July 25, 1999

Special Truth in Media Reports on NATO's Kosovo War and "Peace" S99-127, "Peace" 21

HEADLINES

Gracko                        1. Fourteen Serb Farmers Gunned Down and Mutilated by

                                          Albanians While Harvesting Wheat

Prizren                        2. Serb Patriarch Meets German Prime Minister,

                                        But Murders Continue

Pancevo                      3. Chemical Warfare: NATO Missiles Leave Permanent

                                       Legacy in Serb Town, But U.N. Frets About NATO Vassals

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1. Fourteen Serb Farmers Gunned Down and Mutilated by Albanians While Harvesting Wheat

GRACKO, July 24 - A North Atlantic Treaty Organization patrol found the bodies of 14 Serb men shot dead in central Kosovo in the worst single act of violence since peacekeepers entered the province in mid-June, officials said Saturday (July 24).

The victims were found Friday evening by a British NATO patrol after automatic weapons fire was heard in a field near Gracko, 10 miles south of Pristina. Thirteen Serb farm workers were lying in a circle next to their combine harvester; another man was slumped over his tractor 150 yards away, said Maj. Ian Seraph, the British contingent spokesman.

Surviving villagers blamed ethnic Albanians for the attack. They said the killing field was close to an ethnic Albanian village, Bujance, a KLA stronghold. The residents accused peacekeepers of failing to heed their pleas for protection in the fields when the harvest began seven days ago.

British Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson, head of peacekeeping forces, called it "a cowardly act of brutal and cold murder," according to an Associated Press report. NATO and United Nations officials swiftly condemned the violence and appealed for calm.

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TiM Ed.: Appealed for calm? After the same British general (Jackson) turned a blind eye this week to the fact that the KLA had not disarmed by July 21, as provided in its June 21 agreement with NATO. And after the same British general meekly extended the deadline so as not to upset these Albanian terrorists, while turning down the Serbs’ plea for protection? (see S99-126, "Peace" 20, Item 1, July 23).

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In The Hague, Netherlands, the chief prosecutor of the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal ordered an immediate investigation. "The scale of this massacre is very alarming and suggests that the strongest deterrent message must be sent to those who are inclined to perpetuate the cycle of violence that has shattered Kosovo in the last year," the prosecutor, Louise Arbour, said in a statement.

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TiM Ed.: So the main thing which is of concern to this kangaroo court is the "scale of this massacre?" Had these 14 Serbs been murdered one at a time, as hundreds already have been by the marauding Albanians across Kosovo, then Madam Kangaroo would not be as alarmed? Because it would be easier to look the other way?

Most pathetically, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia’s president, Slobodan Milosevic, blamed the massacre on NATO and the U.N., and demanded the return of some Yugoslav soldiers and Serbian police to Kosovo.

"Demanded?" From whom? From the U.N.? Or from NATO, which has just obliterated his country? Whose permission does an elected president of a sovereign nation need to send the police or the troops in protect its citizens, who are being shot like rabbits while KFOR and the U.N. "appeal for calm?"

Even if Milosevic somehow manages to dodge the war crimes charges by war criminals worse than himself (Bill Clinton and the other NATO leaders), this modern day Serb Vuk Brankovic (a traitor) should be tried by the Serbian people not only for treason, but for dereliction of his duties as the country’s president.

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British troops who were at the muder site said that the killers, not content with gunning down their victims, had run over some with the farm vehicles, and repeatedly thrust blunt objects into the faces to disfigure them, according to Serbs who viewed the bodies later.

"There were people lying there who I have known all my life, but who I could not identify," Milivoje Arsic, 45,  told the New York Times (July 25). "There were puncture wounds in the necks, perhaps from screwdrivers, and the faces had been badly maimed. My father-in-law was hard to recognize because of all the blood and disfigurement."

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2. Serb Patriarch Meets German Prime Minister, But Murders Continue

PRIZREN, July 23 - Serb Patriarch Pavle, and a number of other Serbian Orthodox church officials in Kosovo, met July 23 with the German prime minister, Gerhard Schroeder, in the southern Kosovo town Prizren, which is under German KFOR occupation.

During the conversation with Mr. Schroeder, Bishop Artemije (the naïve one - see S99-123, "Peace" 17, July 13, and S99-122, "Peace" 16, July 11) has pointed out that the Serbs have been being killed, maltreated, kidnapped, that their houses have been being set on fire, and that they have been being expelled from their centuries-long hearths, according to a report we’ve just received from the SOC sources in Belgrade.

Many Serbian churches, several centuries old, have been blown up with mine, demolished and violated. Bishop Artemije has requested of Mr. Schroeder "to urge an end to such insane violence."

Bishop Artemije especially asked the German prime minister to enable the normal functioning of the Theological School in Prizren, reminding him that this Seminary functioned even in the period of the Turkish Empire. So that it would be really incomprehensible that today, in the town under UN protection, this Seminary should be closed.

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TiM Ed.: No word as yet about what action, if any, the German prime minister took upon hearing this appeal by the Serbian religious leaders.

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Meanwhile, Father Sava, a pro-western monk, ostensibly based in Decani, has reported that he saw from a (KFOR) helicopter the Serbian village of Novake completely burned down, our Belgrade SOC sources reported.

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TiM Ed.: Guess now that some of the Serb clergy are evidently being flown around in KFOR helicopters, they can claim that they are closer to God. But the Serb people can just as rightfully allege that such clergy are farther away from them than ever before.

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Meanwhile, the priests from Pristina have reported to the SOC that Svetislav Protic from Susice village, near Gracanica, disappeared on Wednesday, July 21, and is presumed to have been kidnapped by the Albanians.

This afternoon (July 23), Milorad Cvetkovic, aged 70, has been stabbed in the street in Pristina. His condition is stable now, our sources report.

At 18:45, in Ulpijana, a Pristina suburb, Tomislav Kasic, aged 65 was wounded. Today, several Albanians have shot through the closed door at Suncica Brnzev’s apartment. "Thanks to God only, she is alive, since the bullet passed only couple of millimeters from her," the SOC sources reported. Brnzev lives with two little girls in the apartment.

This evening Milica Cistelic's corpse has been found. According to physician's opinion, she was probably killed on Sunday, July 18. The decaying corpse has been found in her apartment. Fleeing from Albanian terror, a large number of Serbs has moved out of Pristina today, too, the SOC sources reported.

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3. Chemical Warfare: NATO Missiles Leave Permanent Legacy in Serb Town, But U.N. Frets About NATO Vassals

PANCEVO, July 23 - In one of the reports this writer filed from his late-April trip to Serbia, at the height of NATO’s bombing, we told you about an ecologically devastating hit which the Serb town of Pancevo took (just northeast of Belgrade, across the Danube - see "A Huge Toxic Cloud Unleashed by NATO Bombs, S99-45, Day 26, Item 1, Apr. 18).

Now, three months later, the aftermath of that, and other NATO attacks on the Serb chemical factories, is slowly starting to trickle out. Here’s an excerpt from a July 23 Associated Press report from Pancevo:

"The grass is bleached to a scary pale gray, and little Ana has trouble breathing when she plays in the park, weeks after NATO wreaked environmental havoc by bombing key industrial sites.

Pancevo, an industrial town five miles northeast of Belgrade, was the town worst hit during the air raids, and doctors and environmental experts say the aftereffects of the bombing will be felt for years -- and maybe generations -- to come.

Huge amounts of chemicals and poisonous fumes have polluted the air, the ground and the water in and around Pancevo.

The damage dates back to April when NATO missiles struck Pancevo's three major industrial sites -- an oil refinery, a nitrogen fertilizer factory and a chemical plant, releasing hundreds of tons of toxic materials which spread over the entire region.

Weeks after the bombing ended, a visit to the fertilizer factory still produced a stinging sensation in the nose and throat. A sticky, yellowish fluid, apparently a leaked chemical, stank and slowly solidified under the blazing summer sun near the front gate.

"I am afraid to even think what we breathed in, what chemicals got into our bodies," said Tamara Radjenovic, a 32-year-old teacher, as she watched her five-year old daughter Ana play in a park. Every few minutes the girl came to her mother to rest, gasping for air.

"She gets tired so easily, she has dark circles around her eyes. ... It wasn't like that before the bombs. She is not the child she used to be," Mrs. Radjenovic said of her daughter with a deep, sorrowful sigh.

Local doctors who examined the girl said the symptoms were caused by the chemicals and that there was nothing they could do now.

Pancevo's municipal authorities have compiled a day-by-day list of dangerous leaks, fires and explosions since March 24 when the air raids began. The town of 70,000 was targeted from the beginning. At least 25,000 tons of fuel, mostly from the bombed refinery, burned into the atmosphere, blanketing a wide area with a layer of tar.

More than 1,400 tons of poisonous vinyl chloride burned and spread noxious fumes when NATO bombs hit a storage tank at Pancevo's Petrohemija factory. The substance, normally used to produce plastics, is carcinogenic, and 2 percent of it turns into even more dangerous phosgene when burned.

A hundred tons of mercury, almost as much sodium hydroxide and tons of other chemicals, including nitric acid, burned up or leaked into the Danube River. Those substances almost invariably cause respiratory problems, nausea, diarrhea, dizziness, skin rashes and blisters when inhaled in even the smallest quantities.

In one of the worst nights of bombing, instruments measuring pollution in Pancevo showed a vinyl chloride concentration of 0.43 milligrams per cubic meter, or 8,600 times more than recommended maximum levels.

Doctors in Pancevo said there were about a hundred cases of acute intoxication, mostly among nightshift workers, security and firemen who were at the sites during the nighttime raids. Three of them have died.

"I had a patient who was treated for infertility last year. She wanted a baby so much, she was two months pregnant when the bombing began," said a local gynecologist, insisting on anonymity. "She got so terrified of possible birth defects that she had an abortion last month." The woman made her decision after a surge of miscarriages in the town in late April, he said.

Milan Borna, head of the environmental protection department in Pancevo, said, "The full extent of the damage will show in coming years.... We fear that the worst effects may be degenerative changes in future generations."

Meanwhile, a 17-member expert team, assembled by the U.N. Environment Program, arrived in Yugoslavia this week and immediately headed to Pancevo to take samples of water and soil for analysis in two mobile laboratories. A mission member, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a chief motive for the U.N. visit was the health of the Danube River which flows through Yugoslavia and into neighboring Romania and Bulgaria, carrying a share of the toxic chemicals downstream."

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TiM Ed.: In other words, never mind about the little Serb Ana’s. The U.N. is more concerned about the Danube carrying the ecological disaster unleashed by NATO’s bombs to the NATO vassal countries east of Serbia (Romania and Bulgaria).

Also, check out... Truth in Media Statement on the Kosovo War, "Wither Dayton, Sprout New War?", "On the Brink of Madness", "Tragic Deja Vu's," "Seven U.S. Senators Suggest Ouster of Milosevic", "Biting the Hand That Feeds You", "A Balkan Affairs Potpourri", "Put the U.N. Justice on Trial", "International Justice 'Progresses' from Kidnapping to Murder", "Milosevic: 'A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery'...", "Kosovo Lie Allowed to Stand", "New World Order's Inquisition in Bosnia", "Kosovo Heating Up", "Decani Monastery Under Siege?", "Murder on Wall Street",  "Kosovo: 'Bosnia II', Serbia's Aztlan",  "What If the Shoe Were on the Other Foot?", "Serb WW II General Exhonerated by British Archives," "Green Interstate - Not Worth American Lives", "An American Hero or Actor of the Year?" (A June '95 TiM story) and/or "Clinton arme secrètement les musulmans bosniaques", "Kocevje: Tito's Greatest Crime?", "Perfidious Albion Strikes Again, Aided by Uncle Sam"

Or Djurdjevic's WASHINGTON TIMES columns: "Chinese Dragon Wagging Macedonian Tail,"  "An Ugly Double Standard in Kosovo Conflict?", "NATO's Bullyboys", "Kosovo: Why Are We Involved?", and "Ginning Up Another Crisis"

Or Djurdjevic's NEW DAWN magazine columns: "Washington's Crisis Factory,"  and "A New Iron Curtain Over Europe"