Oct. 30, 1999 - KFOR "Peacefarce" 49 HEADLINES Sydney 1. TiM Editor in Sydney Receives List of 645 Kosovo Serb "Desparecidos" Pec 2. Convoy of Fleeing Serbs Attacked While Under the U.N. "Protection" London 3. A British Humanitarian Organization Accuses Archbishop of Canterbury of Complicity in NATO's War on Serbia Athens 4. Greek Doctors Expelled from "Medecins Sans Frontieres" Over Help for Serbia Stockholm 5. NATO Hindered U.N. Kosovo Depleted Uranium Inquiry ------------------------- 1. TiM Editor in Sydney Receives List of 645 Kosovo Serb "Desparecidos" (for a full text of the TiM editor's "Gang Rape of a Small Country" lectures, delivered during his "Tour de Oz," click here ).SYDNEY, Oct. 29 - Prior to the start of the Truth in Media lecture at the St. Lazarus Church in Sydney on Friday evening, Dr. Mark Marinkovic handed to the TiM editor a letter from Anka Cvijanovic, a Serb journalist whose husband was apparently kidnapped in Pristina earlier last month, right before the noses of the British KFOR troops, never to be seen again. Attached to the letter was a list of 644 other Serbs who had suffered the same fate in NATO's Kosovo "peace farce," during which over 400 Serbs have been murdered and more than 180,000 driven from their homes. The complete list can be viewed at the Center for Peace and Tolerance Web site - www.cpt.org.yu . Meanwhile, here are some excerpts from Mrs. Cvijanovic's letter, dated Oct. 23, originally written in Serbian:
The letter goes on to cite several examples in which the Serb families in Kosovo witnessed the kidnapping of their family members, reported the incidents along with identities of the kidnappers to the UNMIK or KFOR authorities, only to receive a cold shoulder in return. --- TiM Ed.: Which makes the UNMIK and KFOR leaders and troops accomplices to murder, kidnapping and "ethnic cleansing," according to acceptable legal principles in their civilized home countries. --- In another letter dated Oct. 27, Mrs. Cvijanovic says that, "no one among the Kosovo officials (Albanian or international), wants to talk publicly about the existence of prison camps where the kidnapped Serbs are held. Nor do they admit that such a problem even exists." So Mrs. Cvijanovic and other bereaved families of Kosovo Serb are forming an organization which they are calling HELP, and whose mission will be to try to find and free the surviving Kosovo Albanian's captives. Nor is this an isolated cry for help. Here is an excerpt from another letter which we received from Belgrade, written on Oct. 22 by three Serb women about another apparent kidnapping near Prizren of Mladen Miric, a Serb painter and art historian:
Bojana Lazic, Zorica Miladinovic, Svetlana Marinkovic - friends of the Miric family --- TiM Ed.: If this brings memories of the Argentinean "desparecidos" of the 1970s, and the grieving mothers and wives who banded together against the murderous Buenos Aires regime, you're not alone. Except that the bereaved Kosovo Serbs mothers and wives cannot even demonstrate in Pristina or Prizren as their Argentinean counterparts did in Buenos Aires. Which makes the KFOR "peace farce" worse than even the South American dictatorships of the 1970s, which the entire civilized world condemned in its time. ------------- 2. Convoy of Fleeing Serbs Attacked While Under the U.N. "Protection" PEC, Oct. 27 - Four Serbs were reported missing after a column of ethnic Serbs fleeing Kosovo for Montenegro under United Nations guard and "protection" was attacked by a mob of ethnic Albanians in the western Kosovo town of Pec, the U.N. refugee agency reported (without the quotes around the word "protection"). Peter Kessler, the spokesman for UNHCR in Kosovo, which organized the convoy in cooperation with the KFOR "peace farce" troops, said: "This is the worse incident of its kind. It's completely unacceptable." More than a dozen vehicles in the convoy of 21 civilian cars and four buses were set alight during the attack, as a crowd of Albanians attacked the convoy - escorted by Dutch and German troops - tried to pull the Serb refugees from their cars. UNHCR said that of the 155 people who set out in the convoy, the peacekeepers managed to get 117 to Montenegro. About 35 people were taken to the Italian headquarters of the Nato peacekeeping force, where a mob of hundreds of angry ethnic Albanians gathered outside, setting off firecrackers. Four people were unaccounted for. "The convoy had left the Serb ghetto of Orahovac in the south-west on its way to the neighboring republic of Montenegro via Pec in a tense atmosphere," the London Independent reported on Oct. 28. Many in the cars were visibly upset as they left their homes. Two Serb women in the front of their tiny Yugo car, dressed in dusty black, wept as they waited to leave the town of red roofs and spiky minarets. Another cried as she stooped to grab a handful of dust from the roadside, the only part of Kosovo she could take with her. "This is ugly," said Nebojsa, a young Serb man, who was sitting in his car with his wife and child as the convoy set off from Orahovac. "You can see for yourself what's happening here, we have [to] flee our homes." Orahovac, by the way, is the town in which the Russian peacekeepers were supposed to have been deployed in late August. But they were turned away by angry Albanians who set up roadblock to prevent the Russians from reaching the town (see S99-143, KFOR "Peacefarce" 37, Item 3, Aug. 30). After a five day standoff, the Russians shrugged and left as the KFOR "peace farce" commanders acquiesced to the Albanians. ------------- 3. A British Humanitarian Organization Accuses Archbishop of Canterbury of Complicity in NATO's War on Serbia LONDON, Oct. 23 - The British humanitarian organization, Christians Against NATO Aggression, (CANA) accused Tuesday Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey of complicity in NATO's March 24-June 10 aggression on Serbia. In a statement distributed to reporters, CANA said that, by backing the NATO aggression and the British government's policy, the archbishop had "violated Christian norms and basic humanness and had become an accomplice to this madness." CANA said that the archbishop kept quiet about casualties and the destruction of Christian culture and Serbian Orthodox churches in the Yugoslav republic of Serbia's Kosovo and Metohija province. It also accused him of hypocrisy because, despite his support for the NATO aggression, he had stated in a recent newspaper interview that he opposed wars in general. CANA lashed out also against British Prime Minister Tony Blair for pursuing an aggressive policy. The statement was signed by CANA's Director William Spring, who after working for years as a journalist and being active in humanitarian work, became a Protestant priest in northern London. ------------- 4. Greek Doctors Expelled from "Medecins Sans Frontieres" Over Help for Serbia ATHENS, Oct. 21 - Hypocrisy and a true racist nature of the French based "humanitarian" organization, "Medecins Sans Frontieres" (MSF - "Doctors Without Borders"), the medical relief group which won the 1999 Nobel peace prize, was revealed last week as MSF threw out its Greek branch for sending doctors to Serbia during the Kosovo war, a local spokeswoman told Reuters on Thursday (Oct. 21). "MSF has expelled us for our action in Serbia. There were reactions by the central offices to send in a team to Yugoslavia, but we decided to go with it," Sofia Ioannou told Reuters. She said the Greek team did nothing more than follow MSF's charter to help warring sides regardless of their ethnicity. "The expulsion is a blow to our organization, but we don't have any second thoughts,'' Ioannou said. She said the Greek group would continue to operate on its own as a provider of relief. --- TiM Ed.: Now it remains to be seen how peace-loving and humanitarian the Nobel Peace Prize committee members really are. For, anything other than revoking the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize from the "doctors without frontiers" who have now shown himself to be drawing up new hateful frontiers, would be acquiescing to such a deplorable act by the supposed humanitarians. For, silence means acquiescence. So we urge the TiM members who agree with us on this to write protest letters to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee over the Greek doctors' expulsion by the MSF, and demand that they revoke the 1999 laureate from the racist "Medecines sans frontiers" "inhumanitarians." Here's the address: Norwegian Nobel Institute, Drammensveien 19, N-0255 Oslo, Norway------------- 5. NATO Hindered U.N. Kosovo Depleted Uranium Inquiry STOCKHOLM, Oct. 15 - A United Nations task force looking at the environmental impact of NATO's bombing campaign against Serbia said that it had been hindered by the refusal of the military alliance to co-operate in its investigation of the use of depleted uranium weapons, the London-based Financial Times reported on Oct. 15. Presenting the report of the Balkan task force, set up by the U.N. environment program to assess environmental damage in Serbia and Kosovo, Pekka Haavisto, task force chairman, said the team had been unable to determine the extent of pollution caused by uranium-tipped weapons. He told a press conference in Stockholm that NATO had not been prepared to co-operate with the task force, nor would it admit using the weapons, which are designed to pierce armored vehicles or underground bunkers. In its report, the task force says immediate action is needed to obtain information from NATO confirming "if, how and where" depleted uranium weapons were used. NATO has publicly admitted using depleted uranium weapons during the Kosovo campaign but only in small quantities. NATO diplomats told the FT that there had been some initial contacts between the alliance's Brussels headquarters and the UN task force on how and where such weapons were used. But the matter was then referred to the US - partly at Washington's insistence - since depleted uranium weapons were fired only by US aircraft. --- TiM Ed.: So it seems that "all roads lead to Washington" when it comes to war crime trails. --- The use of such weapons has been associated by organizations representing the U.S. and U.K. veterans of the Gulf war in Iraq with serious health problems, including birth defects. These are denied by the US and UK military authorities. --- TiM Ed.: There have been also credible reports about the use of depleted uranium not only in NATO's recent bombing of Serbia, but also during its bombing of the Bosnian Serbs in 1995 (see S99-17, Day 8, Update 1, Item 2, Mar. 31 for details).
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", "Lift the Sanctions, Now!" (1993) 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" |
and "Peace"
Topic: BALKAN AFFAIRS