RE: Letter on Kosovo (fwd)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 01:53:27 -0700 (PDT)
From: Steve Martinot <marto@ocf.berkeley.edu>
To: digby@the-spa.com, jmusselm_rpa@indiana.edu
Subject: RE: Letter on Kosovo

INDEPENDENT (London) April 17

This atrocity is still a mystery to Nato. Perhaps I can help...

By ROBERT FISK

When you stand at the site of a massacre, two things happen. First, you
wonder about the depths of the human spirit. And then you ask yourself how
many lies can be told about it. The highway of death between Prizren and
Djakovica - on which the Serbs say Nato slaughtered 74 Kosovo Albanian
refugees in a series of bombing raids - is no different.

Only hours after I slipped on a dead man's torso near an old Turkish
bridge, less than a day after I stood by the body of a young and beautiful
girl - her eyes gently staring at me between half-closed lids, the bottom
half of her head bathed in blood - I watched James Shea, Nato's spokesman,
trying to explain yesterday why Nato still didn't know what had happened
on Wednesday.

All those torn and mangled bodies I had just seen - the old man ripped in
half and blasted into a tree at Gradis, the smouldering skeleton with one
bloody, still flesh-adhering foot over the back of a trailer at Terezick
Most, the dead, naked man slouched over the steering wheel of a burnt
tractor - all, apparently, were a mystery to Nato. So perhaps The
Independent can help clear up this unhappy state of affairs with some
evidence - damning perhaps, certainly important - from the scene.

But first a pause, to reflect on atrocities. The Serbs are "ethnically
cleansing" Kosovo. It is a war crime. If Nato massacred the 74 Albanians,
the Serbs have killed many more. On Thursday, I saw four buses in Kosovo
packed with terrified Albanian women and children and old men, black
curtains at the windows of the buses in an attempt to hide their presence.
And at a square in the otherwise deserted town of Pozeranje, near
Urosevac, I passed at least 200 pathetic Kosovo Albanians, exhausted,
frightened, carrying plastic bags of clothes and battered holdalls, the
old women in scarves, the young women clutching children to their bosoms,
the old men wearing black berets; all were standing tightly together for
protection, like animals.

They were waiting for another bus, I suppose - and, not for the first time
these past three weeks, I thought of other scenes, in Eastern Europe just
over half a century ago. At Pozeranje, I was seeing these poor people -
for a few seconds only, from a vehicle window - at the very moment of
their dispossession, on the very day of their "cleansing", within hours of
their arrival among the flotsam of humanity along the Serbian border 12
miles away It was a wickedness I saw, the very moment of evil. When I
drove through Pozeranje again yesterday, it was empty save for four horses
running lose on the main road.

So why dwell on the 74 dead Kosovo Albanians whose remains have been left
in such indignity along the Prizren-Djakovica road? Because the Serbs
wanted us to see them? Because Nato was already embarrassed by the Serb
claims of their slaughter? Because it "evens the balance" - it does not -
between Serbia and its enemies?

No, I suspect that the road of death and its terrible corpses is a
challenge not to Nato's propaganda but to its morality. Nato, we are
repeatedly told, represents "us", the good moral, decent people who oppose
lies and murder. So Nato has a case to answer - for all our sakes. And the
evidence lies on that awful road with its eviscerated people and its bomb
craters.

Nato "thinks" it bombed a tractor on a road north of Djakovica. Indeed,
Nato's military spokesman would say yesterday only that is was "possibly"
a tractor. Mr Shea - or "Jamie" as he enjoins us to call him - says he is
still trying to find out what happened to the 74 refugees. Nato needs more
time, he tells us, to assess what it bombed and did not bomb.

Well perhaps I can help Jamie to speed up his enquiries. Of the four
air-strike locations, I have visited the first three - at Velika Krusa,
Gradis and Terzick Most - and they run consecutively from east to west
along the Prizren-Djakovica road. At the third, I came across four bomb
craters. I saw - and in some cases collected - a number of bomb and
missile parts. At Gradis, I came across part of a missile circuit board,
its congealed wiring attached to a plate which contains a manufacturer's
code.

Yesterday's Independent carried some of this. But Nato will need the
fullest possible information to trace this piece of ordnance quickly. The
full code (the brackets are empty on the original) reads as follows:

SCHEM 872110 ( ) 96214ASSY8721122 - MSN 63341 [remaining figures obscured
by detonation damage]

It shouldn't take Nato armaments experts more than a few hours to find out
where that code came from - indeed what aircraft carried and fired that
missile. Its pilot - if it was a Nato bomb - will then be able to explain
why he fired it.

At Velika Krusa, I found the fusing of an aerial bomb next to a smashed
trailer containing the belongings of 35 Albanian refugees, four of whom -
all women - were killed in this air strike. I also have in my possession
what may be a swivel system to an aerial bomb. It is one-inch square, very
damaged (Xs stand for the illegible parts) - but carries the code: "X6214
- 837XNY".

At Gradis, I found a large bomb part, green in colour but with stencilled
colour code in English, whose full code reads:

WING ASSEMBLY

96214ASSY

78-201872 872128

DATE OF MFG 3/78

Another similar bomb part contained the numbers:

96214ASSY

887760-4

At Gradis, too, part of what appeared to be a detonator contained a
section of manufacturer's name:

- TER Co Inc 13250

Again, Nato intelligence authorities should be able to work out some of
those codings within a few minutes. Another piece of a bomb had the single
word "BENDIX" stamped on the metal. Other bomb and missile fragments
contained moving fin assembly parts. Most of the shrapnel was so sharp it
that it cut the hands of those who touched it. The corpses showed what
happened when the bomb parts shredded them alive. One of the bodies lying
in a field at Terezicki Most - that of a man in his 40s - had the top of
his head cut cleanly off, along with his brain and eyes so that his face
had turned into an actor's mask. A middle-aged woman in a purple pullover
and brightly flowered skirt with her eyes open and a pale waxen face, had
had her neck cut open.

Now, maybe Nato will find that these bomb and missile assembly parts
belonged to weapons sold to other governments. Perhaps they will be able
to claim that a Balkan nation was given the aerial bomb whose wing
assembly number is recorded above. In which case, maybe Nato will say that
the Yugoslav air force - of which not a single aircraft has been seen in
the air since the start of the Nato bombardment - carried out this
massacre of Albanian refugees.

Certainly, Yugoslav army officers at the bomb sites made no attempt to
prevent photographers taking pictures of the larger pieces (though they
showed no interest in the codings and seemed unable to understand my
interest). And I saw one photographer drag a piece of bomb several metres
and turn it over for a better photograph. But given the time available and
the chaos on the road - Nato air raids were going on within a mile of us
as we examined the bomb sites - it is impossible to believe that the Serbs
had time to construct these terrible scenes.

At Gradis, there was evidence of strafing as well as aerial bombing. Huge
troughs had been cut into the earth, each two feet in length, separated by
up to 10 feet and unevenly separated as if a drunken monster had lurched
through the field and on to the road. These appeared identical to the
cannon fire marks I found at the scene of American A-10 "Tankbuster"
strikes in the 1991 Gulf War. But there were no burnt-out tanks on the
Prizren-Djakovica road; only tractors and trailers and an old milk-yellow
van turned inside out by the explosion which destroyed it.

Along miles of the same road were other tractors, some scorched, most
abandoned, apparently in panic, at the side of the road. The few Kosovo
Albanians we found spoke of thousands on the road that day - 14 April -
and it appears that they were moving in both directions. Survivors have
said they came from the border, were moved to Djakovica and then told by
Serb forces to move to Prizren. Most say they had no Serb escorts. I saw
those awful buses with the black curtains moving in both directions near
Prizren on Thursday. "Ethnic cleansing" is not a precise art. Nor is fear.
Undoubtedly some of the Kosovo Albanians on the road were terrified of the
aircraft which bombed them in four separate locations. The fourth attack
took place at Meja on the other side of Djakovica.

It wasn't difficult for me to imagine the terror on that road. While we
were picking our way through the corpses of Terezicki Most, Nato planes
dropped bombs less than a mile away - cluster bombs from the sound of them
- and a series of massive explosions changed the air pressure around us.
We watched the skies. From time to time, we could hear - but not see -
Nato jets power-diving. Columns of dark smoke billowed over the bright
green fields.

But we found no military wreckage. Not a smashed rifle, not a piece of
armour. There was a lot of glass on parts of the road - not a commodity to
find in large amounts on military vehicles. The only victims of these air
strikes appeared to be civilians. At Terezicki Most, I counted 13 corpses
and other body parts. A missile had rammed a tractor, setting fire to its
trailer and incinerating all inside. In the Prizren hospital mortuary, six
corpses lay on the concrete floor. There was a woman, breasts exposed, on
the right, a delicate child close to her with a bloodied face. A piece of
paper with the number "1" written on it had been pinned to the shroud half
covering an unknown man. We had names for the rest: Fikrija Sulja, Imer
Celja, Ferat Bajrami, Persad Sanfjli and Nerdgivare Zecin.

Along the road, there were clothes and rags and broken cups and saucers
beside the bomb sites and photograph albums and family snapshots. I picked
up photographs of a pretty young Kosovo Albanian woman with a lace blouse
and curls and long black earrings, of a smiling four-year old boy in a
T-shirt standing on a sofa behind a vase of sunflowers, of the boy's
parents and two other brothers on the same sofa, of two old women in
Muslim scarves and of a blood group certificate - Rhesus positive - for a
woman named Rama Resmije, dated 16 March 1993.

Did she live or die? Were the little boy and his parents and brothers torn
apart in the air strikes on Wednesday? And what of the pretty woman in the
earrings? If they survived, they deserve to know why their family and
friends died. If they were killed, we deserve to know why. That these
people were massacred in air strikes I do not doubt. I fear very much that
they were slaughtered by Nato. If so, why? Was this some terrible error
about which Nato - after its attack on a passenger train last week - fears
to tell us? Or did some Nato pilots (and this massacre needed three or
four planes) make an error and agree to cover it up? Or - most awful of
all - did a Nato pilot do something terrible, inexplicable, two days ago
and then lie about it?

Nato, I suspect, can tell us. And those of us who walked among the
innocent dead on the road from Prizren to Djakovica this week are waiting
to hear Jamie tell the truth.

*** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest
in receiving the included information for research and educational
purposes. ***


INDEPENDENT (London) April 17

EDITORIAL

Lay off the BBC - it is doing its proper job in Belgrade

Gotcha! The BBC's John Simpson is a Serb agent. That is the silly
allegation levelled by some Labour MPs in public, and some Government
ministers and officials in private. They really should know better. Mr
Simpson may be guilty of many crimes, including the ludicrous affectation
of calling himself World Affairs Editor, but being an apologist for the
odious Milosevic regime is not one of them.

It is surprising that our new generation of rulers should fall into the
same errors as their predecessors. As Tony Blair has often said, we should
learn from history, not be imprisoned by it. He was a young man of 22 when
Saigon fell to the Viet Cong. He knows about the role played by television
in ending the Vietnam war. He knows how one powerful image, of the young
girl covered in napalm running towards the camera, did more than almost
anything else to undermine the American people's support for the war.

Mr Blair was a 29-year-old parliamentary candidate when Margaret Thatcher
clashed with the BBC over its failure to act as the government's
propaganda arm in the Falklands war. He knows how the BBC's international
reputation was compromised during that war by the row about whether it
should refer to the British forces as "our" troops.

He ought to know, too, how the US military took precisely the wrong lesson
from the experience of Vietnam, which was to try to restrict and control
broadcasters' access to war zones. That is what happened in the Gulf war;
it also marked a shift from a merely negative to a positive strategy for
managing the media. In the Gulf, the US realised the importance of
supplying broadcasters with pictures, and began the practice, seen again
this week, of supplying video footage of missiles hitting targets. This
may have distracted CNN and the BBC from dwelling too long on "collateral"
damage to residential suburbs of Baghdad and Belgrade, but it can be
counter-productive. For one thing, it has the effect of portraying war as
a computer game, giving the impression that death and destruction are
being meted out at a distance, by remote control, in some dishonourable
and callous way. And this week's video of the Serb bridge being hit as a
passenger train passed over it, intended to show how the pilot could not
have seen the train in time, was run over and over again in slow motion,
which gave quite the opposite impression.

Indeed, in a modern war fought by a democracy or an alliance of
democracies, it is now the case that any attempt to control or censor
reporting is not just wrong, but pointless. If the cause is just, then the
peoples of the 19 Nato countries will support the war whatever is
truthfully reported from Kosovo - so long as there are not too many tragic
accidents in which tractors are mistaken for tanks.

There is a difference between understanding the power of images and
seeking to control them. The point about the pictures relayed back to the
United States from Vietnam is that they told the truth: that the war was
wrong, could not be won, and was being fought by deliberately cruel and
inhuman means.

It is inevitable that in almost any war now there will be television
pictures "from the other side". Partly because the technology was not
fully developed, and partly because of the logistics, the Falklands was
the last really "closed" war in which the British government could
completely control reporting.

In 1991, Western viewers saw the bombs fall on Baghdad from civilian
cameras on the ground as well as from military ones in the air. Simpson
got it in the neck from the Conservative government when he stayed in the
Iraqi capital - famously observing a cruise missile go past his hotel
window. But has the Labour Government learnt from this recent history, or
been imprisoned by it? When it joined with the US in the most recent
bombing of Iraq, just before Christmas, the Prime Minister's press
secretary, the Foreign Secretary and the Defence Secretary all complained
to the BBC about its "bias".

Now they are at it again, with Ben Bradshaw, the Labour MP, who was 14
when the Vietnam war ended, leading the charge, complaining when Mr
Simpson reported that Nato's bombing of Serbia had strengthened
Milosevic's hold over his own people. "It is a Fascist state," Mr Bradshaw
said. "He should constantly remind viewers of the restrictions that he is
under in his broadcasts."

But it is true that the bombing has united the Serbs against Nato. It is
quite right that the peoples of Nato countries should know that, just as
it is right that we should see the damage done and the mistakes that have
been made. And the BBC has, in fact, been careful to explain the
restrictions on reports from Belgrade. Truth need not be - and indeed
cannot be - the first casualty of a modern, just war.


*** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest
in receiving the included information for research and educational
purposes. ***