------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- Date sent: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 13:15:33 -0700 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Sid Shniad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: IN SERBIA, ORDINARY PEOPLE FEEL SUFFERING AND AGONY OF WAR http://www.independent.co.uk/stories/B1004902.html THE INDEPENDENT Saturday, 10 April 1999 IN SERBIA, TOO, THE ORDINARY PEOPLE FEEL THE SUFFERING AND AGONY OF WAR By Robert Fisk in Cuprija NATO's war is growing more brutal by the hour. I spent most of yesterday - the Orthodox Easter Good Friday - clambering through the rubble of pulverised Serb homes and broken water pipes and roof timbers and massive craters. At Cuprija, Nato jets have blasted away seven homes, two of them direct hits, during an attack on the local army barracks. In Kragujevac, the workers at the massive Zastava car plant who so stubbornly told me just over a week ago that they would sleep on the factory floor to protect their workplace - they even sent e-mails to Clinton, Albright and Solana to this effect - were rewarded with an attack by cruise missiles that smashed into the car works and wounded 120 of the men. And at Aleksinac, it now turns out that up to 24 civilians may have been killed five days ago in the attack by a Nato jet - believed by the Yugoslav military to be an RAF Harrier. Workers still digging through the wreckage yesterday told me that they had recovered 18 bodies and that six more civilians were still missing. The 13th funeral was held yesterday morning - of Dragica Milodinovic, who died of her wounds three days after her husband, Dragan, and their daughter were blasted to pieces in the bombing. At the site yesterday, I found Svetlana Jovanovic standing beside a mechanical digger, unnoticed by the policemen, rescue workers and journalists walking over the wreckage. "Both my parents died just over there - where the bulldozer is moving the rubble," she said quietly. "I was staying in Nis for the night and this saved my life." Beside her was part of the torn casing of the Nato bomb that buried the couple in their cottage. There is a lot of palpable anger in Aleksinac - a Russian resident shouted abuse when he heard me speak in English. But there was not a word of malice from Svetlana, no rhetorical condemnation of the Nato attacks. When I said how sorry I was for her family, she replied in English: "Thank you for coming to see our suffering." Spyros Kyprianou, the speaker of the Cypriot parliament, turned up at the bomb sites during the day on a hopeless mission to secure the release of the three American soldiers captured by Serb forces last week - in anticipation, no doubt, of obtaining US support for a Greek Cypriot solution to the island's partition. He was given a loud and angry account of Nato's sins from Serbian government officials - nothing about the appalling suffering of Kosovo's Albanian civilians, of course - and never had a chance to hear the names of those who died in Aleksinac. Nato says the bomb that killed the people there may have suffered a "malfunction" which caused - that obscene phrase yet again - "collateral damage". The "damage" in this case includes Svetlana Jovanovic's parents, the Milodinovics and their daughter, Jovan Radojicic and his wife, Sofia, Grosdan Milivojevic and his wife, Dragica. Nor was it "collateral": one of the bombs landed square on the Jovanovic house. It was the same story - with mercifully no deaths - at Cuprija. A farming town of 20,000 a hundred miles south of Belgrade, its local barracks was attacked early on Thursday in a raid that left a square mile of devastation through dozens of homes. The Yugoslav army garrison had abandoned the place 10 days ago - "we're not fools," a policeman said - but the civilians stayed on and waited for the inevitable. When the first of seven bombs fell, they ran to their basements as their houses collapsed on top of them. I found one home that was simply blasted from its foundations and hurled across the road into a neighbour's field, the owner left crouching - miraculously untouched - in his basement. Another bomb had exploded in a lane opposite a school, breaking the local water mains and blasting down the walls of a bungalow. True, there is a military barracks at Cuprija - at least two bombs had torn off the roof of the empty Tito-era monstrosity half a mile away. And there is a military building 800m from the site of the Aleksinac slaughter. And yes, Nato believes - and Yugoslav sources confirm - that part of the Zastava car factory is used for weapons production. It is the fate of Yugoslav industry that, thanks to Tito, hundreds of its factories have dual production facilities. And the Kragujevac car plant management had pleaded with its workers to end their sit-in. But Nato's refusal to show restraint when it knew the workers had stayed in the factory shows just how far it is now taking its war against Serbia. On Thursday, military officers at the Pentagon announced the "human shield" of Belgrade's young people on the capital's largest road bridge would not prevent them attacking the structure. I couldn't help thinking amid the devastations yesterday that if Nato goes on widening its bombing campaign to include civilians - as it very clearly did in Pristina this week, despite its preposterous claim that the Serbs bombed themselves - then the final death toll at Aleksinac could soon be academic. Perhaps there are those in Nato who will argue that after their ferocity towards the Kosovo Albanians, the Serbs deserve "a dose of their own medicine". It can always be said - in all truthfulness - Serb casualties are minimal compared with their victims in Kosovo. But if it stays its present course, Nato's offensive risks a massacre. Copyright 1999. Independent Newspapers [UK] Ltd.
[PEN-L:5584] (Fwd) IN SERBIA, ORDINARY PEOPLE FEEL SUFFERING AND AGONY OF W
ts99u-1.cc.umanitoba.ca [130.179.154.224] Tue, 20 Apr 1999 01:03:49 -0500
