SLATE MORNING DELIVERY: Tues., May 11, 1999 (copyright 1999, Microsoft) today's papers Gulfstream War Syndrome By Scott Shuger The LAT [LA TIMES] and WP [Washington POST] lead with Yugoslavia's announcement yesterday of a partial withdrawal of troops and police from Kosovo, and NATO's quick dismissal of the move as not warranting any pause in its air campaign. The NYT [New York TIMES] lead is that NATO's bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade threatens to delay any diplomatic solution to the Kosovo crisis and to inflict long-term damage on the U.S./China relationship. USAT [USA TODAY] fronts the U.S. non-reaction to the Yugoslav declaration of a pullout and President Clinton's formal apology to China for the embassy strike... The [big US] papers report NATO's claims that not only does a partial pullout fall far short of their conditions on the cessation of hostilities--full withdrawal of Serb troops from the province, deployment of a peacekeeping force, and repatriation of all Kosovar Albanians--but that also there has been no sign of any Yugoslav draw-down. The main point of the NYT lead is that the U.S. fears China's call for an end to the allied bombing before it will allow the UN Security Council to take up any solutions to the Kosovo mess may block all diplomacy in the matter. For instance, the paper explains, China, a member of the Security Council, could veto the interposition in the region of any U.N. peacekeeping force. The Clinton administration is further unsettled, notes the Times, by Viktor Chernomyrdin's sudden trip to China. The WSJ [Wall Street JOURNAL], in its Yugoslav coverage, detects growing political anxieties among members of NATO as a result of the alliances series of bombing accidents, with the Italian president and Germany's chancellor depicted by the paper as the most dissatisfied. Everybody covers the State Dept.'s release of its report on war crimes committed in Kosovo. There are some hard numbers alleged here: 4,000 Kosovar Albanians executed in the past year, 300 villages and towns burned. The WP quotes a Yugoslav cabinet minister's response: NATO and the U.S. are falsifying these numbers, and have even with the help of the CIA organized a "big production" in which thousands of ethnic Albanians were paid "actors" who, posing as refugees, left, reentered and left again to float the numbers. The WSJ has this charge as well. [it's possible. After all, the US once had an actor as President.] .... The LAT is alone in fronting yesterday's White House conference on youth violence. At the meeting, President Clinton urged the entertainment industry to help stop the "coarsening of the culture." (To be fair, shouldn't it be also be noticed that Mr. Clinton did his fair share of cultural coarsening over the past two years?) ... The NYT's black budget expert Tim Weiner has fine-printed an interesting item in the emergency bills in Congress that will finance the next stage of the air war in Yugoslavia: The Air Force is asking for half a billion dollars over the next ten years to lease executive business jets to ferry four-star generals around the world. ----------------------- international papers China Loves America's Bombs By Alexander Chancellor According to the South China Morning Post of Hong Kong Monday, the "minimum requirements" of even moderates in the Chinese Politburo are that Washington issue a full apology for the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, pay adequate compensation, and allow China a bigger role in resolving the Kosovo conflict. But hard-liners, who include generals of the People's Liberation Army, are calling for an overall scaling down of U.S.-China relations unless NATO agrees to stop its offensive against Yugoslavia, the paper said. In a report from Beijing on emergency weekend meetings of senior Chinese cadres, the paper noted that the PLA's Deputy Chief of Staff Gen. Xiong Guangkai insisted that the embassy strike had been a deliberate attempt by the United States to trample on Chinese sovereignty. Noting that the Chinese government has reserved the right to take "further action," the generals said "they would do their best if that 'action' contained a military component." Quoting "a Beijing source," the paper said, "government-organized protests would continue at least through this week." It also predicted that Foreign Trade Minister Shi Guangsheng and Prime Minister Zhu Rongji will now reverse some of the concessions they granted to U.S. trade negotiators. According to a report from Beijing Sunday in the Straits Times of Singapore, China's Liberation Army Daily, the mouthpiece of the PLA, had been much impressed by America's bombing methods in Yugoslavia before the embassy strike. Only last week, it urged China to change its defense strategy so as to master U.S. precision-bombing techniques. In an article published last week, the Liberation Army Daily said, "We have to use the Kosovo crisis to raise the alarm, and work towards high-technology warfare, create new warfare techniques and training methods." The newspaper said Beijing has not done enough research on long-distance precision missile strikes. The Balkan crisis will accelerate China's military modernization drive, it said. The Straits Times said that, because of the Kosovo conflict and the United States' promise of a new theatre-missile defense system for Taiwan, the PLA is expected to intensify the development of intermediate or long-range missiles and military communications technology. In an editorial Monday, China Daily expressed its "stalwart moral support for the protests that are blazing across the country against the US-directed NATO atrocity." Insisting that the attack on the embassy was deliberate, the editorial said it was "too smart to be explained as a 'mistake in target identification' or a technical error." It asked, "Then what is the reason that can convincingly explain Nato's provocation? ... Is it because of our country's persistent opposition to their barbarity?" In its editorial Monday, the South China Morning Post deplored the "blind arrogance" of NATO in believing it can drive a man like President Slobodan Milosevic to capitulate through airstrikes alone, and it said that the orchestrated protests in China are "understandable." But it also said that claims that the bombing was no accident are "simply ludicrous," since "Nato stood only to lose by its action." Calling on the United States and NATO to "undertake a damage-limitation exercise in earnest," it said the most important thing is for the United States to make "a proper and public apology. Not words of sadness, but a formal expression of apology." ... Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html Bombing DESTROYS human rights. US/NATO out of Serbia!
