Thousands of people have been killed by Milosevic's army in an attempt to exterminate the Albanians living in Kosovo. 100,000 to 500,000 missing male refugees have met with foul play.

• MILOSEVIC AND CLINTON  by Norman Mailer Washington Post  Monday, May 24, 1999; Page A25

• DISPATCH FROM KOSOVO  In One Village, Albanian Men Are Everywhere By PAUL WATSON,  L.A. Times Staff Writer


• EXPERTS VOICE DOUBTS ON CLAIMS OF GENOCIDE Little Evidence for NATO assertions -Charles A. Radin and Louise Palmer, Boston Globe. Washington Post contributed to this report. San Francisco Chronicle, 19 or 20(?) Apr 99 (I cut it out of the paper.)

 

 
VETLJE, Yugoslavia--Something strange is going on in this Kosovo Albanian village in what was once
a hard-line guerrilla stronghold, where NATO accuses Serbs of committing genocide. An estimated 15,000 displaced ethnic Albanians live in and around Svetlje, in northern Kosovo, and hundreds of young men are everywhere, strolling along the dirt roads or lying on the grass on a spring day.

So many fighting-age men in a region where the Kosovo Liberation Army fought some of its fiercest battles against Serbian forces are a challenge to the black-and-white versions of what is happening here.

By their own accounts,the men are not living in a concentration camp, nor being forced to labor for the police
or army, nor serving as human shields for Serbs.  Instead, they are waiting with their families for permission to follow thousands who have risked going back home to nearby villages because they do not want to give up and leave Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic.

"We wanted to stay here where we were born," Skender Velia, 39, said through a translator. "Those who wanted to
go through Macedonia and on to Europe have already left. We did not want to follow."

A foreign journalist spent two hours in Svetlje over the weekend, his second visit in less than a week, without a
police or military escort or a Serbian official to monitor what was seen or said.

The closest Serbian security forces were two policemen sitting at a checkpoint half a mile up the dirt road, who
weren't pleased to see so many refugees moving back into the Podujevo area.

Just as NATO accuses Yugoslav forces of using ethnic Albanian refugees as "human shields," the Serbs say KLA
fighters hide among ethnic Albanian civilians to carry out "terrorist attacks."

But Velia and other ethnic Albanians interviewed in Svetlje said they haven't had any problems with Serbian police since the police allowed them to come back.

"For the month that we've been here, the police have come only to sell cigarettes, but there hasn't been any
harassment," Velia said.

That isn't what North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary-General Javier Solana believes is happening in
Kosovo.

Solana told BBC television Sunday that he expected much more evidence of "ethnic cleansing" in the province to
emerge once the war is over. "You don't see males in their 30s to 60s," he said.

And on CBS-TV's "Face the Nation" on Sunday, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen said that as many as 100,000
ethnic Albanian men of fighting age have vanished in Kosovo and may have been killed by Serbian forces.

The claims and counterclaims are only part of the tangled web that threatens to trap NATO after nearly two
months of bombing intended to make peace here.  Kosovo Albanians continue to flee Yugoslavia, often with
detailed accounts of atrocities by Serbian security forces or paramilitaries.

Yet thousands of other ethnic Albanians are coming out of hiding in forests and in the mountains, hungry and
frightened, and either going back home or waiting for police permission to do so.

While Serbian police seize the identity documents of Kosovo Albanians crossing the border into Albania or Macedonia, government officials in Pristina, Kosovo's provincial capital, issue new identity cards to ethnic
Albanians still here.

The Kosovo Democratic Initiative, an ethnic Albanian political party opposed to the KLA's fight for independence,
is distributing relief aid, offering membership cards and gathering the names of Serbs accused of committing
atrocities.

"As an Albanian, I am convinced that the Serbian government and security forces are not committing any kind of genocide," Fatmir Seholi, the party's spokesman, said in an interview Sunday.

"But in a war, even innocent people die," Seholi said. "In every war, there are those who want to profit. Here there is a minority of people who wanted to steal, but that's not genocide. These are only crimes."

As an Albanian, Seholi also knows the risks of questioning claims that Yugoslavia's leaders, police and military are committing crimes against humanity in Kosovo.

His father, Malic Seholi, was killed Jan. 9, 1997, apparently for being too cooperative with Serbian authorities. The KLA later claimed responsibility for theslaying in a statement published in Bujku, a local Albanian-language newspaper, his son said.

There are pressures to toe the party line in villages like Svetlje too, where a man who overheard Velia speaking with a Serbian correspondent for Agence France-Presse told himto stop.

"Don't talk to the Serbs," the man said angrily in Albanian. "They are to blame for everything that is happening."

Velia, his wife, Hajiri, their three children and his mother, Farita, 56, were among as many as 100,000 Kosovo Albanians who fled the northern city of Podujevo in the early days of NATO's air war.

Some said Serbs drove them from their homes, while others said they were simply scared and left on their own. But they all ended up moving from one village to another, trying to escape fighting between KLA guerrillas and Serbian security forces.

Now they must live with another danger--the NATO bombs that fall ever closer to Svetlje as the alliance intensifies
its attacks on Yugoslav forces across Kosovo.

Last week, a bomb exploded just 200 yards from the five-room school that houses about 60 refugees. The
explosion killed an ethnic Albanian man named Bashota, who was about 22 years old and from nearby Lapastica, Velia said.

When the foreign visitor asked Velia whether he thought NATO's bombing was helping or hurting, he shifted at the
wooden desk where he was sitting in one of the school's classrooms.

"My blood is the same as yours," he said. "I just want the situation stabilized. People are not very interested in what is going on with big [political] discussions here and there. They are just interested in going home."

Despite the mass exodus of Kosovo Albanians during the NATO bombing, several hundred thousand remain in the province, many of them still hiding without proper food, medicine and shelter.

After waves of looting, arson, killings and
other attacks turned many of
Kosovo's cities into virtual ghost towns, the government took steps to restore order, and
ethnic Albanians began to move back, often under police protection.

Of an estimated 100,000 people living in Pristina, roughly 80,000 are ethnic Albanians and a quarter of those are
displaced people from the Podujevo area living with relatives, friends or in abandoned homes, Seholi said.

An additional 32,000 ethnic Albanians are living in and around Podujevo itself, he added.

A total of 120,000 ethnic Albanians are waiting to return to their homes in four areas--near Podujevo, Pristina, Stimlje and Prizren--while 350,000 more have proper homes, Seholi estimated.

Webmaster note: Pristina was hit with a cluster bomb in the city center. The bomb targeted an open street market and a hospital. Ramsey Clark remarked when seeing it: "The Heart of Pristina has been ripped out of it." Pristina is the capital of Kosovo. Prizen has been continually hit with bombs.

Home for Zajda Hasani, 76, and 10 others in her family isa classroom and an adjoining storage room, where the
shelves are stacked with books by writers such as Twain and Tolstoy.

"I have no problems at all," Hasani said between long draws on a cigarette. "I'm relaxed."

In Svetlje, the biggest problem is getting enough to eat. None of the foreign relief agencies delivering food to
refugees outside Kosovo has been able to come to feed those ethnic Albanians left behind.

Agencies such as the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees are negotiating with Yugoslav authorities about security guarantees and other matters as a prelude to resuming work in Kosovo.

On Friday, the International Committee of the Red Cross sent a four-truck convoy carrying medicine, food and other relief, the first shipment since NATO launched the air war March 24.

It wasn't nearly enough to feed the tens of thousands who are going hungry. The last aid Velia's family received
was from the Yugoslav Red Cross, which gave them 4 1/2 pounds of flour and some yeast a month ago.

Like many of the children in Svetlje, Velia's 7-month-old daughter, Erinisa, is sick. The baby has received four
injections but needs six more.  Her mother has to line up with other refugees at the edge of Podujevo for police permission to enter the town and visit the hospital.

The refugees have started a small, roadside market in Svetlje that sells pasta, coffee, onions, rubber sandals,
cigarettes and a few other assorted items. But in the absence of any jobs, few people can afford to buy much.
"The entire day, we just sit here or walk and wander around," Velia said. Although no one in Svetlje has been
forced to work for the police or military, "Who knows what may happen tomorrow?" he added.

Just a few minutes' walk away, there was a horrible reminder of just how uncertain the future is.
It was a human skull, partly charred by fire. It lay in the grass outside a one-story building where refugees once were sheltered in about half a dozen rooms that were previously municipal offices.

The floors were covered with hay, where families slept, and the clothes and other belongings they left behind were
scattered everywhere. A single, burned corpse lay in the middle of one room, not proof of genocide, but a hint of the dark mystery that is Kosovo.
 
 

 
Washington — Experts in surveillance photography, wartime propaganda and Balkan diplomacy say there is reason to believe that atrocites are being committed against the ethnic Albanian majority in strife-torn Kosovo but little reason at this time to accept the reports of huge numbers of dead and missing Kosovars that are being bandied about.

The State Department saind yesterday that a half-million ethnic Albanaian men are unaccounted for in the disputed province, and a department spokesman hinted that 100,000 may have met with foul play.

"In all these cases, the first numbers we hear are overestimates," said Farouk El-Baz, a pioneer in photography from space who directs Boston University's Center for Remote Sensing.

"I am surprised we are not seeing mpore of what is on the gournd. There must be more (that U.S. officials could show.)," El-Baz added. "Sensing equipment is now at a state that should make these things more obvious and more certain.

Misleading Statements

In the 28 days since NATO began bombing Yugoslavia in what was portrayed as an effort to stop attacks on and expulsions of Kosovar Albanians, several instances of misinformation have sparked questioning of the information being released by alliance and U.S. officials.

• After Yugoslavia charged that a refugee convoy had been bombarded by NATO jets, killing dozens of civilians, General Wesley Clark, the supreme commander of NATO, blamed Yugoslavia forces for the attack. Clark finally retracted his version and NATO took responsibility for bombing the civilians.
• NATO and the State Department have repeatedly said that they had evidence that members of the Albanian intelligentsia were being executed. While some of those named were indeed killed, others turned up alive.
• U.S. and NATO officials have repeatedly asserted they had evidence that Serbian forces are committing crimes against humanity and genocide. This week, they said, the Serbs had dug mass graves pointing in the direction of Mecca, using a satellite photo to undercore their point.

"Long neat rows of individual graves, 150 very nearly dug graves – these are not mass graves," said MIT political science professor Barry Posen, a specialist in the history of warfare. "It's weird to think they would have a mass murder, recruit grave diggers and properly orient the graves toward Mecca so as to give them some semblance of a proper Muslim burial."

Posen said the Western media's hunger for news has led it to accept at face value the official NATO statements.

Nongovernmental specialists and analysts contacted about the various NATO claims uniformly said they believe atrocities are occurring and stressed that they are not defending or excusing these acts.

But, said Robert Hayden, director of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Russian and East European Studies, the State Department Reports of 100,000 to 500,000 unaccounted-for Albanian men "are just ludicrous."

"NATO is running a propaganda campaign, there's no question about that," Hayden said. "There have been lots of discrepancies in the official story, but... there has been amazingly little scrutiny of that story."
 
 
 

 Milosevic and Clinton - by Norman Mailer Washington Post  Monday, May 24, 1999; Page A25

Milosevic, as many of us have been told by now, grew up an orphan. And his wife's  mother might as well have been the protagonist in a Greek tragedy. A Yugoslav  partisan, she was captured by the Nazis, tortured, surrendered crucial information, was  released, and then was executed by the leader of her partisan group, who happened to be her father.

It is obviously a family history to push beyond the measure of just about all of us.  Nonetheless, we use it for political interpretations. Our good Hillary, caught on the  cusp between psycho-history and psycho-babble, was heard to remark to Larry King  that the Milosevices were looking to turn their inner tragedies out upon the Kosovars.

Webmaster's note: Mad Albright has recently found out shocking news that
her own grandparents and a close cousin of her childhood were killed by Hitler's
forces in Czechoslavakia. The same must apply to her and more so: The
Milosevic's were never under any delusion as to who they were.

See Mad Albright.

This about expresses the depth of our comprehension of what we have been up to in Kosovo. What may be more to the point is not Milosevic's personal pain, nor his wife's,  but the identity he acquired as a young Communist in a Yugoslav regime at odds with  Stalin but nonetheless profoundly influenced by the Soviet sense of virtue. The good  Soviet operator was a dedicated bureaucrat who could climb the greasy pole of Party advancement skillfully enough to beat his fellow tigers. Milosevic had to be one of the wiliest, toughest, most treacherous, canny, tricky, ruthless, and resourceful human beings Madeleine Albright had ever encountered. She, too, had climbed a greasy pole, but it was as a hostess charming up the Beltway's A-list. That was no mean feat  either, but it hardly compares to the vertical rise of Master Milosevic. We must face it.  She was no match for him. Nor was Clinton or William Cohen. Neither of them ever served in the Armed Forces.

Combat, for those who get into it, is about as strange and mysterious an experience as  first sex. To have, therefore, such men (plus Madeleine Albright) functioning as our command trust for the Kosovo campaign is analogous to asking a young fellow innocent of carnal experience to become a marriage counselor. A genius could probably surmount the difficulty.

Let us look, rather, at Milosevic's strategy. If, before the bombings began, he had already committed all the heinous acts he has since perpetrated, why, he would probably have been doomed. The outrage of the world would have been immense. So, he waited. He set up a trap. Seven months ago, in October, threatened with air strikes
by NATO, he made promises about his future conduct in Kosovo which, over the next months, he resolutely failed to keep. Negotiations, therefore, began again. They came to climax at Rambouillet. But, he refused to appear. Albright, enraged, decided that he was probably, at bottom, soft. If we not only threatened him again but, indeed, carried it out, he would give in quickly. So we began the bombing in cooperation with NATO. They could use a stunning quick war to gild their 50th anniversary. We brought up the curtain with smart bombs.

Milosevic was more than ready. NATO stepped into a trap whose depth is best plumbed by the weight of the malevolent tricks Milosevic had collected in his career. Did no one anticipate that an all-out ethnic cleansing would now begin immediately? Within 24 hours, columns of refugees were in motion and the houses, towns and cities of Kosovo were ablaze. "Genocide" had begun.

If Clinton and NATO have done nothing else, they have certainly leached out the power of that word. The Holocaust is the foundation of its meaning. So the word should be used with caution. Cambodia gave us genocide, as did Rwanda, but ethnic cleansing, with its loss of homes, passports, town and country, its random rage and slaughter, is still not equal to the murder of millions. Ethnic cleansing is better seen as psychic genocide. For the majority who undergo its travail, the past is amputated from the present.

Bombing, in turn, is another form of psychic genocide. Except that now it is your future which is amputated from your present. You no longer know that you have a future. Your present sense of expectation -- what you will do tomorrow, or next week, next year -- is as crippled as a house with one wall sheared off. What, then, have we
 accomplished? So soon as the bombing commenced, Milosevic's atrocities increased probably by 50 or 100 times over what he had perpetrated before it all began.

Yet such chaos and horror was further magnified by the horror of what NATO was doing to the Serbs. The average Serb, after all, had no more to do with this war than the average Kosovar. Chaos, therefore, was being laid upon chaos. And there was no military plan for a conclusion to the war. Just hopes, plus unconscionable arrogance in
NATO's exposition of its good motive.

For that matter, do we want to contemplate Clinton's personal motives too closely? Given how badly he was mucked-up by impeachment nauseas, it is hard not to believe that apart from his avowed motive that we must fight genocide everywhere, he might also have been looking to shift the media's agenda. (Indeed, he has succeeded at that.) On the other hand, those same impeachment details had soiled the presidency
to a point where Clinton could not ask Americans to shed blood. So, he had to give the store away. We will bomb, he said, but we will not use ground troops.

This is now at the core of a prodigious national embarrassment. War is never there to be easily defended, but even so, there is a visceral difference between a combat devoted uniquely to bombing, and participation in a ground war. Ground war is always cruel beyond human comprehension, but there are occasional examples of heroism or sacrifice, and since both of the adversaries lose young men, there is, with all else, a
hint of shared sorrow on both sides. Over the years and decades, that can even permit a reconciliation.

Bombing, however, is oppression. If the bombing is done with the notion that our own blood is not to be shed, it is obscene. In large part, people who are bombed will never forgive the aggressor. We can hardly wish to meditate upon the detestation of America that we are seeding in all the poor populations of the world.

Offering his explanation of Clinton's reluctance to send in ground troops, Tony Blair said, " . . . Kosovo is a very long way from Kansas." It is. It may even be too far away. If we as a nation are not willing to shed our blood to help the Kosovars, then it is time to disabuse ourselves of the notion that we can prevent genocide, actual or psychic. All we can do, using our present methods, is proliferate havoc.

What, then, might we have done?

Well, after Rambouillet failed, we could have built up ground troops on the periphery of Kosovo, and given resonance to such a threat by a sustained leaflet-dropping over all of Serbia delineating the outrages Milosevic had committed. Then, if Milosevic still refused to negotiate, a ground war fortified by an air war could have commenced. While there would have been notable European and American casualties, such a war would probably have been won by NATO in short time. Of course, this was the last solution Clinton could afford.

Since the above is armchair strategy, the real question is: What do we do now?

The answer: Make peace. Negotiate. Milosevic's problems in rebuilding are already great enough to force him to allow the final results to appear ambiguous. If he is looking for future financial credits -- and how would he not? -- then he cannot afford to claim victory. From NATO's side, not wishing to look too sheepish at descending to a
negotiated peace, stories of the outrages committed against the Serbs by the Kosovo Liberation Army are likely to surface. Clinton, in his turn, will be looking to retain enough face to enable his spin-doctors to gain a draw for him. Given that large Clinton heart which suffers so dependably for all of us, he is quite likely to make the cut.
NATO, however, may not. So much the worse for NATO. Its primary function ended with the Cold War, and it has proved propagandistic and witless in its desire to work up a second function. It may be better if reconstituted as a serious strike force, an international Foreign Legion ready to die if necessary in the service of Europe and
America.

If there should prove to be insufficient volunteers for such a special, dedicated, and conceivably most mortal army, then let us at least recognize that when it comes to standing up to genocide in any form, we are not prepared to sacrifice our sons and daughters, no, our blood is not as ready as our mouth. Such self-awareness, while
humbling, might even be of worth for the future. It can serve to inhibit those acts of programmatic compassion which all too few of us ever feel to the quick. Virtuous emotion that is manipulated at national and international levels is odds-on to breed catastrophe.

 ------
 Norman Mailer's most recent book is "The Time of Our Time."
 

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