[PEN-L:4597] Fw: Ground war next?

["Frank Durgin" <fdurgin1@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It would, seem based on the multiplication of the number of news reporrts
comming over the line about Serb "atrocities" in Kosovo. that the ground
war is not far off.

Attached is the type of report I have been seeing quite a few  of.

Frank
=====
Saturday March 27 1:52 PM ET

NATO Fears 'Dark Things' Happening In Kosovo

                     By Giles Elgood

                     BRUSSELS, Belgium (Reuters) - NATO Saturday expressed
grave concern at growing reports that
                     Yugoslav forces were killing, harassing and
intimidating ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

                     Political representatives of the Kosovo Liberation
Army (KLA) welcomed NATO air attacks on Yugoslav
                     targets but called for the swift intervention of NATO
ground forces.

``We welcome the strikes, but we demand that NATO ground troops come into
Kosovo as quickly as possible,'' a spokesman
said at a news conference near NATO headquarters in Brussels.

NATO has said it currently has no plans to introduce ground forces into
Kosovo, but is extremely concerned by reports of
killings and ethnic cleansing.

NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said the reports from a variety of sources
indicated that ``dark things are happening'' in
Kosovo, although their extent was not yet completely clear.

Albanian sources in Kosovo have described an alarming rise in reprisals
against ethnic Albanians by Yugoslav paramilitary
gangs since NATO began air raids Wednesday.

KLA political representative Bardhyl Mahmuti said that in two houses in the
southern city of Djakovica, 70 people had been
killed. Accusing the Yugoslav government of ``ethnic cleansing'' said there
were dozens of cases of men having been killed in
front of their own children.

One ethnic Albanian woman in the Kosovo capital Pristina, contacted by
telephone, appealed to a relative abroad: ``Do
something for us now or forget about us forever.''

NATO says the atrocities were long planned by Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic and were not caused by the alliance's
air raids, which it says are intended to end the violence.

Shea said there was no evidence yet but ``the concordance of different
reports is enough to alarm us.''

He said those found to be responsible for atrocities would be treated as
war criminals and brought before the International
Criminal Tribunal on the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

The army was mounting sweep operations in northern and central Kosovo, Shea
said, and a large part of the town of Podujevo
was in flames.

``Armed Serb civilians are blocking all access to Pristina and within that
city there have been door-to-door operations in which
men have been separated from their families and taken away to undisclosed
destinations,'' Shea told a news conference.

In one village alone, Shea said, 20 ethnic Albanians had been killed, while
many other Kosovo Albanian refugees had been
pushed across the border into Albania itself. These groups comprised women
and children only -- there were no men.

Earlier, British Defense Secretary George Robertson said some Kosovo
villages had been wiped out.

``And I ask you to reflect on these chilling words -- These villages do not
exist,'' Robertson told a London news conference.

At alliance headquarters in Brussels, NATO said its aircraft attacked 10
targets overnight in the area of the Yugoslav capital
Belgrade, the second city Nis and in Kosovo itself.

In the first two nights, 50 targets were hit.

Some warplanes had to return without dropping their bombs because of bad
weather in Friday night's wave of attacks.

Seventeen Yugoslav surface to air missiles had attempted unsuccessfully to
engage NATO aircraft. It was the first reported
significant attempt by Yugoslav missiles to shoot down NATO aircraft since
the raids began.

The alliance had lost no planes to date while five Yugoslav warplanes had
been shot down, a NATO spokesman said.

Earlier Stories

     Bombs Can't Stop Kosovo Village Attacks-NATO (March 26)




----------
> From: Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
> To: marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx;
wsn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; SOCIALIST-REGISTER@xxxxxxxx;
leninist-international@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [PEN-L:4593] Ground war next?
> Date: Saturday, March 27, 1999 12:11 PM
>
> The Washington Post
>
> March 27, 1999, Saturday, Final Edition
>
> U.S., Allies Weigh Use of Ground Forces; Commanders Fear Bombing Won't
Stop
> Serb Offensive
>
> Dana Priest, Washington Post Staff Writer
>
> The deteriorating situation in Kosovo has prompted discussions among
senior
> NATO and U.S. officials about the possibility of introducing U.S. and
> allied ground forces into the three-day-old air campaign against the
> Yugoslav military.
>
> Senior officials said a decision on a deployment was still unlikely and
> that the subject has not yet been broached with President Clinton, who
said
> this week he did not intend to send U.S. troops to Kosovo to fight. But
> officials said some senior NATO and U.S. military commanders fear that
the
> ongoing bombing campaign cannot stop the offensive by Serbian-led forces
> against Albanian villages in the rebellious province, and that ground
> forces might be needed to halt the Serbs or prevent the war from
spreading
> to neighboring countries.
>
> Officials said the very fact that a ground war is under consideration is
a
> measure of the seriousness of the difficulties now facing the commanders
of
> Operation Allied Force. "Nobody at anything like a senior level, the
> principals' committee or deputies' committee, has looked the president or
> the secretary of state in the eye and said, 'This isn't going to work; we
> have to reconsider,' " said a senior administration official involved in
> the planning. "Here, and in Brussels, people have said, 'What if the
> limitations of air power are such, and the atrocities are such, that we
> have to consider [troops]?' "
>
> In an appearance last night in New Hampshire, Vice President Gore said
> there are no plans for U.S. soldiers to fight in Yugoslavia. "We are not
> going to put any ground troops into a combat situation," Gore said.
> "Neither are our allies."
>
> However, certain NATO commanders are being briefed on military
contingency
> plans for combat and preparing their troops for entry into Yugoslavia in
a
> hostile environment, said U.S. officials. Kosovo is a province of Serbia,
> Yugoslavia's dominant republic.
>
> "You have to make a distinction between what they are told to plan for
and
> what they prudently plan for," said one military officer.
>
> A NATO force that includes 4,000 British, 2,800 German and 2,500 French
> troops is already deployed in Macedonia, a country that borders on
Kosovo,
> in anticipation of peacekeeping duty under a Western peace plan. In
recent
> days, it has been reorganized with a new command-and-control structure
and
> with additional reconnaissance and intelligence assets, officials said.
New
> levels of supplies have been flown in to accommodate a longer stay by the
> force, whose deployment in Kosovo has been repeatedly rejected by Serb
> leader and Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
>
> Also, 38 U.S. officers, including a U.S. brigadier general who is the
> assistant chief of staff for operations, will be in Macedonia to help
> direct troops in NATO's Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, the headquarters for
a
> contingency force planned by the alliance that could be assembled from
> units stationed around Europe. A second Marine Expeditionary Unit, made
up
> of 2,200 Marines, will arrive in the vicinity soon, on its way to relieve
> the current Marine unit afloat in the Adriatic.
>
> Another 350 U.S. soldiers of the 1st Infantry Division-Mechanized who
were
> part of a separate U.N. peacekeeping force in Macedonia are now on
scouting
> missions on the Macedonia-Kosovo border. Yesterday, 100 combat-equipped
> Marines flew to Macedonia to augment U.S. Embassy security there.
>
> In Bosnia, where the United States has 9,800 troops from the 1st Cavalry
> Division in the international peacekeeping force, U.S. forces are on what
> one senior official described as a ready-to-go stance.
>
> The 1st Cavalry is one of the most heavily equipped divisions in the U.S.
> Army, and it is now deployed in Bosnia in unusually large numbers because
> of a scheduled rotation. The units now in Bosnia include 13 combat
> companies and 30 tanks, 60 Bradley Cavalry Fighting Vehicles and one
Apache
> helicopter battalion of 24 combat attack helicopters.
>
> Also, elements of the U.S. 1st Infantry Division have begun training at
one
> of Europe's premier combat training fields, at Hohenfels in Germany, for
> possible deployment as peacekeepers in Kosovo.
>
> U.S. military officials are in a particularly awkward spot. From the
> beginning of the Kosovo crisis, officials said, senior commanders have
> warned Clinton and his top advisers that air power has its limits. Now
the
> events of the past two days, which have seen Yugoslav forces step up
their
> attacks in Kosovo in spite of NATO bombing raids, may be proving them
right.
>
> To avoid a last-minute scramble to get ground forces ready for combat in
> Kosovo or neighboring countries in the event the situation deteriorates
> further, officials said, NATO commanders have begun taking quiet steps on
> their own, hoping they will not disrupt NATO's fragile political
consensus
> on Kosovo or provoke opposition in Congress.
>
> Military officials said the heightened Serb atrocities in Kosovo -- again
a
> scenario NATO and U.S. military planners anticipated -- have cast the
> limits of an air war into clearer focus. To avoid pilot casualties,
> military planners have focused the first several days of bombings on the
> Yugoslav air defense system, rather than on Serb troops.
>
> Yesterday, facing reports of mass killings in Kosovo by Serb special
> police, the Clinton administration urged NATO to increase the pace of the
> bombing campaign so it can more quickly begin to target the troops and
> tanks involved in the reported atrocities.
>
> But administration and defense officials say such targets will remain
> difficult to destroy from the air because the perpetrators are often
small
> gangs of special police using guerrilla tactics, including mixing deeply
> within populated civilian areas.
>
> In fact, it is just this type of urban, guerrilla warfare that is more
> effectively countered by ground troops. "We're going to do everything we
> can through air operations," said one senior military official, speaking
to
> this fact.
>
> Staff writers Thomas W. Lippman and Ceci Connolly contributed to this
report.
>
>
>
>
> Louis Proyect
> (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
>