-Caveat Lector- >From http://www.unhcr.ch/news/media/kosovo.htm 8 May 1999 AT A GLANCE �Thousands of refugees arrive in Albania; officials say they will accept as many as one million refugees if necessary amid reports of a continuing influx from Kosovo. �Only a handful of refugees arrive in Macedonia despite assurances in Skopje that the borders are open. �Departures under the humanitarian evacuation program in the FYR of Macedonia yesterday were 1,914, bringing the total to more than 34,000. �The estimated number of refugees and displaced people has reached more than 718,000, including 230,900 in the FYR of Macedonia, 407,000 in Albania and 62,000 in Montenegro. Major Developments ALBANIA More than 5,000 refugees arrived in Albania through the Morini crossing on Saturday and the influx was continuing at midday. They came in tractor-wagons from the Pec area in western Kosovo and repeated similar stories which previous arrivals had told of mass killings and attacks by Serbian troops using artillery to empty villages. Arrivals through Morini on Friday totalled an estimated 900. Also on Friday, UNHCR Special Envoy Dennis McNamara paid a flying visit to Kukes and announced that Albania would accept as many as one million refugees if necessary. McNamara also said that the tented camps in Kukes, within easy artillery range of nearby Serbian positions, must be emptied as quickly as possible and all of the refugees moved to safer areas. After high level discussions in the Albanian capital of Tirana and with local officials in Kukes Mcnamara said that "The Albanian government has agreed to take as many refugees as necessary, as many as one million people if that is what it takes." "The Albanian government's gesture and decision is extremely important to the whole humanitarian effort at this time," McNamara said, especially given the fact that neighboring Macedonia wants to shift as many of the Kosovar refugees there to other countries as soon as possible. McNamara said the first 6,000 refugees would probably be moved from Macedonia to the Korce region of Albania within the next several days, with possibly tens of thousands of others to quickly follow. Albania already hosts the bulk of the Kosovar refugees, around 400,000 compared with nearly 200,000 in Macedonia. Tirana has repeatedly said it welcomes refugees to stay in the country. McNamara said the issue of security in the Kukes area was high on his agenda during his talks in Kukes and Tirana and that both the government and UNHCR had agreed "these tented camps should not be here. We are doing everything possible to persuade the people in the camps to leave as soon as possible." "We are really going to press the refugees very firmly to move to other facilities in other parts of the country." He added, "We won't close the tents on top of the refugees but we will use every method we can to persuade them to move. We are going to tell them that at a certain point, these camps will not be here. The services they currently enjoy will not be here. We do not want camps near military areas. "'The refugees should move immediately. They should not be here," he said. Mcnamara also stressed UNHCR's difficult financial condition while trying to tackle one of the biggest and most complicated emergencies in its history. The agency, he said, faced an immediate shortfall of at least 40 million dollars as it tried to grapple with a still expanding emergency. FYR of MACEDONIA Only a handful of people crossed to Macedonia on Friday, including a heavily pregnant woman and a man with a Slovenian passport. For all practical purposes, all border crossings from Serbia to Macedonia are closed to Kosovo refugees. Those few who arrived say there may be up to 3,000 people stuck on the Serbian side of the border, including some 200-300 who came by train from Pristina Friday morning. Meanwhile, at the Blace transit center, UNHCR is hastily putting up tents and preparing the ground for a possible new influx. On Thursday, Macedonian officials gave UNHCR assurances that refugees from Kosovo will be allowed into the country. This followed meetings in Skopje in which UNHCR said its staff late Wednesday witnessed an estimated 1,000 Kosovo refugees being prevented from entering the FYR of Macedonia. They were subsequently forced to go back to Kosovo. HUMANITARIAN EVACUATION PROGRAM Departures under the humanitarian evacuation program from the FYR of Macedonia to third countries totaled 1,914 on Friday, including 103 to Austria, 242 to Canada, 112 to the Czech Republic, 162 to Denmark, 157 to Norway, 114 to Poland, 235 to Spain, 160 to Sweden, 222 to Turkey and 407 to the United States. So far, 34,239 refugees have departed under the program in which UNHCR has received offers for 135,000 places in 39 countries. KOSOVO DISPLACEMENT STATISTICS Information as at 8 May 1999, 06:00 GMT Total recent displacement includes figures in Tables 1 and 2. It is emphasized that the totals in Table 1 in particular should be considered as estimates. Totals in Table 1 are rounded to the nearest hundred. <<Tables available for viewing at site>> <<Table 1 Refugees displaced/in total: TOTAL 718,200>> <<Table 2: Humanitarian evacuations of Kosovar refugees from the FYR of Macedonia from 5 April through 7 May 1999 by receiving country TOTAL: May7: 1,914 Total 34,239>> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ >From wsws.org WSWS : News & Analysis : Europe : The Balkan Crisis Unanswered questions in NATO-Russia agreement By Martin McLaughlin 8 May 1999 Officials of the Group of Eight--United States, France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan and Russia--announced Thursday that they had reached agreement on the framework of a settlement of the war in the Balkans, after weeks of diplomatic maneuvers between the NATO powers and Russia. But the agreement leaves a myriad of unanswered questions about the future of Kosovo. Most importantly, the agreement makes no reference whatsoever to the bombing, and therefore gives no hint under what circumstances the aerial destruction of Yugoslavia will come to an end. Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic warned Friday that his government will not participate in any diplomatic efforts until there is a halt in the bombing. While the G-8 ministers agreed on an international force in Kosovo, its make-up (NATO, non-NATO, Russian etc.) and level of armaments were left vague, as well as the issue of whether Belgrade must approve the agreement and give its permission to the entry of this force into what is, under international law, Yugoslav territory. Other unresolved issues included whether Yugoslav forces would have to be entirely withdrawn from Kosovo, what the "demilitarization" of the Kosovo Liberation Army would mean and how that would be enforced, and what kind of interim administration would be established in Kosovo under terms of a future UN Security Council resolution. Of the greatest political significance is the fact that G-8 agreement contains no proviso for either the Serbs or the Kosovar Albanians to have any say in determining any of the conditions under which the war would be end ed or the province of Kosovo politically reorganized. It will be entirely up the UN Security Council--i.e., to the five big powers with veto power--and to NATO. This underscores the entirely undemocratic character of the great power diplomacy in the Balkans. For all the American pretense of sympathy for the fate of the Kosovars, for all the demagogy from Moscow about standing by their Serb brothers, the peoples of the former Yugoslavia are nothing more than pawns on the chessboard as far as Clinton, Yeltsin, and the European imperialists are concerned. The role of the Yeltsin regime in the Balkan crisis has enormous significance. For the first time since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia is intervening as a bourgeois power in a major international crisis. Its acti ons reflect the interests of an emerging bourgeois class in Russia, symbolized by the personage appointed by Yeltsin as his chief representative in the Balkans, former Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. The former head of Gazprom, the Soviet-era gas monopoly and now one of the biggest corporations in capitalist Russia, Chernomyrdin is representative of the most corrupt layer of former Stalinist bureaucrats turned capital ist millionaires. He has close relations with German capitalists, who have extensive investments in Gazprom and in the Russian oil and gas industries as a whole. Chernomyrdin's appointment therefore signaled a decision by the Russian regime to side with Germany and against the United States in Balkan policy. This is a fact well-known in US ruling circles but not commented on in pu blic--with the exception of a vitriolic editorial in the Wall Street Journal Friday which denounced the G-8 agreement as a sellout to Milosevic and suggested that Germany and Russia were making common cause against the Un ited States. Both the Russian and German bourgeoisie are concerned about the long-term implications of a substantial American military presence in the Balkans, particularly in light of the aggressive push by American oil and gas compa nies into the Caspian basin. The G-8 talks demonstrated not only significant differences between the United States and Russia, but growing differences between the European powers and the US, and among the Europeans themselves. While the US continues to demand a total withdrawal of all Yugoslav soldiers and police from Kosovo, several of the European NATO powers, together with Russia, have pointed out that this is incompatible with the continuation of Yugoslav soverei gnty in the province. American officials were visibly dismayed by the reemerged of Ibrahim Rugova, who headed the unofficial Albanian government in Kosovo for the last decade. The State Department has shifted to the KLA as its principal instru ment in Kosovo, and last month circulated reports that Rugova had been killed by the Serbs. Rugova's arrival in Rome for talks with Italian Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema and Foreign Minister Lamberto Dini therefore came as a distinct shock to Washington. American officials suggested that his release was a ploy by Milosevic to weaken Italian and German support for the NATO bombing, an indication of where the Clinton administration sees dangers to its policies in the Balkans. The Clinton administration's public display of enthusiasm over the G-8 agreement is not because a diplomatic solution to the Balkan crisis is imminent. On the contrary, the talks in Bonn give the State Department and Pent agon the opportunity to talk peace while intensifying the war. By embracing diplomacy, the United States appeases the growing antiwar sentiment in Europe, while pushing ahead with an even more ruthless and unrestrained campaign of bombing, and stepping up preparations for ground warf are. All this, without making any significant concessions either to Yugoslavia or Russia, or the European rivals of American capitalism. The indications by Russia that it will not challenge NATO's bid for hegemony in the Balkans, by encouraging American aggression and recklessness, in fact makes a wider war more likely. The diplomatic maneuvers of the past week have only one beneficial consequence. They begin to strip away the rhetoric of humanitarianism and to reveal the real political-economic interests which have impelled the US-NATO intervention in the Balkans. As the conflict escalates, the events in Kosovo will be overshadowed by the broader issues that divide the major capitalist powers. Then those who have allowed themselves to be manipulated by the media will have reason to be somewhat abashed by their own gullibility. See Also: US escalates terror-bombing of Yugoslav cities [8 May 1999] Scenes of death and destruction Victims of tornadoes or victims of bombing? [6 May 1999] The fraud of NATO humanitarianism What are the reasons for the war in Yugoslavia? [5 May 1999] War in the Balkans [WSWS Full Coverage] Top of page Readers: The WSWS invites your comments. 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