WHAT NATO WON’T TELL YOU
EXECUTIONS, MASS GRAVES AND REFUGEES
Several photos distributed by NATO and said to show possible mass graves in Kosovo could be fake, the Dutch daily ‘Algemen Dagblad; said Saturday. The paper based its claims on analyses carried out by a map expert specializing in the study of satellite photos, who examined four pictures taken over the Kosovo villages of Pusto Selo and Izbica. NATO showed two photos of each village. In each case, one of the photos shows the area before the alleged graves were dug and the second, taken several days later, appears to show a number of freshly dug graves. According to the expert, identified only as E. Burie, the most recent photos displayed worrying inconsistencies. He said that in the second picture of the Pusto Selo village, there is a house which does not feature in the image taken a few days before. He said: "Either the Kosovars had time between the massacres to build a house in a few nights, or the photo has been manipulated." He said the photo of Izbica showing rows of graves had "touch-up work which could only be the result of two different pictures being superimposed." "NATO Photos of Kosovo Mass Graves are Fake: Report," Agence France-Presse, April 24, 1999.
A football stadium in the Kosovo capital Pristina stood empty Wednesday, one day after reports that Serbian forces were herding ethnic Albanians there in an apparent prelude to a massacre. An AFP reporter who visited the site said the stadium, whose galleries can host some 25,000 spectators, was completely empty and there were no signs of any mass groupings. "No Sign of Serbs Massing Kosovars in Pristina Stadium," Agence France-Presse, March 31, 1999.
One of the few Western journalists reporting from inside Kosovo says his impressions clash with NATO reports of what is happening in the war-torn province. Paul Watson, a Canadian who works for the Los Angeles Times, says he has seen no evidence that Serb authorities have massacred Albanians in the Kosovo capital of Pristina... "It is very hard to hide an anarchic wholesale slaughter of people," said Mr. Watson, who has been in Kosovo since the North Atlantic Treaty Organization began bombing on March 24. "There is no evidence that such a thing happened in Pristina." ... "I have spoken personally to people who have been ordered to leave their homes by police in black. I’ve also spoken to people who are simply terrified." For example, he said, many people fled the area around Pristina’s airport after a NATO bombing there. "I see a pretty clear pattern of refugees leaving an area after there were severe air strikes." "...I don’t think that NATO member countries can, with a straight face, sit back and say they don’t share some blame for the wholesale depopulation of this country. If NATO had not bombed, I would be surprised if this sort of forced exodus on this enormous scale would be taking place." He said the centre of Pristina has been devastated by the NATO bombing. Marcus Gee, "Reporter Challenges Reports of Massacres in Pristina," The Globe and Mail, April 14, 1999.
However, on Wednesday, one of the two, moderate Ibrahim Rugova, who had supposedly gone into hiding after Serbs burned down his house, spoke to reporters at this undamaged home in Pristina, dismissing those concerns and calling for an end to the NATO bombing campaign. "Questions Mount on Accuracy of Kosovo Atrocity Reports," Agence France-Presse, March 31, 1999.
Both the entire NATO propaganda staff as well as [German leaders] are unabashedly lying to the public with nearly every "fact" they present about the Balkans War, while a willing media pack is keenly spreading these lies, unverified as the gospel truth.... The [German] Federal Government knows the true reasons why the people are fleeing and is cynically playing with the calculated misery of the refugees in the border regions of Kosovo... According to internal acknowledgement of the [German] Defense Ministry the reasons for flight are more or less equally distributed:
Protest statement by an official holding "a high-security post" in the German government, "Erkldrung eines Insiders aus dem Bonner Regierungsapparat zum Balkan-Krieg vom 7. April 1999," www2.pds-online.de/bt/index.htm.
At the Red Cross office near the Turkish bazaar in Tetovo, Kucu was struggling to get his story straight. The Serbian army had attacked Kotlina at 5 AM and driven all the young Albanian men out of the village, he said. They had watched in horror from the forest as the women and children were loaded into lorries and driven off towards Kacanik, 30 miles south of Pristina. Then the Serbs had burnt the village. That was not quite the version that Kucu’s friend, Enes, related to a different Red Cross worker a few minutes later. The Serbs had herded the older Albanian men into the woods, Enes said. The younger men had run away. It was 5 PM - not 5 AM - when the Serbs had burnt the village. Then the fugitive Albanians had walked through the night for 20 miles to the Macedonian border. They had crossed the Sar Planina mountains to register as refugees from the war that had destroyed their homes. It sounded a sadly familiar tale of Serbian mayhem, but a Red Cross volunteer exchanged a glance with a Macedonian interpreter. "These men don’t look as though they have walked 20 miles," she said, staring pointedly at Kucu’s spotless white running shoes. "They look as though they arrived by Mercedes." Tony Allen-Mills, "Truth Chokes on the Fog of War," The Sunday Times, March 28, 1999.
Nor was there much fodder for NATO propagandists among the 200 or so refugees waiting to register at a Skopje district police station early on Friday. Mirvei, a tall Albanian woman clutching her four-month-old baby, looked bewildered when asked if Serbian troops had driven her out. "There were no Serbs," she said, "We were frightened of the bombs." ...Red Cross officials say many of the most recent arrivals intend to return to Kosovo as soon as the NATO bombardment stops. Tony Allen-Mills, "Truth Chokes on the Fog of War," The Sunday Times, March 28, 1999.
HUMANITARIAN BOMBING
On the second floor of the Serbian Clinical Centre in Belgrade are victims of the Balkan war who will never be mentioned in any NATO briefing. There’s a 14-year-old boy with his head crushed, lying in a coma, eyes half-closed, a fat oxygen tube down his throat. There’s a middle-aged farmer hit in the head by shrapnel and expected to die within a few hours. A little further down the emergency ward is another boy - 13 this time - with his head swathed in bandages, moving in agony, his brain damaged and his right leg fractured by a falling building. They are NATO’s victims. Robert Fisk, "’Collateral Damage’:The Victims You Don’t See on CNN," The Independent, April 2, 1999.
Local officials said 50 house were destroyed and 600 others were damaged in Tuesday’s attack on the town of Surdulica.... Local authorities in Surdulica said 11 missiles struck the town. An Associated Press reporter, allowed by Serb police to visit the town, said bodies were blown apart or charred beyond recognition. In one cellar, where 11 people including five children were believed to have been hiding, all that remained were small pieces of burned flesh stuck to bedsheets.... In Surdulica’s Piskavica district, craters 20 feet deep pocked one street. Serb police said shops had once stood there, but they were nowhere to be seen. On a white sheet in the back of an ambulance lay mounds of smoldering flesh, which rescuers said were the remains of four children. "NATO Acknowledges Bombing Serb Town," Associated Press, April 28, 1999.
The small craters and mysterious fin-shaped pieces of metal found next to civilian vehicles attacked in Kosovo suggest that they may have been hit by U.S. cluster bombs designed to destroy tanks. Similar evidence has been found at several bomb sites over the past four days, including two roads on which tractors pulling wagonloads of Kosovo Albanian refugees were destroyed during NATO airstrikes Wednesday. The intact bomb remnants, shaped like single fins about two feet long with a one-inch hole at one end, are stamped in two places with the name ALCOA, suggesting that the U.S. aluminum company made them... "The circumstantial evidence points to some kind of cluster bomb," said a U.S. defense expert in Washington, who spoke on condition he not be named. The refugees, at least six of whom were badly burned, may have been the victims of the debut of U.S.-made CBU-97 cluster bombs, guided by infrared sensors and built to spray super-hot shrapnel into tanks, Cook suggested. Paul Watson, "Cluster Bombs May be What Killed Refugees," Los Angeles Times, April 17, 1999.
Charred and dismembered corpses, wrecked tractors and a pathetic trail of personal belongings yesterday lay on the Prizren to Dakovica road in southern Kosovo... The most gruesome scene was at the third site. In the village of Bistrazin, six bodies lay cheek by jowl in the grass meadow beneath the road, five of them women. Worse was to come: a head lay further up the meadow, and near it a forearm and hand. On the road itself a half-charred corpse lay slumped across the steering wheel of a smashed tractor, slewed crazily across the shrapnel-pitted tarmac. On its trailer lay an indeterminate number of blackened body parts, and one leg hooked over the back of a trailer. A few yards away pieces of brain tissue lay spattered about across the road. Tom Walker, "Charred Corpses Litter Site of Attack," The Times, April 16, 1999.
The chemical tanks ruptured by NATO bombers on the outskirts of Belgrade last week contained a number of lethal pollutants. Some held a complex mixture of hydrocarbons called ‘naptha’, others housed phosgene and chlorine (both of which were used as chemical weapons in the first world war), and hydrochloric acid. As the factories burnt, a poisoned rain, containing hundreds of toxic combustion products, splattered Belgrade, its suburbs and the surrounding countryside. Broken tanks and burst pipes poured naptha, chlorine, ethylene dichloride and transformer oil, all deadly poisons, into the Danube... Oil slicks up to 12 miles long wound their way towards Romania... Many of the compounds released cause cancers, miscarriages and birth defects. Others are associated with fatal nerve and liver diseases. The effects of the bombing of Serbia’s economy equate, in other words, to low-intensity chemical warfare.... This, in environmental terms at least, is perhaps the dirtiest war the West has ever fought. George Monbiot, "Consigning Their Future to Death," The Guardian, April 22, 1999.
The casualties were not hard to find. Three railway cars were incinerated, still smoking three hours later, when the first reporters arrived. On the grassy verge next to the tracks, close to a small plowed field turning green and a street of damaged houses, nine charred and broken bodies lay heaped by a small tree. Their clothes had been blown or burned away.... One man, in blue overalls, picked up a female torso, from the neck to the thighs, and placed it in the coffin. He then bent down and lightly tossed a blackened arm into the coffin, raising his head to stare at the smoldering cars.... A man watching from the road at first refused to talk, Then he began to throw words like stones. "Another atrocity," he said. "Or do the NATO criminals think atrocities are not atrocities from the air?" Steven Erlanger, "The Victims: At Sites of NATO Accidents, Scent of Death, Sound of Fury," New York Times, April 13, 1999.
Half a mile up the road from where NATO pilots mistakenly bombed Kosovo Albanian refugees last week, warplanes on Wednesday pounded a Serbian refugee camp. Four Serbs, including a young boy, died during a heavy airstrike... Serbian villagers complained that they had recently opened their doors to ethnic Albanian refugees. "We were helping them," said Grca Mara, 60, a Serbian refugee who was expelled from Benkovac, Croatia, in August 1995. "We were giving them food. We were taking care of their small kids and giving them clothing, and now see what NATO does to us." Paul Watson, "Refugee Serbs Blame NATO in Camp Bombing," Los Angeles Times, April 22, 1999.
Pools of blood, two corpses and parts of dismembered bodies lay in the wreckage of a large apartment building today in this central Serbian town [Aleksinac] after an overnight air strike.... About 30 people were taken to the hospital, some with head injuries. "An entire street was wiped out," a local doctor, speaking on condition of anonymity, told journalists. Dimitri Messinis, "Yugoslav Town Bathed in Blood," Associated Press, April 6, 1999.
They had been torn apart. Blood was caked around what was left of Vojislav Milic’s cellar, and there was the smell of meat. In the morgue, they had been unable to fit together the pieces of his son and daughter-in-law and his two grandchildren. NATO’s bomb - one of two which struck the homes of Surdulica - had scored a direct hit on the house, killing at least nine other children in the basement, the youngest only five years old... Every house in Zmaj Jove Jovanovica Street had been ripped apart by the 2,000-lb laser-guided bomb, their roofs flung hundreds of metres around the town, their walls cracked or blasted to the ground, their people - those who survived - taken to hospital in their dozens.... Bits [of children] were all over the road," a young, American-educated man said to me. "We found the head of a child in a garden and many limbs in the mud. But you don’t want to report that. CNN filmed the bodies - but they didn’t show them on television." Alas, the young man was right. Robert Fisk, "Families Blasted in ‘Just Another Mistake," The Independent, April 29, 1999.
Yugoslav authorities said between 34 and 60 people were killed, many of them children, when the missile hit the bus as it crossed a bridge in Kosovo at midday Saturday. Dozens of bodies and body parts, including a child’s arm, were scattered near the bridge. The charred bodies of at least two children could be seen.... "They did not hit anything but the bus. There was nothing else there," said Rajko Maksic, 45, a local farmer. "I heard a plane and then I heard a blast. I saw falling bodies. I heard screams. Then I ran to help get the bodies out. "What can I say. What can I think. This is a horror. All I can think about were the children that I saw," he said. "NATO Admits Hit Bus, Raids Go On," Reuters, May 2, 1999.
"I have been an orthopedist for 15 years now, working in a crisis region where we often have injuries, but neither I nor my colleagues have ever seen such horrific wounds as those caused by cluster bombs," he said through a translator Tuesday. "They are wounds that lead to disabilities to a great extent. The limbs are so crushed that the only remaining option is amputation. It’s awful, awful." Paul Watson, "Unexploded Weapons Pose Deadly Threat on the Ground," Los Angeles Times, April 28, 1999.
BOMBING MUST CONTINUE....
The plan [proposed by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic] also would allow all ethnic-Albanian Kosovar refugees to return to their homes and offers a Serb guarantee giving "the right of Albanians of the province to total autonomy within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia." "Libyan Relays Yugoslav Plan to NATO," UPI, April 28, 1999.
Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen said that Yugoslavia’s release yesterday of three U.S. prisoners of war would not prompt a lull in NATO bombing in the Balkans. "We are not only not going to stop the bombing, we’re going to intensify the bombing," Cohen said. Juliet Eilperin and John Harris, " GI Release Does Not Halt Bombing," Washington Post, May 3, 1999.