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LETTERS OF SUPPORT

SERBIAN MASSACRES

Updated at 5:20 PM on May 25, 1999

Massive Desertions Among Serb Troops

Prishtinë, May 25, (Kosovapress)

Reports from within Kosova report that everyday, large numbers of Serb troops are leaving their posts.

As reported yesterday from KLA forces working out of the Llap region, more than 2000 paramilitary forces and Serb army personnel have left Kosova via Krushevc. The deserters formed a column of tractors stolen from Kosovar civilians, loaded with household goods looted from homes.

In addition to these desertions, more than 1600 others, stationed in Ferizaj and Shtima, dropped their weapons yesterday and took the road leading back to Serbia.

In apparent revenge, military commanders of the KLA have reported Serb special security forces executed the local Serb commanders of Krushevc accusing them of stirring up dissent among the ranks.

Radical Serb MP Assassinated

Klinë, May 25, (Kosovapress)

Yesterday, Dragan Milunovic, a member of the Radical Party of Ultranationalist leader Vojslav Sesel, was assassinated in Klina (Kosova).

It is reported Milunovic was killed after quarrelling with Serb Paramilitary troops who refused to follow his orders to continue killing Kosovar civilians.

KLA Forces Conduct Surprise Attacks on Serb Positions

Suharekë, May 25 (Kosovapress) A unit of the 123rd Brigade working in the operational zone of Pashtriku reportedly has conducted yesterday afternoon a surprise attack on Serb positions in the village of Peçan.

In the heavy fighting that ensued, Serb troops retreated after several hours, taking many injured with them while one dead soldier was left behind.

Arm the K.L.A. (NY Times)

By MICHAEL W. DOYLE and STEPHEN HOLMES

PRINCETON, N.J. -- Slobodan Milosevic can defeat NATO on any one of three fronts.

He will win a political victory if he manages to poison relations between NATO and Russia permanently or to shatter the unity of the alliance, results avoided so far largely by NATO's exclusive reliance on air strikes to wage the war.

He will win a moral victory if Americans and Europeans gradually grow numb to bombing hospitals and school buses and become in any way like him, either killing civilians routinely or killing them inadvertently without actually helping the Albanian Kosovars. Or he will win a strategic victory if NATO fails to help the Kosovars survive and return to Kosova in safety.

Thousands of Albanian Kosovars have been killed, more than 800,000 have been driven across borders, and more than 600,000 have lost their homes and are living in the mountains, risking death by starvation and disease. Bombing the bridges of Novi Sad may prove to be a brilliant strategic move in the long haul, but it does nothing for the Albanian Kosovars in trouble today.

What can be done to escape the terrible logic of this situation? A negotiated safe return of the Kosovars is the best solution. But even though news reports now say that Mr. Milosevic is willing to accept a compromise, his conditions and NATO's remain far apart. A straightforward invasion by ground troops is off the table, and if troops arrived three months from now, they would be too late to save lives.

The best remaining alternative, though still anathema to many, is to arm and assist the Kosova Liberation Army. In addition to 6,000 to 10,000 lightly armed irregulars in strongholds inside Kosova like the one mistakenly bombed by NATO last week, there are 10,000 to 15,000 more on the Albanian side of the Kosova-Albania border. They are confident that if they were handed better arms and some logistical support, they could break through the Serbian border defenses and solidify control over the corridors through which they have been sporadically infiltrating supplies. They, not NATO, would take the casualties. They would leap at the chance just as we shrink from the thought. As they broke into Kosova, NATO could support them with Apache helicopters and other air weaponry.

Yes, for such an emergency rescue mission, NATO would certainly be justified in acting as the air force of the Kosova rebels. The rebels would provide the ground forces that NATO's helicopters and aircraft need to be effective. Once across the border, the rebels could secure a staging area into which we could airlift food and medicine for the internally displaced Kosovars. This would allow NATO to put pressure on Serb forces in Kosova while avoiding the costs of hacking its way through recently reinforced Serb border emplacements.

The level of Serb partisan resistance would be low in southern Kosova, where there is little population to support it, and trivial compared with what we would meet if NATO tried to invade Serbia proper from Hungary. Occupation of southern Kosova would not necessarily end the war, but it could put a stop to at least some of the violence of the Serb paramilitaries -- including some of their use of human shields -- and reduce dangerously destabilizing refugee pressure on Macedonia, Montenegro and Albania.

Many military and political experts warn that arming the K.L.A. would be like arming the Irish Republican Army; if some of its members are indeed drug runners or imbued with totalitarian fantasies, they ask, who would control them later? Or, they say, the K.L.A.'s ragtag units would be unlikely to be able to mount a serious incursion anyway.

The risks are real, but given the available alternatives, they are worth taking. And we could lower them by helping Kosovar leaders build civilian authority in the camps in Albania and Macedonia, establishing village councils to plan for repatriation and reconstruction and to re-create, with Western technical assistance, the registries of titles and deeds that have been maliciously destroyed. Civilian authorities who could offer to rebuild people's homes would have a chance, after hostilities ceased, quickly to eclipse the gunmen, however heroic, in prestige.

If NATO refuses to risk this battle by surrogates and Mr. Milosevic refuses to capitulate, where will we be in four months' time? NATO may well have killed large numbers of Serb civilians by disease and medical deprivation as Serbian support structures have continued to be destroyed. But we will not have protected the vulnerable Kosovars from slaughter or helped return any of them to their homes. NATO will have failed, and Slobodan Milosevic will have won.

Michael W. Doyle is the director of the Center of International Studies at Princeton University, and Stephen Holmes is a professor of politics at Princeton.

Kosova Refugees Flood Into Macedonia (Reuters)

By Anatoly Verbin

SKOPJE, Macedonia (Reuters) - Kosova Albanians flooded into Macedonia Tuesday in a new exodus that the U.N. refugee agency warned could be the result of an organized Yugoslav drive to complete ethnic cleansing in the embattled Serbian province.

Since NATO began its bombing campaign against Yugoslavia on March 24, aimed at forcing Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to end repression of Kosova's ethnic Albanian majority, hundreds of thousands of Kosova Albanians have fled or been expelled to neighboring Albania and Macedonia.

UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) spokesman Ron Redmond told a news conference in the Macedonian capital, Skopje, that the latest influx into the country threatened a new crisis in its refugee camps.

He said 8,500 refugees entered Macedonia Monday and a similar number was expected Tuesday.

``If the influx continues, if we have 8,000 to 10,000 a day, we will have a crisis and this will put a severe strain on our capacity in camps,'' Redmond said. ``The camps are once again going to be overstretched.''

Asked if the latest flow of refugees looked like an organized attempt by Milosevic to complete ethnic cleansing in Kosova, Redmond said: ``It could very well be because we see buses and trains. People are from a wide area of eastern Kosova and, as I said, it is very well organized.

``It's all-inclusive, entire neighborhoods, men, women, children, the elderly ... everyone is being pushed,'' he said.

Kosova Crisis UN envoy confirms evidence of massive ethnic cleansing (South China Morning Post)

AGENCIES The head of a United Nations fact-finding mission to Kosova said yesterday he was outraged by clear signs of huge-scale ethnic cleansing in the ravaged Serb province.

Sergio Vieira de Mello said everything he had seen during three days indicated Serb forces had chased out ethnic Albanian residents, leaving burnt houses and ghost towns in their wake.

"In a word, it is pretty revolting," he said.

"We have seen enough evidence and heard enough testimony to confirm that there has been an attempt at displacing internally and externally a shocking number of civilians."

Meanwhile, one of the more than 1,000 imprisoned ethnic Albanian men freed in Kosova who reached Albania at the weekend told how 50 of them had been handcuffed to one another and ordered to march as a human shield in front of Yugoslav troops and armoured vehicles.

More than 1,000 Kosova refugees, including hundreds of exhausted and emaciated women and children and a new batch of freed prisoners, crossed into Albania yesterday. The women described how they had undertaken a two-week march and had had no food for the previous two days.

Sixty men released from the jail at Mitrovica looked in a desperate state of health. One collapsed and had to be rushed to an emergency medical tent.

Most of the women were from Drenica in the centre of Kosova and Orahovac in the southwest. Those from Drenica reported having been forced to turn back several times.

Weeping women described how armed Serb civilians had demanded money and then beaten them because they had none to give.

The refugees said that younger men were hiding in the hills.

Defence Secretary George Robertson said yesterday Britain was sending a war crimes investigator to Albania to interview refugees.

UN refugee workers, meanwhile, dissuaded Macedonian officials from bussing to Albania some of the 15,000 refugees who streamed into the country at the weekend.

Up to 6,000 more crossed yesterday - the largest wave of arrivals in weeks.

Protests Resumed by Families of Yugoslav Reservists Ordered Back to Duty (NY Times)

By CARLOTTA GALL

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- Protests have begun again in towns and villages in Yugoslavia as army reservists, supported by their mothers, wives and other family members, have resisted orders to go back to Kosova after a short leave.

Crowds of at least 1,000 people, and perhaps more, gathered in the towns of Krusevac and Aleksandrovac on Sunday, residents said, when the reservists received orders to report for duty in Kosova after only three days' leave. Demonstrators were out on the streets again Monday, the majority of them women, demanding that their men be spared another tour of duty in the war-battered Serbian province.

The protests follow days of demonstrations last week by the women of the region south of the capital, Belgrade, and not far from the border with Kosova, which is the southernmost province of Serbia. Many of the reservists called up for duty in Kosova in the last two months are from this region.

The initial protests ended when the military authorities allowed hundreds of reservists to return home from Kosova. While the authorities seemed to have stemmed the public anger last week, the new call-up showed that the issue was far from resolved.

The unrest appears to be spreading in the region. As crowds appeared back on the streets in Krusevac and Aleksandrovac, protests by reservists and their families were also reported in the town of Raska, close to the border with Kosova.

A determined group of protesters in the town of Cacak, closer to Belgrade, tried to demonstrate against the war on Sunday but was broken up by police. The group, which calls itself Citizens' Parliament, has been making weekly protests, calling for a negotiated peace. Members were prevented by police officers from even gathering in a restaurant on Sunday and resorted to lighting candles together in a church.

Demonstrators in Krusevac chanted, "Give us our children back!" and "We want peace!" said a resident who watched the protest on Sunday. Reservists were particularly angry that they were being ordered back into Kosova, when the authorities had told them just days before that they would not have to go back, the resident said.

The man, reached by telephone, estimated that perhaps as many as 2,000 people demonstrated for several hours in the city center Monday and the same number on Sunday. The demonstration was peaceful but firm, he said. "They are determined not to go back to Kosova," he said of the reservists.

The Yugoslav military is clearly seeking to negotiate with the men and prevent the dissent from turning into open disobedience or desertion.

Representatives of the Yugoslav third army arrived from the military headquarters in Nis to speak to the reservists but apparently failed to persuade them to comply with their orders, residents said. Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic, the army's top general and commander of the operation in Kosova, arrived in Raska on Sunday to talk to demonstrators there, the independent VIP news agency reported.

The reservists, who face criminal charges if they refuse the call-up, are not refusing outright to serve in Kosova, residents who described the protests say, but are asking that other reservists do a tour of duty first. Many accuse the local authorities, and in particular the governing Socialist Party, of showing favoritism and allowing young men with connections to avoid being ordered into active service.

Demonstrators in Aleksandrovac, a smaller town west of Krusevac, were demanding that their men be the first to be withdrawn from Kosova as the Yugoslav army winds down its campaign, one resident said.

The government has repeatedly announced over the last two weeks that it is withdrawing troops from Kosova and has raised expectations among many families that their men are coming home.

But residents said many men who arrived home last week had received orders to return on Sunday, and local television announced that men of special units should report for duty at their local command centers.

Mothers immediately organized meetings, and many came in from outlying villages to join the protests. A number of women made speeches to the crowd gathered in Aleksandrovac on Sunday. Women outnumbered the men in the crowd, but there were soldiers in uniform and young men in civilian clothes, a resident of Aleksandrovac said.

"They are telling one story," he said of the soldiers. "Their lives are in danger down there. Planes are flying very low -- they don't hit them much, they are targeting mostly armor and military objects, but the men do not see the purpose of being there. They feel like live targets, they feel that NATO can just cover them with bombs any time it wants and they might die for nothing."

The resident said the soldiers who returned had said they no longer felt as safe in Kosova as they did earlier. "This is not a political protest," he said. "It is simply people who are trying to save their necks."