-Caveat Lector- Marines enter Kosovo; Serbs burn homes •14,000 allied troops in place •Milosevic: The worst is over •Dead journalists identified By Melissa Eddy The Associated Press June 14, 1999 7:51 p.m. CDT PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (AP) -- Ducking at the sound of gunfire, patrolling cautiously to avoid the ire of Serbs, thousands of NATO peacekeepers spread out Monday across Kosovo. Some uncovered grim evidence of atrocities as they tightened their control of the province. Serb forces complying with the pullout ordered by NATO to end the 78-day air war mixed in with civilians fleeing in columns up to 500 vehicles long. Some ethnic Albanian homes were set ablaze by Serb troops leaving Kosovo. Aiming to bring a measure of stability to the province shattered by war and a long history of ethnic hatred, NATO and U.S. forces sought to downplay the impasse over about 200 Russian soldiers occupying the Pristina airfield where the allies planned to establish headquarters. NATO lead commander Lt. Gen. Michael Jackson insisted the airfield wasn't crucial to occupying forces though the White House said Defense Secretary William Cohen and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will meet their Russian counterparts in Helsinki, Finland, within days. Kosovo's Serbs fear that the majority ethnic Albanians will take bloody revenge on them for years of oppression and for reported atrocities. The West, meanwhile, fears that a Russian zone will lead to the partition of Kosovo. Refugees who began streaming out of Kosovo after the NATO bombing campaign began March 24 told of Serb slaughter and the massacre of innocent victims. The accounts could not be independently confirmed at the time and one of the peacekeepers' grueling tasks will be to investigate what happened. On Monday, they gingerly probed the town cemetery in Kacanik, where the stench of decayed flesh hung heavy over 81 apparently newly dug graves. British Capt. Andy Reeds said war crimes investigators would be called in to examine the site, 30 miles south of Pristina. Peacekeepers continued to pour into the battered Serbian province from neighboring Macedonia and Albania, and officials said about 15,000 allied troops had entered Kosovo by Monday. "The deployment of KFOR is on schedule," said NATO Secretary General Javier Solana. "The withdrawal of the Serbian forces is also on time." A convoy of 1,200 U.S. Marines began crossing just south of Kacanik at first light, and U.S. forces took over the area, including the site of the graves, from the British troops. "We were all a little edgy going in," said Cpl. Will Rapier, 20, of Paintsville, Ky., with the 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines. "We just hope to get this thing over so we can all go home." Despite the tensions, Monday's troop movements went off without a repeat of Sunday's pair of fatal confrontations, when soldiers shot a Serb in Pristina and German forces killed one man and wounded another after the men fired at them from a car in the city of Prizren. On Monday, Serb citizens poured out of Prizren, Kosovo's second-largest city, taunted by ethnic Albanians who erupted into a wild victory celebration. German soldiers disarmed several members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the ethnic Albanian guerrilla group, as they tried to seize wounded Serb soldiers at the main Prizren hospital. The KLA is supposed to demilitarize under the Kosovo peace agreement, but the group boldly set up an office in Pristina on Monday. The private news agency Beta reported Monday that three Serbs were killed by men wearing KLA armbands in a suburb of Pristina. The Serb-run Media Center said it had a report of five people killed in the same suburb but did not have details. The center blamed the KLA for killing a Serb employee of Pristina's television station in front of his home Monday night in the Taslidze section of the city. The Serb report gave no other details of the attack Italian troops entered the city of Pec, the seat of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Kosovo and the scene of some of the grimmest accounts of slaughter in recent months. Yugoslav troops withdrew from the city on Monday after a spree of home-burnings and alleged rapes, whooping on the way out. Two German journalists were shot dead by unidentified gunman Sunday 15 miles south of Pristina. The German newsweekly Stern identified them as photographer Volker Kraemer, 56, and reporter Gabriel Gruener, 35. The magazine said the team's interpreter was missing. In Pristina, an impasse over its strategic airport continued. Russia's role in the envisaged 50,000-member peacekeeping force, which includes 7,000 Americans, was not clearly defined in the peace plan. A contingent of 200 Russian troops arrived unexpectedly from Bosnia on Saturday, ahead of NATO troops, and took control of the airport. Jackson said Monday that he did not regard the presence of the Russians as important from a military standpoint. "I'm not in a tussle with them," he said. "They are on the airfield. ... It is not important to me at this stage. What is important to me is getting this job done on the ground." President Clinton and Russian leader Boris Yeltsin spoke for a second straight day about continuing differences over Kosovo. U.S. officials and those from allied countries have largely sought to play down indications of a rivalry with the Russians, who demand to control their own sector in northern Kosovo where ethnic Serbs - their longtime allies - are concentrated. The deployment of peacekeepers did not stop Serb forces from shelling an Albanian village early Monday at the village of Dobrun, an area where the KLA maintains sanctuaries, according to Andrea Angeli, spokesman of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. There were no reports of casualties. Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic toured the ruins of a destroyed bridge across the Danube River in Beska, 30 miles northwest of the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, and officially inaugurated the country's reconstruction effort. "Now that peace is here again, we face the task of rebuilding the country," he was quoted as saying by the state-run Tanjug news agency. By agreement, the remaining Yugoslav troops from a 40,000-member contingent in Kosovo when the peace agreement was reached and all Serb paramilitaries are to leave by June 20. About 300 refugees tried to return Monday, crossing the Yugoslav border from Albania before being turned back by German peacekeepers and rebels. Thirty or 40 refugees broke away and scampered off over the hills into Kosovo, said an OSCE spokesman. U.N. officials want Kosovo Albanians to remain in refugee camps in Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro until peacekeepers have restored order and cleared minefields. About 860,000 Kosovo Albanians fled the province of 2.1 million people during the conflict. Copyright 1999 The Associated Press Russians refuse to budge Airport tensions: Serbs drive past a British soldier on the airport road Russian troops are continuing to block Nato access to Pristina airport where British troops want to set up their headquarters. Negotiations to resolve the standoff have been taking place at the runway, in Moscow, and on the telephone between the Russian and US presidents. The deadlock has highlighted the dispute over Russia's role in the international peace keeping force for Kosovo, K-For. Russia wants its own sector to control in Kosovo and its own independent chain of command. Nato is refusing the Russian demands. It fears a Russian sector will become a magnet for Serbs and in effect lead to a partition of the province. Perimeter tensions Kate Adie reports: "The situation is delicate and not without tension"British commanders have negotiated partial entry to the airport but have been blocked from taking total control by a contingent of 200 Russian troops. The British soldiers have been parked near the airport perimeter. At some stages on Sunday they have been just yards from Yugoslav troops who have yet to withdraw from the city. At times tempers have flared between Russian and Nato forces. One British officer, Captain Martin Gorwyn, accused the Russians of "deliberate foot-dragging". Yards apart: Nato and SerbsRussian armoured vehicles have blocked the road to refuse access to Nato troops but are allowing local traffic through. Nato had planned for British troops to set up its headquarters at the airport. A senior Nato officer admitted that the alliance has opened a temporary headquarters away from the airport. Despite the standoff, Nato Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark has insisted the airport is not crucial and that K-For had never planned to use it for any deployment purposes. Military settlement But Nato leaders want the situation resolved and diplomatic talks have been taking place throughout Sunday. Washington Correspondent Richard Lister: "Generals to decide"Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin have spoken on the phone and agreed the matter should be settled by military commanders. White House spokesman Mike Hammer said the two leaders had agreed Russian and Nato generals should meet "military to military and general to general". He said: "We're looking to have Russian participation in K-For that is reflective of their important role. "We would welcome, and would like to see, a meaningful deployment of Russian troops provided that it is within ... the chain of command that had been established." He said that no timetable had been drawn up for finding a solution but added the presidents agreed to talk about the situation again on Monday. British commanders have been talking to their Russian counterparts in Pristina to try to ease the tension on the ground in Kosovo. Compromise deal The American envoy, Strobe Talbott said earlier that he had been told Russia would send no more troops to Kosovo until an agreement had been reached. Mr Talbott offered an American concession by allowing Russia a "zone of responsibility" in Kosovo. It has been reported that details for the zone, which falls short of full control of a sector in Kosovo, are still being thrashed out. Mr Talbott said: "There will be parts of Kosovo where Russian participation will be important and manifest." He added negotiations will not be allowed to end with a solution "that looks like a partition of Kosovo". U.S. Might Cede Russia 'Zone of Responsibility' in Kosovo By David Hoffman Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, June 14, 1999; Page A16 MOSCOW, June 13—Russia and the United States appeared to move closer today to settling their differences on a location for Russian peacekeepers in Kosovo, and Russian military leaders claimed the progress in negotiations was due to the surprise rush of Russian troops into the Serbian province. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott completed another round of talks with Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, which was followed by an hour-long phone call between President Boris Yeltsin and President Clinton in which they discussed Kosovo peacekeeping arrangements. They agreed to talk again Monday and to meet next week in Germany. Before entering his final meeting this morning, Talbott told reporters that the United States might agree to give the Russians a "zone of responsibility" in Kosovo. Under the agreement that ended NATO's 11-week war on Yugoslavia, Kosovo was divided into five sectors to be controlled by U.S., British, French, German and Italian troops, and the Russians have been demanding one of their own. "There will be parts of Kosovo where Russian participation will be important and manifest," Talbott told reporters, but he stopped short of saying there would be a separate Russian area. There also were no signs of progress on the sticky issue of command and control of peacekeepers. NATO has insisted on a unified command of the operation; Russia has refused to put its troops under NATO command. Talbott, referring to the Russians' surprise dash into Pristina early Saturday morning, said Russia once again promised not to deploy further troops until there is an agreement. "I don't expect any more surprise steps from the Russian side," Talbott said. Russia has another 1,000 paratroops at three airports ready to join peacekeeping operations. The possibility of a compromise over the Russian peacekeeping role was swiftly hailed by military chiefs here as a dividend from the foray into Kosovo by approximately 200 troops, which stunned NATO. The troops, while not a large contingent, are holding the Pristina airport. A high-ranking General Staff officer told Interfax news agency today that "the actions of the battalion created conditions for more constructive negotiations" with Talbott. But once the troops went into Kosovo and set up at the Pristina airport -- breaking promises to the West by Ivanov that they would not enter Kosovo before NATO -- the dynamic of the talks changed, he said. "After the dash, the situation at the talks became simpler." Sergei Prikhodko, Yeltsin's deputy chief of staff for foreign policy, told reporters that "definite progress" was made in the talks. In Washington, administration spokesman David Leavy called Yeltsin's and Clinton's talk today "quite constructive." He said that "in addition to the political discussion being held by Deputy Secretary Talbott, the two leaders agree that the military-to-military channel was the appropriate forum to work out the details of Russia's participation in KFOR," the Kosovo peacekeeping force. Asked if Clinton asked Yeltsin to explain Friday night's unexpected dash to Pristina, Leavy said: "Clearly there is political confusion in Moscow." He declined to elaborate. One administration official said Yeltsin suggested he wasn't directly responsible for the foray. The official said Yeltsin told Clinton that "it was up to the [Russian] generals to decide the timing" of their entry into Kosovo. In Skopje, Macedonia, NATO's supreme commander, U.S. Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark, called the Russian move "bizarre" but said it was not hindering the alliance, the Reuters news agency reported. "This is a political problem at this point . . . and I think it needs to have time to be addressed and resolved in political chambers," he said. Yeltsin and Clinton agreed to meet next Sunday in Cologne, Germany, during the meeting of the Group of Seven industrial democracies plus Russia. Staff writer Charles Babington in Washington contributed to this report. **COPYRIGHT NOTICE** In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for nonprofit research and educational purposes only.[Ref. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ] DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
