Rod Hay spotted this on News Unlimited and thought you should see it. To see this story with its related links on the News Unlimited site, go to http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk Nato accused of huge blunder as refugees are slaughtered By Martin Walker in Brussels and Jean Nicholas in Belgrade Saturday May 15 1999 The Guardian Nato was accused by Serbia yesterday of making its most disastrous blunder yet by launching a devastating attack on the Kosovan village of Korisa, killing more than 80 and injuring more than 60 ethnic Albanian refugees. Serbian television film and reports from independent news agencies depicted a gruesome scene in the village of dead children, their bodies charred beyond recognition, scattered among mangled and burning tractors. Two craters likely to have been produced by aerial attack were visible on the roadside. As the cause of the carnage remained blurred, the Pentagon last night pointed to the possibility that heavy Serb shelling in the area may have been to blame. 'We do know that there was substantial and significant Serb shelling in the area where this event that Serb television has shown occurred,' said the state department spokesman, James Rubin. 'Nato military activity took place in this general area [but]... we do not know what damage may or may not have been caused by Nato aircraft. We are reviewing the situation as carefully as we can,' he added. Nato officials, speaking privately, also suggested that Serb shelling might have been the cause of the deaths and pointed to discrepancies in timings. Aerial imagery taken eight hours after the time when Yugoslavia said the attack happened, the officials, said, did not show any damage around the village. The official Tanjug news agency reported that 'at least 100 civilians have been killed and more than 50 injured by Nato cluster bombs' on a column of some 500 refugees in Korisa, six miles north-east of Prizren on the road that leads from the Kosovan capital, Pristina, to the Albanian border. Tanjug claimed the refugees were returning to their homes after 10 days hiding in the woods. Conflicting reports based on the accounts of survivors suggested that up to 700 refugees in two columns had been attempting to flee Kosovo and had been turned back en masse by Serbian police. They then sheltered for the night in Korisa, a village close to strongholds of the Kosovan Liberation Army. Some refugees slept in their tractor-trailers, others huddled in a warehouse which, in the early hours of yesterday, appears to have been struck by bombs. Serb authorities, sensing a fresh propaganda opportunity, quickly arranged a coach for western journalists in Belgrade to be taken to witness the damage. Reporters saw bodies lying around a storage dump across from a motel. Up to 30 tractors lay charred and wrecked, some of them still burning hours after the bombing. The bodies of two children were recognisable, other body parts and parts of bombs were cast around, and blankets were still draped over remaining vehicles. Destan Rexha, 49, who lives in Korisa, said the population had returned to the village the previous day after earlier moving into the mountains for safety. They had returned after striking an agreement with the local military commander. 'During the night, sometime at around 12... we heard heavy detonations. There were five of them,' he said. 'There were a lot of people injured, killed. Other detonations hit us and the others who were outside.' 'Many people burned up instantly. When news that they bombed us got through, police rounded up the wounded and took them to Prizren hospital. 'We still can't collect all the bodies. They are all around the place in fields and nearby farms. They have been blown to pieces. I am convinced that more than 150 have been killed.' In a cellar, reporters saw about 50 women and children, huddled in a bare room. They said they had been hiding from the bombs. The accusation that the allies have made their worst single bombing blunder since the war began on March 24 comes at a deeply sensitive time for Nato, only a day after the German coalition government narrowly survived an anti-war revolt by its Green partners. The fallout from last weekend's bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade also still threatens the diplomatic efforts to end the war. The attack on Korisa came as Serbia's own propaganda offensive stepped up yesterday, with the health minister, Leposa Milicevic, claiming '1,000 Serbian civilians killed and another 6,000 injured by Nato aggression'. He said: 'How can anyone hope that refugees might ever return when this bombing goes on?' Although Nato refused any public comment on the incident, while promising to publish the result of its internal inquiry, allied military briefings yesterday made it clear that its warplanes had staged repeated strikes in the area. The map of Kosovo which Nato briefers present on a big screen turned so completely red with graphic bomb blasts in a 200-square miles area from Prizren to the border that it had the look of a free fire zone. Ironically, it was partly in response to criticism that Nato was mishandling the air campaign and failing to alleviate the plight of Kosovan civilians that it decided this week to step up attacks inside Kosovo. The concentrated air strikes between Prizren and the border, despite the presence of refugees, is militarily crucial because this zone has seen the fiercest battles between Serb forces and the KLA. The Serb campaign to seal off KLA supply routes into Albania means concentrations of Serb heavy weapons and troop columns. General Walter Jertz also admitted that Nato warplanes 'had used depleted uranium munitions' in the campaign an accusation levelled earlier at the allies. This would be the fifth accidental tragedy, after the bombing of a passenger train and then a civilian bus in Serbia, the death of 64 refugees when an F-16 pilot mistook tractors for military vehicles, and last weekend's attack on the Chinese embassy. Nato commanders were last night braced for new political pressure to tighten target controls and avoid further civilian deaths. But Nato admitted that two of its unmanned reconnaissance drones, on which its relies for targeting information, had failed to return. Copyright Guardian Media Group plc.
