https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-june-2-1999/ Disaster Message Service Discussion Board en-US Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:15:25 +0000 wpForo 60 https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-june-2-1999/paged/3/#post-4297 Wed, 02 Jun 1999 14:56:00 +0000 Jon
Newsgroups:
soc.culture.yugoslavia, alt.beograd


It is a regular argument put forward that since Nato, the good boys,
never meant to kill civilians that in some way makes those deaths
acceptable. That is rather akin to the IRA sending flowers to the
grieving relatives of those unfortunate enough to become collateral
damage of a bombing on an RUC checkpoint in Ulster. Imagine how a court
would view the plea of a speeding motorist who having struck and killed
a pedestrian claimed that as he did not really mean to kill them that it
was not a crime at all just a regrettable consequence of being late for
an appointment. A cruise missile is no more selective than semtex in
deciding between good boys who deserve treats and the bad boys who
deserve very nasty things to happen to them. Sorry but when you start to
bomb civilian targets it becomes very hard to swallow the excuse that
you were in some way surprised at the presence of civilians in the area
and that anyway they should have known better than to have been there in
the first place. So even if they were not really bad boys and girls they
at the very least had been quite naughty and got exactly what they
deserved. Besides we did not kill you on purpose so there's really no
reason to get too upset about it, after all it isn't a crime you know as
we are the good boys and never never hurt anybody unless they have been
ever so naughty.
If Nato has been so precise in it's targetting as to have destroyed a
third of all the ordnance of the Yugoslav army in Kosova where are the
pictures of the burnt out tanks and smashed artillery pieces. Nato has
been very kind in showing us lots of exciting little films of clever
cruise missiles turning left at road junctions in order to hit an office
block but have been less than forthcoming in showing us the damage that
they have inflicted on the favourite toys of the really really wicked
boys who wear uniforms and shoot at those nice boys from the KLA who
were rather naughty once but have promised that they will never be bad
again.
Go get them lads!! If it is all over by Christmas Santa will be ever so
pleased.
Jon]]> Kosovo War spirodreamer https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-june-2-1999/paged/3/#post-4297 https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-june-2-1999/paged/3/#post-4296 Wed, 02 Jun 1999 14:55:00 +0000 www.washtimes.com
TOP POLITICAL STORY
Buchanan: 4 in
GOP are Clinton
'copies'

By Ralph Z. Hallow
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

at Buchanan said yesterday that he has four principal
rivals for the Republican presidential nomination and all of
them "are virtual Xerox copies" of President Clinton and Vice
President Al Gore on the most important issues facing the
nation.
He said the four -- Texas Gov. George W. Bush, former
Red Cross President Elizabeth Dole, Sen. John McCain of
Arizona and publisher Steve Forbes -- all share the same views
on everything from Kosovo, China trade and international
banking and trade organizations to foreign aid and
"open-borders" immigration.
Mr. Buchanan reserved his strongest condemnations for the
war against Yugoslavia, which he called "Bill Clinton's
misadventure."
"The Serbs have seen their country smashed by Americans
they once admired," said Mr. Buchanan, who is making his
third bid for the GOP nomination. "The Kosovars have
suffered a catastrophe. . . . The U.S. has seen its superpower
status and reputation for decency tarnished by the pounding of
a tiny country that never threatened us."
"It is neither just nor moral for a superpower to ravage the
civilian economy of a country for refusing to give up sacred
land that has belonged to Serbia for
generations," he said, drawing applause from a National Press
Club luncheon audience.
Mr. Buchanan said if any one of the candidates he
designated as his main rivals wins the GOP nomination, "we
risk a replay of 1992 and 1996, where both major parties will
agree on most major issues, and a pillow fight will ensue over
some dinky tax cut."
"This may satisfy the political establishment, but it would
cheat Middle America," said the conservative commentator.
He warned that "tens of millions of Americans will not vote,
millions more will cast protest votes for Reform
Party, the Taxpayers Party, the Green Party and the
Libertarian Party."
A general election in 2000 between Mr. Gore and one of
the "Xerox copy" Republicans would represent a "politics of
inconsequentiality," Mr. Buchanan said.
Americans, he said, would be condemned to a choice
between "two compulsive interventionists" who believe in "open
borders" on immigration -- "one-worlders, enthralled by a
Utopian vision of a different America or seized by the allure of
some New World Order."
Calling his main GOP rivals "good and able individuals," he
said their biggest mistake has been to endorse the war against
Serbia. "I believe truly this war is the product of a hubris and
an arrogance that has marked American foreign policy since
our triumph in the Cold War and against which I have been
warning since the end of that Cold War," he said.
"I am here to underscore my profound disagreements not
only with Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gore, but with my principal
rivals," he said, and singled out Mr. Forbes for wanting to arm
the mostly Islamic Kosovo Liberation Army. Mr. Buchanan
said such a move would assure "an Afghanistan-type war
between Muslims and Christians."
Mr. Buchanan commended Mr. McCain "for forthrightness
and not engaging in trivial pursuits but contending about the
central issues of our day."
Referring to the senator's popularity with the news media --
his hawkish views on Kosovo have earned him numerous TV
appearances -- Mr. Buchanan joked that Mr. McCain "is
clearly this year's favorite for the 1999 William Ginsburg trophy
-- named after Monica Lewinsky's legendary lawyer."
Mr. Buchanan noted that Mr. Ginsburg once "appeared on
no fewer than five Sunday morning talk shows in a single
morning."
Mr. Buchanan, who challenged President Bush in the 1992
GOP primaries, also had some barbed humor about the former
president's son. The younger Bush has surrounded himself with
former Reagan and Bush advisers on national and foreign
affairs and has refrained from campaigning for the nomination
while Texas lawmakers were still in session.
"And now that the Long Parliament known as the Texas
Legislature has adjourned and Gov. Bush has emerged from his
tutorials, perhaps a great debate over America's destiny and
role in the world can now get under way," Mr. Buchanan said,
drawing gales of laughter from the audience.]]> Kosovo War daniela https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-june-2-1999/paged/3/#post-4296 https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-june-2-1999/paged/3/#post-4295 Wed, 02 Jun 1999 13:55:00 +0000
May 31, 1999

OP-ED

Let's Not Forget Milosevic's Partner in Crime

By PETER MAASS

What about Tudjman?

This question comes to mind after the long overdue
indictment of Slobodan Milosevic, the President of Yugoslavia and
the prime villain behind the carnage that has engulfed the Balkans
for the past decade. But President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia is
hardly an innocent lamb, and if the war-crimes tribunal in The Hague
hopes to be seen as an impartial arbiter of justice, it should match
its indictment of Mr. Milosevic with a move against Mr. Tudjman.

For this to happen, the Clinton Administration, which belatedly
offered the tribunal crucial intelligence about Mr. Milosevic, should let
the tribunal know what it knows about Mr. Tudjman's links to Croat
forces that committed atrocities in Bosnia. Unfortunately, it's unclear
whether the Administration can summon the moral wherewithal to
help the tribunal pursue a dictator who has become a useful ally.

Croatia's ports and airports are staging grounds for the NATO-led
peacekeeping operation in Bosnia.

Mr. Milosevic is far more responsible than Mr. Tudjman for the
bloodshed in the Balkans, and of course Mr. Tudjman is not involved
in the cleansing of Kosovo. But ground zero for Balkan war crimes
remains in Bosnia, not Kosovo. The tragedy in Kosovo is
horrendous and should not be understated, but the known death toll
there does not approach the several hundred thousand deaths in
Bosnia from 1992 to 1995. Serbian forces are responsible for the
bulk of those killings (and rapes and cleansings).

Even so, Croatian forces linked to Mr. Tudjman used similar tactics.
The ethnic Croatian militia in Bosnia, the H.V.O., which received
crucial support from Croatia proper, conducted vicious cleansing
operations in central Bosnia, among other areas. If justice is blind,
why should Mr. Milosevic be indicted and not Mr. Tudjman?

The initial answer is that Mr. Milosevic, along with four associates,
hasn't been indicted for crimes in Bosnia. But the reality is that
Kosovo is for Mr. Milosevic what income-tax evasion was for Al
Capone -- an offense that prosecutors can nail him on.

Again, that's not to underplay the outrageousness of what has
happened in Kosovo. But had there been no war in Bosnia, it is
unlikely that Mr. Milosevic would have been indicted last week. For
the most part, he's being made to pay for crimes committed by his
forces in Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Zvornik, Foca and many other
Bosnian towns. Mr. Tudjman should face the same music. Some
may say this is cruel, or at least moot, because the Croatian leader
has cancer and may not have long to live. This excuse has been
used for several years.

But if someone is suspected of war crimes, should he be granted
more mercies than the innocent men, women and children who
have perished?

Mr. Milosevic and Mr. Tudjman kept their distance from the scenes
of war crimes and refrained from issuing public orders for the
cleansing of Bosnia. The best evidence against them is believed to
be found in electronic intercepts gathered by American and other
Western spy agencies -- phone or radio conversations and telexes
or cables that link both men to cleansing campaigns in Bosnia. Until
recently, virtually none of it was shared with the tribunal.

The tribunal's hard-working investigators have labored under a
number of handicaps as they have pursued indictments. The local
authorities have been reluctant to cooperate, often refusing outright.
At the outset, the tribunal received thin financial support from
Western nations that didn't want their diplomatic apple cart upset by
a powerful prosecutor. NATO forces in Bosnia have so far arrested
only a handful of indicted war criminals.

These handicaps have made it difficult for the tribunal to accumulate
concrete evidence linking Mr. Milosevic and Mr. Tudjman to the
military forces in Bosnia that they controlled from behind the
scenes. Kosovo changed the equation for Mr. Milosevic because
unlike Bosnia, Kosovo is part of Yugoslavia, and the forces at work
there are under his direct control; the chain of command is as
unmistakable as a tank on high ground.

What also changed was the Administration's willingness to provide
incriminating intelligence.

Once the White House went to war against Mr. Milosevic, it began
releasing satellite imagery of mass graves -- for the most part, this
wasn't done in the Bosnian war -- and providing classified intercepts
to the tribunal. Louise Arbour, the chief prosecutor, has not
hesitated to issue indictments once she accumulates enough
evidence.

This sort of cooperation was long overdue but raises the specter of
retribution rather than justice. By turning on and off the flow of
intelligence to the tribunal, the Administration can influence
indictments. If this means that Mr. Tudjman escapes judgment for
lack of evidence, even if the evidence exists in the vaults of the
C.I.A. or the National Security Agency, the Serbs will have reason to
accuse the tribunal of prosecutorial bias.

In the realm of war crimes, there's a name for regrettable outcomes
of this sort -- victor's justice.

Peter Maass is the author of ``Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War,''
which chronicled the conflict in Bosnia.]]> Kosovo War zoja https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-june-2-1999/paged/3/#post-4295 https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-june-2-1999/paged/3/#post-4294 Wed, 02 Jun 1999 13:51:00 +0000
May 31, 1999

REFUGEES

They Were Human Shields When 80 Died, Kosovars Say

By IAN FISHER

KUKES, Albania -- They had no choice but to spend the night
outside a warehouse off the highway in Korisa, Haxhere
Palushi said Sunday. There were 700 Albanian refugees like
herself, and Serbian soldiers herded them all inside the building's
iron outer gates, promising that they would be allowed to leave
Kosovo the next day.

Then, she said, one soldier clicked the gate shut with a padlock.

"One young guy said: 'Why did they lock us in? Something is
happening,' " she said.

A few hours later, just before midnight on May 13, NATO planes
again bombed the village, in southern Kosovo, killing what Serbian
officials and survivors say were more than 80 Albanian refugees.
Mrs. Palushi sat in a field all night watching her 4-year-old daughter,
Diana, bleed from shrapnel wounds in her left leg and then, at dawn,
die.

The attack on Korisa killed perhaps more Albanian civilians than any
other in the two-month-old NATO air campaign, which has been
criticized for its fatal mistakes. At the time, NATO officials said the
village was a legitimate military target and was being used as a
military camp and command post. The Serbian authorities, claiming
that the refugees had merely stopped at Korisa for the night, said
the incident showed why NATO should stop the bombing.

But three Albanian survivors -- women interviewed here today for
some of the few witness accounts of the bombing -- said they had
no doubt that they were put there intentionally.

"They used us as human shields," Mrs. Palushi said. "It was all
planned."

While the accounts could not be independently confirmed, they
appeared to give weight to similar allegations by the Pentagon and
NATO that Serbian forces have placed civilians near sites, like
bridges or military installations, that could be vulnerable to attack.

There is still no way to tell from these accounts how widely or
systematically such a strategy might be used. Nor are they likely to
quiet critics who say NATO's targeting procedures are not adequate
on a battlefield where civilians are mixed with military targets.

But these accounts suggest that in Korisa, at least, the refugees
had been calculatingly placed in harm's way, if not to deter a NATO
attack, then to create the kind of civilian casualties that the Serbs
hope could erode support for the air campaign. NATO officials say
the planes had specifically targeted the building among other military
sites in the town without knowing that civilians were there.

Mrs. Palushi described the bombing in one of the refugee camps
here, at the door-flap of a tent that now sleeps 19 people, 10 of
whom survived the attack. The survivors arrived in Albania only on
Saturday, and many of them still show signs of their wounds.

Mrs. Palushi's older son, Driton, 10, pulled up his shirt to show a
scar that runs from his navel to his sternum, from an operation to
remove a piece of shrapnel that pierced his back and wedged near
one lung. His cousin, Genci Ahmetaj, 4, still has a bandage on his
right foot covering his own shrapnel wound.

Purple scars mark the face of Genci's mother, Zyrafete, 30, and, no
doubt, there are emotional wounds as well.

The night of the attack, Mrs. Ahmetaj said she was sleeping under
the tractor wagon that sheltered her two children, along with six
other children and two adults. Huge explosions erupted. Tents
caught fire. Bits of the tractors blasted through the compound.
Children were shrieking, including hers.

"I didn't know what was happening," she said. "It was like I was
crazy. I saw my mother, and I touched her but she was dead. My
father, blood was all over his face."

She heard the voice of her 10-year-old son, Agon, from inside the
wagon.

"My son was screaming, 'Look what they did to my legs,' " she said.
"He started screaming: 'Mommy, my legs! Why don't you come get
me?' He was only 10 years old. I could only take the little one."

"I wanted to go back and get him," she said. "But the other people
wouldn't let me go back and take my son. The Serbs were
shooting."

"But I know I left him," she said. "He was there, and he was alive."

She said she heard later that Agon died at 7 A.M., next to an old
man who had found him and dragged him away from the flaming
warehouse.

"He kept saying, 'Give me some water,' " Mrs. Ahmetaj said.

She wept. "I am worried that no one could give him water," she said.

She and others said Serbian forces opened fire on the refugees as
they fled from the burning compound. Those who escaped made
their way to Prizren, where some received treatment for wounds.
On Saturday, they were bused out of Kosovo by the Serbs,
apparently the first group of survivors from the Korisa attack to get
to Albania.

They were among thousands of Albanian refugees fleeing the
burning houses and looting by Serbian policemen and paramilitary
forces near the city of Prizren. Mrs. Ahmetaj's sister, Sahadete
Ahmetaj, 26, said hundreds of refugees had been living in the hills
near Korisa for two months, waiting to go to Albania.

Weary, on May 13, after some in the group approached Serbian
police officers, the refugees were promised that they could leave
safely the next day. The police took some 700 people to a field for
an hour, then moved them to a warehouse surrounded on
three-sides by a chest-high concrete wall and a fence with an iron
door. There they took everyone's name and birth date, Mrs. Ahmetaj
said, saying they could move on the next day.

But they had to spend that night outside at the courtyard of the
warehouse, she said. The Serbian soldiers did not indicate that they
were being arrested.

"They said we could only stay in that place," Mrs. Ahmetaj said. "We
were not allowed to go anywhere else."

The police officers then locked the refugees in and left the
compound, the survivors said.

Just before midnight, four American F-16's dropped what officials
said later was one 500-pound laser-guided bomb and seven other
bombs. The women said 84 refugees had been killed, many of them
burnt beyond recognition. A NATO official, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity, said that despite reports that all the police
had left, some police guards appeared to be among the dead.

A spokesman for the Kosovo Liberation Army, the rebel group
fighting the Yugoslav Army in Kosovo, said today that the general
area around the warehouse was used to store tanks and
ammunition, though they had no information about that particular
building. The survivors said it appeared to be empty. The NATO
official said intelligence reports before the bombing identified it as a
command post, though he said it may have been vacated before the
bombing.

The Ahmetaj sisters said they did not blame NATO for the attack,
even if it was NATO bombs that killed their relatives.

"The Serbs are guilty," said Sahadete Ahmetaj. "NATO didn't know
they attacked us."

Mrs. Palushi, whose daughter was killed, said she did not blame
NATO either, though she said she exploded in anger when she took
her son to a hospital in Prizren and a Serbian doctor told her: "You
wanted NATO to help you. Look what they did."

"I was very upset, I was very nervous," she said. "I said, 'I didn't
want NATO. I don't want you. I don't want the K.L.A. I only want
peace.' "]]> Kosovo War zoja https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-june-2-1999/paged/3/#post-4294 https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-june-2-1999/paged/3/#post-4293 Wed, 02 Jun 1999 13:47:00 +0000
Zoja]]> Kosovo War zoja https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-june-2-1999/paged/3/#post-4293 https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-june-2-1999/paged/2/#post-4292 Wed, 02 Jun 1999 13:42:00 +0000
May 31, 1999

THE POWER COUPLE

The First Lady of Serbia Often Has the Last Word

By STEVEN ERLANGER

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- The Yugoslav President, Slobodan
Milosevic, and four of his top associates have now been
indicted for war crimes in Kosovo. But by all accounts here,
the person with the most influence over him is his dreamy and
complicated wife, Mirjana Markovic, whose lifelong sense of
persecution will intensify with this new threat to her husband and
family.

The entire point of NATO's air war against Yugoslavia, now more
than two months old, has been to bomb Milosevic into changing his
mind about Kosovo. If that is to succeed, current and past friends of
the couple suggest, then Ms. Markovic, who denounced NATO
before the bombing even began, will have to change her mind too.

Milosevic and his wife are both inseparable and indissoluble. They
were lonely children of unhappy families who met in high school
and created their own, singular world, which they have proceeded
to defend at any cost to ideology, to friendship or even to their own
people.

At the moment, say those who claim to know them still, Milosevic
is calm and deliberate, willing to negotiate over Kosovo but
confident that the Serbs will resist a NATO invasion and occupation
"from behind every blade of grass," as they resisted the Nazis.

But some of those who have known the couple, and those who
have been dropped or discarded, believe that Ms. Markovic will feel
cornered, judging that the indictment has made this war
intensely personal. Some say they fear that she will drive her
husband, using what they consider to be her malign and
absolute influence over him, to take the entire country over the
cliff.

"The West should either settle on good terms or go after him now,
hard; otherwise, this indictment is a goad to final war," said one such
individual, who like everyone when asked about the ruling couple
here, in wartime, asked for anonymity.

"They won't surrender," the individual continued. "They'll
defend themselves. Even in chess, the pawns die before the
king and queen."

Others consider this picture of a weak, beholden husband and a
scheming, malevolent wife, a Balkan Lady Macbeth, to be an
insulting caricature that underestimates Milosevic's own talents of
fearlessness and decisiveness, which have given him unrivaled
power here.

Yet Ms. Markovic, now 57, herself believes that she has both formed
her husband and driven him to his current perch, even as she has
bemoaned his boyhood decision to study law. According to her
biography and articles she wrote in the Belgrade weekly Duga, she
wanted him to take on "the more beautiful and romantic occupation"
of an architect. She blames him for letting her study sociology and
become a university professor rather than pushing her toward
literature, which she says is her real love.

Ms. Markovic, wrote her hagiographer and friend, Ljiljana
Habjanovic-Djurovic, "always openly and boldly claimed that he
would have been quite different without her, worse in every respect,
and that everything good about him came from her and that
everything that is not good is where her influence didn't reach."

Their bond was forged in loneliness and family tragedy. His mother
was a teacher who, ambitious for her son in the new Communist
world, divorced his father, a teacher who trained to be a priest. Both
parents committed suicide when he was a young man. His mother
disliked the young Mirjana Markovic, and when Milosevic and a friend
cut her down after she hanged herself, Milosevic is said to have told
him: "She never forgave me for Mira."

A Life Framed by Mother's Execution

Ms. Markovic's mother, a Partisan fighter in World War II, was
reviled for confessing under Gestapo torture and giving up
the names of key Communist officials, including an
undercover agent. She was executed when her daughter was 2.

Not surprisingly, Ms. Markovic has fiercely defended her mother,
and when Milosevic rose in the 1980's to the top of the Communist
Party in Serbia, all documents about the case disappeared.

Ms. Markovic, her life marked by tragedy, is full of contradictions.
She claims to detest nationalism and feels no responsibility for the
nationalist wars that broke up Yugoslavia; she is the founder and
chief ideologist for the modern Marxist party called the Yugoslav
United Left, yet has allowed it to become a form of mafia that
distributes favors and concessions to rich and well-connected
businessmen; her associates say that she demands complete loyalty
even though she says she detests flattery, and that she discards
acolytes at will; she describes herself as a dreamy romantic, yet
she is universally described as ruthless.

Another person who knew her, and who saw his own political
relationship with Milosevic destroyed in a day, likened Ms.
Markovic to a consuming fire that could burn anyone who comes too
close: "She wants maximum obedience. She's good at provoking
people, and then assesses and judges later, in private, with him.
You can say everything to him and he'll support it and praise it, but
already the next morning everything is different. It will be the way he
agreed with Mira in the night."

An advocate of democracy, it was Ms. Markovic who returned from an
Indian book tour in 1996 to put spine into her husband after the
opposition won local elections. When she heard Danica
Draskovic, the similarly influential wife of one protest leader, Vuk
Draskovic, call for a march on their neighborhood, Ms. Markovic told
Milosevic that the threat was personal to them and their family,
persuading him to overturn the results and ride out the months of
street protests, according to people familiar with events at that time.

Self Revelation, on Sale Weekly

Like her husband, Ms. Markovic largely shuns the public eye.
But she has written extensively, including a bizarre and closely
watched diary published throughout the 1990's in a Belgrade
weekly, Duga.

Through her writings, Ms. Markovic has opened herself to an
unusual degree of judgment and ridicule.

She says that the moon is a planet and that it protects her, so she
wears a moonstone. She spends hours combing her hair -- which
she wears as she did in high school, with bangs -- and resents
anyone interrupting that activity, her writings suggest. She used to
wear a flower in her hair -- plastic when she was poor, real later --
but she stopped when it became a major topic of discussion.

She says she cannot live without mirrors, and she works for a
month to plan the music for the couple's New Year's Eve
celebrations, which she regards as a mystical moment to start
anew. She says she hates flattery but insists on complete loyalty.
Those who cross her are dropped. Four former associates of the
Milosevic family have ended up shot dead, by assailants never
identified, in circumstances never explained.

According to her biographer, Ms. Markovic sees herself as
"paralyzed by small fears but motivated by great ones."

She loves her husband, who is believed never to have been with
another woman. After she met him, her biographer writes, she was
"no longer afraid of the winter, nor darkness, nor mosquitoes, nor
the beginning of the school year, nor a possible C in math." She
says that he was always on her side, whether she was right or
wrong. "What every woman instinctively seeks through her whole
life and few have, she had," Ms. Habjanovic-Djurovic wrote.

They talk many times a day. She praises him "as a man who does
not miss anything that is important to her." She says he remembers
to wake her up at 2 A.M. to wish her a happy first day of spring.

Hints of Condescension Toward Her Husband

But her memoirs also patronize him as limited and dull. "He
was a simple and pragmatic boy who never showed any
inclination for long coffee bar conversations and meditations
aloud," so unlike her own attraction to the intellectuals of the little
town of Pozarevac, where they met and fell in love. She devoured
Sartre novels, loved "Last Year in Marienbad" and wore black, still
her favorite color, because it seemed to her refined.

She formed his tastes in literature and poetry. In quiet evenings she
would recite her favorite lines, which he remembered. "To this day
he utters her thoughts and assessments as his own, unaware of
where she ends and he begins," wrote Ms. Habjanovic-Djurovic in
her lengthy article, published in 1994.

But her sense of herself as much-misunderstood and
much-maligned, appalled by the corruptions of power, is matched
by a powerful sense of persecution and retribution that stems from
her remarkable history.

Mirjana Markovic was born in the woods in July 1942, the offspring
of two Partisan fighters who were famous and later infamous in their
own right. Her father, Moma Markovic, became an important
Communist official after the war, but had little to do, then or later,
with his revolutionary love child.

Her mother, Vera Miletic, used the nom de guerre "Mira," short for
Mirjana, which is how Ms. Markovic still signs her name. But Ms.
Miletic spent only one day with her daughter before returning to the
fight against the Nazis, and she was arrested nine months later. It is
believed she never saw the little girl again. She was executed in
September 1944, just a few weeks before the victorious Partisans
marched into Belgrade.

But Ms. Markovic still keeps what her mother knitted for her in
prison, including the needlework red star of the Communist faith,
woolen booties and a heart with her own name inscribed, according
to her biographer.

Ms. Markovic's earliest memories are of being hidden in a storage
cabinet used for firewood, unable to utter a word, while
anti-Communist Chetniks, fierce Serbian nationalists, searched for
the daughter of the famous Partisan fighter.

It is these searing memories, combined with a sense of
defensiveness and historical injustice, that formed Ms. Markovic.
After she went to live with her grandparents in Pozarevac, her
favorite story was that of Antigone, the young woman in Greek
tragedy who tried to vindicate the memory and restore the reputation
of the beloved brother who defied the tyrant Creon.

And it was in the library, as she sought solace once again in
Antigone's story after getting a C in history, that she first met
Slobodan Milosevic. She was 16; he was 17. "Her sorrow attracted
her to him," Ms. Habjanovic-Djurovic wrote. "He felt the need to
relieve her pain, to protect and cherish her."

But these fierce family tragedies also help explain Ms. Markovic's
devotion to her children, Marija, now 33, and especially to her
25-year-old son, Marko.

She was pregnant with Marija when she married Milosevic in 1965,
and hoped her daughter would be the writer she never was, naming
her after the Partisan heroine Marija Bursac.

But Ms. Markovic, according to the biography, describes her
daughter in harsh terms, calling her "less ambitious, less disciplined
and less sensitive" than herself, "and not romantic at all." Her
daughter married young and went to live in Japan in 1984, the year
Milosevic left banking and entered Communist politics in a serious
and fateful way.

Although she returned and currently runs a popular station, Radio
and Television Kosava, Marija is rarely pictured with her parents.

Limitless Pride For Her Son

But Ms. Markovic is besotted by her son, who flunked out of
high school and became a race-car driver, famous for the
prices of the vehicles he crashed. Marko still lives in
Pozarevac, where he is described by locals as behaving like a "little
lord," abusing people and running a discotheque called "Madonna."

In a strange article in November 1996, Ms. Markovic, with her
ideological bent, tried to reconcile Serbia's traditional values with her
own. She described "three images of time" that hang on her wall,
three heroes who personify the Serbian spirit. Her choices were St.
Nikola, the patron saint of her mother's family; her mother, as an
18-year-old high-school senior from a rich family who chose instead
to join the Communist youth organization, and her son, Marko, at the
wheel of his BMW.

Each personified the age, she said: Byzantine, Partisan and the
modern era of computers. "In my value system," she wrote, "these
three images are eminently compatible."

Even today, she reacts fiercely if her son is criticized, seeing it as
an attack on the nation. In one of the odder documents of this war,
she published an angry response to the British Foreign Secretary,
Robin Cook, who said that she and her children were not in
Yugoslavia under the bombs.

"You wanted to send a message to the world public that my children
and I are dishonest and fearful," she wrote. "To your regret and to
our fortune, you will not succeed in your intentions -- not when my
country nor my family is concerned."

All remain in the country, she said. "My children have highly
developed patriotic sentiments, they are indeed courageous, rather
smart and extremely beautiful."

Marko, she said, "is in uniform and cares about his small new
family," and indeed, he has been shown on television wandering
through Pozarevac in a military-like uniform, carrying a Kalashnikov,
although he is not believed to be in the army.

Clearly furious, Ms. Markovic ended her letter, "very disrespectfully
yours." And there was a P.S. "I just remembered -- you said we had
five villas abroad. We do not have any, of course." Partly for
financial reasons, she said. "But why should we, even if we could?
Our country is so beautiful."

With her husband under indictment as a war criminal, he is liable to
be arrested if he goes abroad, so her fierce pride in Yugoslavia's
beauty is fortunate.

Yet in the musings that Ms. Habjanovic-Djurovic recorded, Ms.
Markovic imagined a different future. When she turns 60 in 2002,
she wants Milosevic to be through with politics and on vacation with
her abroad, at a Swiss resort.

"She sees the two of them in Lugano eating ice cream. She wears a
white dress and a flower in her hair, and from that distant, cold,
windy Pozarevac street, a melancholy girl asks her with
seriousness, 'How much can a human being really decide about
one's life?"'

---

Mrs Arbour 'forgot' to incict one more person.....
But not for long.....

Zoja]]> Kosovo War zoja https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-june-2-1999/paged/2/#post-4292 https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-june-2-1999/paged/2/#post-4291 Wed, 02 Jun 1999 13:15:00 +0000 Kosovo Refugees' Return

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, May 31, 1999; Page A18=20

SKOPJE, Macedonia, May 30=97The three heavily armed policemen came
knocking at 8:15 a.m. a few weeks ago at a house on Gavran Street in the
center of the Kosovo city of Gnjilane.

They sat down at the kitchen table with green forms in hand and demanded
that Isuf, the 38-year-old homeowner, help them create a detailed record
of the ages and birthplaces of everyone who lived there.

After 45 minutes of questioning, they gave Isuf and the other seven
members of his family special residency cards with an official stamp in the
corner. They said that without these cards, the family was not entitled to
stay in Gnjilane. They warned that anyone who was not registered could
be killed. Then they moved on to the house next door.

Similar scenes have unfolded recently in cities throughout Kosovo as
Yugoslavia's policy of "ethnic cleansing" -- expelling or killing hundreds=
of
thousands of ethnic Albanians -- moves into a new phase. In the view of
Western human rights experts here and in Albania, it is no less ominous
than earlier phases.

After being pursued for two months by forces employed by the army and
the Interior Ministry, the government's program has been turned over to
bureaucrats. They are now creating a detailed accounting of who lives in
Kosovo -- the first since 1981 -- thereby trying to streamline and simplify
the task of deciding who can stay and who must leave.

The patterns of the new displacement are already evident: Only those who
still have identification cards and other documents issued before March 20
can obtain new residency cards. This leaves out hundreds of thousands of
people whose identity papers were destroyed by police or left behind
when they were forced to flee their homes. None of these people will be
able to return if the government's new policy sticks.

In addition, police are requiring that the new cards be obtained in the
towns where residents lived before March 20. Since many of these towns
were burned to the ground by government forces or lie behind the battle
lines that still exist between Yugoslav troops and separatist rebels, this=
rule
excludes hundreds of thousands of additional ethnic Albanians from
meeting the new residency requirements.

Those who were expelled from their villages in Kosovo and fled into the
mountains before migrating back to major cities in search of food are not
entitled to stay in these cities, police have told them.=20

And if they must move from the cities, the only path open to most of them
is to head for neighboring Albania or Macedonia, according to dozens of
refugees interviewed after their arrival at camps here.

Coupled with recent claims by top Yugoslav officials that Kosovo never
had more than 800,000 ethnic Albanians -- roughly a million fewer than
Western governments said were there before hostilities broke out last year
-- the new registration cards create a pretext for the government to bar
reentry, Western officials say. Kosovo is a province of Serbia,
Yugoslavia's dominant republic.

"It's a way to complicate" the return of ethnic Albanians to their previous
homes, said Sandra Mitchell, human rights director at the Kosovo
Verification Mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe (OSCE). "It could complicate citizenship and identification. It
could contaminate and pollute any kind of existing property records or
election database that exists. . . . It's a pattern that we've seen in other
conflicts that Milosevic was involved in."

Although the registration effort has been underway for weeks, the details
have emerged only in the past few days from refugees trickling across the
Macedonian and Albanian borders.=20

As a result, monitors still do not know how many people are affected by
the change. Qamile Sadiku, 34, said, for example, that the police came to
his home in Urosevac two weeks ago to tell him that he must register the
eight members of his family "or leave. . . . We didn't have any choice."

Many refugees interviewed here and in Albania say they fled rather than try
to obtain the cards, because they feared the prospect of a face-to-face
meeting with Serbian officials. Although fighting between rebels and troops
has diminished in many cities, such meetings can get out of hand, according
to refugees.

After hiding in basements for weeks, "a lot of men went to get this
document and were sent to the prison" after being stopped by police on
the street, said Isuf as he stood in line to register for a food card at the
Brazda refugee camp.=20

He said he had obtained the identity card but fled with his family anyway,
because "we were afraid that once they knew everything about us, they
could just take people to the prison -- fighting-age men."

Alistair Brown, a human rights monitor for OSCE, confirmed that "some
people are leaving because they do not want to register their details. "That
itself is a form of coercion to start pushing people out . . . without going=
to
one of the extreme measures."

For example, Hyra Haxholli, 43, who lived on Proleter Street on the north
side of the Kosovo capital of Pristina before fleeing to Macedonia, said
she had decided not to get the registration card "because of my sons,"
aged 15 and 17. "Then they made me leave because we didn't have the
card. They said that if we don't have all the people who are here
registered, we will kill you. The policeman knew us, and he said that if he
ever saw anyone running away , he will
shoot."

Many refugees have said that the demands for registration cards came after
police had already made several visits to their homes -- first to see who
was there, and then to write down the names of any relatives or refugees.

The card lists a resident's name, birth date, birthplace, address and
neighborhood. Every member of a family -- even babies less than a year
old -- must have one.

In Pristina, residents were ordered to pick up the card at a bank on the
city's main street, where police moved after NATO warplanes bombed
their headquarters. Outside the entrance is a policeman who admits only
those who still have documents proving their residency in Pristina before
the war, said Selami Gashi, 34.=20

He was unable to get one, and fled in fear. "They are cleansing Pristina,"=
he
explained.=20

=A9 Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company]]> Kosovo War zoja https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-june-2-1999/paged/2/#post-4291 https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-june-2-1999/paged/2/#post-4290 Wed, 02 Jun 1999 12:57:00 +0000 number of Yugoslav soldiers entered Bosnia near Rudo on
the border with Serbia, took six NATO peacekeepers with
them back into Serbia, and detained the SFOR men for
about eight hours before releasing them, AP reported
from Sarajevo on 28 May. A NATO spokesman said that some
of the men had been mistreated. He added that "the
Yugoslav violation of Bosnian sovereignty is a breach of
the Dayton Peace Agreement."

---

Slob Milo is losing and he knows it. Only he is such a sore loser, that he tries to stir up the war in Bosnia again. The fact that here are still Milo puppets in the free world, only inidcates they are fools to believe in this dictator.

JUST LOCK HIM UP AND THROW AWAY THE KEY. PUT MLADIC AND KARADIC AND ARKAN IN THE CELLS NEXT TO HIS AND LEAVE THEM THERE TO ROT. THEN THE WORLD WILL BE A BETTER PLACE.

Zoja]]> Kosovo War zoja https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-june-2-1999/paged/2/#post-4290 https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-june-2-1999/paged/2/#post-4289 Wed, 02 Jun 1999 12:37:00 +0000
You are mistaken about all your Muslim-prejudice. Religion has nothing to do with this war, or any other war. War is about power. Religion and religious prejudice, like you are showing is used as a tool to get people to a state of fighting.

So, engaging in religious prejudice like this one only shows you like so many others, fell into that trap.

Furthermore, if you write something about religion, please take care that you get your facts right. Now, your piece only served as lunch time laughter.

Zoja]]> Kosovo War zoja https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-june-2-1999/paged/2/#post-4289 https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-june-2-1999/paged/2/#post-4288 Wed, 02 Jun 1999 12:12:00 +0000 I have another question. Why do christian people eat porkmeat while also in the bible it sais that they should not.Just curious thats all?

Emina]]> Kosovo War emina https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-june-2-1999/paged/2/#post-4288