Macedonian Media Monitor, May 2, 1999
Slavko Mangovski
WORD & IMAGE BY MAX FRANKEL, The New York Times Magazine
Our Humanity vs. Their Sovereignty
Lacking laws and cops to regulate the behavior of nations, we let
television cameras choose our wars.
Perhaps Bill Clinton really believed that he was going to war to crush
the seeds of World War III in the Balkan morass. Or maybe he decided
that NATO needed a new cause to refresh itself. Or he became convinced
that saving Western Europe from a flood of Albanian refugees was a vital
American interest. Maybe he was just furious at that man, Slobodan
Milosevic, for refusing to let Kosovo move toward independence like the
rest of the former Yugoslav federation.
Domino theories and subtle diplomatic strategies may have guided the
White House, but they don't explain Americans' willingness to follow the
President into this new war. The reason for that is obvious -- on every
television screen. It's those pictures of almost unfathomable atrocity
that once again drive our politics.
Those scenes of huddled masses burned out of their homes and driven into
exile aroused our sympathy and overrode all obligations to respect
Serbia's sovereignty. Once the cameras went into action, and the
President promised only surgical, aerial combat, no U.N. treaties or
Russian entreaties could keep us out. And once "in," as the slogan went,
we had to "win," whatever that meant.
Brushed aside were the slogans of the former anti-war movements that
America was not "the world's policeman," that we had no business
interfering in other nations' civil wars. A few critics clucked about
our inconsistency -- our failure to get similarly aroused about even
worse barbarities in Cambodia, East Timor, Liberia, Sudan, Algeria,
Rwanda. Did Asian and African slaughters not qualify for American
response?
What those challenges fail to grasp is that our responses, or lack of
responses, are not based on consistency of policy. They're based on the
tube. Television drives the public temperature // and cameras were
either barred or scared away from those other battlegrounds. Hence there
were no bloodcurdling images, and words alone failed to move us.
Cameras also drive our choice of military tactics. President Clinton
ruled out ground combat in Kosovo because he had seen how the sight of
bloody battle scenes on TV forced our retreat from Vietnam. And he
himself ordered us out of Somalia after a single American soldier was
shown beaten to death and disgustingly dragged around by people that the
troops had come to feed. Images seize our hearts.
But they also cloud our thoughts.
Long before television, or bombers or telephones, Americans questioned
their purpose in the world. In every generation, one faction insisted
that we fight only to defend the national interest, using power to guard
our frontiers and to bargain for the economic and political welfare of
our people. Another faction insisted that we had to fight also for our
national beliefs, to promote our universal values of peace, freedom,
justice and democracy.
Jefferson thought societies had the same obligations as individuals to
advance moral values. Hamilton thought a nation had no right to indulge
"emotions of generosity and benevolence" at the expense of its own
interests. Madison struggled for a middle ground; he said nations must
serve their interests, but thought these sometimes included the general
interests of mankind.
In our century, we learned to devise different strokes for different
folks. President Wilson came through World War I agitating for the
"self-determination" of peoples held down by the enemy powers, Germany
and Austria-Hungary. But he ignored the domination of other peoples by
the United States and by allies like France and Britain.
We continue to be torn in that Wilsonian fashion. Like Hamilton, we
worry about oil-supply lines more than about civil liberties in the
Middle East. Heeding Jefferson, we wage economic warfare to promote
human rights in South Africa or Cuba. And when it comes to China, like
Madison, we recognize our national interest in a bountiful trade and our
human interest in opposing tyranny. Even after a decade of profound
transformation in China, we cannot erase the images of the tanks in
Tiananmen Square.
China now opposes our attacks on Yugoslavia on behalf of dissident
Kosovo because it fears our intervention would challenge its claim to
Taiwan and its hold on Tibet. Yet the Chinese are eager to join the
World Trade Organization, to which they would have to yield a large
measure of sovereignty. In a similar ambiguity, the United States in
recent years has sided with China to oppose the creation of an
international court to prosecute war crimes. Yet when the cameras
finally caught up with the skeletal remains of atrocity in Rwanda and
Bosnia, Americans guiltily endorsed some ad hoc trials of a few captives
for "crimes against humanity."
Milosevic remains a poor candidate for trial so long as we need to
negotiate with him for an eventual deal for Kosovo. We want to preserve
a sovereign Yugoslavia even as we bomb within its borders. The United
Nations is no help; it forswears intervention in matters of "domestic
jurisdiction" even as it sponsors a "universal declaration of human
rights." So we let the cameras steer our course.
Someday in the next century we will acknowledge that there can be no
global human rights without global laws and no way to write and enforce
the laws without a global congress, courts and cops. The more our
cameras intrude upon the world's terrain, the more of our sovereignty
will we yield to our humanity.
As the lion in the jungle of nations, the United States is obviously not
ready to yield to a higher authority. But in time we will realize, like
the nations of Western Europe, that sovereignty has become the enemy of
safety. The time will come when Americans recognize that anarchy among
nations constitutes a threat to our interest and welfare. We would then
take the lead in creating a canopy of law across the globe. Only under a
regime of law can politics replace violence and allow the reason of
words to take precedence over the passion of pictures.
========================================================================
==============
Why Are We In Kosovo?
It's complicated, but not that complicated. There is such a thing as a
just war.
By SUSAN SONTAG, The New York Times Magazine
The other day a friend from home, New York, called me in Bari -- where I
am living for a couple of months -- to ask whether I am all right and
inquired in passing whether I can hear sounds of the bombing. I
reassured her that not only could I not hear the bombs dropping on
Belgrade and Novi Sad and Pristina from downtown Bari, but even the
planes taking off from the nearby NATO base of Gioia del Colle are quite
inaudible. Though it is easy to mock my geographyless American friend's
vision of European countries being only slightly larger than postage
stamps, her Tiny Europe seems a nice complement to the widely held
vision of Helpless Europe being dragged into a bellicose folly by Big
Bad America.
Perhaps I exaggerate. I am writing this from Italy -- weakest link in
the NATO chain. Italy (unlike France and Germany) continues to maintain
an embassy in Belgrade. Milosevic has received the Italian Communists'
party leader, Armando Cossutta. The estimable mayor of Venice has sent
an envoy to Belgrade with letters addressed to Milosevic and to the
ethnic Albanian leader with whom he has met, Ibrahim Rugova, proposing
Venice as a site for peace negotiations. (The letters were accepted,
thank you very much, by the Orthodox primate following the Easter Sunday
service.) But then it is understandable that Italy has panicked:
Italians see not just scenes of excruciating misery on their TV news but
images of masses on the move. In Italy, Albanians are first of all
future immigrants.
But opposition to the war is hardly confined to Italy, and to one strand
of the political spectrum. On the contrary: mobilized against this war
are remnants of the left and the likes of Le Pen and Bossi and Heider on
the right. The right is against immigrants. The left is against America.
(Against the idea of America, that is. The hegemony of American popular
culture in Europe could hardly be more total.)
On both the so-called left and the so-called right, identity-talk is on
the rise. The anti-Americanism that is fueling the protest against the
war has been growing in recent years in many of the nations of the New
Europe, and is perhaps best understood as a displacement of the anxiety
about this New Europe, which everyone has been told is a Good Thing and
few dare question. Nations are communities that are always being
imagined, reconceived, reasserted, against the pressure of a defining
Other. The specter of a nation without borders, an infinitely porous
nation, is bound to create anxiety. Europe needs its overbearing
America.
Weak Europe? Impotent Europe? The words are everywhere. The truth is
that the made-for-business Europe being brought into existence with the
enthusiastic assent of the "responsible" business and professional
elites is a Europe precisely designed to be incapable of responding to
the threat posed by a dictator like Milosevic. This is not a question of
"weakness," though that is how it is being experienced. It is a question
of ideology.
It is not that Europe is weak. Far from it. It is that Europe, the
Europe under construction since the Final Victory of Capitalism in 1989,
is up to something else. Something which indeed renders obsolete most of
the questions of justice -- indeed, all the moral questions. (What
prevails, in their place, are questions of health, which may be
conjoined with ecological concerns; but that is another matter.)
A Europe designed for spectacle, consumerism and hand wringing ... but
haunted by the fear of national identities being swamped either by
faceless multinational commercialism or by tides of alien immigrants
from poor countries.
In one part of the continent, former Communists play the nationalist
card and foment lethal nationalisms -- Milosevic being the most
egregious example. In the other part, nationalism, and with it war, are
presumed to be superseded, outmoded.
How helpless "our" Europe feels in the face of all this irrational
slaughter and suffering taking place in the other Europe.
nd meanwhile the war goes on. A war that started in 1991. Not in 1999.
And not, as the Serbs would have it, six centuries ago, either. Theirs
is a country whose nationalist myth has as its founding event a
defeat -- the Battle of Kosovo, lost to the Turks in 1389. We are
fighting the Turks, Serb officers commanding the mortar emplacements on
the heights of Sarajevo would assure visiting journalists.
Would we not think it odd if France still rallied around the memory of
the Battle of Agincourt -- 1415 -- in its eternal enmity with Great
Britain? But who could imagine such a thing? For France is Europe. And
"they" are not.
Yes, this is Europe. The Europe that did not respond to the Serb
shelling of Dubrovnik. Or the three-year siege of Sarajevo. The Europe
that let Bosnia die.
A new definition of Europe: the place where tragedies don't take place.
Wars, genocides -- that happened here once, but no longer. It's
something that happens in Africa. (Or places in Europe that are not
"really" Europe. That is, the Balkans.) Again, perhaps I exaggerate. But
having spent a good part of three years, from 1993 to 1996, in Sarajevo,
it does not seem to me like an exaggeration at all.
Living on the edge of NATO Europe, only a few hundred kilometers from
the refugee camps in Durres and Kukes and Blace, from the greatest mass
of suffering in Europe since the Second World War, it is true that I
can't hear the NATO planes leaving the base here in Puglia. But I can
walk to Bari's waterfront and watch Albanian and Kosovar families
pouring off the daily ferries from Durres -- legal immigrants,
presumably -- or drive south a hundred kilometers at night and see the
Italian coast guard searching for the rubber dinghies crammed with
refugees that leave Vlore nightly for the perilous Adriatic crossing.
But if I leave my apartment in Bari only to visit friends and have a
pizza and see a movie and hang out in a bar, I am no closer to the war
than the television news or the newspapers that arrive every morning at
my doorstep. I could as well be back in New York.
Of course, it is easy to turn your eyes from what is happening if it is
not happening to you. Or if you have not put yourself where it is
happening. I remember in Sarajevo in the summer of 1993 a Bosnian friend
telling me ruefully that in 1991, when she saw on her TV set the footage
of Vukovar utterly leveled by the Serbs, she thought to herself, How
terrible, but that's in Croatia, that can never happen here in Bosnia
... and switched the channel. The following year, when the war started
in Bosnia, she learned differently. Then she became part of a story on
television that other people saw and said, How terrible ... and switched
the channel.
If several African states had cared enough about the genocide of the
Tutsis in Rwanda (a million people!) to intervene militarily, would we
have asked what right they had when they had done nothing on behalf of
the Kurds or the Tibetans?
How helpless "our" pacified, comfortable Europe feels in the face of
all this irrational slaughter and suffering taking place in the other
Europe. But the images cannot be conjured away -- of refugees, people
who have been pushed out of their homes, their torched villages, by the
hundreds of thousands and who look like us.
Generations of Europeans fearful of any idealism, incapable of
indignation except in the old anti-imperialist cold-war grooves. (Yet,
of course, the key point about this war is that it is the direct result
of the end of the cold war and the breakup of old empires and imperial
rivalries.) Stop the War and Stop the Genocide, read the banners being
waved in the demonstrations in Rome and here in Bari. For Peace. Against
War. Who is not? But how can you stop those bent on genocide without
making war?
We have been here before. The horrors, the horrors. Our attempt to forge
a "humanitarian" response. Our inability (yes, after Auschwitz!) to
comprehend how such horrors can take place. And as the horrors multiply,
it becomes even more incomprehensible why we should respond to any one
of them (since we have not responded to the others). Why this horror and
not another? Why Bosnia or Kosovo and not Kurdistan or Rwanda or Tibet?
Are we not saying that European lives, European suffering are more
valuable, more worth acting on to protect, than the lives of people in
the Middle East, Africa and Asia?
One answer to this commonly voiced objection to NATO's war is to say
boldly, Yes, to care about the fate of the people in Kosovo is
Eurocentric, and what's wrong with that? But is not the accusation of
Eurocentrism itself just one more vestige of European presumption, the
presumption of Europe's universalist mission: that every part of the
globe has a claim on Europe's attention?
If several African states had cared enough about the genocide of the
Tutsis in Rwanda (nearly a million people!) to intervene militarily,
say, under the leadership of Nelson Mandela, would we have criticized
this initiative as being Afrocentric? Would we have asked what right
these states have to intervene in Rwanda when they have done nothing on
behalf of the Kurds or the Tibetans?
Another argument against intervening in Kosovo is that the war is --
wonderful word -- illegal," because NATO is violating the borders of a
sovereign state. Kosovo is, after all, part of the new Greater Serbia
called Yugoslavia. Tough luck for the Kosovars that Milosevic revoked
their autonomous status in 1989. Inconvenient that 90 percent of
Kosovars are Albanians -- ethnic Albanians" as they are called, to
distinguish them from the citizens of Albania. Empires reconfigure. But
are national borders, which have been altered so many times in the last
hundred years, really to be the ultimate criterion? You can murder your
wife in your own house, but not outdoors on the street.
Imagine that Nazi Germany had had no expansionist ambitions but had
simply made it a policy in the late 1930's and early 1940's to slaughter
all the German Jews. Do we think a government has the right to do
whatever it wants on its own territory? Maybe the governments of Europe
would have said that 60 years ago. But would we approve now of their
decision?
Push the supposition into the present. What if the French Government
began slaughtering large numbers of Corsicans and driving the rest out
of Corsica ... or the Italian Government began emptying out Sicily or
Sardinia, creating a million refugees ... or Spain decided to apply a
final solution to its rebellious Basque population. Wouldn't we agree
that a consortium of powers on the continent had the right to use
military force to make the French (or Italian, or Spanish) Government
reverse its actions, which would probably mean overthrowing that
Government?
But of course this couldn't happen, could it? Not in Europe. My friends
in Sarajevo used to say during the siege: How can "the West" be letting
this happen to us? This is Europe, too. We're Europeans. Surely "they"
won't allow it to go on.
But they -- Europe -- did.
For something truly terrible happened in Bosnia. From the Serb death
camps in the north of Bosnia in 1992, the first death camps on European
soil since the 1940's, to the mass executions of many thousands of
civilians at Srebrenica and elsewhere in the summer of 1995 -- Europe
tolerated that.
So, obviously, Bosnia wasn't Europe.
Those of us who spent time in Sarajevo used to say that, as the 20th
century began at Sarajevo, so will the 21st century begin at Sarajevo.
If the options before NATO all seem either improbable or unpalatable, it
is because NATO's actions come eight years too late. Milosevic should
have been stopped when he was shelling Dubrovnik in 1991.
Back in 1993 and 1994, American policy makers were saying that even if
there were no United States intervention in Bosnia, rest assured, this
would be the last thing that Milosevic would be allowed to get away
with. A line in the sand had been drawn: he would never be allowed to
make war on Kosovo. But who believed the Americans then? Not the
Bosnians. Not Milosevic. Not the Europeans. Not even the Americans
themselves. After Dayton, after the destruction of independent Bosnia,
it was time to go back to sleep, as if the series of events set in
motion in 1989 with the accession to power of Milosevic and the
revocation of autonomous status for the province of Kosovo, would not
play out to its obvious logical end.
If Europe is having a hard time thinking that it matters what happens in
the southeastern corner of Europe, imagine how hard it is for Americans
to think it is in their interest. It is not in America's interest to
push this war on Europe. It is very much not in Europe's interest to
reward Milosevic for the destruction of Yugoslavia and the creation of
so much human suffering.
Why not just let the brush fire burn out? is the argument of some. And
the expulsion of a million or more refugees into the neighboring
countries of Albania and Macedonia? This will certainly bring on the
destruction of the fragile new state of Macedonia and the redrawing of
the map of the Balkans -- certain to be disputed by, at the very least,
Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece. Do we imagine this will happen peacefully?
Not surprisingly, the Serbs are presenting themselves as the victims.
(Clinton equals Hitler, etc.) But it is grotesque to equate the
casualties inflicted by the NATO bombing with the mayhem inflicted on
hundreds of thousands of people in the last eight years by the Serb
programs of ethnic cleansing.
Not all violence is equally reprehensible; not all wars are equally
unjust.
No forceful response to the violence of a state against peoples who are
nominally its own citizens? (Which is what most "wars" are today. Not
wars between states.) The principal instances of mass violence in the
world today are those committed by governments within their own legally
recognized borders. Can we really say there is no response to this? Is
it acceptable that such slaughters be dismissed as civil wars, also
known as "age-old ethnic hatreds." (After all, anti-Semitism was an old
tradition in Europe; indeed, a good deal older than ancient Balkan
hatreds. Would this have justified letting Hitler kill all the Jews on
German territory?) Is it true that war never solved anything? (Ask a
black American if he or she thinks our Civil War didn't solve anything.)
War is not simply a mistake, a failure to communicate. There is radical
evil in the world, which is why there are just wars. And this is a just
war. Even if it has been bungled.
Stop the genocide. Return all refugees to their homes. Worthy goals. But
how is any of this conceivably going to happen unless the Milosevic
regime is overthrown? (And the truth is, it's not going to happen.)
Impossible to see how this war will play out. All the options seem
improbable, as well as undesirable. Unthinkable to keep bombing
indefinitely, if Milosevic is indeed willing to accept the destruction
of the Serbian economy; unthinkable for NATO to stop bombing, if
Milosevic remains intransigent.
The Milosevic Government has finally brought on Serbia a small portion
of the suffering it has inflicted on neighboring peoples.
War is a culture, bellicosity is addictive, defeat for a community that
imagines itself to be history's eternal victim can be as intoxicating as
victory. How long will it take for the Serbs to realize that the
Milosevic years have been an unmitigated disaster for Serbia, the net
result of Milosevic's policies being the economic and cultural ruin of
the entire region, including Serbia, for several generations? Alas, one
thing we can be sure of, that will not happen soon.
========================================================================
===========
Kosovo guerrillas quietly aid effort from worried Macedonia
By Brian Murphy, Associated Press, 05/02/99 13:40
TETOVO, Macedonia (AP) - Tucked deep in his wallet, a Kosovo refugee
carries the red-and-black emblem of the ethnic Albanian separatists
fighting in his homeland.
''We can't show it openly here,'' explained Mustafa Imiri, a 22-year-old
volunteer for the Kosovo Liberation Army waiting to cross back over the
border. ''The Macedonians would arrest us on the spot.''
This is very much the way the KLA is operating in Macedonia's ethnic
Albanian region: discreetly and mostly out of sight. But the mere
presence of KLA recruiters and planners is part of a nightmare scenario
worrying Macedonian leaders.
The Slav-led government in the capital, Skopje, fears its ethnic
Albanian enclave of Tetovo could become another front for the KLA's
battle.
Closer links with the KLA's struggle could upset the relative ethnic
harmony in Macedonia and put strains on the three-party coalition
government, which includes the Tetovo-based Democratic Party of the
Albanians. An eventual KLA victory - aided by NATO - could stoke the
ultimate fear: Tetovo seeking to break away and join its neighbor.
Separatist sentiments in Tetovo have subsided after clashes and protests
in the early 1990s. But a galloping Balkan conflict could quickly
rekindle ethnic fervor, some analysts say.
''Issues that are settled in normal times are reopened in wars,'' said
Espen Barth Eide, a regional expert at the Norwegian Institute of
Foreign Policy. ''If there are any changes in the borders (of
Yugoslavia) that could put everything up for grabs.''
And these are definitely not normal times in Tetovo. Macedonia's
northwestern corner - the center of the country's ethnic Albanian
minority - is swelling with Kosovo refugees with the connections or
money to avoid being put in camps. Before the refugee surge, ethnic
Albanians comprised about a third of Macedonia's 2.1 million people.
Now, the balance is shifting quickly against the Slavs.
''This may give the Tetovo Albanians a renewed sense of clout and
affinity with the Kosovars,'' said Eide.
But KLA strategists are careful not to anger their Macedonian hosts.
Recruitment is done quietly in cafes along the main street. There is no
overt display of KLA support except for a few splashes of graffiti that
are quickly covered by authorities, who have promised to come down hard
on any KLA activity.
Interior Minister Pavle Trajanov vowed that the KLA movement will not be
''exported'' to Macedonia. The United States - which tacitly backs the
group - also wants it to stay away to avoid possibly setting off another
Balkan showdown.
''They are not welcome here,'' U.S. Ambassador Christopher Hill said in
an interview broadcast on state television.
But a top KLA aide said Tetovo is a friendly haven. He said the rebels
enjoy deep sympathy around the region, which could become an important
fund-raising and logistics post.
''Why wouldn't they support us? They are part of the Albanian people
like we are,'' said the KLA collaborator, who would only use his nom de
guerre Gypsy. ''It's natural that we are here.''
For the moment, however, Macedonia is on the fringe of the KLA fight.
The rebels can operate freely in Albania and move weapons over the
border. But that could change. A brief Serb incursion into northern
Albania last month showed present supply routes could be vulnerable.
''Then we would have to turn more to Macedonia,'' said Gypsy, who
claimed to be part of the inner circle of one of the KLA's most
successful field guerrillas, Kadri Kastrati, who fought for Croatia
gainst Serb-led Yugoslavia. Kastrati, also known as Commander Daja, or
uncle, leads forces in the KLA's main stronghold in the northern Kosovo
town of Llapastica.
Small groups of new KLA fighters are sent over Tetovo mountain trails to
Kosovo, said Gypsy. The convoys go only after they can find enough
weapons.
''This is not so easy in Macedonia,'' he said.
But officials claim the KLA could be stockpiling an arsenal on
Macedonian territory.
On April 17, police said they found four tons of weapons outside of
Tetovo near the city of Kumanovo, 24 miles northeast of Skopje. The
cache included assault rifles, rocket launchers and anti-tank mines.
Gypsy admitted keeping the KLA supplied is becoming a difficult task.
Each new recruit - from Macedonia and Albania - must carry at least 66
pounds of arms and ammunition. Food supplies are also a growing problem,
Gypsy admitted.
Serb forces have destroyed stores and cut off normal food channels in
many parts of Kosovo, Gypsy said. ''Food is the Serbs' most successful
weapon against us now,'' he added.
Gypsy said KLA envoys may appeal to NATO for aerial food drops into
rebel-held territory.
In Macedonia, the main KLA task at the moment appears to be recruiting
new fighters and encouraging refugees to remain in Tetovo. There are
worries a full-scale refugee resettlement outside the Balkans will hurt
KLA morale and undermine their base of support in a key border staging
areas.
''By sending people away, the West is taking part in the ethnic
cleansing as well,'' complained Gypsy. ''We know many of these people
will not return. This is precisely what Belgrade wants.''
========================================================================
======
FOCUS-Thousands more refugees arrive in Macedonia
11:42 a.m. May 02, 1999 Eastern
By Pawel Kopczynski
BLACE, Macedonia, May 2 (Reuters) - Thousands of refugees poured into
Macedonia again on Sunday as the United Nation's human rights chief
condemned ethnic cleansing in Kosovo as a crime that could not go
unpunished.
Mary Robinson, head of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, met refugees
swarming to get into Macedonia from Kosovo and visited a crammed refugee
camp near Skopje.
``It is not a humanitarian problem. It is a human rights problem,'' she
said as she toured Stankovic refugee camp and heard tales of alleged
Serb atrocities.
Refugees continued to pour in at Blace, the main border crossing between
Macedonia and Kosovo, leaving aid workers at their wit's end to find
places from them in the country's bursting refugee camps.
A Reuters photographer watched doctors bring Ahmed Rahuna, a 67-year-old
refugee, from a holding camp next to the border after suffering a heart
attack. Rahuna died a few minutes later in a nearby field hospital with
only basic facilities.
The UNHCR refugee agency has been scrambling for days to try to find
room for the influx of refugees in camps already bursting at the seams.
One official said between 3,000 and 4,000 arrived at Blace on Sunday.
At Cegrane camp, the newest, Macedonia Prime Minister Ljupco Georgievski
made another appeal for money from the international community to help
handle the crisis.
Cegrane was an island of tents in a spreading sea of people. Thousands
of people spent a second night there in the open on Saturday, sleeping
on plastic sheets because there were no tents.
The UNHCR has appealed to the international community to speed up
airlifts of refugees to help ease the pressure. Macedonia's government
fears economic collapse and intolerable strains on its own delicate
ethnic mix unless help comes soon.
Refugees camping out at Cegrane filled one field about twice the size of
a soccer pitch, their sheets practically touching, and were spilling
over into a neighbouring field.
A tear rolled down one old woman's cheek as she sat on her square of
plastic in the camp, which looks out at a spectacular snow-capped
mountain range.
At Stankovic, Robinson met a man who said his ear had been cut off by
Serb forces. At Blace, she spoke with a woman who told her how her
husband had been taken away by Serbs just as the family was about to
cross in to Macedonia.
``It is an appalling story of human misery,'' she said of the influx of
refugees. ``But it is not happening by accident. It is a deliberate
violation (of human rights). We must have accountability. We cannot have
impunity.''
Earlier, UNHCR spokeswoman Paula Ghedini said the overcrowding crisis
was becoming obvious to anyone who looked -- or smelled.
``People can see for themselves, they can smell for themselves how
desperate things are,'' she said. Rotting rubbish and inadequate
latrines have begun to stink after several days of hot weather and
doctors fear the poor sanitation could spark an outbreak of disease.
The UNHCR said that, as of Saturday morning, there were 173,100 refugees
in Macedonia, 79,700 of whom were crushed into nine overcrowded camps
and holding centres.
========================================================================
=====
Macedonia Camps Overflow, UNHCR At Wits' End
06:48 a.m. May 02, 1999 Eastern
By Oleg Popov
CEGRANE, Macedonia (Reuters) - Macedonia's unfinished Cegrane camp was
an island of tents in a spreading sea of people Sunday after thousands
more Kosovo refugees spent a second night in the open on plastic sheets
because there were no tents to put them in.
Officials from the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR were at their wits' end as
refugee camps overflowed and there appeared no let- up in sight to the
stream of thousands crossing the border daily fleeing fighting in the
southern Serbian province.
Thousands more began arriving at the main Blace border crossing Sunday.
UNHCR has appealed to the international community to speed up airlifts
of refugees to help ease the pressure. Macedonia's government fears
economic collapse and intolerable strains on its own delicate ethnic mix
unless help comes soon.
``Yesterday we think we had 7,000 (arrivals) and we only had 600
evacuations,'' UNHCR spokeswoman Paula Ghedini told Reuters. ''If we
have another day like that...we really don't know what we are going to
do with the people.''
Cegrane, where German NATO troops have been working around the clock to
put up tents in a vain bid to keep up with the flow of refugees, should
only really house 4,000 in its current state, Ghedini said. There are
now about 14,000 there.
Ten buses drove to the camp some 70 km (44 miles) west of the capital
Skopje late Saturday night and the new arrivals were handed blue plastic
sheeting, given food and water, and told to bed down as best they could.
Refugees camping out filled one field about twice the size of a soccer
pitch, their sheets practically touching, and were spilling over into
another field beside it.
A tear rolled down one old woman's cheek as she sat on her square of
plastic in the camp, which looks out at a spectacular snow-capped
mountain range.
Aid workers crammed another 1,000 into the main Stankovic camp near
Skopje and extra tents were hurriedly put up at the squalid holding camp
beside the Blace checkpoint, where between 5,000 and 6,000 spent the
night in an area designed to house half that number.
Some tents had 100 people in them although they were supposed to hold
only 50.
Ghedini said she was hopeful the airlifts would now move into a higher
gear. ``I know the commitment is there. It's just a matter of activating
things,'' she said.
``People can see for themselves, they can smell for themselves how
desperate things are,'' she said. Rotting rubbish and inadequate
latrines have begun to stink after several days of hot weather and
doctors fear the poor sanitation could spark an outbreak of disease
within days. ``It's just horrendous,'' Ghedini said.
UNHCR said that, as of Saturday morning, there were 173,100 refugees in
Macedonia, 79,700 of whom were crushed into nine creaking refugee camps
and holding centers. The U.N.'s human rights chief, Mary Robinson, was
due to visit Blace and the main Stankovic camp later Sunday.
========================================================================
=========
NATO Plane in Emergency Landing at Skopje
Reuters
02-MAY-99
SKOPJE, May 2 (Reuters) - A NATO A-10 Thunderbolt aircraft made an
emergency landing at Skopje airport on Sunday but it was not immediately
clear what caused the incident.
NATO sources in Skopje and Brussels confirmed that the plane -- a
Warthog of the type used by the U.S. military in its campaign against
Yugoslavia -- had landed at Macedonia's main airport in the morning.
A NATO source in Brussels said the reason for the landing was not yet
known.
One private Macedonian television quoted eyewitnesses as saying the wing
of the aircraft appeared to be damaged, but this could not be
independently confirmed.
NATO said on Sunday it had lost an F-16CJ over Yugoslavia to engine
failure and that an AV8B Harrier had crashed during a training exercise
in the Adriatic
========================================================================
=====
UNHCR Says Kosovo Refugee Overcrowding Worsens
Reuters
02-MAY-99
ZURICH, May 2 (Reuters) - A spokesman for the United Nations refugee
agency said on Sunday that camps in Macedonia were hopelessly
overcrowded, but refugees continued to pour in.
In Macedonia alone, around 5,000 new refugees were estimated to have
just arrived through two crossings.
"I spoke to my collegue in Macedonia, who said there were 4,000 people
arriving in the Blace crossing and about a thousand people arriving at
the Jazince crossing," said Kris Janowski, spokesman for the UN High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
"They have been taken partially to the Cegrane camp -- it is a new
camp -- which is already hopeless overcrowded. So, basically, the
overcrowding is huge, and continues to be a major problem," he told
Reuters by phone from Geneva.
He said more refugees had also been arriving in Albania. He had no exact
figure, but said the number was "certainly into the thousands."
The UN agency estimated on Saturday that roughly 800,000 ethnic
Albanians have fled or been expelled from Kosovo since fighting began in
the region just over a year ago in March 1998.
========================================================================
==============
Focus-U.N. Rights Chief Slams Ethnic Cleansing
Reuters
02-MAY-99
BLACE, Macedonia, May 2 (Reuters) - U.N. human rights chief Mary
Robinson listened to harrowing stories of Kosovo refugees queuing at
Macedonia's main border checkpoint on Sunday and vowed the ethnic
cleansing of Kosovo Albanians would not go unpunished.
"The main focus (of my visit) is the huge suffering reflected in the
deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing which is absolutely unacceptable,"
she told reporters.
"We must have accountability. We can't have impunity...It may be a slow
process but there will not be impunity," she said.
Robinson, who was starting a 12-day trip to the Balkans during which she
plans to meet Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, said her mission
was "to see at first hand the extent of the human rights problem that is
at the heart of this humanitarian catastrophe."
Towards the back of a queue of around 2,000 people waiting to be allowed
to cross into Macedonia, Robinson heard some graphic testimony. One old
man who had to be supported by another man showed her a bullet wound and
told her Serb police shot him on Saturday night in his flat.
A youth lifted up his T-shirt to reveal several red weals across his
back. There was another at his throat. He said 10 Serbs had beaten him.
Others said they had been hit and had teeth broken.
One old man, a professor of zoological science from the southern Serbian
town of Gnjilane, told Robinson: "I cannot describe what happened. Three
thousand pages of suffering cannot be written down."
Robinson, a lawyer and former Irish president who took over as the
United Nations' top human rights official two years ago vowing to "stand
up to bullies," described the reported incidents as "savagery and total
lack of respect for human beings."
One woman told her how her husband had been "snatched" at the border as
they tried to cross to Macedonia with their four children. She does not
know where he is now.
Describing what she termed ethnic cleansing, Robinson said: "It's an
appalling story of human misery but it's not happening by accident. It
is a deliberate violation."
Robinson has not spared NATO either. She has criticised the alliance's
six-week-old campaign of air strikes for "killing large numbers of
civilians," and reiterated on Sunday that it was necessary to draw
attention to the civilian deaths and injuries caused.
After speaking to refugees at the border, where more than 5,000 spent
the night in a squalid camp beside the checkpoint, Robinson visited
Macedonia's biggest camp, which is full to overflowing, and spoke to
refugees there.
One was 28-year-old Nijazi Bajrami who says Serb police sliced his left
ear off with a knife last week.
Robinson also exchanged a few words with Hollywood actor Richard Gere,
who is in Macedonia to help organise humanitarian aid for the refugees.
Macedonia is struggling under the weight of more than 80,000 refugees
crammed into camps. The U.N. refugee agency UNHCR has urged other
countries to airlift people out to temporary homes to ease the pressure.
The pace has so far lagged the 2,000 departures-a-day goal and thousands
more Kosovar Albanians have poured in.
"Many countries have made promises...There is a need for countries to
come forward with practical plans," Robinson said. "I do believe
European countries...can do more."
========================================================================
==============
Hunger Joins Kosovo's Perils
By Anne Swardson and R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, May 2, 1999; Page A01
BLACE, Macedonia, May 1 Emine Misini is nine months pregnant and her
weariness shows in her deep and labored breaths here at the border
crossing from Yugoslavia. Sprawled on the side of the road, she cannot
at first remember when she last had something to eat, but finally it
occurs to her.
The day before yesterday, at around 3 p.m., she had some bread. On the
day before that, she says she had some bread. And the previous day, some
bread.
Her husband, Isuf, stands beside her, and her two children sit
listlessly nearby. His creased face conveys panic and moisture collects
at the corner of his eyes. He is clearly alarmed and ashamed at his
wife's condition, and worried about the health of the unborn baby after
weeks of inadequate nutrition.
"We were running out of everything," Isuf says, explaining their
decision to leave their home in the village of Bablak, near the city of
Stimlje. Every day that they lived in the mountains of south central
Kosovo, "we heard about someone dying from hunger," he adds.
Particularly at higher elevations, where snow is still present, "people
are . . . starving."
Widespread hunger is being reported inside Kosovo by refugees who said
it is a new, important reason for the continued outflow of ethnic
Albanians into Macedonia and Albania by the thousands each day.
As NATO's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia has reached 5 1/2 weeks,
refugees and aid workers say the humanitarian crisis that Washington and
other allied capitals worked hard to prevent last October is now
unfolding inside Kosovo.
Then, they successfully pressured the Yugoslav regime with the threat of
NATO airstrikes, forcing Belgrade to pull back its forces from the
Serbian province and let terrorized ethnic Albanians come down from the
hills just in time to find food and shelter for the winter.
But the tensions grew, and the fighting between ethnic Albanian rebels
seeking independence for Kosovo and Yugoslav forces intent on keeping
the province in Serbia escalated.
This spring, the West repeated its threat, but this time it failed and
the bombing went forward. Many of Kosovo's residents anticipated the
event by digging holes in the forest or filling their basements with
caches of food to last through a month-long nightmare. But virtually no
one expected the nightmare to persist, and so now comes the spread of
hunger, and the fear that it will be followed by the spread of disease.
The signs are just beginning, but a trend is evident and its direction
clear. Anyone who visited this border crossing in recent days and
plunged into the crowd of thousands of refugees to inquire about why
they left Kosovo heard scores of identical statements that virtually no
one made the week before: There is no food. We haven't eaten for several
days. Our children had nothing to eat. We barely had enough energy to
get here.
A World Food Program representative described what is happening now as
the fourth and most serious sign of a looming disaster.
The first, said Lindsey Davies, was the widespread looting and burning
of shops where ethnic Albanians bought their food. The second was the
deliberate refusal of Serbs -- who were given food by the government or
who collected food from the looted shops -- to sell any to ethnic
Albanians. The third was the exhaustion of individual families'
emergency stockpiles of food, down to eating the last cow in some cases.
The fourth is a mass decision to come down from the mountains and
attempt to flee to Macedonia or Albania, even at great personal risk,
because of hunger.
"We aren't seeing malnutrition yet, but people are severely hungry,"
Davies said on the basis of interviews she has conducted with the latest
wave of refugees from Kosovo. "We could be looking at an emergency food
situation inside Kosovo in coming weeks." A state of emergency, in
humanitarian lingo, means that many people will become malnourished and
some of the weak, the young and the elderly may die.
Under the 1949 Geneva Conventions governing the conduct of war, the
deliberate starvation of civilians is a crime. Scores of refugees have
now begun to report that they are deliberately being denied access to
food, and that the tactic is swelling the crowds that each day jostle
and sometimes fight to get aboard buses or trains bound for the
overcrowded camps in Macedonia.
Several in the villages of Prizren and Mushikove, northeast of this
border crossing, have reported that Yugoslav troops came to their homes
and threw their flour on the floor or into their water wells. Ethnic
Albanian refugees from Stimlje, Pristina, and Urosevac report standing
in line for hours to buy food at shops run by Serbs, only to be turned
away after being forced to show documents that revealed their family
names.
"A lot of people are running not only from shelling but from
starvation," said a man who did not give his name. "If I had stayed two
more days, I would not have been able to feed my children."
The problem is worse in the mountains, where officials with the rebel
Kosovo Liberation Army said the first deaths from hunger occurred two
weeks ago. Many refugees have since reported that newborn babies
particularly have suffered, along with people in their sixties and
seventies.
But even in the capital of Pristina, food reserves are running low, with
the few remaining shops closed to ethnic Albanians and only cigars
available on the black market. As thousands of residents have been
forced into smaller cities by the crisis, these locales also have been
affected. In Gnjilane, for example, all but one of the 10 bakeries have
closed for lack of flour. Refugees from outlying villages have flooded
in, driving up prices and leaving many without access to food. "All the
stores are closed; you can't get any sugar, bread or milk for the
children," said Agim Zeka, 39. Two pounds of sugar that once cost 50
cents now goes for $3, he said, while a liter of gasoline has risen from
50 cents to $5.
Xhevahire Belia, 34, a refugee from Kacanik, said troops burned 80
percent of the food at their home. The family took the rest when they
fled to the mountains, but most was used up by the time they left three
weeks later. "We had some spaghetti we boiled, and bread," she said.
Refugees who came from the country said they were the fortunate ones:
they often owned cows, so they could provide milk for their children and
even make cheese. Others fashioned their own solutions.
Fiza Rexheri, 33, mixed flour and water and cooked it lightly for
Blenda, her 4-month-old daughter. Blenda ate it, but seemed to prefer
the jar of fruit baby food she was eating as her mother told this story.
She had been handed the food when they arrived at the transit camp.
"We had food for only two more days. We would either have died from the
Serb police or from hunger," Rexheri said. Others who leaned their heads
out of the windows of buses taking them from the border to several
refugee camps said they had subsisted for days on potatoes, bread, salt,
and sometimes raw sugar for the children. Even fresh water is scarce;
when a group called Action Against Hunger deposited a truckload of water
bottles at the border crossing, it disappeared within minutes in the
hands of refugees who scrambled to tear apart the plastic packaging.
Shefqet Uruqi, 38, said that in Urosevac last week, shopkeepers told him
"there is no bread for Albanians." He said that army troops had taken
all the cows in outlying villages, and that "the city was full of people
who didn't have anything with them when they came," exacerbating the
food shortage there.
Pieter Dijkhuizen, chief nutritionist at the World Food Program's office
in Rome, predicted that if overall conditions continue to worsen, "in
the coming weeks, the main problems we'll see will be among children and
pregnant and lactating women," who feel the effects of hunger first.
The wait may not be so long. Shpresa Parllakuso, who came here from
Urosevac, said her 9-month-old girl, Kropina, would cry from hunger,
because she could not produce enough breast milk to satisfy her. She
said four other children with her also cried because they had subsisted
for the past week on a bag of broken crackers.
========================================================================
===========