Kossova menu April 16 - ROBERT FISK (plus supplements)
MichaelP
Read FISK then read the supplements. Versions of the same reality,
especially on the marketing of destruction.
MichaelP
=======================
War in The Balkans - 'This is a horror story. There is no other way to
describe it'
By ROBERT FISK in TEVZICKI MOST
This is a horror story. There are no other words for it. It is the story
of a series of massacres along a road lined with torched houses and cherry
blossom, of smouldering skeletons and women cut in half, of a man's head
lying in a field with the wind blowing his brown hair against the grass,
and of corpses lying in a squalid hospital nearby.
Nato did all this, say the Serbs, and it is true that US munitions litter
the road and fields around here, sometimes within a few inches of corpses,
body parts, human bones, smashed tractors and trailers, their pathetic
contents of old clothes, pots and family snapshots lying around them.
Clearly there were air strikes here. And Nato appears to be responsible
for an atrocity.
But we saw other dark and terrible things on the road between Djakovica
and Prizren yesterday afternoon. Busloads of terrified Kosovo Albanians,
women and children and old men, peering from behind black curtains as they
were driven east; row after row of burnt out houses, some of them still
burning, a few only recently set on fire.
And several of the dead along the road appeared to have been attacked by
machine-gun fire.
The Serbs say that 74 Albanian refugees were massacred on this road on
Wednesday afternoon. And I counted 20 corpses - or parts of bodies - in
three bombing locations along a 12-mile stretch of highway, and in the
mortuary at Prizren, where a half-naked woman and a tiny girl covered in
blood lay on the floor partly covered in shrouds.
Esmet Sulja, whose sister-in-law was in the mortuary, told journalists
brought here by Serb officials that he came from the Kosovo village of
Malitce and was told to move "for his own safety" three weeks ago to
Dobros.
On Wednesday, he says he was driving his tractor containing 35 people in
the trailer from Djakovica to Prizren when planes began dropping bombs
around him.
The 46-year-old man, who had lacerations on his face, told us from his
hospital bed that five of the passengers had been killed in the trailer .
There were terrible scenes along the road, for the Serbs had left many of
the bodies where they were found. A grey-haired old man lay cut in half in
a tree, six corpses, including that of a young woman, lay in brightly
coloured clothes in a field where they had been dragged after the air
raid. I found a human head 50 metres away and skeletons burnt out in the
back of another trailer.
The munitions parked along the road bore several American markings. One
bomb part was marked "for use on MK82" and was marked assembly
96214assy78-201872, with a date of manufacture of March 1978. A missile
circuit board contained the code fchem872110.
================
"Opportunity target"
INDEPENDENT (London) April 16
War in The Balkans - Strike aircraft hunt in deadly pairs controlled from
on high
By John Davison
THE two F-16 Fighting Falcons would have taken off from Aviano air base in
northern Italy as part of a typical bombing formation of eight aircraft
that work in pairs or "two ship flights". But they are just the strike
element of a complicated attacking "package" that has to rendezvous in the
air and be co-ordinated all the way to the target and back.
First, they would meet up with an airborne tanker to re-fuel before the
mission was brought together under control of an E-3 Awacs aircraft,
flying at about 30,000 feet. It carries out the role of an airborne air
traffic controller, guiding the various elements together.
Other aircraft would include those jamming Serb radar and carrying Harm
missiles to destroy radar defences.There would also have been fighter
aircraft to protect the rest from enemy fighters. "The whole mission
involves punching a hole into the enemy's air defences, completing your
work and then punching your way out again," said an RAF source yesterday.
The "work" in this case involved a seek-and-destroy mission against Serb
tanks, other armour and vehicles on the ground. Such sorties flown by Nato
planes have often been frustrated by bad weather that has kept Serb forces
hidden.
The difference between this and other missions is that the exact target
will probably not be known before the aircraft take off, and no prior
approval will be needed. They are looking for what are called "opportunity
targets", and fly in holding patterns above the area until one presents
itself.
This information might come from intelligence on the ground, from unmanned
drones flying over the area or from American Jstars aircraft, which use
radar to spot movements from up to 150 miles away. All this would be fed
to the pilots through the Awacs, which would also be sending a picture of
the whole mission to air commanders, either in Italy or flying over the
area in a specially converted Hercules mobile command and control centre.
Alternatively, the pilot might just see something on the ground and launch
an attack. In that case, no target approval would be necessary. This kind
of attack, then, is a long way from the process of checking and approving
target lists that has been much discussed over the past weeks. It relies
entirely on a pilot being able to identify a military target correctly .
"At the end of the day there has to be an element of discretion, because
mobile targets move," said one source.
Because of continuing fear about Yugoslav air defences, particularly from
hand held surface-to-air missiles, the bombing is almost all taking place
from medium altitude of about 15,000ft. From that height, three vehicles
in a convoy would only appear as dots on the ground.
Rules of engagement include the strict requirement for pilots to abort a
mission if they are not certain they can avoid civilian casualties, and
such cancelled attacks have been reported in respect of RAF Harriers. But
perhaps it was just a matter of time before this kind of pilot error led
to a disaster.
=====================
"pilot de-briefing"
INDEPENDENT (London) April 16
War in The Balkans - 'I roll in, put my system on the vehicle and
execute...'
THIS account of the attack on the convoy was given by the unnamed American
fighter pilot of the first aircraft in a debriefing session. A recording
of the debriefing was played yesterday at a Nato briefing session in
Brussels.
THE PILOT started by saying that as he flew at 15,000ft over South-west
Kosovo he saw what he took to be systematic burning of villages by Serb
forces.
"I work my way back up to the road and I see another house that had just
been set ablaze and a three-vehicle convoy moving South-east about a click
(kilometre) from the freshest burning house. They come to a stop at the
next house down the road.
"I am convinced now the VJ (Yugoslav Army) and MUF (Ministry of Interior
police) forces, working their way down towards Djakovica and the refugees,
are preparing to set this next house on fire.
"(I made several passes) "to ensure that they are in fact military
vehicles. I roll in on two passes to get a close look both with my
eyeballs and my targeting pod.
"I make a decision at that point that these are the people responsible for
burning down the villages that I have seen so far. I roll in, put my
system on the lead vehicle and execute a laser-guided bomb attack on that
vehicle destroying the lead vehicle."
The pilot then said that his aircraft was low on fuel and had to pull out
of the area. He then described how he then passed on the target
co-ordinates and a general description of the vehicles to another pilot
who then also attacked.
======================================
At the other end of the bomb-sight.
INDEPENDENT (London) April 16
War in The Balkans - A pilot saw blazing villages, then a convoy. Seconds
later, he fired
By Andrew Buncombe
Eighty-year-old Dibran Asmani had been on the road for three days in
Kosovo, edging ever closer to the Albanian border he hoped would offer
safety.
Instead, early on Wednesday afternoon, the world exploded around him and
Mr Asmani's family disappeared before his eyes. "Suddenly, there was a big
blast, and I started running," said Mr Asmani, leaning on his walking
stick.
"All I could think was, my God, Nato is bombing us. I ran through the
field like a mouse. I'm ashamed, but I'm too old to lie about it."
More than 36 hours after one or more convoys of Kosovan refugees was hit
by bombs from Nato planes, details are slowly emerging about exactly what
happened between 1pm and 3pm on a road near Djakovica in south-west
Kosovo.
Perhaps because of a lack of facts, or because there is mileage to be made
peddling disinformation, at least two versions of what happened has
emerged.
What is without doubt is that Nato planes bombed the very refugees they
were trying to help - people like Mr Asmani. Nato called it a tragic
accident.
The tragedy began to unfold just after midday on Wednesday when an attack
team of American F-16 strike aircraft armed with laser-guided bombs, took
off from their base in at Aviano, in northern Italy.
Their mission was to fly over south-west Kosovo, specifically over towns
where Serb MUP (interior ministry) police - those responsible for the past
month's ethnic cleansing - had been spotted, and over areas known to be
"strategic supply routes" for the Yugoslav military machine.
Flying at 15,000ft, out of reach of anti-aircraft artillery and most
hand-held surface-to-air missiles, the pilot in the lead aircraft was
passing over open country between the village of Decani and the town of
Djakovica. From the cockpit of the single-seat aircraft he saw the ground
beneath dotted with villages that had been set on fire. Three, four, he
counted, all recently set alight and still burning and all, he presumed,
the work of the MUP.
Then, passing over a dirt road that linked the two settlements, he saw
movement on the ground. Looking closer he saw what he thought was a
60-vehicle convoy of vehicles. At the front of the convoy were three green
trucks.
"[I saw] three uniformly shaped dark green vehicles, look like
deuce-and-a-half (two and-a-half-ton) troop-carrying vehicles," the pilot
said, on a tape played to reporters yesterday by Nato.
"They come to a stop at the next house down the road. I am convinced now
that that's [army and police] forces working their way down toward
Djakovica."
Satisfied that he had identified the same forces who had been setting fire
to the villages, the pilot decided to mount an attack.
"I go in, put my system on the lead vehicle and execute a laser-guided
bomb attack on that vehicle destroying the lead vehicle," he said.
Realising he was running low on fuel, the pilot and his wingman - the
second pilot in the flight, who was marking the target with a laser for
the bomber - pulled away.
He passed on the map coordinates of the target to the next "flight", or
squad, of aircraft. In turn, this next flight spotted a further three
vehicles in a compound beside the dirt track. Using the same laser-guided
weapons, this team then moved in to destroy these targets, dropping three
bombs.
Later in the afternoon another team of F-16 bombers attacked a separate
military convoy. These were spotted on a road bridge east of Djakovica.
There was no information about civilian casualties.
This is Nato's account of events. But Belgrade's version of events is
quite different.
The Serbs say there was no military convoy in the area around Djakovica on
Wednesday afternoon. Instead, what Nato took to be military targets were
two convoys of refugees, separated by around 15 miles.
And they were not heading towards Albania, but were travelling back into
Kosovo from the border crossings at Cafta Prusit and Vrbnica. The Serbs
claim the first convoy to be hit was a procession of 1,000 people and 100
vehicles - tractors and private cars - struck by three bombs as it passed
the village of Maja, close to Djakovica. They say 64 people were killed
and 20 wounded.
Soon afterwards, they say, Nato aircraft struck a second convoy, this one
a line of 600 people travelling on the same road but in the village of
Zrze, 15 miles to the east. While this may have been the second of Nato's
targets, Belgrade insists there were no military vehicles, just refugees'
tractors and trailers. They said 44 people were killed at Zrze and dozens
injured.
"[This was] a horrendous massacre" claimed the Serbian President, Milan
Milutinovic. "This cannot be explained as an error when the columns of
refugees were bombed four times - this was done deliberately.
"It was a massacre of Albanian refugees who were returning to their homes
in the middle of the day."
What can we know for sure? We know that innocent refugees were killed on
Wednesday by bombs dropped from Nato planes.
We know that they were desperate, exhausted people who had probably been
on the move for weeks, their only possessions the little they could carry
as they fled from their homes.
We can presume that they were not deliberately targeted by Nato - the
political fallout from this "accident" will be bad enough.
We must question Pentagon and Nato suggestions that Yugoslav MiG fighters
attacked the columns. Experts point out that Nato would have spotted and
shot down any Serb planes.
In any case, the refugees themselves would not have been able to identify
whether the planes were Serb or Nato.
They simply talk of being attacked from the air, of the ground exploding
in front and around and behind them, and of shattered bodies and twisted
machinery.
They talk of a horror that has become ingrained on their memories.
=====================
Apologies - it was an accident.
INDEPENDENT (London) April 16
War in The Balkans - Nato apologises for convoy deaths
By Marcus Tanner
Nato apologised yesterday for attacking a column of Albanian refugees in
Kosovo on Wednesday, killing at least 60 people, in what may prove the
first big test of Western public support for the Balkan air campaign.
The Serbian authorities seized the opportunity of a propaganda windfall,
dropped their ban on journalists in Kosovo and rushed foreign reporters to
the scene of the carnage to interview wounded survivors under Serb
supervision.
And although Nato admitted US pilots based in Italy did hit what they
thought were military convoys near the western Kosovo town of Djakovica,
questions remain unanswered over who was responsible for the
machine-gunned bodies strewn along the Prizren-Djakovica road.
Nato played a tape-recording from the debriefing of an F-16 pilot who said
he made two passes over a three-vehicle convoy near Djakovica and fired a
laser-guided bomb at the lead vehicle on his third pass. The pilot said he
saw villages burning below and attacked what he thought were Yugoslav army
vehicles engaged in the ethnic cleansing of the region.
The pilot, whose name was not released, said on the tape: "I make a
decision at that point that these are the people responsible for burning
down the villages that I've seen so far. I go in, put my system on the
lead vehicle and execute a laser-guided bomb attack on that vehicle,
destroying the lead vehicle."
The Nato account still did not dovetail with the Serbian video footage
showing mangled bodies next to a column of tractors and trailers.
In Washington and London, leaders said they would not be derailed by the
"one tragic accident" from prosecuting an intensified air campaign against
the forces of the Yugoslav leader, Slobodan Milosevic.
The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, said: "We regret these things deeply when
they happen but that should not make us flinch from placing responsibility
for this conflict squarely on the shoulders of Milosevic, who has begun
this conflict." Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, added: "How dare they
[the Serbs] produce crocodile tears for people killed in the conflict for
which they themselves are responsible."
The White House said Nato would continue the air campaign into midsummer
if necessary if the Serbs continued to drive the Albanians from Kosovo.
The US Defense Secretary William Cohen said the campaign could go on for
months and added: "This is not going to be quick or easy or neat."
Nato yesterday attacked army barracks in Belgrade and other cities,
Serbian state television transmitters and more bridges. US Apache attack
helicopters are arriving in Albania and the aircraft carrier HMS
Invincible has taken up position in the Adriatic.
==========================
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