What do you think of the following article--both its content and the very fact that the New York Times printed it? Doesn't it say something about both the nature of Albanian 'nationalism' a la KLA _and_ how NATO is planning to treat Albanians (that is, not as "innocent victims" of the media coverage so far but as pesky and uncivilized natives who are the white man's burden)? Yoshie ***** Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company The New York Times June 7, 1999, Monday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section A; Page 12; Column 5; Foreign Desk LENGTH: 1455 words HEADLINE: CRISIS IN THE BALKANS: THE REFUGEES; Kosovar Attack on Gypsies Reveals Desire for Revenge BYLINE: By DAVID ROHDE DATELINE: STANKOVEC I REFUGEE CAMP, Macedonia, June 6 BODY: For a moment, it seemed as if the mob of Albanian refugees would literally tear the 7-year-old Gypsy boy apart, limb from limb, said three aid workers who saw the attack on Saturday night. Minutes earlier, 15 to 20 enraged Kosovo Albanian refugees had beaten the boy's older brother and father, whom they accused of collaborating with the Serbs and killing Albanians inside Kosovo last month. "The look in their eyes when they tried to tear this boy's arms out -- there was just fire in their eyes," said Ed Joseph, of the Catholic Relief Service, one of the aid workers who pulled the boy from the mob. "I was just grabbing them and shouting: 'No! No! You won't!' " The attack was part of a chaotic and terrifying four-hour siege here as a mob of several thousand Kosovo Albanian refugees tried to seize and beat the Gypsy family. The attack illustrated the chaos NATO forces could face in Kosovo when hundreds of thousands of Albanian refugees return home to the shattered province -- and NATO's reluctance to get involved in such conflicts. Many of the Albanians could arrive home intent on exacting revenge on former Serbian and Gypsy neighbors who attacked Kosovo Albanians or destroyed their homes. While most Serbs, and Gypsies have who allied themselves with the Serbs, are expected to flee the province before any Kosovo Albanians return, some elderly people could remain. Before the NATO bombing campaign, Serbs made up about 10 percent of Kosovo's population and Gypsies about 2 percent. The Gypsies attacked on Saturday had been in the camp for weeks after crossing the border from Kosovo. While refugees have reported that Gypsies in some Kosovo cities have allied themselves with the Serbs, it was unclear whether this family was among them. In the attack, the refugees, chanting and screaming for blood, tore down the fence surrounding the Catholic Relief Service's main office here, kicked in the front door, tore bars from its windows and used a metal gutter as a battering ram. The violence was only defused after hundreds of Macedonian riot police officers arrived, and Christopher R. Hill, the United States Ambassador to Macedonia, addressed the mob at midnight and promised that justice would be done in the case. Relief workers spirited the Gypsy family and other Gypsies out of the camp and took the men who were beaten to a Skopje hospital, where they remained hospitalized today. "One man's face was the color of an eggplant and his eyes were swollen shut," said Paula Ghedini, a spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. "The other had been beaten with a stick and had a very large wound on his head. It was very clear that if they had been caught they would have been killed." Macedonia has been tense since refugees started pouring in from neighboring Kosovo after NATO began its bombing in late March. The extraordinary authority NATO carries with the refugees and the political sensitivity of its mission was shown during the siege. The mob repeatedly demanded that NATO troops come to take the Gypsies away to be held as war criminals. But officials of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, in consultation with NATO officials, decided it was not part of NATO's mission in Macedonia to carry out such an operation. Exactly how NATO troops respond to similar situations inside Kosovo could be crucial to their success. NATO officials are already emphasizing that they will enforce any peace accord "evenhandedly." Maj. Trey Cate, a NATO spokesman, said that if, for instance, Serbian soldiers, or members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the separatist Kosovo Albanian rebel group, fire their weapons, they could potentially be fired on by NATO soldiers. In Bosnia, NATO's only other peacekeeping mission, whether or how NATO troops would intervene in such situations was the focus of fierce debate. At the outset of that mission in 1996, NATO commanders insisted that they would not be involved in carrying out what they saw as "local police actions" and instead delegated much responsibility to local police forces controlled by Bosnia's three ethnic factions. NATO officers feared being progressively drawn into a larger and larger role in the country. Critics assailed the approach, saying it undermined NATO's authority and allowed local Muslim, Serb and Croat authorities to act in the sectors they controlled to thwart efforts by refugees from other ethnic groups to return to the homes from which they were expelled during the war. Most refugees in Bosnia have not returned to their homes more than two years after the Dayton Peace Accord guaranteed that they could. Kosovo represents a vastly different mission, but NATO is also likely to face difficult decisions over the scope of its mission. After NATO forces enter Kosovo, refugees now in the sweltering camps here may grow tired of waiting for an organized return to their homes and simply decide to head into Kosovo on their own. A chaotic chain of events could develop in which NATO forces would be in the awkward position of potentially blocking refugees from returning to their country, a right they are guaranteed under international law. A far larger problem could be revenge attacks. The Saturday night attack here illustrates how intense the desire for vengeance may prove. In one sense, the refugee camps here are sweltering caldrons of hate, where increasingly frustrated Kosovo Albanians can commiserate about their mutual victimization at the hands of the Serbs. As might be expected, peer pressure is exerted in the camps to hate Serbs. In the Cegrane camp here, which holds 40,000 refugees. children recited poems to a crowd of refugees last Thursday that glorified the Kosovo Albanian rebel soldiers and listed massacre after massacre believed to have been committed by Serbs as their Albanian teachers looked on approvingly. And most refugees interviewed here today said they believed that the Gypsies who were attacked did commit war crimes and applauded the mob's actions. "We are The Hague for them," said Afrim Ademi, an Albanian refugee, referring to the international war crimes tribunal in the Netherlands. Rumors of what set off the attack on the Gypsies were already rampant today. Nancy M. Shalala, a spokeswoman for the Catholic Relief Service who was trying to piece together what occurred last night, said that she repeatedly heard that a newly arrived ethnic Albanian refugee said he recognized the Gypsy teen-ager because he was wearing a piece of jewelry stolen from the refugee's mother. The refugee reportedly said the Gypsy had killed his father and then robbed his mother. The Gypsy teen-ager and his father were then beaten in separate attacks and brought about 7:30 P.M. to the Catholic Relief building by Kosovo Albanians who work for the aid agency. A group of 15 to 20 Albanian refugees stormed the building an hour later and beat the two men even more fiercely. The aid agency's staff members finally pushed the group out of the building. A large crowd then began forming around the building, led by a group of 150 to 200 men, Ms. Shalala said. The badly beaten father and son were moved to the building's bathroom to prevent them from being seen by the crowd. Aid agency workers also went to the family's tent to try to retrieve the mother and three younger children before they too were set upon by the Albanian refugees. When they arrived at the relief agency's building, the 7-year-old boy was grabbed by the mob, but then wrestled free by aid workers. With other Gypsies in the camp being "hunted like dogs," aid workers said, the aid workers tried to hide them to protect them. The mob, meanwhile, continued to grow. Efforts by Mr. Joseph and other aid workers to use megaphones to get them to disperse failed. The crowd repeatedly rushed the building, ripping bars from the windows. At one point, Mr. Joseph said, he stood on a window ledge, imploring the crowd to stop. At other times panicked aid workers stacked cots against the chain-link fence surrounding the building to prevent it from giving way. They failed. Ms. Ghedini, the refugee agency spokeswoman, said that at one point her agency considered evacuating all foreigners from the area. But when it became clear that the refugees' real hostility was toward the Gypsies, she said, 15 to 20 Gypsies were evacuated from the camp. Mr. Joseph, who was still shaken by the attack today, said the attack seemed to him to be a grim omen for what could happen in Kosovo when the refugees return. "I think it's a very bad harbinger for any kind of reconciliation or easy peace," he said. "Any Serb still there has to be packing his bags." *****
