humanitarian law committed on the territory of the former Yugoslavia since 1991." Based at the Peace Palace in The Hague, the Netherlands, the tribunal "passes judgment, on behalf of the world community, on crimes which by their nature and scope are a concern to the entire world. The Tribunal will investigate a matter, if necessary in the absence of the accused, in a manner which is both independent and authoritative." Now why, do you suppose, the United States is against a concept on an international basis that it was demanding implementation of a mere six years ago where Yugoslavia and Slobadan Milosevic were concerned? US Senate Foreign Relations Committee spokesperson Marc Thiessen explained. He warned that the Clinton administration wants an exception from investigation or prosecution by the court for personnel involved in official military actions. The United States wants "a clear recognition that states sometimes engage in very legitimate uses of military force to advance international peace and security," he explained…."

Original Sources 8/17/99 Mary Mostert "…'Articles 18.1 and 18.4 of the International Tribunal for Serious Violations of Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia created in 1991. Article 2 of the statute gives the Tribunal the power "to prosecute persons committing or ordering to be committed grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, namely the following acts against persons or property protected under the provisions of the relevant Geneva Convention including the following:(a) willful killing;(c) willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health;(d) extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly." Article 3 .gives the Tribunal "the power to prosecute persons violating the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to:(a) employment of poisonous weapons or other weapons to cause unnecessary suffering;(b) wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity;(c) attack, or bombardment, by whatever means, of undefended towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings;(d) seizure of, destruction or wilful damage done to institutions dedicated to religion, charity and education, the arts and sciences, historic monuments and works of art and science." Article 7 provides for individual criminal responsibility of "A person who planned, instigated, ordered, committed or otherwise aided and abetted in the planning, preparation or execution of a crime referred to in articles 2 to 5 of the present Statute, shall be individually responsible for the crime. "2. The official position of any accused person, whether as Head of State or Government or as a responsible Government official, shall not relieve such person of criminal responsibility or mitigate punishment. …"

San Jose Mecury News 8/16/99 Lori Montgomery "…- To Americans, the order seemed simple: Report to work by July 15 and you can keep your jobs. But to Serbs, terrified victims of a new rash of Kosovo violence, the order might as well have called them to the moon. The American-led committee that runs the Klokat spa and mineral-water plant recently welcomed to work scores of ethnic Albanians who met the deadline. And it officially fired 186 Serbs -- many of whom had begged for a military escort so they could reclaim their jobs. ``We kept giving these Serb workers another chance and another chance to come to work,'' said U.S. Army Lt. Jason Green, one of two Americans on the Klokat committee. ``They just never did show up.'' ….Since late June, when U.S. peacekeeping troops took over the Klokat plant, Brig. Gen. John Craddock, the top U.S. military commander in Kosovo, has fired the Serb general manager and filled top posts with ethnic Albanians. In short order, the workforce shifted dramatically -- from 198 Serbs and 52 ethnic Albanians before the war, to about 140 ethnic Albanians and fewer than 30 Serbs today. The Americans defend the changes as representative of Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians have long made up more than 90 percent of the population. They point out that the Klokat plant is operating with a mixed workforce -- a minor coup at a time when more than a quarter of Kosovo's 200,000 Serbs have fled the province. But bitter Serb employees say the Americans cost them their jobs. …"

Times of London 8/17/99 James Pringle "…BRITISH troops scoured the Kosovo capital yesterday for two killers who battered an old Serb woman to death and left her flat laughing and congratulating one another. The two kicked down the door of Zorka Zizic's flat as two Danish workers for the United Nations refugee agency watched anxiously through the keyhole of their own flat. Mrs Zizic, 75, was one of the dozens of elderly Serbs whose names are on a "vulnerable persons register" and who are visited daily by men of the Royal Irish Regiment in what are called "reassurance patrols"…"

UPI 8/26/99 "...Yugoslav Foreign Minister Zivadin Jovanovic is accusing U.S. KFOR forces of trying to cover up the discovery of a mass grave containing the bodies of Serbs in Kosovo and demanded an urgent meeting of the U.N. Security Council. Jovanovic said in letters to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the Security Council Wednesday that U.S. peacekeepers had tried to conceal the mass grave found at the village of Ugljare as long ago as July 24. He claimed they did so in order to avoid the reaction of international public opinion that ``this crime against humanity'' might provoke as it took place only a day after the massacre of 14 Serb farmers at Staro Gradsko...."

UPI 8/26/99 "...Villagers living around the Kosovo gravesite where the bodies of some 14 people have been found say the dead were ethnic Serb paramilitaries who were killed in self- defense. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) is investigating the burial site near Ugljane, apparently the first such site found in Kosovo. According to ethnic Albanians who live nearby, some of their neighbors killed 14 Serb paramilitaries in April in defense of their homes after seven Albanians were killed April 7...."

Stratfor.Com CIS/Eastern Europe Intelligence Center 8/27/99 "...2233 GMT, 990827 Yugoslavia - Russian KFOR peacekeepers backed down from a standoff August 27 with ethnic Albanians blocking Russian entry into the town of Orahovac. The blockade marks the fifth-consecutive day Russian troops have been denied access to the town, where they were scheduled to relieve Dutch KFOR soldiers August 23. ...

Electronic Telegraph 8/27/99 Robert Shrimsley "...NATO'S strategy of bombing Serbia during the Kosovo conflict prompted rather than prevented ethnic cleansing, Lord Carrington, the former Foreign Secretary, said yesterday. The bombing had "made things very much worse", he said, and the European Union had made some "catastrophically stupid decisions" in its diplomacy in the Balkans. "I think what Nato did by bombing Serbia actually precipitated the exodus of the Kosovo Albanians into Macedonia and Montenegro. I think the bombing did cause ethnic cleansing."..."

Washington Times 8/25/99 Amos Perlmutter "...The Clinton administration's handling of the three crises in Yugoslavia demonstrated a definite pattern. While acting in partnership with Slobodan Milosevic, U.S. officials simultaneously colluded with disparate and fratricidal ethnic forces in the hope of toppling the Yugoslav president. They have not succeeded in toppling Mr. Milosevic or in replacing Serbian rule in Bosnia and Kosovo with democratic forces. The opposite is true. The Milosevic authorities have been replaced with corrupt and authoritarian entities. There is little doubt about who controls Kosovo. The U.S. client, the Albanian KLA, is in command of much of the civilian administration of Kosovo. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and her spokesman, James Rubin, have adopted the Albanian cause. In fact, they colluded with them before the talks in Ramboulliet, France, and after. ..."

Stratfor.Com CIS/Eastern Europe Intelligence Center 8/27/99 "...2236 GMT, 990826 NATO/Yugoslavia - Former NATO Secretary-General Lord Peter Carrington suggested that NATO's bombing of Serbia caused ethnic cleansing. Carrington said the bombing precipitated the mass exodus of Kosovar Albanians into neighboring nations. In an interview with Saga magazine, Carrington said it was foolish to mark Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic as a war criminal and that NATO created more harm than good by getting involved with the civil war. 1350 GMT, 990826 Yugoslavia/Russia - Ethnic Albanians in Orahovac prevented Russian peacekeepers from entering their village for the fourth day in a row August 26. The Albanians have set up a roadblock to keep out Russians, who are perceived as allies of the Serbs. Two sets of meetings have yet to produce a compromise..... 1618 GMT, 990825 Yugoslavia/Albania - More than 100,000 Albanian citizens have illegally entered Kosovo since the pull-out of Serbian troops, according Foreign Ministry spokesman Vladimir Krsljanin. Krsljanin said August 25 that Yugoslavia demands the Albanian citizens be removed and expects the international community to "end the terrorism in Kosovo, disarm the KLA, respect the culture of the population in the forming of transitional institutions and protect Serb historic monuments." ..."

UPI 8/27/99 "...Russia is demanding that the Kosovo Liberation Army be demilitarized at once, saying that Albanians had opened fire on Russian troops evacuating priests from a Serbian monastery in Kosovo. A Russian Foreign Ministry statement said today nobody was hurt in the incident but did not say when and where it took place. ``The incident is just more proof that the process of demilitarization of the KLA and other armed groups of Kosovo Albanians is evolving exceptionally slowly,'' the statement quoted by Belgrade Radio B2-92 said..."

UPI 8/27/99 "...Incidents of violence between Serbs and Albanians in the southeastern end of Kosovo are on the rise again, according to U.S. KFOR perosnnel. As in other areas of Kosovo, Albanians in and around Gnjilane are trying to force the remaining Serbs to leave, said U.S. Army Maj. Steve Russell, who is part of a platoon of 24 soldiers living in and around this small village. Scared Serb families in this village of 240 had packed their bags and were ready to leave, but U.S. soldiers convinced them to stay. Soldiers moved into town from their base in Gnjilane to provide a greater measure of security to the Serbs. ``It's to keep people from dying,'' Russell said. ..."

Reuters 8/26/99 "...A leading Serbian opposition politician Zoran Djindjic said on Thursday that a Serbian proposal for carving up Kosovo into ethnic cantons was the only way to provide security for the Serb minority there. Djindjic, on a visit to Bulgaria, also told reporters that his opposition Democratic Party would not take part in elections under Yugoslav President Slovodan Milosevic but would rather stage mass protests to oust him from power by year's end. ..."

UPI 8/27/99 "...An estimated 5,000-7,000 people marched peacefully through Pristina to draw attention to Kosovar Albanian political prisoners being held in Serbia. Family members held pictures of their loved ones and signs saying in English, ``Where are our sons and daughters?'' and, ``UN Help Us.'' Bernard Kouchner, the U.N. special representative to Kosovo, and Hashim Thaci, prime minister of the self-named provisional government, led the crowd, which wound in a solemn procession through several blocks from a downtown theater to the United Nations headquarters and on to Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe offices. ..."

AFP 8/27/99 "... Moscow on Friday said its peacekeepers in Kosovo would hit back in future after they came under fire from Kosovar Albanians. Ethnic Albanians fired on the Russians late Wednesday near the town of Gnjilane as the soldiers were escorting Serb priests to a hospital, a foreign ministry statement said. No one was hurt in the attack. "The Russian military contingent will react in an adequate manner to armed provocations," said the ministry....."

AFP 8/27/99 "...Belgrade on Friday summonsed US President Bill Clinton and other NATO leaders to answer to war crimes following the recent bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, the state news agency Tanjug reported. District prosecutors of a dozen towns in Serbia have launched an investigation of 14 NATO leaders, accused of "having commanded or executed" NATO air strikes against the "civilian population" of Yugoslavia. Around 2,000 civilians were killed and 6,000 were injured during the 11-week long campaign, according to Belgrade..."

AFP 8/25/99 ".... A UN war crimes tribunal team was investigating Wednesday a grave in eastern Kosovo containing 11 corpses, some of which were identified as Serbian, a spokesman for the Kosovo peacekeeping force said. The US-led Multinational Brigade of the Kosovo peacekeeping force (KFOR) discovered the grave Tuesday in Ugljare, five kilometers (three miles) south of Gnilane, KFOR spokesman Roland Lavoie said. ..."

Washington Weekly 8/22/99 Jerry Zeifman "...On July 12, 1999 the International Ethical Alliance (IEA) filed a formal indictment with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia -- charging President Clinton and other NATO leaders with war crimes. To date, the Tribunal has failed to consider it. IEA now advocates a further agenda for bringing a just peace to Yugoslavia. Opposed to NATO's counter-productive efforts to unify Kosovo by military force, IEA supports indigenous democratic movements within Yugoslavia. Such a movement is now being led by Patriarch Pavle of the Serbian Orthodox church...."

AP 8/22/99 "...Bringing Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic before a court to answer war crimes charges is a ``priority,'' the new head of the U.N. war crimes tribunal said in an interview printed Saturday. Swiss federal prosecutor Carla del Ponte, who takes over from Canadian Louise Arbour next month, told the daily Neue Zuercher Zeitung that that she would ``work on'' bringing Milosevic and other indicted members of his government to trial...."

South China Morning Post 8/18/99 Editorial "...Having gone to war to protect Kosovo Albanians from Serb persecution, Nato is now trying to protect Serbs there from Albanian persecution, but it is an uphill task. Since the conflict ended, a Serbian population of more than 200,000 is reduced to 50,000 and falling, as murder, assault and intimidation cause more to flee. Many of those left behind are elderly people who took no role in the past fighting, but are nevertheless victimised by Albanians bent on revenge or Albanian criminal gangs bent on pillage. Kosovo, like much of the Balkans, remains a territory of fierce tribal and ethnic loyalties, which all too often can lead to terrible violence. Nato thought it was fighting for a multi-ethnic province. Instead, it seems about to inherit a long-term 100 per cent Albanian protectorate, ethnically cleansed by the victims of ethnic cleansing, who can be as cruel as their former tormentors when given a chance....."

New York Post 8/22/99 Rod Dreher "...NOW that NATO troops have ended ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, there's reason to fear that the United Nations Population Fund will do what the Serbs failed to: pacify the region by reducing the Albanian population. So say Catholic human-rights activists, who worry that UNFPA's activities in Kosovo dovetail ominously with Slobodan Milosevic's longstanding determination to slash the ethnic-Albanian birth rate, which is far higher than that of Serbs. Last summer, Milosevic's minister for family affairs, Rada Trajkovic, denounced the "demographic bomb" ticking in Kosovo. Using language worthy of Nazi eugenicists, she called Albanian women "child-bearing machines." ...."

UPI 8/21/99 "...A police academy has opened in the Kosovo town of Vucitrn to train future members of a multi-ethnic police force. A statement by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe says the academy was inaugurated today by OSCE Secretary-General Jan Kubic. International trainers from the United States and Britain, among others, will impart training to an initial batch of 402 recruits, including 74 women and 151 former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army...."

AFP 8/25/99 "...The Yugoslav authorities estimate that more than 100,000 Albanian citizens have entered Kosovo illegally since government troops withdrew from the Serbian province, a foreign ministry official told AFP Wednesday. "Parallel with the uncontrolled return of (Kosovar) refugees, which Belgrade has never contested, more than 100,000 Albanian citizens, mostly criminals, bandits and members of the Albanian army, have penetrated into Kosovo," Vladimir Krsljanin said...." http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/237/oped/Fatal_US_errors_in_Kosovo_are_fueling_a_new_war+.shtml 8/25/99 Christopher Layne "...In the aftermath of NATO's military intervention in Kosovo, some analysts presciently warned that the peacekeeping and reconstruction mission undertaken by the United States and its allies was fraught with peril. However, as each day brings ominous reports from Kosovo - sniper attacks on peacekeepers, ''organized'' ethnic cleansing of Serbs by ethnic Albanians - it is apparent that the postwar honeymoon between the Kosovo Liberation Army on one side and NATO troops and UN civil authorities on the other has ended much more quickly than we expected. The first shots in Kosovo's next war - pitting the KLA against its erstwhile liberators - have already been fired. The unraveling of the post-conflict settlement in Kosovo was easily foreseeable - except, of course, by the Clinton administration. The Clinton foreign policy team bears a heavy responsibility, because the looming disaster in Kosovo is the cumulative result of the serial miscalculations that have been the hallmark of its Balkan policy for the past 18 months The fundamental problem confronting the United States, NATO, and the United Nations is simple: Their postwar objectives in Kosovo and those of the KLA are wholly antithetical...."

UPI 8/25/99 "...French and German foreign ministers are expressing concern over the situation in Kosovo following a Tuesday's visit to the province, Belgrade media is reporting. Hubert Vedrine and Joschka Fischer saw the KFOR commander, British Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson, and United Nations mission chief Bernard Kouchner and leaders of the Kosovo Albanians and Serbs. At a joint news conference in Pristina, Vedrine said attention should be paid to security problems, especially the security of the Serbs, which he found lacking...."

New York Times 8/26/99 Carlotta Gall "...As the effort to have Serbs and Albanians live together in Kosovo seems to be failing, the United Nations administration has been forced to consider the de facto segregation of Serbian enclaves and even the temporary resettlement of Serbs to protect them. In the nearly three months since NATO stopped bombing Yugoslavia and took over the devastated province of Kosovo, pressure has been mounting from Belgrade and from Serbs within Kosovo to formally partition the province into Serbian and Albanian cantons. But the United States and its NATO allies strongly oppose any such formal partition because it would abandon the stated goals of the bombing campaign. ...The official acknowledged that the current atmosphere was not conducive to "full integration" between Serbs and Albanians -- a situation that has not existed in Kosovo in more than a decade. But Washington would like some of the Serbs who have left Kosovo to return, the official said. Some 180,000 Serbs of a prewar population of 200,000 have left Kosovo during and since the war, and barely 1,000 remain in Pristina, the capital...."

Christian Science Monitor 8/26/99 Scott Peterson "...Half hidden among the rumpled hills of southwest Kosovo, ethnic Albanian villagers are staging an unprecedented protest against the will of NATO and Russian peacekeeping troops that make up the Kosovo Force (KFOR). The Russian soldiers have been ordered by KFOR commanders to relieve Dutch and German troops. But here in Orahovac, where the "ethnic cleansing" campaign by Serbian forces was particularly brutal, suspicious survivors are countermanding the KFOR order. The dilemma for NATO - whether to use force or try to negotiate through the standoff - is stark. And it illustrates how ethnic Albanians in Kosovo have turned the tables. NATO's 78-day bombing campaign liberated the 90 percent ethnic Albanian minority here, who had suffered under Serb repression for some 10 years. It also underscores the ability of the ethnic Albanians to throw wrenches into the best-laid plans of the world's most powerful military alliance. In doing so, it may justify deep reservations NATO commanders and Pentagon officials had about using NATO as a police force...."

UPI 8/27/99 "...A new mass grave with 50 bodies of murdered Serbs has been discovered near Gnjilane, the Yugoslav state- run news agency Tanjug reported. Tanjug said today that an unnamed police officer told a gathering of Serbs in Gnjilane late on Thursday about the grave but did not specify where the bodies were found. ...."

AFP 8/27/99 "...Police here have held two men suspected of smuggling Kosovo Gypsies to Italy, after bodies of at least 40 refugees were earlier recovered off the Montenegrin coast, press reports said Friday. Joko Nikaljevic and Ramadan Balja were held as police looked for six others also suspected of involvement in organised trafficking of illegals from Montenegro to Italy. Coastguards and police units found 40 bodies this week, fished from the Adriatic Sea some three kilometres (two miles) off the Montenegro coast. They appear to have been refugees from Kosovo who sought to enter Italy ..."

Associated Press 8/22/99 "...The Kosovo conflict will cost Yugoslavia almost $64 billion and make it the poorest country in Europe, according to a report being published Monday. The Economist Intelligence Unit said NATO's 11-week bombing campaign inflicted enormous damage on Yugoslavia's economy and infrastructure, and will cause the economy to shrink dramatically in the next few years. Gross domestic product, the total value of goods and services produced by a nation, will drop by 40 percent this year and remain at levels far below those of a decade ago, the report said. Measured by that yardstick, Yugoslavia will sink below nearby Albania and become the poorest country in Europe, it said. ..."

AFP 8/23/99 "...The commander of Kosovo's KFOR peacekeeping force, Lieutenant General Mike Jackson, said Monday the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was disarming as planned, but he refused to say how many weapons have been surrendered. The weapons so far handed over to KFOR-controlled weapons storage sites "have been carefully checked by my own forces" and by the former rebel group, Jackson told a news conference with KLA military chief Agim Ceku at his side...."

Fox News Online 8/22/99 AP "...The Kosovo conflict will cost Yugoslavia almost $64 billion and make it the poorest country in Europe, according to a report being published Monday. The Economist Intelligence Unit said NATO's 11-week bombing campaign inflicted enormous damage on Yugoslavia's economy and infrastructure, and will cause the economy to shrink dramatically in the next few years. Gross domestic product, the total value of goods and services produced by a nation, will drop by 40 percent this year and remain at levels far below those of a decade ago, the report said. Measured by that yardstick, , it said....A total of 10 experts from eight European countries are to focus on damage to Yugoslavia's main waterways, particularly the Danube River, mission spokesman Robert Bisset told The Associated Press. After their first visit in July, the U.N. team identified environmental "hotspots'' - sites where mercury, asbestos and other hazardous substances accidentally leaked from industrial facilities during the bombing...."

TheDailyWire.com via Time 8/23/99 Tony Karon "...NATO may yet pay a heavy price for its failure to rein in militant ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Albanian demonstrators on Monday prevented Russian peacekeeping troops, authorized by the NATO-led peacekeeping mission, from taking control of the town of Orahovac, raising tensions in the province to boiling point. "For weeks now Russian forces have been taking hits from Albanian snipers, while the Russians believe NATO is doing very little to stop the perpetrators," says TIME Moscow correspondent Andrew Meier. "The ethnic Albanians are playing with fire, because there's mounting pressure in Moscow for a forceful reaction." ..... The Russians have been furious both about attacks on their own personnel and over the continuing ethnic cleansing targeted against the province's dwindling Serb population. "If there's a concerted attack on the Russian forces in Kosovo now, they'll likely return fire with interest," says Meier...."

http://www.nando.net/noframes/story/0,2107,84685-133831-932964-0,00.html 8/21/99 Melissa Eddy "...NATO granted a Serb request Sunday to extend a deadline for returning weapons, postponing threatened searches by peacekeepers and arrests of those who fail to comply in Kosovo. NATO troops had threatened before to conduct house-to-house searches in the Serb neighborhood of the town of Orahovac, in southern Kosovo. ..."

Electronic Telegraph (UK) 8/23/99 Julius Strauss "...SERBS in Kosovo have demanded the division of the province into ethnic "cantons" to protect them from the growing number of attacks by Albanians. The move would mark a step towards partition, but the attacks are making the case for it appear ever stronger. Since Yugoslav troops and Serb police were withdrawn from Kosovo in June, the Serb minority has been increasingly victimised by ethnic Albanians and most of Kosovo's 200,000 Serbs have fled the province. ..."

Agence France-Presse 8/24/99 "... The KFOR peacekeeping force in Kosovo said Tuesday 750 of its Russian soldiers will be stationed in this southern town "within a few days" despite protests from local ethnic Albanians who are obstinately blocking the deployment. The steely response from KFOR came on the second day of roadblocks manned by the ethnic Albanians, who allege that Russians fought alongside Serbs during the Kosovo war and that the Russian troops will try to protect local Serb war crimes suspects. The Russian foreign ministry, meanwhile, issued a statement saying the protests violated a Helsinki agreement reached in June on Russia's participation in KFOR and of KFOR's UN mandate. "Such provocations, which were, without a doubt, planned and carefully organized, are an open challenge to the international community and a direct violation of UN Security Council resolution 1244 and of principles for settling the Kosovo conflict agreed by the Group of Eight," the ministry said...."

AFP 8/24/99 "....The prospect of a Serb-free Kosovo was approaching, a spokesman for the UN refugee agency warned on Tuesday. UNHCR spokesman Kris Janowski made the remark while discussing Yugoslav government figures, which put at 195,000 the number of Kosovar Serbs who have fled to Montenegro and Serbia. He said the UNHCR estimated there were probably up to 30,000 Serbs, possibly fewer, left in the Yugoslav province which is now under UN civilian administration and patrolled by the international KFOR peacekeeping force. "We are pretty much approaching the line of an almost Serb-free Kosovo which is an extremely sad phenomenon, and the joy of the huge return is now spoiled by what is happening to the ethnic Serbs," said Janowski. "The scenario we also warned against unfortunately, of one exodus following the other, is happening."...."

AFP 8/24/99 "...Russia accused ethnic Albanians in Kosovo Tuesday of staging a "provocation" after its peacekeepers were prevented from deploying in the southern Kosovo town of Orahovac. Ethnic Albanian protestors lined tractors, trucks and cars along the main road of the town on Sunday and manned roadblocks to prevent the Russian peacekeepers, which they view as pro-Serb, from entering. "Such provocations, which were, without a doubt, planned and carefully organized, are an open challenge to the international community and a direct violation of UN Security Council resolution 1244 and of principles for settling the Kosovo conflict agreed by the Group of Eight," said the Russian foreign ministry in a statement....."

AFP 8/24/99 "...A group of nine experts are carrying out an investigation into whether NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia polluted the Danube river, the UN environmental program (UNEP) said Tuesday. Water and sediment samples from the riverbed are being taken in Belgrade for analysis by the scientists. The experts, who began their work Monday, will also visit sites both up and downstream from an oil refinery in Novi Sad, an industrial complex in Pancevo and an auto factory in Kragujevac....It is the third UN mission of its kind. Haavisto led the first, which evaluated industrial sites for environmental damage from July 18-27, and concluded that there was no large-scale ecological threat to the country. But it did find evidence of "dangerous" pollution at several industrial sites bombed by NATO planes. A second team is working in Pristina, the provincial capital of Kosovo. A fourth mission is due to concentrate on threats to biological diversity starting in September. Finally, a joint mission by UNEP, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the World Health Organisation, and a Swedish radiological institute began August 3 to check for radioactivity from NATO munitions which contained depleted uranium...."

UPI 8/24/99 "...Remaining Serbian families in this Kosovo town of about 25,000 now fight with each other about whether they should stay or leave. Old people want to stay, while young people feel they have no future in this formerly ethnically mixed town. Kosovo Liberation Army members call them constantly, telling them they have to leave, said Mirjana Soric, 30. All Serbs want is freedom to go farther than the end of the street, Soric said. They currently are afraid to leave the sight of a Dutch KFOR tank about 200 yards away. ``We have seen what people are these. They are our neighbors; we didn't touch them during the war,'' Soric said. ``I would like peace here, so I can live.'' ...."

World In Review 8/99 Dr John Coleman "...We have so often said, the American people are the most lied-to, connived, cheated people in the world, even though they have a Constitution and a Bill of Rights, given to them for their protection against such eventualities. Professional liars run the U.S. Government and they no longer care who knows it. In their insolent attitude toward the sovereigns of this nation, they have no fear that their rule will be broached. The unconstitutional onslaught against Serbia proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt the tares sown among the wheat by the Socialists have grown to maturity and are choking this nation. We are governed by professional liars, skilled in the art of making lies sound like truth. They have shown the utmost contempt for the American people, believing that "bread and circuses" will pacify them, as did the bread and circuses of Rome just before it fell. The United States has lost the cultural war being waged against it by the enemies of freedom, the servants of collectivism ias opposed to individualism. These enemies of freedom and servants of collectivism have come out, quite openly, and boasted of their lies which they used to get the acquiessence of the Amerian people to their vicious armed aggression against the sovereign nation of Serbia. They are boasting about how they ran the show, excluding the legislature from their bloody plans. James Rubin, a functionary of the State Department goes around boasting that he carried out "negotiations" in Serbia virtualy as the executive for Mrs. Albright, without once consulting with the members of the House and Senate, whose job it is to set and run foreign policy. And with whom did Rubin "negotiate?" Certainly not with any official of the Serbian government, oh no, nothing like that. Rubin spent his time chasing after "leaders" of the KLA drug mafia, begging them to accept the latest U.S. "compromise." What constitutional authority did Rubin have for his activities which completely bypassed the legislative body of the nation? The answer is that he did not have one shred of authority that might have made his conduct acceptable under the United States Constitution. ...."

WorldNetDaily.com 8/24/99 Col David Hackworth "...Bill Clinton and British leader Tony Blair don't want us to get the word that: Their promises to end the bloodshed and ethnic cleansing and bring peace to Kosovo aren't happening. Bullets and grenades are still flying in Kosovo. Americans and other NATO soldiers are now targets along with the Kosovars. Just as they lied to us about how NATO air power was clobbering the Serbian Army, their spinmeisters are now working overtime to put the best face on a situation that daily becomes nastier.

The facts are that since VK-day -- "Victory in Kosovo" -- more Serb civilians have been slaughtered than ethnic Albanians were before the NATO air campaign began. Since NATO's last bomb fell, scores of Serbians, Gypsies and Jews have been murdered, over 200 Serb villages have been torched and 50 Christian churches have been defiled or destroyed. Grannies are being murdered in their homes. Out of 350,000 Serbs, Gypsies, Jews and others who've lived in Kosovo for centuries, all but 30,000 have fled to nearby countries. They no longer trust NATO to protect them and don't see the promised peace coming anytime soon. Why should they? NATO troops flat haven't been able to stop the violence or the ethnic cleansing...."

AP 8/22/99 "...The bodies of 17 Kosovo Gypsy, or Roma, refugees were found floating in the Adriatic Sea after a ship smuggling people to Italy sank, the Montenegrin newspaper Vijesti reported Monday. The unnamed vessel sank Friday about 30 miles off the Yugoslav coast. A passing ship rescued 69 refugees. On several occasions, Italian border guards have intercepted hundreds of Gypsies trying to flee retaliatory attacks by ethnic Albanians in Kosovo...."

The Guardian (UK) 8/23/99 Chris Bird "...Jelica Cemburovic, 87, is waiting to die. She wants to die in Kosovo so that she can be laid to rest next to her husband in a Serbian Orthodox cemetery in Kosovo's northern town of Podujevo - a banal enough wish. But Mrs Cemburovic is not to be allowed a peaceful old age and a dignified death. The hatred felt by Podujevo's ethnic Albanians, thirsty for revenge against the Serb minority here for the horrific excesses of the Serbian security forces during this year's war in Kosovo, has seen to that. The frail old woman, with inflamed blue eyes and a heart condition, is now a prime target for groups of armed ethnic Albanians who have carried out a spate of murders of the Serb elderly to terrify the handful of Serbs, Montenegrins and gypsies still left in Kosovo into leaving. At the weekend Nato peacekeepers found an elderly couple shot dead in their apartment in the south-western town of Prizren. "We presume they are Serbs," said a spokesman for K-For yesterday Brutality characterises these murders, intended to act as an example to those who refuse to leave. Belgrade's media reported that a 62-year-old Serb woman was found dead in the village of Landovica, near Prizren, last week. An elderly Serb woman was found beaten to death in her bath in Pristina earlier this month.... In a report this month detailing abuses against Serbs and other minorities in Kosovo, the US-based Human Rights Watch recorded how two elderly Serb neighbours had their throats slit in June. One of the victims, Marica Stamenkovic, was found by German peacekeepers to have been almost decapitated. The victims had ignored repeated warnings to leave issued by ethnic Albanians wearing the uniforms of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)....."

BBC 8/24/99 "...Nato troops have warned Serbs in southern Kosovo that they must hand in their weapons or face arrest. Soldiers from the Dutch peace-keeping contingent in Orahovac have threatened to carry out house-to-house searches to find arms. They are reported to have obtained local police lists of Serbs with weapons...."

AFP 8/26/99 "...There are no signs of a massacre at Ugljare, where war crimes investigators unearthed 15 bodies this week, the NATO-led Kosovo peacekeeping force (KFOR) said Thursday in a statement. "So far, it has not been possible to confirm exactly when (the people) died, although it is likely to have been after the arrival of NATO forces," the statement said. "There is no indication of a mass murder." The investigators have only been able to identify four of the corpses as being Serbian, as they bore "no formal identification," the statement added. Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic meanwhile blamed Washington for the deaths of all 15 people he assumed to be Serbs. ...."

AFP 8/26/99 "...The Bosnian Serb government has expressed serious concerns about the security of its citizens following the arrest of its army chief of staff General Momir Talic. "The government of (the Bosnian Serb entity) Republika Srpska is deeply concerned about the security of any of its citizens," said a government statement signed by Prime Minister Milorad Dodik, issued late Wednesday. It added that the question of further participation of the Republika Srpska's (RS) representatives, "at any level", at international gatherings was "justly raised." ...."

AFP 8/25/99 "...Albanian mobsters may have slipped into Canada with the thousands of Kosovar refugees who came to this country in May, according to a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) document released Wednesday. "Should Albanian organized crime members reach Canada, it is possible that they could align themselves with organized crime to pursue their drug-trafficking operations," said the memo dated May 6, 1999 from the Criminal Intelligence Directorate. ..."

The Daily Republican 8/21/99 Tatsudo Akayama "...World newspapers clatter at the Clinton administration's mis-shapen foreign policy gaff in Yugoslavia. For example, a front-page summary of an editorial by Guido Rampoldi in Italy's influential La Repubblica published this on its front page on Friday, "Since the United States became the world's superpower, all its presidents have aimed at handing down a sign to the world. This desire has often taken the form of a foreign policy project, that is, of a doctrine. We had a Truman doctrine, a Nixon doctrine, a Carter doctrine." It went on, "In June, the Clinton policy...that a military intervention (can take place) wherever an oppressive, deadly violent policy meets with three unmentioned conditions, the existence of an American strategic interest, the assurance of being able to win exclusively by employing an overwhelmingly powerful air force, [with] such dramatic television shots that public opinion will be prepared for the risk of a short and yet successful war....merging the 'good' with 'profit'..." "However, the White House alchemist must now demonstrate that merging 'good' and 'profitable' is not like making a philosopher's stone, a theoretical exercise, or, even worse, a trick. What is happening in Kosovo is what President Clinton promised two months ago to stop. Some are persecuting innocent civilians and are trying to kill them...and when even the New York Times calls for clarity about the situation, it is legitimate to suppose that the Clinton administration does not stick to what has been stated.... Clinton cannot afford to lose the war he has won.... The Americans thought of defeating Milosevic at the table, and, by underestimating his viciousness, entangled themselves in a conflict in which NATO's survival was at stake." ...."

BBC News 8/21/99 "... The UK's main opposition, the Conservative Party, says violence in Kosovo is "spiralling out of control" with 130 murders in the area patrolled by British troops. Shadow Defence Secretary Iain Duncan-Smith says the situation has been exacerbated by a shortfall in Nato's peacekeeping forces and has called on the government to make an urgent statement. Mr Duncan-Smith says there is a danger British troops supporting K-For could get bogged down in Kosovo...."

Boston Globe 8/25/99 Christopher Layne "...The first shots in Kosovo's next war - pitting the KLA against its erstwhile liberators - have already been fired. The unraveling of the post-conflict settlement in Kosovo was easily foreseeable - except, of course, by the Clinton administration. The Clinton foreign policy team bears a heavy responsibility, because the looming disaster in Kosovo is the cumulative result of the serial miscalculations that have been the hallmark of its Balkan policy for the past 18 months. The fundamental problem confronting the United States, NATO, and the United Nations is simple: Their postwar objectives in Kosovo and those of the KLA are wholly antithetical...."

AFP/ Joe Lockstep 8/26/99 "...The White House reiterated its commitment to a multi-ethnic Kosovo where Serbs could feel safe Thursday. "The mission of KFOR is to help foster an environment that is autonomous and democratic for Kosovar Albanians, but also protects the rights of the Serb minority," said White House spokesman Joe Lockhart. "These are people who are working very hard in difficult circumstances and will continue to stay in there ... until they're satisfied that both of those things can be done," he continued. President Clinton was confident the United Nations and KFOR peacekeepers could do the job, Lockhart continued...."

The DailyWire.com via Time Daily 8/26/99 "....Washington announced Wednesday that it would do its utmost to stop the creation of separate Serb enclaves in the territory, insisting that the measure would undermine the stated objective of a multiethnic Kosovo for which NATO went to war. But partition may be the only means left of achieving that end. "Neither the KFOR peacekeepers and the U.N. nor the Kosovar Albanian leadership have been able to provide basic security for Serbs and other non-Albanians in Kosovo," says TIME Central Europe bureau reporter Dejan Anastasijevic. "Because of that failure, creating secure enclaves for Serbs and others may be the only way of keeping Kosovo multiethnic. Without such partition, Albanian radicals will drive out the remaining Serbs and leave Kosovo 100 percent Albanian." ..."

Reuters 8/26/99 Kurt Schork "… Orahovac has been much in the news this week since its majority ethnic Albanian population blockaded the roads leading into this central Kosovo town to prevent Russian peacekeepers being deployed here. But if you prefer human drama to the major power politics driving Russia's deployment, there is another story to be found on a hill rising steeply from Orahovac's centre. About 3,000 Serbs and Gypsies are under a peculiar, Balkan-style siege there, surrounded by 30,000 ethnic Albanians and a cordon of NATO-led ``KFOR'' peacekeepers. Many of those trapped are rural people who fled outlying villages when the NATO air war ended in June. They sought safety in Orahovac as a last resort. …"

AFP 8/28/99 "…KFOR peacekeepers in Kosovo have found the bodies of two women apparently murdered earlier this week, KFOR said Saturday. Soldiers in the southern city of Prizren on Friday found the corpse of one woman, aged in her 60s, who had been probably been killed on Wednesday, the NATO-led force said in a statement. The body of the other woman, aged between 35 and 40, was also found Friday, near the central town of Belo Polje…."

Electronic Telegraph (UK) 8/29/99 Julius Strauss "…UNITED NATIONS officials have drafted emergency plans to establish safe havens in Kosovo to protect the remaining Serb population from attack by ethnic Albanian hardliners, The Telegraph has learnt. The UN proposal to resurrect the controversial safe-haven policy that fell apart in Bosnia signifies Nato's failure to create a Kosovo in which all races can live safely. Tony Blair and President Clinton have repeatedly stated that this was the aim of the alliance's bombing campaign. …"

AFP 8/30/99 "…The Security Council on Monday condemned violence against ethnic minorities in Kosovo and called on member states to provide the UN mission in the province with the means to do its job. A statement issued by its president, Martin Andjaba of Namibia, said the Council had taken note of recent improvements in security, but "condemned violence against the civilian population, in particular against ethnic minorities and KFOR personnel." …."

Reuters 8/30/99 "…U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke said on Monday the international community had yet to decide what, if any, organisation would be created to absorb Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guerrillas after their disbandment….Providing recognition and gainful employment to thousands of young guerrilla soldiers is shaping up as a major test of the Kosovo peace process…."

Orlando Sentinel 8/29/99 James Slogar "…The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, fresh from the first military offensive in its history, is preparing to welcome a new secretary-general. The organization has been repositioning itself for a changing role in the 21st century, with the United States leading the effort. But does that make sense? No. Now is the time for the United States to withdraw from an organization that no longer serves America's national interests. NATO's role as an aggressor in Yugoslavia was not in keeping with the original, defensive purpose for the alliance. Indeed, the purpose of the alliance -- defending against an invasion by the Soviet Union -- no longer exists. The total costs of the war against Yugoslavia will haunt the United States. It failed to dislodge Slobodan Milosevic. It earned criticism for violations of international law byNATO. And it strongly alienated two important countries, Russia and China. And, despite all that, the fate of Kosovo remains unresolved. Worse for Americans, President Clinton got away with justifying intervention in another nation's internal affairs for "humanitarian" reasons. Does this now mean that the United States will police the world, declaring war on any nation it chooses for humanitarian reasons? NATO was intended to be a defensive alliance against a common enemy, not an excuse to bully small countries or evade potential vetoes in the United Nations Security Council….."

Stratfor 8/31/99 "…"1255 GMT, 990831 Yugoslavia - U.S. Ambassador to the UN Richard Holbrooke warned ethnic Albanian leaders that congressional support would evaporate if they did not disarm their guerrilla army. Holbrooke, who called the ethnic tensions in Yugoslavia "pure racism," will travel to Albania August 31 to continue stabilization talks for the southern Balkans...."

UPI 8/31/99 "…The strongest opposition group in Yugoslavia, the Serbian Renewal Movement, has praised the newly appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Richard Holbrooke, for saying Albanians who kill Serbs and burn their houses are terrorists. Both the Serb government and the opposition have been sharply critical of the international military and civilian authorities who they say are tolerant toward ethnic Albanian terrorists and separatists and especially toward the Kosovo Liberation Army...."

Stratfor 9/1/99 "…The ranking democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Joseph Biden has insisted the KLA will lose all U.S. financial support if it fails to meet the September 19 deadline established for the KLA s full disarmament. This position threatens the ability of KLA leader Hacim Thaci to appease both the U.S. and the fractious military bands he represents. If Thaci has no more bargains to make between the U.S. and KLA, then his control over KLA forces will slip, as will U.S. control over the KLA. …But Biden s demand may be more than Thaci can deliver and the U.S. will likely see now just how difficult it is to deal with the KLA. KLA commander Agim Ceku explained to U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke on August 30 that the KLA would honor the deadline for demilitarization. Ceku went on to say the KLA would become a police organization, an administrative organization and an Army of Kosovo. If this happens, U.S.-KLA relations will likely collapse…"

UPI 8/29/99 "…Saying he admired what KFOR troops had done so far in Kosovo, Richard Holbrooke, newly appointed U. S. ambassador to the United Nations, also says he realizes there is much work left to be done. ``Sometimes forging a peace is more difficult than winning a war,'' Holbrooke said this morning in Kosovo, who is known for his role as troubleshooter in the Balkans over the last 10 years. Holbrooke is in Kosovo today and Monday as part of a six-day trip through the region that will include stops in Albania and Bosnia as well….."

AFP 8/29/99 "…Two passengers of a private car died and three others were injured when they collided with a vehicle of the French KFOR contingent in Kosovo, a spokesman for the Kosovo Force announced Sunday. Two people died on the spot, while the injured, who were said to be in criticial condition, were taken to a hospital in Pristina. The passengers of the KFOR vehicle were not hurt in the accident which happened on the road between Pristina and Vucitrn on Saturday…."

AFP 8/30/99 "…Newly-appointed US ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke and the UN administrator in Kosovo Bernard Kouchner took part in a UN police patrol in Pristina Monday morning. Accompanied by UN police chief Sven Frederikson, they passed through a sector of the Kosovo provincial capital designated "high-risk", where the Serb population is under threat...."

AFP 8/30/99 "…Macedonia has arrested a Norwegian officer in the Kosovo peacekeeping force (KFOR) who was involved in a car crash that killed a Macedonian government minister and two members of his family, KFOR said Monday. The Norwegian was driving a KFOR vehicle when it collided head-on with another car carrying minister without portfolio Radovan Stojkovski and his family. Stojkovski, his wife and their daughter died in the crash, and the minister's son was injured. ..."

UPI AFP 8/30/99 "…An international training course for Serb and ethnic Albanian members of the new police force for Kosovo has been postponed until September 7, a United Nations spokeswoman said Monday. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe decided to postpone the course, due to start Monday, in give more time to select recruits…."

Chicago Tribune 8/25/99 Tom Hundley "…As you would expect from people who have lived for a long time under authoritarian rule, Serbs have a healthy respect for authority. But unlike the citizens of, say, Iraq or North Korea, the Serbs of Yugoslavia do not quake in the shadow of their leader. Indeed, Serbs these days display a conspicuous lack of respect for President Slobodan Milosevic. That was obvious during last week's big soccer match in Belgrade between Yugoslavia and Croatia. When a transformer blew early in the second half, plunging Red Star Stadium into darkness, the chant went up almost immediately: "Slobo, you (very nasty expletive), you sold out Kosovo." …."

AFP 8/30/99 "…The US ambassador to the United Nations, Richard Holbrooke, on Monday said that discussions had begun on a Kosovo defense force that the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) says should be built around its fighters. At a joint press briefing in Pristina with US Senator Joseph Biden, Holbrooke said "discussions are going on" concerning a provision in the undertaking on demilitarization that the KLA presented to the Kosovo peacekeeping force (KFOR) in June…."

AFP 8/30/99 "…About 120 Kosovo Serb refugees have been expelled from a school near Kraljevo and forced to camp in a park in the city to await instructions from authorities. The refugees, originally from the Pec region west of Kosovo, were camped out Monday after spending the night in the park. They said some had sheltered in their cars, while others had taken refuge under makeshift tents constructed with tractors and sheets of plastic…."

Jewish Task Force 9/1/99 "…Any fool who thinks that the North Atlantic Terror Organization (NATO) went to Kosovo to create a "multi-ethnic democracy" should read the latest news coming out of "Kosova." Every bloodstained page from the new Albanian Muslim protectorate proves that the New World Order traitors guiding U.S. foreign policy are laughing at the well-meaning dupes -- the American public -- who swallowed their lies hook, line and sinker…."

UPI 8/30/99 "...The FBI says its 62-member forensics team has returned to Kosovo at the request of international investigators pursuing allegations of Serb atrocities against ethnic Albanians. In a statement, FBI Director Louis Freeh said, ``The contingent is scheduled to begin work in Kosovo on more than a dozen sites (in the British-Canadian controlled sector), including multiple common graves and possible crime scenes.'' United Press International first reported the new FBI deployment last week…."

New York Times 8/30/99 Steven Erlanger "…The new American ambassador to the United Nations, Richard Holbrooke, met Kosovo's ethnic Albanian leaders Sunday and urged them to help build the free, law-abiding and democratic society they say they want and that the NATO alliance went to war to provide…"

AFP 8/29/99 "…Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov voiced serious concern Sunday to his US colleague Madeleine Albright about the situation in Kosovo where ethnic Albanians are preventing deployment of Russian troops. Speaking by telephone, he also indicated Moscow's reservations over the continued exodus of Serbians and other minorities from the province, as well as "the slowness of the process of disarmament of groups of bandits and provocations against the Russian contingent." …"

Stratfor 9/1/99 "…1657 GMT, 990901 Russia/United States - The Russian Foreign Ministry accused the U.S. September 1 of attempting to cover up the killings of 15 Serbs in the village of Ugljare last month. A ministry statement said, "We are talking about an odious incident - the concealment during an entire month by the U.S. military contingent of a crime ... We consider that the UN Security Council must examine in detail this cover-up." The allegations follow KFOR's claims that no massacre took place and that only four Serb bodies were discovered…..1255 GMT, 990831 Yugoslavia - U.S. Ambassador to the UN Richard Holbrooke warned ethnic Albanian leaders that congressional support would evaporate if they did not disarm their guerrilla army. Holbrooke, who called the ethnic tensions in Yugoslavia "pure racism," will travel to Albania August 31 to continue stabilization talks for the southern Balkans…."

Reuters 9/1/99 "…Kosovo Albanian leader Hashim Thaqi Wednesday visited ethnic Albanian protesters staging a blockade to keep Russian peacekeepers out of their town and told them he supported their action. Thaqi, leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas and head of a self-proclaimed provisional government, flew in a helicopter supplied by the KFOR peacekeeping force to meet protesters who have set up roadblocks all around Orahovac. "We support them and we believe their demand for Russian troops not to be present here in Orahovac will be met," he told reporters…."We were averaging 30 ... murders a week when we started to deploy, but slowly and gradually this number has gone down to 12 murders for the week ending on Aug. 21 and to seven murders last week," spokesman Maj. Roland Lavoie said…."

AFP 9/1/99 "…Kosovo's UN-chaired Transitional Council met for the fourth time Wednesday, but without its Serb representatives, a UN statement said. Contradicting an earlier statement by the UN Mission in Kosovo in Pristina, the UNMIK communique issued late Wednesday said that Serb Orthodox Bishop Artemije and Momcilo Trajkovic of the Serb Resistance Movement were absent when the interim body met.,,,:

International Herald Tribune 9/2/99 Jim Hoagland "…Three months after NATO's air war broke the Serbs' murderous hold on Kosovo it has become clear that Americans are being drawn toward a global role which they tell pollsters and politicians they shun: that of the world's policeman. The bitter disappointments of the Korean War discredited ''police action'' as an acceptable label for international intervention. No American president would acknowledge embarking on such an undertaking today. But today's world of fragmented national purposes and massive power imbalances encourages police actions to restore order in the neighborhood….. NATO governments continue to recognize Slobodan Milosevic's regime as the legal sovereign authority over Kosovo even as they make sure that he cannot exercise that sovereignty. The United States adopted the same contradictory positions on Saddam Hussein and Kurdistan at the end of the Gulf War and still observes them. This is a failure of diplomacy as well as imagination…."

UPI 9/1/99 Lulzim Coata "…Italian Gen. Pietro Frisone took over command of NATO forces in Albania. Frisone will lead 2,400 NATO troops from Italy, Greece and Turkey. Some 1,400 of them will be Italians. Frisone's troops will continue security and reconstruction work already under way at Tirana international airport, Durres port in the Adriatic and the road from Durres to Kosovo via Kukes…."

Reuters 9/1/99 Andrew Gray "…Hundreds of Kosovo Serbs blocked a main road and overturned a truck and several cars in the town of Gracanica Wednesday to protest against the alleged kidnapping of a local resident. A much larger roadblock protest by ethnic Albanians determined to keep Russian peacekeepers out of the town of Orahovac continued, meanwhile, with guerrilla leader Hashim Thaqi visiting protesters and voicing his support. Scuffles between Albanians wanting to cross into a Serb- dominated part of the city of Mitrovica and French peacekeepers also underscored that tensions remain high in the aftermath of 16 months of armed conflict between Serbs and Albanians….."

UPI 9/1/99 "…Some 50 percent of the Kosovo's 1000 schools have reopened, but many buildings are still severely damaged from NATO's bombing campaign, the United Nations said. U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard told reporters today that the reopening is not the official start-up of the school year…."

AFP 9/1/99 "…Corruption is widespread throughout the countries in the Balkans, including Bosnia, and is an issue that should be dealt with as a priority, the US ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke said here Wednesday. "We cannot have elements pretending to be security forces who are in fact mafioso or criminal gangs," Holbrooke told reporters, adding that the problem existed not only in Bosnia but also in Kosovo and Albania. "Corruption has always been a problem in this part of the world, because of history and tradition, because of political system, war, sanctions," Holbrooke said after meeting members of Bosnia's joint presidency….."

UPI 9/1/99 "… A mass grave containing the bodies of 42 Serb civilians has been found at the village of Zlas, near the Kosovo capital Pristina, independent Belgrade media reports. The Serbs had been tortured before being killed, the reports said today, quoting unofficial sources in Kosovo. There has been no confirmation of the mass grave from Kosovo peacekeeping force or the United Nations civilian mission…."

9/1/99 UPI "…The supreme NATO commander in Europe, Gen. Wesley Clark, told Montenegro Television Tuesday that KFOR is taking stringent measures to protect Serbs in Kosovo, Belgrade Radio B2-92 reported. ``We know where Serbs are living, we call on them frequently, we patrol those areas and are carefully listening to what they have to say about their concerns and fears,'' Clark said in an interview to the TV station broadcasting from Podgorica. ``We contact Albanians and talk to their leaders. We have told them they must control their men,'' he said…."

9/1/99 UPI "…Serbian educators kicked off a new school year by playing the national anthem and reading denouncement of NATO to schoolchildren. The message that the pupils heard today said that the NATO aggression ``debunked the smoldering conflict between the new and existing world order, West and East, the law of might and the might of law, hypocrisy and sincerity.'' Serbian Education Minister Jovo Todorovic said, ``All pupils should be reminded who bombed us, who killed pupils and destroyed schools.''…."

UPI 9/1/99 "…The Kosovo Liberation Army is asking for a 10-day extension to the group's demilitarization deadline, the Albanian language newspaper Koha Ditore reports. On Sept. 19, it will have been three months since the KLA signed an agreement with KFOR peacekeeping troops in Kosovo to hand over uniforms and weapons. KFOR peacekeeping troops estimates most of the 15,000 KLA soldiers, fighting for independence from Serbia, have returned to civilian life…."

AFP 9/1/99 "…Russia's foreign ministry charged Wednesday that US peacekeepers in Kosovo had sought to cover-up a massacre last month of 15 Serbs in the southeast Kosovo village of Ugljare. "We are talking about an odious incident - the concealment during an entire month by the US military contingent of a crime committed in the village of Ugljare... in which 15 Kosovo citizens of Serb nationality were killed," the foreign ministry said in a statement. "We consider that the UN Security Council must examine in detail this cover-up of a crime in Ugljare," it added…."

Associated Press 9/2/99 Dusan Stojanovic "…- Aside from its bombed-out buildings, Belgrade seems like an ordinary European capital - traffic jams, streets packed with pedestrians, cafes full of customers. Scratch the surface, however, and very little is normal. Street vendors sell gasoline in plastic Coke bottles. Workers receive no monthly salaries, retirees get no pensions. Win the lottery and there is no prize. Even at hospitals, there are no medicines….. Now salaries and pensions, averaging no more than $50 a month, come months late - if at all - because the economy is at a virtual standstill. More than half the workforce, or nearly two million people, is unemployed. Social security and child welfare payments are a year late. Living standards have dropped to levels akin to the communist days of the early 1960s…."

European Stars And Stripes 9/2/99 AP "…A mass grave believed to contain bodies of ethnic Serbs was discovered July 24 near the village of Ugljare, in the US-controlled sector of Kosovo. The NATO-led peace force announced the discovery of the grave only last week. The Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement Wednesday accusing U.S. authorities of trying to conceal the apparent massacre. "We are dealing here with an odious case, a cover-up for a month by American military contingent within the [KFOR] of a crime committed in the village of Ugljare, in the U.S.-controlled sector, where a month ago 15 ethnic Serb residents of Kosovo were massacred," the ministry said…."

Reuters 9/2/99 "…Yugoslavia has complained to the United Nations that the U.N. civil administration in Kosovo illegally seized Yugoslav government property and demanded its return. ``Seizing automobiles, funds and buildings, UNMIK (the U.N. Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo) is in breach of its function and in violation of general and international law,'' Yugoslav U.N. envoy Vladislav Jovanovic said in a letter to the president of the Security Council circulated on Thursday. …"

United Press International 9/8/99 "...The Yugoslav general who headed the Pristina Corps of President Slobodan Milosevic's Serb-led forces is threatening (Wednesday) to repossess the southern Serbian province by force if the United Nations does not stick to its commitments....."

UPI 9/7/99 Pamela Hess "…A draft report says NATO was ``lucky'' the air campaign against Yugoslavia ended as well as it did, criticizes a lack of preparation, says the lack of a ground option likely prolonged the bombing, and says well-planned information warfare could have shortened the 78-day conflict by half. Those conclusions are drawn in a draft after-action briefing being prepared for U.S. Navy leaders by a team reporting to Adm. James Ellis, who was the direct commander of all U.S. combatants during NATO's Kosovo campaign. The briefing says the NATO campaign was complicated by political constraints, organizational short-sightedness, equipment shortages, and a well-trained enemy with the discipline to wait NATO out…."

AP 9/7/99 "…Two weeks before the Kosovo Liberation Army is to demilitarize, international officials and leaders of the former rebel army have agreed on the broad outlines of an armed force to replace it. But the plan could derail at the United Nations, where the Russians and others object to giving such a prominent role to the former guerrillas, in part because of fears for the safety of non-Albanian minorities. And there are concerns that KLA commanders are looking to use a small, approved security force as the basis for an army for the independent state they seek. Details of the future ethnic Albanian force are still under negotiation, but the major elements have been agreed upon by the NATO commander in Kosovo, Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson, and the KLA military chief, Agim Ceku, said officials in the NATO-led Kosovo peacekeeping mission, speaking on condition of anonymity. The force would be called the ``Kosovo Corps'' and would include a helicopter unit as well as an honor guard, security force and a small rapid reaction unit. The officials said the corps would number 3,000 and would be allowed to carry weapons….."

AFP 9/6/99 "…Russian peacekeeping forces in Kosovo killed three Serbs Monday morning in Korminjane in eastern Kosovo during clashes between Serbs and ethnic Albanians in which one Kosovar died, KFOR officials said. …"

AFP 9/1/99 "…At least ten bodies have been exhumed from a mass grave site by the Moslem-led State Commission for missing persons, the Sarajevo daily Vecernje Novine said Wednesday. The daily said that although the full identity of victims would only be known after an autopsy, they appeared by the clothes they were wearing to be civilians. The paper quoted a judge who oversaw the exhumation as saying that the work would continue over the next few days. ..."

AFP 9/6/99 "…A proposal for turning the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) into a security force may be submitted to the UN Security Council Thursday by UN administrator Bernard Kouchner, diplomatic sources said here Monday. "The goal is to get Russian support for the text. That will only be obtained if the force has a civilian character," the NATO diplomat said. "The negotiations are not completely finished. But there is a risk that the document may meet opposition from China," another diplomat said...."

Reuters 9/1/99 "…A Kosovo Serb leader slammed the province's U.N. administrator Bernard Kouchner in an interview on Wednesday, saying he was aiding the ethnic cleansing of Serbs. ``Bernard Kouchner has failed in Kosovo,'' Momcilio Trajkovic, head of the Serbian Resistance Movement in Kosovo, told the French daily Humanite. ``In not actively protecting Serbs, he's doing nothing but participating in the ethnic purification of Kosovo.'' Trakjovic's comments come amid mounting ethnic tension in the province. Kosovo Albanian leader Hashim Thaqi on Wednesday backed ethnic Albanians staging a blockade to keep Russian peacekeepers out of the town of Orahovac. Serb protesters blocked a main road through the Kosovo town of Gracanica to protest against the alleged kidnapping of a local resident. Only 20,000 to 30,000 Serbs and other minorities are thought to remain in Kosovo, which has an Albanian majority, compared to about 200,000 in March. Most left during the three-month NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia or in the first 10 days of the KFOR peacekeeping force's arrival in Kosovo….."

The London Telegraph 9/5/99 Julius Strauss "…THE Albanian mafia, among Europe's most feared, is consolidating its grip on Kosovo, imposing taxes on lorries, taking over flats and houses, running drugs and targeting the burgeoning and well-financed aid community. Taking full advantage of Kosovo's open border with Albania, the gangsters have swiftly filled the power vacuum left by Serb police and militia, setting up operations together with local criminals. Albania has long been an incubation house for organised crime. The north is controlled by rival heavily-armed gangs who operate out of village bases…."

UPI 9/5/99 "…Ethnic Albanians continue to attack Serbian villages in Kosovo with small artillery, Serbian radio and television reports say. Ethnic Albanians reportedly fired seven mortar grenades today in Dobratin, near Lipljan, wounding a woman. The villagers immediately blocked the roads leading in and out of Lipljan. Reports say a rapid deployment patrol from the international KFOR peacekeeping force was sent to investigate the incident. Radio B2-92 reports a KFOR official said the patrol found the spot from where the grenades were fired, but the attackers had already escaped….."

UPI 9/5/99 "…The chief of the United Nations mission in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, has condemned the bomb attack on Serbs in Pristina calling it a ``racist, fascist, act of cowardice.'' An elderly man was killed and five other people were wounded when a makeshift bomb exploded in an apartment building in Pristina on Friday night. ``We will not accept the return of blind terrorism against innocent people,'' Kouchner was quoted as telling a press conference in Pristina on Saturday, Belgrade Radio B2-92 reported today…."

UPI 9/4/99 "…An elderly man was killed and five other people were wounded when a makeshift bomb exploded in an apartment building in Pristina on Friday night. In a statement today, Kosovo's KFOR peacekeepers said the 4 1/2-pound (2-kg) explosive device was placed outside an apartment owned by a Serbian family. The wounded have been hospitalized, the statement said. KFOR said another explosive device went off later in a different building some 700 yards (meters) away, but its exact location could not be determined……Elsewhere, three people were killed today in the village of Misutiste, not far from Prizren, according to the information service of the Serbian Orthodox Church. The victims were a man, a woman and the woman's daughter…."

UPI 9/2/99 "…Violent crime is increasingly striking the small Gypsy minority in Kosovo, as general chaos among Serbs and ethnic Albanians continues mostly unfettered. KFOR spokesman Maj. Roland Lavoie said today four members of a Gypsy family were murdered Wednesday in the village of Gornji Dragoljevci, south of Istok. Radio Pancevo reported that KFOR military police were called and confirmed that a man, his wife and daughter, and an elderly woman were shot and killed. …."

AFP 9/2/99 "…NATO should clear the River Danube of remains of bridges it bombed during the Kosovo war, which are seriously disrupting freight traffic on this important European artery, US Senator Joe Biden said here Thursday. "I think, assuming that (Yugoslav President) Mr Milosevic would not stop us, we should be clearing the Danube," the Democrat senator said during a visit to the Romanian capital. "I think we should do it quickly," he told journalists. "…"

Stratfor 9/3/99 "…As he begins a seven-day tour of Europe, Hashim Thaci s leadership of the KLA appears to be tested both by his own people and NATO. In order to retain his leadership, he is attempting to straddle both sides. However, he must define his understanding of "demilitarization" this week if he wants to have allies rather than reluctant partners. Thaci s credibility is at stake at home and abroad, and his strategy of appeasing both constituencies is failing. Yet, his comments at Orahovac September 2 show little change. His address to the crowd of protestors at Orahovac, a critical mass of civilian Albanian solidarity, was uninspired. Thaci is neither in a position to rouse his comrades in arms, nor to block KFOR-NATO goals. He could have taken the opportunity to congratulate town officials and the protestors for their resolve. Though this might have jeopardized his negotiating strength over the next week, it would have at least gained him a warm welcome by KLA leaders upon return. Instead, he vacillated, saying, "In the town of Orahovac you won t have Russian soldiers, but we can t guarantee that for the whole municipality and the whole thing is not definite yet. " …."

The Guardian (UK) 9/3/99 Chris Bird "…Kosovo Liberation Army fighters are to be allowed to form a lightly armed "national guard", despite the public insistence by the Nato-led peacekeepers and United Nations officials who are overseeing the province that the KLA will demilitarise by the agreed deadline of September 19. Western officials involved in negotiating the terms of the force with KLA leaders have told the Guardian it will be 2,500-3,000 strong, that members will wear uniforms and be allowed to carry sidearms, and that some members will be trained to fly helicopters. The officials say that these helicopters will be for civilian purposes…."

The Guardian 9/8/99 Vic Williams "…The bombing of Yugoslavia has stopped but the resulting poisoning and long term killings go on. Dr Janet Easton, biologist, researcher for International Systems Institute, who had worked in Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, summarised information from 64 articles. She warned of ecological catastrophe threatening the Balkans from the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. The final destruction of Pancevo Petrochemical Complex sent toxic black clouds across the Balkans. Over 2,000 tonnes of toxic material, including hydrogen Chloride and vinyl chloride monomer and 100 tonnes of mercury spilled into the Danube, the drinking water of 10 million people. The bombing of an oil refinery in Novisad and petroleum storage sites in Nis, Sombor and other locations resulted in acid rains in Romania in April and May and in Bulgaria in May. Rain washed down vinyl chloride monomer, poisoning the soil, grain and fruit growing in it…."

AFP 9/8/99 "… A top US official said Wednesday he would take an anti-corruption message to officials when he travels to the Balkans next week. "I will be framing my policy discussions around the issues of corruption," said David Aaron, Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade. "We need to develop a program to fight corruption both for the health of democracy and the creation of an attractive investment climate," he told reporters. Aaron, who will travel to Macedonia, Kosovo and Croatia from September 19-21, will be the first high-level American trade official to visit the region since the war. He said he would encourage democratic and economic reforms and evaluate possibilities for American investment in the area…."

AFP 9/8/99 "…The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) has reached agreement in principle with the NATO-led force KFOR to turn itself into a civilian force after its forthcoming disarmament deadline, a senior KFOR officer said Wednesday. The text of an agreement with the KLA is to be submitted to the United Nations by the UN's mission chief in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, who is currently in New York, KFOR's French second-in-command General Jean-Claude Thomann said. "There should be a force of 3,000 active personnel, with 2,000 reservists. Its emphasis will be humanitarian, with the mission of taking on the task of the reconstruction of Kosovo," he said. …."

Toronto Sun 9/14/99 Lorrie Goldstein "....If East Timor was Kosovo, we all know what would have happened by now. U.S. President Bill Clinton would have gone on national television to denounce Indonesian president B.J Habibie as a new Hitler and a threat to world peace. There would have been American-led cries (with a hearty, "Me too!" from Jean Chretien and Lloyd Axworthy) to indict Indonesia's army generals for war crimes. The media would be referring to what is now happening in East Timor as a "new Holocaust." The reason none of this is happening is obvious. The United States, the key player in both conflicts, regards Serbia as a pariah state and Indonesia as a valued trading partner. Say this much for the Americans. At least they address their blatant double standards and selective morality in the open. In Canada, our politicians simply ignore the huge discrepancies in approach, hoping no one will notice. Belgrade remember, was bombed for waging a campaign of murder, terror and ethnic cleansing against an independence movement in Kosovo in which 10,000 ethnic Albanians were killed over a few months. Indonesia, by contrast, is being consulted on UN peacekeepers, including 600 Canadians, after the latest outrage in its 24-year campaign of murder, terror and ethnic cleansing against East Timor's independence, in which some 275,000 people have died. (One-third of East Timor's entire population prior to its 1975 invasion by Indonesia.) And yet no one calls for bombing Indonesia or Dili in East Timor the way Belgrade and Kosovo were bombed. ....."

Stratfor.com 9/14/99 "....2140 GMT, 990914 - Where Serb Forces are Forbidden, Serb Paramilitary Grows NATO is denying the re-entry of Serb military or police into Kosovo, despite its agreement to allow limited Yugoslav troops to return after ethnic Albanian disarmament. This is causing not only a Serb protest in Belgrade, but also two further complications for NATO's reconstruction attempt in the region. First, evidence shows a Serb paramilitary has developed in Kosovo. Second, Russia has threatened to rethink its involvement in KFOR, due to the NATO policy that prevents Yugoslav forces from having any control in Kosovo. As was predicted by Stratfor in July, a Serb paramilitary force has developed in Kosovo. The Yugoslav administration said last week it would refrain from sending military troops into Kosovo, but reaffirmed its intent to reclaim the Kosovo territory. We think Belgrade could be supporting an alternate Serb presence in Kosovo. NATO has failed to curb ethnic violence in the region, and both Serbs and Albanians have accused NATO of favoring the other. The Albanians have had KLA protection since the end of NATO bombing, but the Serbs feel the international community is allowing Albanians to victimize them...."

AFP 9/14/99 ".... US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on Tuesday urged Kosovo's ethnic Albanian population to "win the peace" in their conflict-riven province, calling on them to democratize and put historical hatred behind them. Two-and-a-half months after NATO suspended air strikes aimed at halting Yugoslavia's ethnic cleansing campaign and an international peacekeeping force was deployed in Kosovo, Albright called on the province's ethnic Albanian population to continue their rebuilding work. "After all that the people of Kosovo have suffered and lost, they -- and you -- should not accept anything less than true democracy and lasting peace," Albright told a group of Kosovar Albanians who have just completed a workshop on democratic coalition building here. ..."

New York Times 9/14/99 Carlotta Gall "....Groups of Serbian paramilitaries are infiltrating back into Kosovo from Serbia, apparently bent on causing trouble three months after Serbian forces withdrew from the province, NATO's supreme commander, Gen. Wesley Clark, said Monday. "I am increasingly concerned by the evidence that we see of organized Serb efforts to cause a little bit of disruption here and there and bring increasing pressure on this fragile community," he said during a visit to Kosovo. Clark said that one of the three Serbs shot dead by Russian peacekeepers in eastern Kosovo last week was carrying a police identification card. Another was in a military-style uniform, a spokesman for the peacekeepers said...."

UPI 9/15/99 "...Law and order is slowly gaining a foothold in Kosovo as the number of violent incidents decrease, an Italian KFOR commander said during a visit to neighboring Albania. ``The mission in Kosovo is going very well and the incidents decrease,'' said Italian Maj. Gen. Pier-Giusepe Giovannelli, deputy KFOR commander in Kosovo. ``We are very much satisfied by the situation in Kosovo from the military and the civil point of view,'' Giovannelli told reporters today in the Albanian capital, Tirana...... Giovannelli said he believes that after Sept. 19, the deadline for the KLA demilitarization, no one would move with guns and uniforms on Kosovo streets. ..."

AFP 9/15/99 "....Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic called for stronger ties between Yugoslavia and Iraq Wednesday when he met with the new Iraqi ambassador to Belgrade, Sami Saadoun Kati. Milosevic said that Yugoslavia "gives great importance to the intensive development of friendly relations and economic ties with Iraq," said a statement from his office, quoted by the Tanjug news agency. "Relations based on equality and mutual understanding... constitute the best obstacle to the tendencies of enslavement and hegemony in the world," Milosevic said...."

AFP 9/15/99 "....The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) says it has surrendered its total of almost 10,000 weapons, in compliance with an undertaking to demilitarize, US Colonel Douglas Nash said here Wednesday. "I firmly believe that they are dealing squarely with us," said Nash, a member of the Joint Implementation Commission which oversees the June 21 undertaking that set a calendar for the KLA to disarm and disband. In that undertaking, the KLA called on its members to disarm in three stages, with the weapons gradually coming under control of the NATO-led peacekeeping force known as KFOR. The deadline for full demilitarization is September 19...."

Washington Times 9/15/99 David Sands "...Feuding factions of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian community, including the Kosovo Liberation Army, have hammered out a joint program to build a free-market democracy during three days of closed-door talks at a Northern Virginia resort. The program, which did not include any representatives of Kosovo's embattled Serbian minority, calls for a referendum on independence from Yugoslavia, a "multi-ethnic society that includes equal opportunity for all," an independent judiciary and a free press, and a transformed KLA that would become the territory's "national defense force." ...."

Christian Science Monitor 9/15/99 Alex Todorovic "....In recent days, Yugoslav military leaders have begun harshly criticizing the KFOR peacekeeping mission in Kosovo. The leaders, pretending as though they were not involved with the killings of thousands of Albanians during the war, have repeatedly said they want the UN to invite the Yugoslav Army to help establish order. Analysts say the situation is indirectly bolstering the Milosevic regime, because Serbs are again uniting around a perceived foreign enemy. "International peacekeeping forces [under NATO auspices] haven't adequately fulfilled one single task assigned to them by the UN Security Council and the military technical agreement," said Third Army Commander Gen. Maj. Nebojsa Pavkovic on Sept. 12. "If international peacekeepers in Kosovo can't carry out their assignments, they should ask the Yugoslav Army to return."...."

UPI 9/9/99 "...Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Henry Shelton told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he was troubled by British Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson's refusal to follow the orders of Supreme Allied Commander U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark when Russian soldiers moved uninvited into Kosovo in June. "We can't have second-guessing at every level of command for a military organization to be effective," Shelton said. "In any military operation one of the things we stress is discipline....Sometimes it's a matter of life and death," Shelton told committee Chairman Sen. John Warner, R-Va. ...."

http://etherzone.com/ 9/9/99 Mary Mostert "....On July 16th my column, entitled "S1234: Yugoslavia: Give us you assets or we kill your Children" was a protest against a bill, passed 97-2, in the U.S. Senate, with no debate or media attention, that would have declared Serbia a "Terrorist State." The result of that designation would ensure that the Serbs would be unable to restore electricity and heat to its people before the harsh Yugoslavia winter sets in, which would cause the death of thousand of children , sick and elderly people of all nationalities in Serbia. Then, on July 23rd, the House passed a companion bill which did not have the Terrorist designation in it. On August 4, just before the Congress adjourned for the summer vacation, the Senate portion was added, including the designation of Serbia as a "terrorist state.".....While the House version did not contain the "terrorist" designation, the House Committee Report Read: Committee Report: SERBIA The Committee intends that none of the funds provided under this heading, or in this Act, may be made available for reconstruction or development activities for the Republic of Serbia, outside of Kosova. The Committee would support a substantial increase in democratization activities in Serbia and Montenegro, excluding Kosovo, including increased assistance as authorized under the Support for East European Democracy Act of 1989. The Committee is recommending a new general provision, section 537, that would prohibit funds from being made available for assistance for the Republic of Serbia. Such assistance is not appropriate at the present time. This is an improvement over the Senate bill which would not only have not provided any funds to restore the electrical and heating plants which American bombs destroyed, but would have required the blocking of any other nation that wished to help Yugoslavia have heat and electricity this winter. Of course, the conference isn't over yet. So NOW is the time to write your senators and representative to insist they understand that the children, elderly and ill of Yugoslavia - and there are many in all those categories in the over one million refugees trying to survive in Serbia - are not the ones who die in the War of Annihilation against Yugoslavia. If the central heating facilities and electricity are not restored, thousands of children, elderly and hospitalized people of all nationalities will die this winter in Serbia......"

http://etherzone.com/ 9/9/99 Mary Mostert "....Q "You're saying that you can engage in preventive wars to avoid ethnic cleansing, to avoid any sort of genocide?" BERGER: "I think every situation has to be taken on its own merits. And I think the President has said many times that it depends upon whether America's national interests are involved, as well as our values. I think in this case, both our values and our interests are involved. Our values are involved in preventing what I believe would be a humanitarian catastrophe. Our interests are involved in avoiding a wider conflict in Southeastern Europe, which I think would most likely involve us at some later point with far greater cost and with far greater risk. Thank you". Of course, both Croatia and Bosnia were provinces of Yugoslavia which were in the process of seceding. East Timor, on the other hand has NEVER been a province of Indonesia, having been a colony of Portugal for over 400 years. ..... After 2000 people were killed in all of 1998, 300 of whom were Serb police, postmen, farmers, etc., Clinton decided to spend billions of your hard-earned tax dollars to bomb them back to the stone age, with no concern for either Yugoslav sovereignty or its civilian population. Now we have a situation where the U.S. government not only encouraged the vote, but appropriated money to make sure it took place, but after the voting resulted in an overwhelming vote for independence we are going to just pull out the UN observers and let the Indonesian army and militia ethnically cleanse East Timor? Is our foreign policy reduced to the support of anarchy, drug dealers and murderers? ...."

AFP 9/9/99 "...Forty people have been killed and 192 wounded by mines and unexploded bombs in the province of Kosovo in the three months since the end of the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, a United Nations agency said Thursday. The UN Mines Action Coordinating Committee (UNMACC), noting that such incidents had fallen sharply over the past month, said there were 150 casualties in the first month. Bombing stopped on June 12 when Serb forces withdrew, prompting ethnic Albanians to pour back to their homes. To date, 4,384 anti-personnel mines and 2,300 anti-tank mines had been defused, UNMACC said....."

Reuters 9/5/99 Ljiljana Cvekic "....For nine-year-old Igor, war is a time when people sleep in bomb shelters, are afraid, and listen to the news all the time. Peace is when he can watch television and sleep in pyjamas in his own bed. Stefan, 11, said nearly three months of NATO bombing had taught him never to relax, because anything can happen. ``And I've learned to be afraid.'' For 11-year-old Aleksandar, ``civilians are ordinary people who work in the army and police but dress as ordinary people.'' According to a study prepared by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), Yugoslav children have been severely traumatised by the death and destruction caused by the bombs, the sounds of air raid sirens, planes and explosions, and the disruption caused by nights spent in air raid shelters. ...."

AP 9/9/99 "....Former ethnic Albanian rebels will wear uniforms and serve under "military structures" in a new organization to replace the Kosovo Liberation Army, a NATO official said Thursday. Russia, however, called the plan for a restructured KLA "unacceptable." The government plans to make its objections clear when the head of the U.N. mission, Bernard Kouchner, and U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen visit Moscow next week, the ITAR-Tass news agency said. With the Sept. 19 deadline for the demilitarization of the KLA approaching, some senior figures in the group are said to be reluctant to accept any plan that spells the end of their army, which rose up against the Serbs in late 1997. Russia and some Western European governments, however, are concerned about letting the KLA play a major security role _ especially in view of the continuing attacks by ethnic Albanians against Serbs and other non-Albanian minorities....."

The National Post 9/10/99 Christin Schmitz "....Members of Canada's first team of forensic experts and homicide investigators who returned from Kosovo last month after spending 45 days interviewing witnesses, exhuming graves and performing autopsies have questioned the competence and efficiency of the UN-sponsored international tribunal directing the war crimes investigations in the Yugoslav province. "I have lost a lot of confidence in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia [ICTY]," Sergeant Brian Honeybourn, of the Vancouver police-RCMP unsolved homicide unit and a member of the investigating team, said in an interview. The Canadians' investigations at several crime scenes produced strong evidence in support of the tribunal's war crimes indictment of Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav president, and his senior staff. But Sgt. Honeybourn said the $94-million-a-year tribunal mismanaged forensic expertise by ignoring some prime crime scenes. The tribunal also assigned team members to other less productive sites without sufficient prescreening by its own investigative staff, he said. "We, our resources, were not maximized, simple as that," Sgt. Honeybourn said. "ICTY is a confused organization and there seemed to be a pronounced lack of co-ordination, which was extremely frustrating. Using us as a resource, I don't think we were deployed properly." ....."

Edmonton Sun 9/10/99 Paul Stanway "....On the night of April 23, NATO bombed the headquarters of Radio Television Serbia in downtown Belgrade, destroying much of the building and killing as many as 16 people. It was one of the most disturbing incidents of the air war in Yugoslavia, and one you might expect to have been the subject of heated debate in the NATO democracies. But while the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade two weeks later (with less loss of life) prompted a diplomatic incident and some serious apologies from Washington, the television centre attack received scant comment and certainly no apologies. Serb TV "is as much a part of Milosevic's murder machine as his military," claimed Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon. British Defence Secretary George Robertson said the bombing was aimed at "getting at the nerve centre of the military machine that is driving the violence in Kosovo." Well, there's no doubt that RTS acts as a propaganda arm of the Milosevic government. This is a dictatorship and we're not talking about the Serbian equivalent of the CBC, BBC or even PBS. But to describe the state television network as part of Slobodan Milosevic's "military machine" seems a gross exaggeration of its role. ....The 100 or so people working in the television centre that night were mostly junior employees pulling the night shift. Reports say they had been warned that anyone who failed to show up for work during the bombing campaign would be fired. They were also aware they were a target. According to the IPI Report magazine, they had been warned by a U.S. television executive that the centre would be bombed, regardless of civilian casualties. Interestingly, foreign crews using RTS's broadcast facilities all left the building before the bombing. ...."

AFP 9/10/99 ".....Ten people were injured, one seriously, when a crowd of ethnic Albanians attacked French peacekeeping forces Friday on a bridge separating Serbs and Albanians in this northern Kosovo town. Witnesses said the injuries were caused when the French troops fired tear-gas and stun grenades in the latest in a rash of violent incidents in the province. Four explosions were heard on the Mitrovica bridge as some 300 Albanian Kosovars pelted the French with projectiles. According to several witnesses, one protester was hit in the throat by a stun grenade fired to disperse the crowd as it tried to make its way to the Serb part of town. Stun grenades are designed to avoid death or serious injury, "The French are against us, they are protecting the Serbs," said a leader of the demonstration, Visar Proja, just before the clashes erupted...."

AFP 9/11/99 "....A British general disobeyed an order from NATO's supreme commander to block Russian troops moving into Pristina's airfield in Kosovo June 12, the top US military commander told Congress. "No, I'm not going to do that. It's not worth starting World War III," British General Michael Jackson, head of NATO's forces in Kosovo (KFOR), told his superior US General Wesley Clark, according to US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Henry Shelton. The incident was settled by Shelton and top British General Charles Guthrie in favor of Jackson, Shelton told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Thursday on his nomination to a second term as top US military commander...."

Reuters 9/10/99 ".... Billionaire financier George Soros said on Friday his vision of a new Balkans after the Kosovo conflict was a region where borders and customswould have no importance. ``This is the only way to avoid conflicts in the future,'' the Hungarian-born philanthropist told reporters in Tirana, where he came to visit his Open Society foundation in Albania. He said once emergencies were over, Europe tended to forget and returned to a pre-crisis way of thinking, and it was up to the countries in the region to seize the historical moment..... Soros established the Albanian Open Society in 1992, part of his network of foundations promoting an open society, and has since than has financed programmes reportedly costing $13 million a year. Albanian President Rexhep Meidani awarded Soros the country's highest decoration, the Skanderbeg award, for ``his great contribution'' in the development of Albania...."

UPI 9/11/99 "....President Clinton and 13 other prominent world leaders failed to appear before a Belgrade district court charging them with war crimes. The Belgrade court called on a host of Western leaders involved in NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia to appear in person Friday to face criminal charges, but none showed. The court leveled war crimes charges against Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Defense Secretary William Cohen, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, French President Jacques Chirac, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, NATO civilian chief Javier Solana, Allied Commander Gen. Wesley Clark and other top-ranking officials from NATO member nations. They were all charged with committing war crimes against the civilian population and ordering the assassination Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. ...."

AFP 9/11/99 "...The Romanian authorities impounded about 10 Serbian boats on Saturday in retaliation for discriminatory measures taken by Belgrade against the Romanian river fleet, port sources said. The boats affected were tugs and barges in the Black Sea port of Constanta, southeast Romania, that had brought goods into Romania. Romanian boat owners say that since Thursday Belgrade has prevented Romanian boats from using a canal bypassing the Serb sector of the Danube, while letting Russian and Ukranian boats through..."

British Helsinki Human Rights Group 9/11/99 "....With the end of the 78 day war between NATO and Yugoslavia, hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians may have returned home, but a new refugee has crisis followed. The flow of would-be asylum seekers claiming to be from Kosovo and trying to enter EU states has not stopped. During the summer several European countries reported an upsurge in the number of refugees arriving and seeking asylum, notably Great Britain, Germany, France and Italy. During the summer, the British Helsinki Human Rights Group conducted several on-the-spot observation missions in Dover, Calais and south-eastern Italy to analyse the complex and controversial issues of political asylum, migration, and the role of the mafia in people smuggling. The summer of 1999 has seen a spate of incidents reported in the media without adequate analysis..... Along the coast of Puglia in southern Italy hundreds of asylum seekers arrive every day, including gypsies from Kosovo. One boatload of would-refugees was apparently drowned at sea off Montenegro after been thrown overboard by the people smugglers. Added to which, hundreds of containers filled with humanitarian aid for Kosovo which should have been delivered by the state-sponsored charity Arcobaleno months ago have been discovered sitting at the port of Bari and in Durres in Albania.....Reports in both national and local newspapers in these countries have highlighted concerns that many refugees are not fleeing political persecution per se but seeking work and more favourable economic circumstances in the more affluent West. More alarmingly, police in Western Europe suspect that the influx of refugees is part of a worldwide network involving not just the smuggling of people but also the control of drug, prostitution and paedophile networks. ...."

Reuters 9/10/99 "...Eleven bodies found in shallow graves in eastern Kosovo last July are of Serbs shot, stabbed or clubbed to death after NATO forces entered the province, a NATO military official said on Friday. ``We are sure that they were killed after KFOR troops entered in Kosovo, in different times and different places,'' Colonel Ian Mitchell, chief of military police for the NATO-led KFOR peacekeeping forces, said at a news conference. The bodies were found near the village of Ugljare, northeast of Gnjilane, on July 24 and evidence was passed to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for investigation. Mitchell said six bodies had been identified and all were known to be Serbs. An Albanian man who had been arrested had admitted he took part in the kidnapping of three of the victims, but denied any role in the killings. ...."

UPI 9/11/99 "....The chief of the U.N. civilian mission, Bernard Kouchner, says nearly 100,000 Serbs remain in Kosovo, appreciably more than original estimated. According to a new survey carried out by the international peacekeeping force, KFOR, there are 1.4 million ethnic Albanians, 97,000 Serbs and 73,000 Turks, Gypsies, Muslims and other ethnic minorities in the Yugoslav province. Kouchner was quoted by Radio Pancevo as saying the United Nations had resolved to ensure greater security for Serbs and other ethnic groups. Kouchner also said that the spirit of revenge must be smashed in the entire population, which he said could not be done in a few weeks or months but would take some years....."

Los Angeles Times 9/12/99 Paul Watson Scott Martelle "...The Yugoslav army is making ominous threats that it will force its way back into Kosovo if the United Nations doesn't soon deliver on a promise to let some Serbian soldiers and police return to the southern province. Angered by almost daily attacks on Serbs and other ethnic minorities in Kosovo, the Yugoslav military accuses the U.N. and NATO-led peacekeepers of violating the June peace accord that ended the war over Kosovo. Under the deal, called the Military Technical Agreement, the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army is supposed to be dismantled and Yugoslav sovereignty over Kosovo assured, but the opposite is happening, Yugoslav Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic charged in an interview here....."

U.S. News & World Report 9/20/99 Richard Newman "....There were plenty of bomb craters, sure enough. But investigators "saw nothing," according to a NATO official, "that would indicate that kind of devastation"-such as scattered personal effects. "Unless Hazel came in with her broom and cleaned things up," he insists, "nothing serious was destroyed in the area." .... NATO and Pentagon officials are reluctantly beginning to apply that conclusion to the entire campaign against Serbian forces on the ground. That strategy was championed by NATO's top commander, Gen. Wesley Clark, even though it tied up most of NATO's jets for several weeks of the war and was opposed at the time by Clark's top air-power expert. "The campaign against mobile targets was a near failure," declares one NATO official. While some dismiss such sour post-mortems as irrelevant bean counting, the issue is already a focal point of NATO and Pentagon "after-action" reviews meant to determine what worked in Kosovo and what didn't. The final results, due out in coming weeks, will shape how the Pentagon fights future wars and even which weapons earn scarce defense dollars. Many military analysts, meanwhile, now think that Russia's withdrawal of support for Yugoslavia along with attacks on the power grid, transportation system, and other "strategic" targets-which only intensified late in the 78-day war-are ultimately what defeated Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic. It may never be clear whether NATO could have won the war more quickly. But emerging insights suggest that, at the very least, NATO planned poorly for Operation Allied Force and sputtered along for weeks in a kind of trial-and-error mode......But Clark's dictates about how to employ air power soon produced a schism between him and Lt. Gen. Michael Short, NATO's top air commander. A week after the first bombs dropped, Clark began insisting that NATO go all out after Yugoslav forces in Kosovo, who were expelling and murdering civilians with virtual impunity. Short maintained that such an approach was unlikely to succeed and argued that the priority should be obliterating Yugoslavia's air defense system. That would permit broad attacks on infrastructure and "leadership" targets-if NATO political leaders approved. Clark prevailed, and soon nearly all of NATO's pilots-except for those flying stealthy F-117s and B-2s, which were sent against infrastructure targets elsewhere in Yugoslavia-were squinting through the ubiquitous clouds trying to make out tanks 15,000 feet below. Clark had his staff compile bar charts assessing the combat effectiveness of ground units in Kosovo-a dubious proposition with no friendly forces on the ground to gather intelligence.....The approach infuriated adherents of Air Force doctrine, which calls for the use of overwhelming force against a full spectrum of targets from the very outset of a campaign. One general complained that "rather than fight this war as a four-star theater commander, [Clark] is fighting it as an Army company commander in Vietnam."...."

AFP 9/12/99 ".... In a town that has become a symbol for the ethnic hatred that pits ethnic Albanians and Serbs against each other in Kosovo, clashes last week that left 150 injured were a new failure for international efforts to end its de facto partition. Kosovska Mitrovica, the biggest town in the north of the province, has been divided since the return of Albanian refugees in June. The north of the town is occupied by Serbs, with Albanians mainly living in the south. In the middle is the bridge on which French troops of the NATO-led KFOR peace force came under assault from cans, bottles, stones and other projectiles on Thursday and Friday as the soldiers stopped Albanians from heading north. The specific problem last week in a town where confrontations on the bridge have become a daily event was caused by plans to return 136 Albanian families to the north. The programme has now been suspended for "at least several days," said the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). "Conditions are not right to pursue the relocation operations," the UNHCR said Sunday. ...."

9/12/99 Electronic Telegraph "...W F Deedes in Pristina "....A TOUR round some of Kosovo's ubiquitous minefields makes painfully clear that many of the casualties suffered by civilians are being caused by cluster bombs dropped by Nato from the air rather than mines sown by the Serbs or Kosovo Liberation Army. Since the refugees returned to Kosovo in June there have been 232 casualties attributed to mines, or around 80 a month. It is officially admitted that at least a third of these have been victims of the cluster bomb; and some estimates put it higher. Nato is known to have dropped a total of 1,300 containers of cluster bombs over Kosovo. Each container carried 208 of these bomblets. So something like 270,000 of these deadly weapons were scattered over the country. ...."

The New York Times 9/13/99 Carlotta Gall "....Lt. Gen. Sir Mike Jackson speaks his mind. At the start of his command in Kosovo, he refused to obey NATO's supreme commander and seize Pristina airport ahead of Russian forces. Now, nearing the end of his tour of duty, he warned that soldiers have done about all they can to restore order, and civilian authorities must take over. "I fear that the soldiers are now more and more policemen," he said in an interview at his headquarters this past weekend. "They are a sticking plaster on the wound that is due to the continuing desire for revenge. And that has to change." .....His remarks were echoed in a separate interview Sunday with another senior officer in the Kosovo peacekeeping force. Both men said that preventing the violent deaths that still occur almost every day in Kosovo, and creating the multiethnic society that NATO said it went to war for, is a task that will take years and is not a job for the military. "We are guarding flats and we must continue to, but we must tackle the cause of their fear," Jackson said of the Serbian and other Kosovo minorities who now rarely venture outside their homes without protection....."

AP 9/13/99 "....The 78-day NATO bombing of Yugoslavia has left the country with environmental ``hotspots,'' a United Nations team of experts concluded Monday. There were no ecological catastrophes as a result of the bombing, but urgent action is needed to deal with pollution at certain locations, said the team's chief, Pekka Haavisto. The team announced some of its findings Monday after completing its third and final investigative mission on the effects of the alliance's airstrikes here. ``The towns of Pancevo and Kragujevac are two hotspots of particular concern,'' Haavisto told reporters. Both towns were repeatedly pounded by NATO. Pancevo's petrochemical plant and oil refinery were leveled in the process, as were the industrial complex and factories in Kragujevac, in central Serbia. Also urgently in need of cleaning is a one-mile stretch of a heavily polluted canal that feeds into the Danube River, Haavisto said. Water and sediment there have become heavily polluted with mercury, dioxin and petrochemical waste. ``If the Danube level significantly rises in the fall, the waters will flow with all these pollutants into the river,'' Haavisto said....."

AP 9/14/99 "....Gunmen fired on a convoy of Serbs returning to their homes in the American sector of Kosovo, killing one and wounding others, NATO said today. Elsewhere, two Montenegrin women _ aged 50 and 70 years _ were found dead Monday in their home in the western city of Pec, the NATO command said without releasing further details. Since NATO peacekeepers arrived in Kosovo on June 12, Serbs, Montenegrins and other non-Albanians have been targeted for reprisal killings by ethnic Albanians seeking revenge for the 18-month crackdown that ended when President Slobodan Milosevic accepted a peace plan to halt NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia. In a brief statement, NATO said the Serb convoy was fired on Monday afternoon east of Ranilug village, nine miles northeast of Gnjilane in part of eastern Kosovo patrolled by American and Russian troops....."

The Electronic Telegraph (London) 9/16/99 Julius Strauss "....FEARS are growing that the Kosovo Liberation Army is planning to disregard Sunday's demilitarisation deadline in a move that would put it on a collision course with the Nato peacekeeping force in the province. The ethnic Albanian guerrilla force, which fought the Serbs for more than a year, is understood to be trying to avoid its disbanding despite an undertaking it gave to Nato when the Serb forces left the province in June.. ...."

UPI 9/14/99 "....NATO Commander Gen. Wesley Clark is set reveal more about how badly enemy forces in Kosovo were hit during the 78- day bombing campaign, and it appears initial estimates were too optimistic. Gen. John Ralston, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, says Clark is expected to report Wednesday that initial estimates that NATO hit of 30-40 percent of the Yugoslav forces in the field were too high. NATO had said it destroyed about 120 tanks, 220 armored personnel carriers and 450 artillery and mortars, but media reports immediately after the war said peacekeeping troops only found the wreckage of about a dozen tanks. Ralston says he reviewed Clark's report about 10 days ago and found the final tally for fielded forces destroyed to be about ``60-70 percent'' of the initial projections...."

AFP 9/19/99 Jean-Luc Porte "....The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which officially disbands Sunday, had special "Serb-hunting" units operating even after international peacekeeping troops arrived here in June, according to two KLA members. The special KLA units "forced the Serbs out of their homes and took them off to kill them in discreet places as far as was possible," said one of the KLA special unit members "But, if they put up any resistance, they mowed them down on the spot." said the rebel officer, whose nom de guerre is "the teacher". "Our group of seven men would go to the Serbs, house by house, and give them between 15 and 30 minutes to get out," the 'teacher' explained. "Then in came the mopping-up team, 13 of them, with the job of executing those who stayed behind," he added. The mopping-up team were "real professionals," said the burly 46-year-old with a Colt 45 pistol protruding from a jacket pocket. ....."

AFP 9/19/99 Jean-Luc Porte and Ingrid Bazinet "...Talks between NATO-led peacekeepers and the Kosovo Liberation Army that were to result Sunday in transforming the guerrilla band into a civilian force snagged at the last minute over an insignia for the new body, officials said. The hitch arose shortly before the head of the NATO-led KFOR force, Lieutenant General Michael Jackson, and the head of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), Agim Ceku, were to have announced the formal transformation of the guerilla movement into the civilian Kosovo Corps. "The KLA is more worried about symbols than contents. We're splitting hairs about the badge" the new corps will wear, said a KFOR source close to the negotiations....."

UPI 9/20/99 "…A second deadline for signing an agreement to transform the demilitarized Kosovo Liberation Army into a civil force passed at midnight Sunday, apparently because of discord on the character and size of the new Kosovo Corps. KLA soldiers have already handed in most of their weapons, but their leaders want the new 5,000-member force to form the basis for a regular army - a demand rejected by NATO. …."

International Herald Tribune 9/17/99 Joseph Fitchett "....NATO destroyed significantly fewer Serbian tanks in Kosovo than the alliance had claimed at the end of the air war, General Wesley Clark said Thursday, acknowledging that only 26 actual wreckages had been found by allied troops who have been combing the province since June. But North Atlantic Treaty Organization commanders insisted that they had confirmed evidence of 93 Serbian tanks being destroyed by allied warplanes, most of which were taken away by Serbian forces before the NATO-led peacekeeping force took over Kosovo. That figure - fewer than the 110 previously claimed by alliance spokesmen or the 122 total announced by the Pentagon at the war's end - was disappointing in terms of allied effectiveness in the 78-day air war in Kosovo, Western officials and analysts said. ...."

The Independent (UK) 9/17/99 Robert Fisk "...NATO PRODUCED a dossier detailing strikes against tanks and heavy artillery in Kosovo during the air offensive but admitted it had uncovered physical evidence for only a fraction of the destruction claimed. A presentation by General Wesley Clark, Nato's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, still left doubts about the success of the campaign, because it argued that most evidence of destruction had been removed by the Serbs. Dogged by accusations that the campaign destroyed only 13 tanks, against the 110 claimed, General Clark yesterday mounted a fight-back, dismissing criticism as "incorrect" and "invalid", adding: "We struck enough; the conflict ended on Nato's terms - Serb forces are out, Nato forces are in. We have every piece of evidence available. ....The findings, which leave a lot on trust, fall short of Nato's contemporaneous claims, which were said to be "on the conservative side". At the end of the conflict the alliance said that 110 tanks had been hit, against the 93 it accounts for now. Nato also said it hit 210 armoured troop carriers, compared to 153 now accounted for, and 449 artillery pieces or mortars, as opposed to 389 verified. A team of 35 experts did the survey in July, visiting 429 locations and interviewing witnesses. Nato investigated 181 reported strikes against tanks and self-propelled artillery pieces. Apart from the 26 "catastrophic kills" confirmed on site, and 67 "validated by multiple sources", 19 were accounted for by duplicated reporting of hits, 60 were impossible to confirm and nine were decoys. The nub of Nato's argument is that the Serbs could remove equipment that had been hit with some ease....."

AP 9/17/99 Robert Burns "....Yugoslavia may have sold the wreckage of the U.S. Air Force F-117A stealth fighter that its air defense forces shot down near Belgrade early in the Kosovo war, Air Force chief of staff Gen. Michael Ryan said Friday. Speculation centers on Russia or China as the likely buyers. The downing of the F-117A on March 27 was the first loss of a stealth aircraft in combat and confirmed that although stealthiness is an asset it does not make an airplane invisible to enemy radar....."

AFP 9/16/99 "...The Kosovo Liberation Army's military chief Agim Ceku said Thursday his group had completed the promised disarmament process, but local commanders continued to express contempt for the process. "We have finished the demilitarization," Ceku, told AFP. "We handed in all weapons and munitions that we had. It's about 10,000 weapons," he added. But commanders on the ground continued to express defiance. "If KFOR protects the Serbs, we will fire into the crowd. We will make war on everyone if we have to," said one KLA leader. "How will KFOR know if I have disarmed or not? Besides, the weapons we have are our own personal possessions," he added. US Colonel Douglas Nash, of the Kosovo peacekeeping forces (KFOR), nevertheless took Ceku at his word. "There are going to be crises and disappointments," said Nash, a member of the Joint Implementation Commission overseeing the disarmament process agreed on June 21. The deadline for full demilitarization is September 19. But although the KLA will officially cease to exist from next week, Nash did not rule out the possibility of more weapons being smuggled in from Albania...."Only the name of the organisation will change because the KLA will continue to exist and will remain a military force made up of KLA people." ...."

UPI 9/17/99 Chris Hawke "...The self-declared prime minister of Kosovo said the head of the U.N. mission there is acting like a king and should cooperate more with the provisional government set up by the Kosovo Liberation Army, which he leads. At a press conference Friday, hosted by Albania in the United Nations, KLA chief Hashim Thaci sidestepped a question about reports he may have personally summarily executed men in his own ranks. The reports surfaced several months ago. He said the KLA will fulfil its pledge to disarm by Sept. 19 but added, ``Kosovo is awash with weapons that are not under our control.'' On Monday, officials will begin work on transforming the KLA into an organization called the Kosovo Corps, envisioned as a national guard. Former members of the KLA will be forbidden from wearing their military uniforms or emblems....."

Washington Post 9/18/99 Daniel Williams "....Three months after the war, the dwindling number of Serbs who remain in Kosovo are concentrated in tense enclaves that more and more resemble permanent ghettos. In these places, the Serbs are watchful and suspicious. As they see it, a flood of hostile ethnic Albanians is set on invading their fragile refuges. Embittered men, some veterans of the province's ethnic conflict, sit at cafes eyeing passersby with suspicion. Ethnic Albanians enter at their own risk. Outside the Serbian enclaves, the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which fought Yugoslav and Serbian security forces during a 16-month war for independence, virtually runs the province as a separate armed force alongside NATO-led peacekeepers and the United Nations. ..."

UPI 9/17/99 "...A military tribunal in the Serbian town of Nis on Friday sentenced 11 ethnic Albanians to a total of 153 years in prison on charges of conspiring to carry on hostile activity, Serbian radio and television reported. Prosecutors said the defendants were organizers and members of a terrorist group that was formed in the village of Ljeskovo, near Prizren, in Kosovo, last June. The group was discovered while smuggling a large quantity of weapons from Albania into Yugoslavia, the report said. ...."

Associated Press via canoe.com 9/18/99 Robert Reid "....Surrounded by thousands of cheering ethnic Albanians, the Kosovo Liberation Army marched through the streets Saturday in a symbolic farewell, one day before it is to disband and begin the transformation into a civilian organization. Leaders of the former rebel army made clear that they consider the change the first step toward a national army of an independent Kosovo -- a goal strongly opposed by Yugoslavia and Russia and not endorsed by the United States and its Western allies. "The KLA is transforming, it won't be called KLA, but it will be a defense force of the citizens and territory of Kosovo," Hashim Thaci, the group's leader, told supporters at a stadium after the parade. "I'm convinced the international community will respect the democratic right for self declaration and referendum," he said. "And I am convinced that you will vote for the independence of Kosovo." ....."

UPI 9/18/99 "....Negotiations continued late Saturday night among Kosovo's KFOR peacekeepers, representatives of the United Nations and leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army on the KLA's demilitarization, scheduled to be completed Sunday. Radio Pancevo quoted KFOR sources in Pristina as saying the talks stumbled over the question of what form future civilian force, to be called the Kosovo Corps, will take. Ex-KLA members are to be integrated into the 5,000-member force. Already, more than 10,000 KLA soldiers have registered to enlist in the new corps, which is expected to comprise 3,000 active-duty members and 2,000 reservists. Of those, 200 will be allowed to carry weapons. A particular problem under discussion late Saturday was the number of arms the civilian force would be allowed to have, a diplomatic source close to the negotiations reported....."

UPI 9/18/99 "....An official said the United Nations will support Albania's efforts to collect weapons in exchange for development. In Tirana on Saturday, Jaynatha Dhanapala, the U.N.'s deputy secretary-general for disarmament, appealed for international support for the project, which seeks to reclaim more than 600,000 guns looted from Albanian military depots in the spring of 1997. ``I would like to use this opportunity to appeal to the international community, on the basis of the success of the Gramshi pilot project, to support the expansion of the project,'' Dhanapala told reporters. After the collapse of pyramid schemes in early 1997, Albanians attacked military depots, looting some 618,000 guns, millions of bullets and tons of ammunition. Albanian authorities failed to collect these weapons, and fewer than one in five were returned in a voluntary scheme. Many of the arms found their way into the Kosovo conflict, Albanian press reports said. ....."

Washington Post 9/19/99 R Jeffrey Smith "....The Kosovo Liberation Army has rejected a NATO plan to transform it into a small, peacetime civil defense group within Yugoslavia, leaving the rebel organization's future size and role undecided on the eve of a Sunday night NATO deadline for its demobilization...."

UPI 9/21/99 "....International investigators confirm they have found a mass grave with 28 bodies near Zvecan, just north of Mitrovica, the first to be found in an area of Kosovo populated only by Serbs. Col. Claude Vicaire, head of the French police force in Mitrovica, said today four Serbs have been arrested in conjunction with Saturday's discovery. Vicaire said French police, originally acting on information from ethnic Albanians of a massacre on April 14, first checked an industrial furnace in a factory in Zvecan for evidence of incinerated bodies..."

AFP 9/21/99 "...A senior aide of the Saudi billionaire Osama bin Laden, arrested earlier this month in Turkey, was given Bosnian citizenship two years ago, Bosnia's deputy minister of civilian affairs and communications told AFP Tuesday. Nudzeim Recica confirmed that Tunis-born Mahrez Amduni, who is known in Sarajevo as Mehrez Amdouni, was given Bosnian citizenship in December 1997, on the basis of his Bosnian army membership during the 1992-1995 war. "There had been no legal obstacles for granting citizenship to Amduni in 1997, since Interpol issued an arrest warrant against him in 1998," Recica said....."

Washington Post 9/22/9 R Jeffrey Smith "...Yugoslav security forces are infiltrating Kosovo to spy on NATO forces and provoke renewed violence, a senior U.N. official said today. Military officers in the NATO-led peacekeeping force said their troops have been placed on a higher state of alert, particularly in the tense northern Kosovo city of Kosovska Mitrovica, where Serbs and ethnic Albanians clashed 10 days ago....."

Agence France-Presse 9/22/99 "....The former political chief of Kosovar Albanian rebels on Wednesday told a crowd of about 1,000 ex-guerillas that the province's new civilian force would be the basis for an army. "We have to give our last effort to run out the Serbian occupiers," Hashim Thaci, the political boss of the former Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), told a crowd of uniformed, but mainly unarmed, supporters....."

Philadelphia Inquirer 9/22/99 Robert Reid "....Angry Kosovo Serbs threatened yesterday to organize their own defense force in response to what they said was a NATO and U.N. move to perpetuate the Kosovo Liberation Army under a new name and move the province closer to independence from Yugoslavia. A local Serb leader, Oliver Ivanovic, said establishment of a 5,000-member Kosovo Protection Corps to replace the KLA was never provided for in the Security Council resolution that established the NATO-led peacekeeping force. "It's a completely new idea, and we are not satisfied with that," Ivanovic said. "I am absolutely sure that members of the Kosovo corps will be members of the [KLA] in different uniforms and, of course, with the same attitude" against Serbs. ..."

Los Angeles Times 9/22/99 Paul Watson ".... The church was built of stones quarried six centuries ago from the rock of Kosovo, and before last week's blast it had the power to make people believe in miracles. For generations, through endless cycles of war and foreign occupation, people came to the small Serbian Orthodox shrine behind monastery walls and asked the spirits of saints to heal them. Pilgrims reached out to touch caskets said to contain relics of St. Cosma and St. Damian, or lay down beside them and whispered a prayer before closing their eyes and waiting to be healed. Even ethnic Albanian Muslims were known to come. But the saints' power was as nothing against the explosion Sept. 13 that collapsed the 14th century church. The charges that destroyed it were placed at just the right spot to bring the whole medieval building down and make certain there was nothing left to rebuild. The Church of Saints Cosma and Damian was built in 1327. It is now a ruin of broken stone, yellowed by the centuries that the sanctuary endured. Four other, newer buildings where the monks lived and worked were not blown up. They were gutted by fire instead, and scorched pieces of religious icons lie among the ruins..... The letters UCK, the Albanian acronym for the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army, were painted neatly in white on the wooden doors at the monastery's front gate. ....The Zociste monastery is one of at least 60 Serbian Orthodox churches and other religious sites that have been looted, burned or, in at least 21 cases, blown up since the NATO-led peacekeeping force, known as KFOR, began to take control of Kosovo--a province of Serbia, the dominant of Yugoslavia's two republics--from retreating Serbian forces in mid-June. ..."

The Washington Post 9/20/99 Dana Priest "....Before U.S. warplanes fired missiles into Belgrade's 23-story Socialist Party headquarters in late April, NATO planners bluntly spelled out the risks in a document circulated to President Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and French President Jacques Chirac. Next to a photograph of the party headquarters, the document said: "Collateral damage: Tier 3 - High. Casualty Estimate: 50-100 Government/Party employees. Unintended Civ Casualty Est: 250 - Apts in expected blast radius." ..."

AFP 9/20/99 "....NATO is prepared to take a tough line with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) unless the ethnic Albanian fighters stick to an agreed disarmament calendar, Canadian Defense Minister Art Eggleton said Monday. "We intend to have our objectives met," he said when asked if the alliance intended to come down hard on the KLA after the midnight Sunday deadline for arms surrender had passed. "Another 48 hours has now been provided for them to do that," Eggleton told reporters before the start of an informal meeting of NATO defense ministers here. "The demilitarization of the Kosovo Liberation Army is a clear objective. It is something that has been agreed to and we intend to have that honored." ...."

AFP 9/20/99 "....The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and the Kosovo peacekeeping force KFOR were about to sign an agreement late Monday turning the ex-rebel group into a purely civilian organisation, western officials said. Obstacles raised by the KLA over the formation of a civilian security force which saw negotiations continue past a midnight (2200 GMT) Sunday deadline had been overcome, said the officials, who had been present at the talks between the two sides. ..."

AFP 9/20/99 "...The former military chief of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), Agim Ceku, was named late Monday the "supreme commander" of the UN-approved civilian Kosovo Protection Corps which has succeeded the ex-rebel group, the UN administrator for Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, said...."

National Review 9/27/99 Fareed Zakaria "...Have we achieved our war aims? That depends on what our aims were. If the purpose of our intervention was to avert a humanitarian crisis in Kosovo, in fact we exacerbated it. In the year before the bombing, 2,500 people (mostly KLA partisans and Serb soldiers) died in Kosovo; in the eleven weeks after the bombing began, 10,000 people (most of them Albanian civilians) were killed. At the start of the war, 230,000 Kosovars were estimated to have been displaced; by its end, 1.4 million Albanians had been displaced, 860,000 of them outside Kosovo. Most of the latter have returned, but now over 150,000 Serbs have fled the province. Kosovo has been physically laid to waste; without international aid, mass starvation would soon set in. Yugoslavia itself is estimated by the European Union to have been bombed back 50 years. It will take decades--and over $50 billion--to rebuild the civilian infrastructure of that country when Milosevic exits the stage. For a war waged with humanitarian intentions, these are troubling consequences...........If the purpose of the war was to bring political stability to the Balkans, the results are even more unsettling. Yugoslavia has been turned into a Third World country, which will probably mean that the next wave of refugees into Western Europe will be impoverished Serbs fleeing a desperate land. Kosovo has been liberated from Yugoslavia, but has not been granted independence, which is what 90 percent of Kosovars sorely want. Thus NATO is now the primary obstacle to the fulfillment of Kosovar popular aspirations--an odd role for an alliance that has made the promotion of democracy one of its new goals. .......Finally, if the purpose of the war was to affirm the concept of ethnic harmony, that is now also in ruins. The NATO occupation has coincided with a wave of reverse ethnic cleansing so that soon Kosovo will be Serb-free. An emboldened Montenegro is likely to declare independence from Yugoslavia. Macedonia, reeling under the war's impact, is sensing new tensions with its Albanian minority. Albania itself is quietly encouraging the Kosovars to join with it and, after attracting the Albanians in Macedonia, to create a greater Albania. This last outcome is unlikely, but all these trends are hardly conducive to religious harmony and regional stability......"

UPI 9/21/99 "....A newly created Kosovo Protection Corps, ostensibly to serve as a peacetime disaster relief agency, is allowed many more weapons than originally expected. Under an agreement signed Monday after 26 hours of marathon negotiations led by NATO Commander Gen. Wesley Clark, 2,000 weapons will be held in storage sites to be accessed by authorized corps members. International agencies earlier this week announced a 5,000-member strong civilian corps would be created to deal with things like fire fighting, search and rescue and rebuilding...."

HINA Croatian News Agency 9/24/99 "….The most wanted terrorist in the world, [Osama] Bin Laden, was issued a Bosnia-Hercegovina passport, Sarajevo weekly `Dani'says in the issue which hit the news stands on Thursday [24th September]. Laden was issued a Bosnian passport by the Bosnian embassy in Vienna in 1993, the source maintains. According to `Dani', the Bosnian Foreign Ministry was seized by panic when Mehrez Aodouni, another Bosnian passport bearer, was arrested in Istanbul on 9th September. What ensued was the destruction of all documents which might connect Bosnian Muslim authorities with the outlawed Saudi millionaire. Bin Laden allegedly obtained the Bosnian passport when the Bosnian Muslim side was making desperate attempts to collect financial assistance from Western and Arabic countries for the defence of the country….."

AFP 9/26/99 "….Isolated and apprehensive, Kosovo's Serb minority said Sunday it will demand its own defence force in response to the new Albanian-dominated Kosovo Protection Corps. "All we are asking of the United Nations is the same right that has been given to the Albanians with the setting up of the KPC," Oliver Ivanovic, self-proclaimed Serb mayor in the ethnically divided town of Kosovska Mitrovica, in northern Kosovo, told AFP….."

UPI 9/26/99 "….International peacekeepers arrested four Serbs near Orahovac on war crimes charges, a spokesman for the NATO-led force, KFOR, said Sunday. KFOR spokesman Ole Irgens said in Pristina that the four men had been accused of murder. No further details about the accusations were given….."

El Pais (Madrid) 9/23/99 Pablo Ordaz Freeper fie~on~feminism! Reports "…This piece from a Spanish newspaper has several interesting quotes. (I don't speak Spanish, but my daughter helped translate a little.) Some outstanding quotes:"War crimes, yes; genocide, no.""Perhaps the Serbs are not as bad as we have portrayed them.""The data of the UN...began with 44,000 dead, soon they lowered to 22,000 and now they go by 11,000. I'd like to see in the end how many there were, really."…"

Fox/Reuters 9/24/99 "….Senior U.S. officials have privately dropped their opposition to Kosovo's independence from Yugoslavia and say the Clinton administration increasingly sees the province's secession as inevitable, the Washington Post reported Friday. In a report from Pristina and quoting unidentified officials, the newspaper said the emerging consensus, which amounts to a major shift for the United States, is already having a significant impact on the international peacekeeping operation in Kosovo……"

Original Sources (www.originalsources.com) 9/24/99 Mary Mostert "…Today, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians now live in Kosovo, some of whom apparently never lived there before. Now it is everyone else who, in the words of President Clinton, are being "taken from their homes, forced to kneel in the dirt and sprayed with bullets." Pristina, which had 30,000 Serb residents when KFOR arrived, today has fewer than 1000 Serbs. The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which officially disbanded Sunday, had special "Serb-hunting" units, according to two KLA members. The special KLA units "forced the Serbs out of their homes and took them off to kill them in discreet places as far as was possible," said one of the KLA special unit members "But, if they put up any resistance, they mowed them down on the spot." said the rebel officer, whose nom de guerre is "the teacher". "Our group of seven men would go to the Serbs, house by house, and give them between 15 and 30 minutes to get out," the 'teacher' explained. "Then in came the mopping-up team, 13 of them, with the job of executing those who stayed behind," he added. The mopping-up team were "real professionals," said the burly 46-year-old with a Colt 45 pistol protruding from a jacket pocket. The Kosovo capital of Pristina was "split into four zones, each with four units that are still at work today. We have been working in the eastern districts. Does this bother the American people? It doesn’t seem to bother most of them. Many people still believe the stories told by Clinton and NATO spokesman Jamie Shea. The graves of the 100,000 Albanians that supposedly were killed by the Serbs, according to Jamie Shea, so far have not been located, in spite of 300 paid forensic experts who have been digging up cemetaries in Kosovo for three months. This, for some reason, is not a probem for some people who are determined to believe that all the problems in Kosovo are the fault of Slobodan Milosevic…."

UPI 9/23/99 Pamela Hess "….Outgoing NATO Secretary General Javier Solana sees no definite end to the western troop presence in Kosovo, and says Kosovo must never be allowed to be independent. ``Imagine if we start changing borders in Serbia, where will it stop?'' Solana said at a Washington breakfast today. Solana said the international community must remain engaged in Kosovo indefinitely. ``We have to be in Kosovo until the final standard is reached,'' he said, adding, ``One outcome will not be independence for Kosovo.'' ….."

Washington Post 9/24/99 R Jeffrey Smith "….Senior U.S. officials have privately dropped their opposition to Kosovo's independence from Yugoslavia and say the Clinton administration increasingly sees the province's secession as inevitable. Officials say the emerging consensus, which amounts to a major shift for the United States, is already having a significant impact on the international peacekeeping operation in Kosovo. The United States has become a leading advocate for the creation of independent institutions and legal structures that tend to isolate the fledgling United Nations protectorate from Yugoslavia's manifold economic problems and political troubles. U.S. officials deny that the administration's approach is meant to engineer the further breakup of Yugoslavia, as the Belgrade government claims. They say it is meant only to ensure that Kosovo becomes a viable, self-governing democracy with a successful economy. But they add that sovereignty issues should not be allowed to stand in the way of Kosovo's progress because it will likely gain its independence anyway….."

UPI 9/25/99 "….The coordinator of the Alliance for Change, an opposition coalition of some 30 parties, today said it will blockade Serbia in two weeks. Vladan Batic, leader of the Christian Democrat party, told a press conference broadcast by independent Belgrade media, ``If the Vojvodina coalition has managed to blockade the northern province, we as the largest opposition alliance are capable of blocking Serbia.'' ``We'll bring everything to a stop: roads, railways, bridges, border crossing points,'' Batic said, signaling that new actions would then follow after a respite of a few days. However, he did not disclose what kind of actions would be taken….."

UPI 9/24/99 "….An ugly incident took place during peaceful demonstrations against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in the western Serbian town of Sabac when a man drove his car into a column of protesters, knocking over and injuring a girl, Belgrade media reported Friday. The protesters were marching through the streets of Sabac after attending a rally of the opposition Alliance for Change. The driver managed to escape the pursuing marchers but his car was overturned where the incident occurred. The 11-year-old girl was later treated in the Sabac hospital, where doctors said her injuries were not life threatening and her condition was stable, the reports said….."

UPI 9/25/99 "…..The deputy Serbian Prime Minister, Dr. Milovan Bojic, has filed a complaint in a municipal court in Belgrade against the organizers of an opposition rally, claiming he was slandered. Belgrade media reported today that Bojic filed the suit over a Sept. 22 rally that featured a mock trial in which he was found guilty of helping ruin Serbia's health service and sentenced to submitting his resignation. Bojic, represented in the trial by his effigy in the form of a life- sized Muppet Show figure, faced the mock trial together with the Serbian health minister, Dr. Leposava Milicevic, at a rally staged by the opposition Alliance for Change…."

Reuters 10/4/99 "....Russia has warned the West that it could end its participation in Kosovo peacekeeping operations unless suggestions the province could secede from Yugoslavia are stopped, Interfax news agency said Monday. Interfax, quoting diplomatic sources, said Russia was concerned by comments from certain Western officials linked to the operation. "If we do not manage to reach an understanding, the Russian side will have no option but to cease taking part in the peacekeeping operation," Interfax quoted the sources as saying. "This is an extreme measure and the Russian side will undertake to do everything to prevent the collapse of the efforts of the international community." ....."

The Independent (UK) 10/3/99 "....AFTER INSISTING throughout its air bombardment of Yugoslavia that its use of depleted uranium munitions against Serb forces posed no hazard to human health, Nato officers in Kosovo now admit that particles from their shells may have contaminated soil near targets in Yugoslavia and could cause "inhalation" problems, especially for children. There has been a growing outcry against munitions containing depleted uranium (DU) - a waste product of the nuclear industry - since it was used in armour-piercing projectiles in the 1991 Gulf war. In the eight years since, hundreds of Iraqis living near the battlefields have died from mysterious cancers and grossly deformed children have been born to Iraqi soldiers who fought in the war. British and American veterans suffering from Gulf war syndrome suspect that the use of DU weapons caused their own sickness and cancers....."

European Stars and Stripes 10/5/99 Robert Reid "....With Serbs and ethnic Albanians blocking roads to press their demands, a NATO spokesman warned Monday that peacekeepers will take appropriate action to restore freedom of movement throughout Kosovo. Roland Lavoie also denounced comments made by an ethnic Albanian leader, Hashim Thaci, saying he has no role or influence in the new civilian organization being established after the Kosovo Liberation Army officially disbanded....... Lavoie also berated Thaci over comments he made Sunday at a rally in the American-controlled city of Gnjilane. "Yesterday, it was reported in the press that Mr. Thaci made a number of statements about the [Kosovo Protection Force] that are not only factually incorrect but also could be construed as inflammatory," Lavoie said. Thaci, the political leader of the former rebel army, told 2,000 supporters Sunday in Gnjilane that "Belgrade will never again make decisions about Kosovo."....."

Christian Science Monitor 10/5/99 Scott Peterson "....International attempts to assess the risks from depleted uranium (DU) bullets used in Kosovo and Serbia are being thwarted by American reluctance to pinpoint where DU was used. As part of a sweeping United Nations environment damage assessment of the Kosovo conflict, UN agencies have made inquiries about exactly where and how much DU ammunition was used in the 78-day NATO bombing campaign. So far, they have received little data. "They say it's militarily sensitive information," says David Kyd, spokesman for the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. The IAEA is examining radiation aspects for the Balkans Task Force, a group created last May by the UN Environment Program to investigate the impact of the war....."

AP 10/5/99 "....Ethnic Albanians stoned a Russian-Serb convoy in northern Kosovo on Tuesday, injuring some Russian troops and the French police trying to stop the clash, a French official said. At least one Serb was killed, according to Yugoslavia's Beta news agency and Albanian sources reached by phone in Kosovska Mitrovica. Seventeen Serbs were injured, two of them critically, and two Serb cars and one truck were burned, Beta reported. Thirteen French soldiers were injured in the clash, the news agency said. ..."

The Washington Times 10/13/99 Philip Smucker "..... GNJILANE, Yugoslavia This city, which survived Kosovo's war largely unscathed, has become a bastion of Balkan-style ethnic cleansing since coming under U.S. military control, Western officials say. Only 2,000 Serbs remain from among a population of 22,000 at the end of the war. The city's Gypsy population has dwindled nearly as quickly, from a total of 870 after the war to just 150 today, according to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE.) "The shame is that this has gone on under the watch of the international community," said a European official with the OSCE who has spent the last 10 months working in eastern Kosovo. "Unless something changes, this city will soon be emptied of all its minorities." Surprised international officials say they had expected that Gnjilane, having escaped the wrath of Serbian paramilitaries and NATO bombs, would be easier to police than other cities in Kosovo. ...."

Philadelphia Inquirer 10/14/99 Jeffrey Fleishman ".... Near bombed oil refineries and crumpled petrochemical plants, Petar Danilov baited his hook with bread dough and fished for carp in a canal polluted with vinyl chloride, mercury and ammonia. "I'm eating these fish, but I'm not feeding them to my kids," said Danilov, standing in wading boots and watching a bobber drift on the murky water flowing into the Danube River. "It will take years to know the long-term damage to the Danube. In the meantime, I'll fish." ...."

Long Island Newsday 10/10/99 Matthew McAllester "....It's not just the blond down covering Kastriot Gashi's upper lip that makes him look young. He's small both in height and build. He has the wavy hair and big eyes of a boy hero from a children's book. But this 15-year-old boy, who wouldn't stand a chance of making it onto any high-school football team, has an adult's job. One afternoon in early June, Kastriot was walking down a road in the northern Albanian town of Krume carrying a small Thompson machine gun, as was his duty as a soldier in the Kosovo Liberation Army, the ethnic Albanian guerrillas then fighting Serbian forces in Kosovo. "I joined because of the massacres," said Kastriot, referring to Serb killings of Albanian civilians during the struggle between the KLA and the Serbs. "And now I want revenge. I want to send them to the [War Crimes Tribunal at The] Hague. I consider them criminals. If they were real soldiers, they would fight against soldiers, not civilians." ...."

Long Island Newsday 10/13/99 Charles Ingrao ".....Over the last decade, perhaps the most powerful argument for intervention in the former Yugoslavia has been the vivid memory of the horrible atrocities committed during World War II. .......Behind the reluctant statesmanship of President Bill Clinton, NATO air power ended the killing in Bosnia and, most recently, in Kosovo. So now we can say that we've learned from the horrors of World War II and acted decisively against ethnic cleansing. Or can we? Today very few of us are aware of a second wave of ethnic cleansing that took place with the defeat of the Third Reich, when 14 million German civilians were driven from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe. The largest expulsion in human history was so brutal that 2 million refugees died in the process of fleeing to Germany-from exposure, starvation, or outright violence. To this day the survivors' descendants represent 20 percent of Germany's 80 million people. Yet, very few people outside Germany know or care about their fate, certainly not their former homelands, which have carefully expunged all evidence of their presence there. Such was the punishment for their "collective guilt" that, even today, many European and American "liberal" intellectuals cannot bring themselves to sympathize with the plight of these forgotten victims, even though most of them had taken no part in the Nazi crimes perpetrated in their name. ..... The monstrous acts committed in the name of "Greater Serbia" have transformed the Serbs into the Nazis of the '90s and ready candidates for expulsion from Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. This summer alone, at least 100,000 Serbs have fled Kosovo in the wake of a brutal regimen of murder, rape, assault, arson and robbery meted out by their former victims. Most have left for Serbia, where they have shared the fate of over a half-million Croatian and Bosnian Serb refugees, most of whom have been denied access to schools, jobs, housing and other scarce resources. The majority of these refugees committed no crime; some actually risked their lives by shielding their Albanian neighbors from Serb paramilitaries and providing them with food and shelter. ....."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/1999-10/13/063r-101399-idx.html 10/13/99 Peter Finn "....Valentin Krumov had just arrived in Kosovo, one of the legions of U.N. workers come to help rebuild this devastated land. A Bulgarian, Krumov, 38, attracted the attention of a group of ethnic Albanian teenagers as he took an after-dinner walk with two female colleagues along Pristina's crowded main street Monday evening. Someone speaking Serbian asked him the time, and Krumov replied in Serbian, unaware that he was apparently being put to a kind of ethnic identification test. It was a test he unwittingly failed, and it cost him his life. The group of young thugs immediately attacked Krumov, punching him and kicking him to the ground. A shot rang out, the crowd fled and Krumov's first night in Pristina ended with his murder -- on Mother Teresa Street. ...."

Reuters (via ABC) 10/11/99 ".....War crimes investigators have found nothing in the shaft of a Kosovo mine where hundreds of bodies were rumored to be hidden, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia said Monday. "They found absolutely nothing. They didn't even find animal bones," tribunal spokeswoman Kelly Moore told Reuters. Rumors that Serb forces had hidden the bodies of up to 700 ethnic Albanians in theTrebca lead and zinc mine, near the northern city of Mitrovica, had been circulating for months...."

London Times 10/12/99 Sergei Romanenko "....In recent weeks there has been much discussion of the similarity between Russia's operations in Chechnya and Nato's war against Yugoslavia. Foreign specialists have said that Moscow was using the same methods which between March and June it denounced as barbaric. In fact, Moscow has not one but two teachers in this matter. We are trying to imitate Slobodan Milosevic's aims and Nato's methods. Officially, Belgrade is not expressing a position on the events in Chechnya. However, subconsciously, it cannot fail to compare the situation in the Caucasus and in the Balkans, often drawing conclusions which are unfavourable to its "great Slavic brother". ....."

Long Island Newsday 10/12/99 "....A deepening rift over humanitarian aid to Serbia is developing between the United States and its European allies. Although it's based on defensible principles on both sides, it's an unnecessary division and it should not stand in the way of providing help to Serbian civilians to weather the severe Balkan winter. The Clinton administration is right to insist on continuing to put economic pressure on the regime of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. But it's wrong to oppose a European Union plan to provide $5 million in heating oil to two Serbian cities controlled by opposition parties. The heating-oil aid would be part of a broader assistance plan that would later include medicines, food and even some limited help in rebuilding water and power plants. ...."

AFP 10/7/99 ".....The UN administrator for Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner said Thursday he was "very worried" about the security situation in Kosovo as more evidence of planned ethnic-hate attacks added to the tide of violence in the province this week. Speaking in Rome, Kouchner revealed that two bombs had been discovered -- one Wednesday in UH World Food Programme buildings and one Tuesday in a separate UN building. The discoveries follow the violent clash Tuesday between ethnic Albanians mourners and Serb passers-by at a funeral in Mitrovica. One Serb died and 10 were injured in the incident. In addition 18 KFOR troops and three members of UNMIK's internationally-staffed police force were injured. "These incidents show how deep the hatred and the opposition between the two communities is," Kouchner said, adding that rivalries "would not just disappear miraculously in a few months." ....."

Stratfor 10/7/99 "....The UN and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) are at odds over how to proceed in Kosovo. Nearly four months after the end of NATO bombing in Kosovo, the international community has no decisive plans for Kosovo s future. On the other hand, former KLA leader Hashim Thaci is clear about his goals. In the face of international hesitation, his objectives are bound to become the de facto Kosovo policy......While NATO lacks a plan, the KLA has clear objectives. Since before it drew NATO into the fighting, the KLA s mission has been the creation of an independent Albanian Kosovo. The KLA has little intention of waiting for European bureaucrats to determine the election process, and will undoubtedly take advantage of this period of NATO and U.N. indecision to transform their plan into official policy. ...."

The Australian 10/9/99 Robert Burns AP ".....THE United States military acknowledged for the first time today that it used a form of computer warfare against Yugoslavia as part of NATO's air war last spring. Army General Henry Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made the remark during an interview in which he discussed the Pentagon's decision to assign US Space Command the responsibility for coordinating both the defence of military computer networks and attacks on enemy networks....."

Agence France-Presse (AFP) 10/15/99 "….NATO soldiers moved in Friday morning to separate several thousand Serb and ethnic Albanian demonstrators in the centre of the divided Kosovar town of Kosovska Mitrovica. French soldiers and police came under a volley of stones from the ethnic Albanians as they tried to break through to the Serb side of the bridge. According to an unofficial report several police officers were slightly hurt….."

Toronto Sun 10/14/99 George Jonas "….Gwynne Dyer in the Toronto Star, describes three disasters (Dyer's word) that are being prepared in Kosovo. Disaster one: instead of NATO's ostensible war aim of ethnic harmony, it's now the Serb minority that's being cleansed from the territory. Disaster two: this will discredit what was supposed to be an important new precedent in international affairs, namely that the war was fought for human rights, not just Albanian rights. Disaster three: Kosovo is being handed over by default "to the worst elements of the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army), people who have no mercy for Serbs and no love for democracy." …"

Washington Post 10/17/99 Peter Finn "…..Just four months after they descended from the hills as conquering heroes and declared themselves the new masters of Kosovo, the political leadership that emerged from the Kosovo Liberation Army is suffering a collapse of its support, according to voter surveys, interviews with ordinary ethnic Albanians and even senior figures in the rebel movement. The former guerrillas are ensnared in a deep political crisis, caused by popular unhappiness with their heavy-handed power grabs, rising disgust about the violence plaguing Kosovo and the rebels' underestimation of their political rivals…."

UPI 10/20/99 "....The United Nations Civilian Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and the KFOR peacekeeping force Tuesday rejected a plan formulated by Kosovo's ethnic Serbs to organize their own independent enclaves, known as cantons, and security force. The two organizations said in a statement that an ethnic Serb security force would duplicate the efforts of the fledgling Kosovo Protection Corps, and was also unacceptable because membership was based on ethnic background. KFOR and UNMIK said in a joint statement they fully understand the ethnic Serbs' security concerns, but they consider formation of an ethnic Serb security force to be unnecessary. ..."

New York Times 10/20/99 Jane Perlez "...The secretary-general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, warned Tuesday that the "built in tension" between the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo who want independence and the United Nations, which is administering the territory as part of Yugoslavia, would mount as time went on. Annan suggested that he had no immediate solution to the problem but stressed that holding quick elections was not an easy answer. He said he was determined that the United Nations should not repeat what he called the "mistakes" made in Bosnia, where the results of national elections held nine months after the Dayton peace accord "legitimized those who caused the war" when hard-line ethnic leaders were voted into office. ...."

AP 10/21/99 "....U.N. police are investigating several fellow officers suspected of pressuring Serbs to sell their homes to ethnic Albanians at prices below market value, a U.N. official said today. The inquiry was launched after Serbian media reported that two U.N. officers told Serbs they should sell their homes to Albanians and instructed them to contact an ethnic Albanian lawyer to draw up the contracts. ..."

Stratfor.com 10/17/99 "....During its four-month war against Yugoslavia, NATO argued that Kosovo was a land wracked by mass murder; official estimates indicated that some 10,000 ethnic Albanians were killed in a Serb rampage of ethnic cleansing. Yet four months into an international investigation bodies numbering only in the hundreds have been exhumed. The FBI has found fewer than 200. Piecing together the evidence, it appears that the number of civilian ethnic Albanians killed is far less than was claimed. While new findings could invalidate this view, evidence of mass murder has not yet materialized on the scale used to justify the war. This could have serious foreign policy and political implications for NATO and alliance governments..... By the very rules that NATO has set up, the magnitude of slaughter is critical. Politically, the alliance depended heavily on the United States for information about the war. If the United States and NATO were mistaken, then alliance governments that withstood heavy criticism, such as the Italian and German governments, may be in trouble. Confidence in both U.S. intelligence and leadership could decline sharply. Stung by scandal and questions about its foreign policy, the Clinton administration is already having difficulty influencing world events. That influence could fall further. There are many consequences if it turns out that NATO's claims about Serb atrocities were substantially false......"

Agence France-Presse 10/18/99 "....China Monday rejected reports that it aided the Yugoslav military in its war against NATO and said the Alliance was solely responsible for the May bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. "The so called theory that the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia provided support for the Yugoslav military side is pure fabrication with ulterior motives," a foreign ministry spokeman told AFP. "No matter what kind of lies the relevant parties fabricated, the US-led NATO cannot shirk from the responsibility they should take for the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia," he said. ....."

UPI Wire 10/18/99 "....Representatives of ethnic Serb communities in Kosovo have decided to form their own separate enclaves in the province and set up a protection force to parallel the predominantly Albanian Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC), Belgrade media reported Monday. .... "

Agence France-Presse 10/19/99 "....NATO's new secretary general Lord Robertson, who travels Friday to Kosovo, told its ethnic Albanian majority Tuesday to put a halt to revenge attacks against Serbs. "The returning Albanian majority must control their understandable anger, and refrain from attacking the minorities that remain" in Kosovo, Robertson said in a speech to a gathering of the Atlantic Treaty Organization in this eastern France city...... "At some point, when the situation stabilizes sufficiently, a political settlement will have to be found to determine Kosovo's final status," Robertson said in his speech, copies of which were handed out to reporters prior to delivery. ...."

NET WORLD DAILY 10/20/99 Jon Dougherty "....An independent intelligence report issued by a U.S.-based firm says that ethnic Albanians "numbering only in the hundreds" have been found in mass graves after four months of investigation by, among others, the FBI. ....The U.S. State Department did not return phone calls seeking comment on the [Stratfor] report. But Dave Miller, a spokesman for European affairs at the FBI, told WorldNetDaily the investigation in Kosovo consisted only of "laboratory support for the International Criminal Tribunal (ICT)." "They requested that we look at a finite number of locations, and within those locations there were 124 bodies -- 100 of which have been identified" so far, he said. "The FBI was not sent there to conduct mass grave exhumations or to locate and find the missing populace of Kosovo." ......The Stratfor report admitted that "the tribunal's primary aim is not to find all the reported dead. Instead, its investigators are gathering evidence to prosecute war criminals for four offenses: Grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, violations of the laws of war, genocide, and crimes against humanity." "The tribunal believes that it will, however, be able to produce an accurate death count in the future, although it will not say when," according to Stratfor...... Controversy about the actual numbers of ethnic Albanians killed by Serbian troops began on Oct. 11, when the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Republic of Yugoslavia reported that the Trepca mines in Kosovo, where 700 murdered ethnic Albanians were reportedly hidden, contained no bodies. "Three days later," the report said, "the U.S. Defense Department released its review of the Kosovo conflict, saying that NATO's war was a reaction to the ethnic cleansing campaign by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic." The Defense Department report called Milosevic's campaign "a brutal means to end the crisis on his terms." However, the tribunal's findings and the Defense Department's assertion served to raise even more concerns about the actual number of "cleansed" Albanians...... So far tribunal investigators are a little more than a quarter of the way through investigating some 400 reported mass gravesites...."

London Times 10/19/99 James Pringle ".... Radiators and hot water pipes remain uncomfortably cold in the Yugoslav capital, even though temperatures are dropping below freezing. Meanwhile, Government and opposition vie to see who will supply the most power to a population dreading the oncoming winter. Western sources estimate that Nato bombing raids this year knocked out a third of the national grid. State television, controlled by the Government of President Milosevic, boasted on Sunday that the state Serbian oil industry had reached agreement with the Hungarian state oil company for the trans-shipment of Russian gas, which had been blocked for non-payment of debts...."

Fox News 10/20/99 George Jahn "....Bogus lists of suspected war criminals that bear the name of the banned Kosovo Liberation Army have been sighted in several communities and could result in violence, NATO said today. Maj. Roland Lavoie called the "lists of alleged war criminals'' illegal and dangerous and warned that they could put those listed or pictured on the posters at grave risk. He urged Kosovo's people "not to take justice in their own hands'' - either by publishing such lists or by hunting down those on them. Lavoie did not elaborate or describe the lists, but it appeared those on it were Serbs, who have increasingly been the target of revenge-motivated violence by ethnic Albanians......"

UPI Wire 10/20/99 "....Montenegro's President Milo Djukanovic said Wednesday the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia does not exist because President Slobodan Milosevic "drastically violates the constitution and because all federal bodies and all structures of authority are subjugated to his dictatorship."....."

United Press International 10/21/99 "....The American general in charge of the Kosovo air war told a Senate panel Thursday that France ``on many occasions'' prevented NATO jets from attacking key strategic targets in Serbia and Montenegro, playing a ``red card'' in alliance meetings. Lt. Gen. Michael Short, in emotional and colorful testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he wanted to fight the 78-day war differently by going after Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's strategic power centers right away...."

AP/Fox News 10/22/99 ".....Ethnic Albanians who fled their war-torn homeland for the U.S. must reimburse relief agencies for their airfare here, according to their refugee contracts. The repayment of so-called "travel loans'' has been official U.S. policy for all refugees since at least 1986. But Kosovo refugees told The Star-Ledger of Newark in a story published today they were shocked by the repayment rule and felt they had no choice but to sign the contract...."

Reuters 10/21/99 ".....Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), the medical relief group which won the 1999 Nobel peace prize, has thrown out its Greek branch for sending doctors to Serbia during the Kosovo war, a local spokeswoman said on Thursday. ``MSF has expelled us for our action in Serbia. There were reactions by the central offices to send in a team to Yugoslavia, but we decided to go with it,'' Sofia Ioannou told Reuters........ She said the Greek team did nothing more than follow MSF's charter to help warring sides regardless of their ethnicity.....Ioannou said the Greek group would continue to operate on its own as a provider of relief......"

Boston Globe 10/19/99 Barbara Borst ".....Running afoul of US policy toward Yugoslavia, a group of retired American military commanders and Serb-Americans is struggling to bring humanitarian aid to Serbian cities damaged by NATO bombs. Calling their group the Yugoslavian-American Humanitarian Relief Council, the former generals and admirals have run the gauntlet seeking clearance for a reconnaissance mission to Serbia, one of Yugoslavia's two republics and the main target of the 11-week bombing. They propose to work through private companies to supply medicine, food, and spare parts for water purification systems and electrical plants. ..."

Reuters 10/21/99 "....A Serbian interpreter working for the United Nations mission in Kosovo was seriously injured when a grenade was thrown into her apartment, UNMIK said on Thursday. It was the second reported attack on a Serb-speaking U.N. worker in Kosovo in 10 days. Last week a Bulgarian UNMIK member was shot dead on his first evening in the province after being asked the time in a busy street in central Pristina crowded with Albanians. ..."

Associated Press 10/24/99 "....Some 4,000 ethnic Albanians gathered Sunday to reaffirm their refusal to allow Russian peacekeepers to be stationed in this southern town, two months after barricades went up to prevent their deployment. ``I am here to give my support to the people of Orahovac for this peaceful protest against the entrance of Russian forces,'' popular folk singer Adelina Ismajli said. Ethnic Albanians erected barricades on the edge of town Aug. 23 to prevent Russian peacekeepers from deploying in Orahovac, 30 miles southwest of Pristina......"

Houston Chronicle 10/24/99 Richard Mertens "…. All over Kosovo, the race against winter is on. International organizations are scrambling to put up roofs and provide other emergency housing before bad weather hits, but many Kosovars are growing desperate. After weeks of sunshine and mild days, sudden cold has caught the ravaged province unprepared. Cold nights and raw, gloomy days have chilled to the bone a population that in many places is still living in miserable conditions, sleeping in tents and makeshift shelters, often without heat or any warm clothing beyond what people were wearing when they fled Kosovo as refugees in the spring. Help from abroad, so eagerly awaited, has been slow to materialize…."

Washington Post 10/25/99 Anna Husarska "….The entry of the multinational forces into Kosovo didn't end violence there; it just ushered in a new kind of violence -- attacks by ethnic Albanians on ethnic non-Albanians (Serbs, Gypsies, Goranis). Some Albanians, known for their ties with Serbs, also have been killed, and it is getting worse every day. The U.N. mission in Kosovo asked that ethnic Albanian leaders take a public stance against this new form of "ethnic cleansing," and they did -- up to a point...."

USA Today 10/26/99 John Omicinski "…. The 78-day air campaign against Serbia and the peacemaking effort that followed in Kosovo has cost taxpayers nearly $5 billion, according to Pentagon figures. Count in the costs of Bosnia and Iraq operations and the 1999 costs of U.S. emergency operations abroad total close to $7 billion. Replenishing supplies of air-to-ground cruise missiles and so-called "standoff" weapons that can be fired by aircraft from miles away will cost $1.5 billion alone…."

The Associated Press 10/27/99 Robert Burns "…..The Army said Wednesday it has scheduled three National Guard divisions to rotate with active duty divisions in commanding U.S. peacekeeping forces in Bosnia over the next three years……. Army forces have been on peacekeeping duty in Bosnia since 1995 and there is no end in sight to the NATO-led mission. Reservists have been on duty in Bosnia from the start. But now, for the first time, the Army is putting a National Guard division in charge of a combined ``team'' of active and reserve units….."

U.S. News & World Report 11/1/99 Kevin Whitelaw "….In a race against the fast-approaching bitter Balkan winter, humanitarian groups are scrambling to provide makeshift shelters suitable for some 600,000 needy Kosovars. Most of the homeless live in tents, stables, or garages that are not insulated, but preparing for winter is proving even more difficult than feared. Hampered by limited supplies, transportation delays, and a lack of skilled labor, aid groups cannot yet guarantee that everyone will have a warm place to stay when temperatures get really cold around mid-November. In some areas, too many homes are beyond repair. Like most everything else in Kosovo, the shelter program is being run largely by foreigners and is behind schedule. Four months after NATO troops took control, the United Nations is still trying to get officials in place to run the government….."

CATO Institute 10/25/99 Christopher Layne ".....The threat of air strikes failed to get Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic to sign the Rambouillet peace accord. Once the air strikes began, the unintended consequences were horrific. Not only did the bombing trigger a refugee crisis, but U.S.-Russian relations were driven to a post-Cold War low-a development that makes Europe and the world more dangerous. Even the various rationales for NATO intervention offered by the administration were faulty. Those rationales included assertions that (1) genocide was occurring in Kosovo; (2) if the United States did not intervene, American credibility would be lost and dictators around the world would assume that they had a free hand; and (3) NATO's role as the guarantor of European security would be discredited, thereby increasing the risk that Europe would be drawn into its third Continent-wide war this century. .... The humanitarian situation in Kosovo prior to NATO bombing, however, was not unusual in the annals of counterinsurgency wars. NATO member Turkey has been for years waging a similar war against Kurdish separatists. Moreover, the conflict in Kosovo was not a test of American credibility-the stakes were both murky and meager-until Washington needlessly transformed the situation into a test of American resolve. The Kosovo war was a challenge not to NATO's traditional role as a collective-defense alliance but only to its new and dubious role as a post-Cold War crisis-management institution...."

Chicago Sun-Times 11/2/99 John O'Sullivan "...."I want to see a political system based on pluralism," says one. "No, it must be a pluralist democratic system," replies a second. "Not enough," says the third. "It must be a pluralist, democratic, multiethnic system." That final declaration wins the pot, since the "principle of multiethnicity" is something to which the United Nations mission, the humanitarian non-governmental organizations and the international community now all running Kosovo have committed themselves. After a while, however, one notices that these splendid platitudes are uttered by men surrounded by bodyguards and, further, that some of the speakers could get employment as bodyguards themselves....."

Stratfor 11/2/99 "....Although the Czech Republic was admitted to NATO in March and is now in the process of joining the European Union (EU), reports describe it as the center of European activity for Russian spies. Despite the Czech government's intentions, the administration and its military are said to be overrun with people allied with Russia via loyalty, bribery or salary. Unwilling to abandon their democratic values, the country does not wish to resort to the totalitarian tactics needed to rout the spy infrastructure...... NATO membership is another major incentive for locating an intelligence operation in the country. In February 1997 Russia denied allegations its agents in Prague were acting to prevent Czech NATO membership. This may have been true, considering how much more useful the country is to Russia now that it is a member. Like other new NATO members Poland and Hungary, the Czech Republic has not managed to convincingly control remaining Russian elements. The recent disclosure on Russian spies in Prague only reaffirms our expectations that, while the Czech Republic is likely committed to its responsibilities, NATO will not be able to trust it as much as other members. Not only will this injure NATO's fragile internal unity, but it will also affect future membership bids by former Soviet states. NATO can expect to find similar obstacles in the Baltics and the Balkans...."

U.S. News & World Report 11/8/99 Richard Newman "……The war was not going well. Serbian forces were sowing terror across Kosovo. NATO pilots squinting through clouds could do little to stop them. Errant NATO bombs had killed dozens of civilians and shaken support for the alliance. Then the Pentagon saw it had another problem. A Colorado outfit called Space Imaging was about to launch a picture-tak- ing satellite with clarity nearly as good as that of U.S. spy satellites. The company could have sold photos of NATO air bases or troop encampments to, say, Serbian operatives. That had to be stopped. But how?…. "We got lucky," says a U.S. official: A malfunction sent Space Imaging's satellite plunging in- to the Pacific Ocean 30 min-utes after it lifted off on April 27. Fortune may not be so kind next time."…."

AFP 10/31/99 "....The former leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), Hashim Thaci, pledged Sunday to create an independent Kosovo "free of the fear of Serb police" in an address in this southwest Kosovo town. "The United Nations and international community promised a free Kosovo... to which everyone could return. This has not happened...."

Agence France Presse 10/30/99 "....A Yugoslav minister said Friday that NATO plans to attack Russia after "conquering" Belgrade, comparing the alleged scheme to "Hitler's scenario" for dominating Europe, the Tanjug news agency reported. The NATO campaign against Yugoslavia this summer "has nothing to do with Kosovo," said Information Minister Goran Matic in an interview to state radio quoted by the news agency. "Kosovo was used as an excuse and mechanism for attempting to break Yugoslavia," Matic said...."

Tampa Bay Online 10/30/99 "…..Demonstrators planning large anti-American protests will be kept a safe distance from President Clinton during his visit to Greece next month, a senior law enforcement official said Saturday. ``People will be able to demonstrate if they want to (but) foreign guests of the state must be protected,'' Dimitris Efstathiadis, general secretary of Greece's public order ministry, told private Flash radio. Clinton's Nov. 13-15 visit follows a surge of anti-American feeling created by NATO's 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. During the conflict, many people in NATO-member Greece sympathized with fellow-Orthodox Serbs….."

New York Times 10/29/99 Carlotta Gall "….Officials of NATO and the United Nations struggled Thursday to explain how they failed to protect a convoy of Serbian civilians from a sudden and ferocious Albanian attack on Wednesday. Representatives of the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which organized the convoy, expressed relief that no one had been killed and said the incident was under investigation to prevent a recurrence….."

Newsday 10/29/99 Edith Lederer "….Russia complained Friday that NATO and the United Nations weren't doing enough to protect Kosovo's Serbs from ethnic Albanian attacks. Russia, which holds this month's rotating presidency of the Security Council, made its criticisms in response to an attack in Kosovo Wednesday on a Serb convoy that was fleeing to neighboring Macedonia. While part of the NATO-escorted convoy was traveling through the center of Pec, Kosovo's third-largest city, about 300 ethnic Albanians mobbed the Serbs, pulled people into the streets and set fire to 15 vehicles, said Bernard Miyet, the U.N. undersecretary-general for peacekeeping. …."

The Guardian 10/27/99 Paul Brown "… The rules of warfare which resulted in the people of Serbia and Kosovo being faced with life-threatening pollution should be reviewed, the head of the UN Environment Programme's Balkans Taskforce, set up to study the environmental aftermath of the Kosovo conflict, said yesterday. Pekka Haavisto questioned the bombing of industrial plants close to big cities when it posed an immediate risk of pollution. Mr Haavisto, a Finnish pollution expert, was addressing a scientific, religious and environmental symposium on the problems of pollution on the Danube. ..."

Los Angeles Times 10/28/88 Alexander Cockburn "….Whatever horrors they may have been planning, the Serbs were not engaged in genocidal activities in Kosovo before the bombing began….. After the war was over, on June 25, President Clinton told a White House news conference that tens of thousands of people had been killed in Kosovo on Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's orders. A week before came the statement from Geoff Hoon of the British Foreign Office that, according to reports, mostly from refugees, it appeared that about 10,000 Kosovar Albanians had been killed in more than 100 massacres…..Teams of forensic investigators from 15 nations, including a detachment from the FBI, have been at work since June and have examined about 150 of 400 sites of alleged mass murder. There's still immense uncertainty, but at this point it's plain that there are not enough bodies to warrant the claim that the Serbs had a program of extermination. The FBI team has made two trips to Kosovo and investigated 30 sites containing nearly 200 bodies... The U.N. figures, said Perez Pujol, director of the Instituto Anatomico Forense de Cartagena, began with 44,000 dead, dropped to 22,000 and now stand at 11,000. He and his fellows were prepared to perform at least 2,000 autopsies in their zone. So far, they've found 187 corpses….."

The Washington Times 10/25/99 Lisa Hoffman Scripps Howard News Service "….With utmost secrecy during the war in Kosovo, the United States triggered a superweapon that catapulted the country into a military era that could forever alter the ways of war and the march of history. Silently, American forces launched offensive cyber-combat, a development of breathtaking promise and peril that some experts say matches in significance the first use of bombs dropped from warplanes during World War I and the nuclear decimation of Hiroshima in 1945. Indeed, experts both inside and outside the Pentagon say the range of capability will include disrupting or disabling an enemy army's communications systems, as well as blitzing weapons themselves --for example, by reprogramming a cruise missile to turn around and plow into the ship or plane that fired it. Even so, the United States embarked on this unprecedented path with only a rudimentary rule book guiding how, when and why to use a weapon capable of crippling not only an enemy army, but also its civilian populace -- all without shedding a drop of American blood….."

Inside the Pentagon 10/28/99 "….Speaking by telephone in Washington, DC, on Oct. 21, [Gen Wesley] Clark told Inside the Pentagon the discovery of genocidvictims "absolutely" substantiates an earlier estimate by the United Nations' chief administrator in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, that 11,000 bodies were interred in mass graves. Some doubt was cast on Kouchner's statement when the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia immediately disavowed the number, according to a tribunal spokesman…… But the Yugoslavia war crimes tribunal spokesman, Paul Risley, told Inside the Pentagon on Oct. 27 that while forensics investigations carried out to date are consistent with projections for a death toll in the neighborhood of 10,000 to 11,000 Kosovar Albanians, just one-quarter of that inquiry has been completed. With about 325 of a suspected 450 mass grave sites yet to be examined, only a fraction of the anticipated victims have been uncovered. Asked if 11,000 bodies had already been found, Risley responded, "Of course not." ….. As it stands, the figure Clark cited exceeds some U.S. government tallies by nearly an order of magnitude. A State Department official, for example, told ITP this week that the remains of just 1,400 Kosovar Albanians have been discovered. If that assessment is correct, ultimately the death toll could be closer to 5,600 -- still a horrific number but well short of the level of genocide many Western officials accused Serbs of carrying out last spring….."

Philadelphia Inquirer 10/27/99 Trudy Rubin "….Four months after Serb forces were driven out of Kosovo, violent men still threaten the province. This time they are ethnic Albanians, who, many believe, come from the former Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The victims are Serbs and Roma (gypsies) who have remained in Kosovo - along with Kosovar Albanians who dare to call for tolerance. This struggle between the forces of tolerance and the thugs will determine whether Kosovo can develop democratic institutions. It will also determine when and whether NATO troops can leave...."

Reuters 10/27/99 "…..Up to eight Serbs were reported missing after a column of ethnic Serbs from Kosovo under United Nations protection was attacked in the western town of Pec on Wednesday, the U.N.'s refugee agency reported. A spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said between three and eight members of the column, headed for the republic of Montenegro, were missing after it was attacked by ethnic Albanians in Pec, adding that several vehicles were on fire. ..."

International Herald Tribune 10/27/99 Bernard Kouchner ".....In Kosovo, the United Nations faces the unenviable task of trying to rehabilitate the victim without the victim turning the oppressor. The ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo suffered for 10 years under the brutal subjugation of the Milosevic regime. Now a sinister reminder of that oppression is re-emerging as the remaining minorities, particularly, the Serbs, find themselves the victims of the severest forms of discrimination and reprisal, including murder. ..."

Stratfor 10/27/99 "....Albanian Prime Minister Pandeli Majko resigned Oct. 25, officially transferring power back into the hands of longtime arch rivals Fatos Nano and Sali Berisha, who will now directly compete for control of Albania. This event, the most recent in a chain of Albanian political developments, will have ramifications for the entire region. While NATO expects Albania to act as a unified country, like it did during the Kosovo conflict, there is a new and potentially violent disagreement developing between ethnic-Albanian subgroups, which could easily spill into Kosovo. Despite the international community's efforts to keep moderate leaders in power, Albania has returned to the extremist pre-Kosovo war leadership notorious for its internal feuding. This month, the opposition Democratic Party elected former President Berisha to its highest position. Soon after, the party began rallying for the ruling Socialist Party to relinquish power in order to create a coalition government and plan for early elections. The prime minister did resign, but no coalition was offered. Now, much to Berisha's dismay, former Prime Minister Nano - as the ruling party's leader - will appoint a new prime minister, pending presidential approval....."

AP 11/2/99 "….Nearly 3,000 student activists gave a boost to the faltering protests of Yugoslav opposition parties Tuesday, marching through the streets and demonstrating against the government. ``Here we go again!'' the crowd chanted in a collective reminiscence of similar student protests three years ago that nearly toppled President Slobodan Milosevic. Among the students' demands are fair elections in the hopes of ousting Milosevic and his government, whom they blamed for a decade of repression, growing economic hardship, and the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia that culminated in Serbia's loss of Kosovo province earlier this year. …..In Kosovo Tuesday, a Serb crowd roughed up two U.N. policemen, breaking the nose of one and giving the other a black eye, U.N. officials said….."

Toronto Star 11/3/99 Richard Gwyn "…..IN THE GENOCIDE of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo by the forces of Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic, the worst incident occurred at the Trepca mine. As reported by American and NATO officials, large numbers of bodies were brought in by trucks under the cover of darkness. The bodies were then thrown down the shafts, or were disposed of entirely in the mine's vats of hydrochloric acid. Estimates of the number of dead began at 1,000. That was six months ago, in the middle of the war undertaken to halt what both U.S. President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair called ``a human catastrophe.'' Estimates of the number of ethnic Albanians slaughtered went upward from 10,000. U.S. Defence Secretary William Cohen put the count at 100,000. Three weeks ago, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia released the findings of Western forensic teams investigating the horror at Trepca. There were not 1,000 bodies down the mine shafts at Trepca, reported the tribunal. There were not 100 bodies there. There was not one body there, nor was there any evidence the vats had ever been used to dispose of human remains……"

AFP 11/6/99 "…..The UN's civil administrator for Kosovo on Friday warned that if local Kosovar government employees continued unpaid, they would turn to the black market and mafia for cash. "First, we need money," Bernard Kouchner told reporters after he presented his report on the situation in the UN-administered Yugoslav province to the Security Council. Kouchner asked the council for 135 million dollars to pay the employees. "It was the main message, and it has been very well received," he said. A French diplomat, Kouchner was assigned to lead the UN civilian administration for Kosovo last July, after Belgrade withdrew its forces from the war-torn province. Since then, Kouchner has alternately come under fire from both Serbs and Kosovar Albanians, each accusing him of favoring the other side, as he goes about his task of restoring Kosovo to normal life. …."

New York Times 11/5/99 Carlotta Gall "….- Kosovo Albanians have become increasingly aggressive in attacking not only Serbs in this battered province, but also Gypsies and other ethnic minorities, according to foreign officials in charge of restoring peaceful administration in Kosovo. A joint report issued here on Wednesday by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees described "a climate of violence and impunity." Attacks by the Albanians against the dwindling Serbian population and the Gypsies are continuing unabated, officials of the European organization said, and, in a new step, Muslim Slavs in the Prizren area in southern Kosovo are suffering intense intimidation and violence. The officials said there was growing evidence that the Kosovo Albanian leadership was behind some of the harassment and was encouraging the formation of an intolerant monoethnic state. …."

AFP 11/5/99 "…The Yugoslav government told the U.N. Security Council Thursday it wants to send troops and police back to Kosovo, saying minorities in the U.N.-administered province are living under a reign of terror, the official Tanjug news agency reported. On Wednesday, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said in a joint report that "there is a climate of violence and impunity, as well as widespread discrimination, harassment and intimidation directed against non-Albanians" in Kosovo, and on Thursday the European Union's Finnish presidency said EU support for Kosovo's reconstruction would suffer if ethnic Albanians persisted in attacking Serbs….."

London Times 11/2/99 "…. How many bodies make a genocide? The forensic experts who have been in Kosovo since Nato's bombing campaign ended in June, unearthing grisly evidence of mass murder that Nato's wartime reports indicated, are reaching a surprising conclusion. The number of ethnic Albanians murdered or executed during the springtime hostilities may be lower than at first suspected - perhaps in the hundreds, not tens of thousands. The good-hearted might treat this as cause for rejoicing. Instead it has been taken up as a stick with which to beat Nato. Critics suggest that Nato officials deliberately made up the accusation that the Yugoslav President, Slobodan Milosevic, planned the destruction of Kosovo Albanians. The accusation of genocide was sometimes used as moral justification for intervention. If it is not now backed by vast numbers of mass graves, critics allege that those who backed Nato were the victims of a con trick……"

Stratfor 11/11/99 "....The tribunal's chief prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, presented the figure to the U.N. Security Council in New York. She said that the tribunal had received reports of 11,334 bodies in 529 gravesites. But she added that to date only 2,108 bodies have been exhumed and that work has been completed at fewer than one-third of the sites....... It is not clear from del Ponte's briefing if the bodies found so far are all the victims of Serb atrocities, combatants, Serb troops killed in NATO raids or some combination. Since many were killed in the fighting between Serbs and KLA during the war and, according to NATO, many Serb troops were killed in the bombing campaign, the location of bodies does not, by itself, explain how many of those killed were the victims of Serb war crimes. Using the evidence obtained by forensics teams, The ICTY must now determine how many of those killed died at the hands of the Serbs. This report does not shed any light on that question....."

Fox News 11/11/99 "…..Kosovo Serb leaders accused the NATO-led KFOR peacekeeping force on Thursday of publishing false crime statistics to cover up a failure to protect minorities from killings and kidnappings. Kosovo's Serb National Council lodged a protest at the latest figures issued by KFOR, which reported 379 people had been murdered since it moved into Kosovo five months ago - 145 from the ethnic Albanian majority, 135 Serbs, and 99 others……. But Serb leaders said the total was far higher, with nearly 400 Serbs killed since June, when Yugoslav Serb military and police forces withdrew from Kosovo following three months of NATO bombings meant to stop a mass purge of ethnic Albanians. Serb leaders also said more than 500 had been kidnapped in the Yugoslav province, compared with KFOR's figure of just 43….."

AFP 11/10/99 "….Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov told the Bosnian government nearly a month ago that Russia had information about terrorists being trained in Bosnia before being sent on to the breakaway republic of Chechnya, the Bosnian foreign ministry said Wednesday. "During talks (with Bosnian foreign minister Jadranko Prlic) ... Ivanov said Russia had unconfirmed information on terrorists being trained in Bosnia ... Some of them have been sent to battlefields in Chechnya", the statement said...."

NY Times 11/7/99 Steven Erlanger "….In early June, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, the most outspoken advocate of a ground invasion of Kosovo, had ordered the preparation of 30,000 letters calling up Britain's army reserves. Typed and addressed, they were about to go into the mail, making possible the commitment of up to 50,000 British troops -- half the standing army -- to go into Kosovo. In Washington, President Clinton, with enormous reluctance, was about to give his own approval to preparations for a ground invasion of Kosovo, including up to 120,000 American troops -- despite his vow, in a televised speech on the first day of the war, March 24, that "I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war." Based on interviews with senior officials from seven governments -- the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, France, Finland and Yugoslavia -- the United States came much closer to a ground war in Europe than is commonly understood…."

Fort Worth Star-Telegram 11/10/99 Danica Kirka "….Targeting Kosovo's dwindling Serb community, vandals burned down one of its Orthodox churches, NATO said today, as a key Russian diplomat pressed for better security in the ethnically divided province. Monday's arson was a "well-planned action by criminal elements," a statement from the NATO-led peacekeepers in Kosovo said. The attack on the church in Gornja Zakup, about six miles north of Podujevo, happened between NATO patrols...."

Reuters 11/10/99 "…..U.N. war crimes investigators have exhumed 2,108 corpses in Kosovo to date, but the real number of ethnic Albanian victims of Serb aggression may be much higher, U.N. Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte said Wednesday. In a speech to the U.N. Security Council, the text of which was released in The Hague, Del Ponte said she had received reports of 529 grave sites….."

AP 11/10/99 "….Nearly 400 people have been murdered in Kosovo since NATO troops established control over the province, and a disproportionate number of them were Serbs, according to figures released today by NATO officials. Of the 379 people murdered, 135 were Serbs, 145 were ethnic Albanians and the rest were of unknown or other ethnic origins, Maj. Ole Irgens said. But the numbers must be seen in the context of the dwindling Serb and majority Albanian populations in Kosovo. While no recent census figures are available, Kosovo's ethnic Albanian population was nearing 2 million before they were temporarily pushed out by the Serbs this spring. The Serbs, originally numbering about 200,000, have been fleeing attacks by ethnic Albanians seeking revenge for the earlier Serb crackdown that left 10,000 people dead. Today, the Serb population in Kosovo is thought to be only in the tens of thousands. The homicide figures appeared to support fears that Serbs were facing large-scale attacks based on their ethnicity….."

Original Sources Rep Bartlett 11/10/99 "….Dear Colleage: Here in Congress, supporters of paying our so-called "debt" to the United Nations continually stress that the United Sates, as a founder of the U.N., has a legal obligation and moral responsibility to oopay our "arrears." Where was our legal obligation and moral responsibility, based on the United Nations Charter regarding our recent air war in the Balkans? Article 33 1. The parties to any dispute, the continuance of which is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security, shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice. Article 37 1. Should the parties to a dispute of the nature referred to in Article 33 fail to settle it by the means indicated in that Article, they shall refer it to the Security Council. Article 39 The Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace or act of aggression and shll make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken in accordance with Articles 41 and 42, to maintain or restore international peace and security. No wonder we didn't sprint up to New York and demand a U.N. resolution authorizing our air war in the Balkans. It not only would have been vetoed by Russia and China, it would have violated the United Nations Charter, to which, after all, we have a moral and legal obligation to adhere. Sincerely, Roscoe G. Bartlett Member of Congress …."

Washington Times 11/9/99 Ben Barber "....US. and other estimates that 100,000 or more people were slaughtered in Kosovo and in East Timor have turned out to be grossly inflated -- by as much as 900 percent -- according to humanitarian and government officials. The inflated death estimates were issued in the fog of war, when access to battlefields and killing grounds was impossible and refugee accounts could not be verified. So estimates of the numbers killed were made by multiplying a small number of convincing accounts or verifiable killings, said experts and government officials. Some suggest that the inflated body counts were politically motivated -- intended to drum up public support for NATO's bombing campaign in Yugoslavia ....."

UPI 11/8/99 "…. A Serb was fatally wounded in a mortar attack on the Kosovo village of Pasjane, the Belgrade news agency Beta reported. Serbian sources told Beta that nine mortar shells exploded Sunday night after being fired from the Albanian village of Vlastica. KFOR spokesman Ole Irgens said in Pristina that four Albanians had been arrested in connection with the incident….."

St. Petersburg Times 11/5/99 "....The peacekeeping force appears powerless to protect Kosovo's Serbs from reprisals by ethnic Albanians...... First, the troops were expected to create the conditions under which hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians who were driven out of Kosovo by Serb forces could begin rebuilding their homes and communities. By most accounts, that reconstruction job is going as well as could be expected. The NATO force had another crucial objective: protecting what remained of Kosovo's minority Serb population - and, by extension, re-establishing Kosovo's status as a multiethnic society. By that criterion, the NATO mission is failing....."

Tampa Bay Online 11/8/99 AP "….In a well-publicized mock trial planned for today in Athens' main square, President Clinton faces charges of international meddling and mayhem. The proceeding is, of course, not real - but the sentiments are. Clinton's scheduled arrival in Greece this week has demonstrators feverish to vent decades of anti-American ire and their still-raw anger over NATO's clash with Yugoslavia, which left Greece in an awkward position as Serbia's main backer in the alliance..."

Stratfor 11/5/99 "….U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright announced a policy shift Nov. 3 on the issue of Yugoslav sanctions. The media framed this as a complete reversal of U.S. policy that would benefit the Serbian opposition greatly. This representation is superficial at best, and perhaps even erroneous. According to Albright's announcement, the United States will lift sanctions, which include a ban on flights and an oil embargo, if Yugoslavi