SIT-REP 5-8; Saturday, May 8, 1999

In this Issue: Short-Takes; The Art of the Deal --4; Real Crimes to Account For

Civil Wars are ugly. Interventions are tricky and hard to justify. Monday, Yugoslavia presents its case against NATO at the World Court in The Hague. Obviously the United States can stifle almost any international initiative, as it did Friday night at the UN, in covering over the accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade; but at least Yugoslavia will get its charges aired. Stay tuned.

On Friday, Tanjug confirmed that the Kosovo moderate Fehmi Aghani, was indeed murdered near Lipljan, about 10 miles southwest of Pristina. Agani and Ibrahim Rugova were considered traitors by the KLA. According to an AFP version of the report the police opined: "With Rugova's departure for Rome, the KLA had no further interest in keeping him and killed him," the police statement said.

What is Nato Doing Bombing City Centers in Broad Daylight? It appears to be General Wesley Clark's desire to re-strike already destroyed barracks and offices in downtown Belgrade, Novi Sad and Nis, during business hours. Nighttime bombing is bad enough, especially when all the primary targets have already been destroyed; so these urban attacks are down to the level of attempting psychological warfare --which we know does not work.

In daylight, more people are exposed to these attacks. "Collateral damage" in human casualties and damage to a market place in Nis, hospitals, schools and other non-threatening edifices is adding up. Thursday it was Novi Sad's turn, while thousands were stranded in the open at the ferry landings. On Friday, two 500lb cluster-bombs fell in Nis, killing at least 15 and wounding 70. "They have destroyed this city," 59-year old Radmilla Mitrovic of Nis said through her tears. "They did it with a clear conscience but without a sound mind."

Worst of all, as this pattern was defining itself, the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade was hit in a Friday night raid, killing 4 (3 Chinese and a local?) and injuring 21. Also, more carbon-tinsel bombs were used against the city's power supply. With all respect to the decent-minded pilots executing these increasingly reckless orders, General Clark more and more appears to be a sociopath-megalomaniac reviving the Bomber Harris-Curtis LeMay spirit of "bombing them back into the stone age." (An appreciation of General Clark's true nature from "Counterpunch" will be appended to the website edition of this report.) It seems clear that Clark is trying to get Milosevic or Arkan, or both men, plus Chetnik leader Vojslav Seselj, the way Ronald Reagan tried to get Colonel Qaddaffi, and both Bush and Clinton have tried to get Saddam with a lucky strike. Clark is trying to "one up" Generals Schwarzkopf and Zinni.

Apparently when the Chinese Embassy was struck, NATO was after a downtown command bunker, but it turned out they were after a nearby hotel, as well. The Hotel Yugoslavia was struck on the grounds that part of it was being used as a command & control center plus barracks for Arkan's Tigers. If true, so what? Civilians were there. NATO should focus its energy on the army, air force and special police units at this stage; the strategic bombing is counter-productive even when the bombs don't go astray, because the targets --primarily long-emptied buildings-- just are not relevant anymore.

It is unfortunate that Stanley Kubrick and Terry Southern, creators of "Doctor Strangelove," are not alive to observe this tragic farce. This type of willful and malicious bombing, with its increasingly controversial "mistakes," is not helping diplomacy, as we see.

Cluster Bombs: There is an erroneous belief among many in Yugoslavia and the anti-war movement that cluster bombs --canisters containing grenades-- are illegal under an international treaty. Not true. But it is unwise to the point of courting a war crime allegation, to use cluster munitions around civilian populations. It is also foolish-to-vicious to use cluster bombs or MLRS cluster bomb barrage rockets in farm country, such as Kosovo or Vojvodina, because up to a third of the grenades fail to explode on impact and lie around waiting for some innocent or fool to happen by. There have been several such incidents reported by Belgrade.

More MLRS/ATACMS: General Clark has requested more Army MLRS batteries, equipped with the 100-mile range ATACMS missile, to position near Yugoslavia's borders, in order to further threaten air defense sites and other military targets. ATACMS has a cluster-bomb warhead. One proposed site is on the southern Dalmatian coast of Croatia, near Montenegro's Kotor Bay.

LOGISTICS: In the last two weeks, as the Pentagon began calling up reservists, 40 KC-135 tankers headed abroad. A further reinforcement of 176 aircraft, including another 80 tankers, has been ordered. As another element, 24 F/A-18 aircraft are to be based in Hungary. This should tell you something about how Operation Allied Force is straining the military airfields and civil airports of Western Europe. Fighter and strike aircraft are being stationed farther from Yugoslavia and need more in-flight refueling.

This also crowds the already jammed-up skies around Yugoslavia; pilots report intense activity where the tankers circle in oval race-track patterns servicing F-15s, F-16s, F/A-18s, A-10s, EA-6s and other aircraft in need of a drink. With 80 more tankers and 96 more attack aircraft joining the air onslaught, the air controllers in the E-3AWACS and in the EC-130E ABCCC command aircraft are going to have a busy time.

Fort Dix: There was a bit of a flap when the White House tried to cut New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman out of its welcome ceremony photo-opportunity. More interesting, the selected arrivals included an expectant mother, who, on cue, provided a photo-opportunity baby. Who would recommend sending a mother-at-term on an intercontinental flight under such stress? Then, watching interviews of the refugees, I noted the prominence of men named Berisha (Selim) and Hoxha: Another Hoxha, (Bra) was interviewd in Saturday's NY Post America is taking care of the core clans involved in the KLA, not just anybody. I suppose there are lots of Krasniqis, too.

Apache Update: A reader with time to pay careful attention alerted me that he was seeing AH-64A Apaches in the film out of Tirana. At his urging, I double checked and he is right. The newly remanufactured AH-64D Apache Longbow is in short supply, with 3 coming off the production line each month. The first battalion only went operational last October, at Fort Hood, Texas. So, although a few D-models may show up there, this threatened deployment is of even more limited value and greater pilot risk than if the new birds were to be deployed; this explains the maintenance problems and training accidents as these are old birds. The US lost 5000+ helicopters in Vietnam, before shoulder-fired infra-red missiles were developed. The Apache A-model is all but sitting duck in that terrain.

Art of the Deal -4: An International Security Presence:

The Russians have slowed down their diplomatic initiative in the wake of the bombing of China's Embassy, though Strobe Talbott is still due to be in Moscow on Monday, to work on the details of the G-8 initiative. Meanwhile, the US is getting some noisy feedback at its Embassy in Beijing.

"Two wrongs don't make a right," we say in English. What the KLA and NATO were doing does not excuse criminal retribution by paramilitary vigilante gangs in Kosovo. It is time to be candid with ourselves about what has transpired in Kosovo, since March 23^rd. There is a process of "necessary disclosure" being played out between Serbian officials and the media. Though the magnitude of atrocities alleged by Albanian refugees is far beyond actual events, Mr. Milosevic, himself, began disclosing the grim realities in the KHOU interview with Ronald Hatchett, and in an April 30^th interview with Arnaud DeBorchgrave.

Milosevic told Arnaud de Borchgrave of UPI on April 30th:

Steven Erlanger, in Wednesday's New York Times, got more detailed disclosures from officials and other sources in Pristina (the complete text is appended in the website edition of this report) about mayhem unleashed after the bombs began raining down on Yugoslavia. Some 350 Serbs, at least, have been jailed for various crimes:

This is one key reason why the Clinton team insists on the NATO view that its troops and command headquarters must be at the core of the international security presence is reasonable, despite the high passions Serbs feel against NATO member states. A second reason is that only NATO can provide the necessary headquarters-staff-logistics functions needed by a UN-flagged command structure.

Yugoslavians must understand that at this stage, the level of violence includes Serb criminality on more than a scattered level. Thus, if the KLA is to be neutralized while most refugees return and re-settle, somebody has to keep watch on the KLA. But as General Clark's bomb continue to stray, America is only making its argument tougher to market.

Gun Control: In one of the paradoxes of the Clintonian New World Order, though it is clear that the KLA must be demilitarized if a sullen peace is to be established in Kosovo, "gun control" will not be imposed. All communities will have to retain the ancient, common law right-obligation of self-defense, "the right to keep and bear arms." Will the UN force ban personal "assault weapons" and force men to trade in their AK-47s for bolt action rifles? I don't think so.

The Dogs of War - An Aside:

Bob Djurdjevic, recently returned from Yugoslavia, told me last week that the first signal of an oncoming air attack was that dogs began to bark even before the air raid sirens went off. He asked about "The Dogs of War," a phrase from a famous Shakespearean speech --Mark Antony in "Julius Caesar." Here is the speech, regarding violence in civil wars:

A curse shall light upon the limbs of men;

Domestic fury and fierce civil strife

Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;

Blood and destruction shall be so in use,

And dreadful objects so familiar,

That mothers shall but smile when they behold

Their infants quartered with the hands of war,

All pity choked with custom of fell deeds;

And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge,

With Atè by his side come hot from hell,

Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice

Cry `Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war,

That this foul deed shall smell above the earth

With carrion men, groaning for burial."

- Shakespeare; Julius Caesar; III, i, 262-275 -Antony

After this speech, Antony spoke of Brutus and the assassins being "honorable men," and I keep thinking of Joe DioGuardi and the KLA leaders as "all, honorable men."

© Copyright 1999 by Benjamin Works -- SIRIUS www. siri-us.com

From Counterpunch May 5, 1999

Meet the Real General. Clark

Anyone seeking to understand the bloody fiasco of the Serbian war need hardly look further than the person of the beribboned Supreme Allied Commander, General Wesley K. Clark. Politicians and journalists are generally according him a respectful hearing as he discourses on the "schedule" for the destruction of Serbia, tellingly embracing phrases favored by military bureaucrats such as "systematic" and "methodical".

The reaction from former army subordinates is very different. "The poster child for everything that is wrong with the GO (general officer) corps," exclaims one colonel, who has had occasion to observe Clark in action, citing, among other examples, his command of the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood from 1992 to 1994.

While Clark's official Pentagon biography proclaims his triumph in "transitioning the Division into a rapidly deployable force" this officer describes the "1st Horse Division" as "easily the worst division I have ever seen in 25 years of doing this stuff." [Another source informed SIRIUS that Clark's nickname at the 1^st Cavalry was "Luke Skywalker."]

Such strong reactions are common. A major in the 3rd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division at Fort Carson, Colorado when Clark was in command there in the early 1980s described him as a man who "regards each and every one of his subordinates as a potential threat to his career".

While he regards his junior officers with watchful suspicion, he customarily accords the lower ranks little more than arrogant contempt. A veteran of Clark's tenure at Fort Hood recalls the general's "massive tantrum because the privates and sergeants and wives in the crowded (canteen) checkout lines didn't jump out of the way fast enough to let him through".

Clark's demeanor to those above is, of course, very different, a mode of behavior that has earned him rich dividends over the years. Thus, early in 1994, he was a candidate for promotion from two to three star general. Only one hurdle remained - a war game exercise known as the Battle Command Training Program in which Clark would have to maneuver his division against an opposing force. The commander of the opposing force, or "OPFOR" was known for the military skill with which he routinely demolished opponents.

But Clark's patrons on high were determined that no such humiliation should be visited on their favorite. Prior to the exercise therefore, strict orders came down that the battle should go Clark's way. Accordingly, the OPFOR was reduced in strength by half, thus enabling Clark, despite deploying tactics of signal ineptitude, to triumph. His third star came down a few weeks later.

Battle exercises and war games are of course meant to test the fighting skills of commanders and troops. The army's most important venue for such training is the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, where Clark commanded from October 1989 to October 1991 and where his men derisively nicknamed him "Section Leader Six" for his obsessive micro-management.

At the NTC, army units face a resident OPFOR that has, through constant battle practice coupled with innovative tactics and close knowledge of the terrain, become adept at routing the visiting "Blue Force" opponents. For Clark, this naturally posed a problem. Not only were his men using unconventional tactics, they were also humiliating Blue Force generals who might nurture resentment against the NTC commander and thus discommode his career at some future date. To the disgust of the junior OPFOR officers Clark therefore frequently fought to lose, sending his men on suicidal attacks in order that the Blue Forces should go home happy and owing debts of gratitude to their obliging foe.

All observers agree that Clark has always displayed an obsessive concern with the perquisites and appurtenances of rank. Ever since he acceded to the Nato command post, the entourage with which he travels has accordingly grown to gargantuan proportions to the point where even civilians are beginning to comment. A Senate aide recalls his appearances to testify, prior to which aides scurry about the room adjusting lights, polishing his chair, testing the microphone etc prior to the precisely timed and choreographed moment when the Supreme Allied Commander Europe makes his entrance.

"We are state of the art pomposity and arrogance up here," remarks the aide. "So when a witness displays those traits so egregiously that even the senators notice, you know we're in trouble." His NATO subordinates call him, not with affection, "the Supreme Being".

"Clark is smart," concludes one who has monitored his career. "But his whole life has been spent manipulating appearances (e.g. the doctored OPFOR exercise) in the interests of his career. Now he is faced with a reality he can't control." This observer concludes that, confronted with the wily Slobodan and other unavoidable variables of war, Clark will soon come unglued. "Watch the carpets at NATO HQ for teeth marks."

-- CP --

The New York Times; May 5, 1999

Kosovo's Ravaged Capital Staggers Back to Half Life

By STEVEN ERLANGER

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia -- Serbs and a few Albanians are trickling back to Pristina, Kosovo's capital. The sunny daytime streets, with a few pedestrians and shoppers, now display a poor imitation of ordinary life, so long as one doesn't focus too hard on the empty, looted Albanian districts, the bomb damage and the nearly total lack of children in the town.

A few cafes have reopened, from about 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., and there is coffee, for a price, when there is the electricity to make it. Mostly there's running water, too, and the central city has had little bombing for a month now.

There are lines for bread and for what little meat or milk is sometimes available, and almost no cooking oil or sugar. And there seems to be no gasoline for private sale.

As NATO escalates its air campaign, the sound of NATO warplanes and the thud of their munitions echoes day and night, even if intermittently, and in the evenings and long dark hours, there is sometimes the sound of gunfire.

So there is no shortage of fear and wariness. Some Albanian families have remained in their apartments, refusing to go outside for nearly six weeks now, while the elderly or some sympathetic Serb neighbors do their shopping, or have made them Serb nameplates for their apartment doors.

Other Albanians, mostly the elderly, move freely through the town, but seem to flinch when a Yugoslav soldier or policeman appears, or even when a stranger approaches.

And some Albanians are continuing to leave. At a downtown bus stop, a small knot of Albanians waited, carefully watching as strangers approached to talk. They seemed to shrink back, but told quietly that this was an American journalist, a middle-aged woman in a purple sweater said she was finally fleeing Pristina, to try to get to Macedonia.

Asked what pushed her now to leave, her eyes darted about, to see who might be listening. "You know everything already, everything," she whispered. "What shall I tell you? It's been terrible."

Her whole family had left, she said, and now she would try to find them in Macedonia. "But I have no idea where they are," she said. A few others tried to hush her.

Would she and other Albanians come back to Kosovo? "Yes, if things change," she said. "But not like this. Now there are too many people listening," she said, turning away.

In a line of Albanians waiting for bread, outside a former grocery shop with its windows broken but its metal grilles still intact, a few older men were willing to talk softly.

They'd been waiting a half-hour for bread. There are no rationing coupons, they said. "You don't need coupons, just money," said one man bitterly. All their families had already left. "Just the old people stay," one man said.

Asked if life was becoming any more normal, he said urgently, also gazing around: "Go to Podujevo and Pec and Prizren and see what it looks like. Here it's different."

And while the purging of Kosovar Albanians may be continuing elsewhere in Kosovo, the worst depredations seem to be over, here, for now, according to some Serbs and Albanians interviewed here. In the first two weeks after the bombing started on March 24, radical Serbs with guns, masked paramilitaries and at least some police rampaged through the city, burning and looting and ordering Albanians to leave.

Thieves also ran rampant, sometimes rushing up apartment house stairs during air raids while the occupants rushed down to the shelters.

Asked if patriotic Serbs will later feel any shame at what was done in their name in Kosovo, a senior Serb official here said without hesitation: "A lot."

But events were worse in Pec and Podujevo than in Pristina, he said. "It was a catastrophe," he said. "Podujevo was emptied in about three hours. There were a lot of vile and angry people, maddened, who were out of control." And in the Albanian villages where the Kosovo Liberation Army was strongest, he said, he was sure that terrible things happened.

"I don't believe there were mass killings and mass graves," he said. "But I certainly believe that people were shot to death."

He sighed, then said: "There are times when something gets broken in the minds of people, and no one is ever the same as they were before."

People in Pristina suggest the first wave of refugees was ordered or threatened into leaving soon after the bombing began, after the observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe withdrew and foreign journalists were pushed out of the city.

The second wave left because of the bombing downtown on the night of April 6 to 7, with everyone who owned a car taking off and as many as 5,000 people at a time at the bus and train stations.

The third wave left in a generalized panic, because everyone else seemed to be leaving.

It is almost impossible to put good numbers on the exodus, since there was no good estimate of how many Albanians lived in Pristina.

But those who remainded, one Albanian said Tuesday, "were the old, the sick and the people so afraid they did not even want to open their doors."

Thousands of Serbs, left, too, and those who stayed sent their wives and children north out of Kosovo.

A large number of Serbs always lived in Pristina, Kosovo's capital. The situation is calmer now, residents of varying ethnic groups say. The authorities, who are trying to advertise the return of sanity, if not normality, are now saying that 350 Serb civilians, policemen and soldiers have been arrested for crimes against civilians, like looting and arson.

And they say that the army and police have mostly cleared off the paramilitaries, most of whom were radical Serbs who had learned their trade in Bosnia and applied it here.

But the Serbs and the Albanians who remain keep their distance from each other. At a meat shop, the butcher raised the metal grill over the door to let in one person at a time. While he served Albanians, any Serb seemed to be allowed to cut to the head of the line.

While the outskirts of Pristina have been hit repeatedly and very hard by NATO, especially army barracks and warehouses, gasoline and fuel depots and the civilian and military airports, the damage in the central city is concentrated, but limited.

The central city Government office building is wrecked, as is the main post office and telephone exchange. That knocked out most telephones and the cell-phone network, further cutting off Pristina.

Some bombs or missiles went astray, destroying houses behind the telephone exchange, killing at least 10 people, and a row of shops and restaurants. One huge bomb, apparently intended for a fuel storage depot, blew a 50-foot crater into the city's central cemetery, blasting gravestones and sending bones flying.

While most of the remains have been returned with ceremony to the earth, shards of bone and chunks of smashed coffins still litter the ground. At the gravesite of the Brankovic family, the tombstone is propped up from behind by a tree limb and a wooden cross. Dojcin Brankovic had died in 1991, and the stone erected then had a place for his widow, Zlatinka, with her name and birth year, 1917, already etched. She died from the bomb that missed the telephone exchange, her family gravesite broken by the bomb that missed the fuel depot.

Walking around the back of the blasted telephone exchange, an Albanian man agreed to talk. Shefki Islami, 60, said he had remained in Pristina. "No one ever came to my house and pushed me out," he said, then stopped and added carefully: "But if they come you should leave."

Asked about the city now, he said: "To be honest, it's a little bit better. It's calmer now, over the last few days. Before that, it was very tense." Noticing a lingering Serb, he said, "That's enough now," and walked away.

An unshaven but elegant old man emerged from a lane behind a burned car and agreed to talk through a Serbian interpreter. Ali Reja, 77, is a pensioner, long retired from his job as an editor with the Rilindija state publishing house. His wife, Iqbala, was sick, he said, and he was off to try to find her some milk, but he also was happy to show a stranger the aftermath of the explosion.

He pointed to automobile fenders still hanging in the trees, to the thick ropes of tangled copper wire that hung over a brick wall like dreadlocks, to a chrome wheel and melted tire that had embedded themselves on a roof and to an engine that landed on one blasted car from another 30 yards away.

Reja considers himself a "loyal Albanian," who had fought for Yugoslavia and profited within it. "I was born three times," he said. "Once from my mother, the second time in World War II, when I was a partisan fighter, and my third birthday is April 7, when I survived this bomb."

He took a reporter into his garage, where he bemoaned that his books stored there had caught fire, and then talked a bit more freely. "What the Serbs have done here will change things forever," he said. "But one day the war will stop, and then the Albanian question will be settled." After all, he noted, even the French and Germans get along these days. "We are no exception," he said. "We cannot be excused from living together."

Asked how many Albanians would return, he shrugged. "Who could know? No one in the Balkans knows."

Pressed for details about events here, Reja stopped then, saying abruptly: "Are you satisfied? What else can I tell you but I thank you." He walked back out into the sun, onto the lane littered with burned car parts and copper wiring. "And if you're not satisfied," he said smiling politely, distant again, "I also thank you."

© Copyright 1999 by Benjamin Works - SIRIUS www.siri-us.com