Mirjana Markovic needs PROZAC. Urgently. Just as Nick, who believes there is no genocide in Serbia/Kosova.

Zoja

THE NEW YORK TIMES

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.' "

THE NEW YORK TIMES

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.

Published in Washington, D.C. 5am -- June 2, 1999 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 [the province of Kosovo] 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 [Ross Perot's] 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.

From:
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