[PEN-L:4663] 'Refugees' from NATO Bombs and the KLA

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Barkley Rosser wrote:
>OTOH, it is possible that all (or many
>of) those "missing males" at the borders have fled
>to the hills to join the KLA.  Sure don't know at this
>point in time.

*****  The Sunday Times
March 28 1999
Truth Chokes on the Fog of War
by Tony Allen-Mills Tetovo, Macedonia

AT THE Red Cross office near the Turkish bazaar in Tetovo, Kucu was
struggling to get his story straight. The Serbian army had attacked
Kotlina at 5am and driven all the young Albanian men out of the village,
he said. They had watched in horror from the forest as the women and
children were loaded into lorries and driven off towards Kacanik, 30
miles south of Pristina. Then the Serbs had burnt the village.

That was not quite the version that Kucu's friend, Enes, related to a
different Red Cross worker a few minutes later. The Serbs had herded the
older Albanian men into the woods, Enes said. The younger men had run
away. It was 5pm - not 5am - when the Serbs had burnt the village. Then
the fugitive Albanians had walked through the night for 20 miles to the
Macedonian border. They had crossed the Sar Planina mountains to
register as refugees from the war that had destroyed their homes.

It sounded a sadly familiar tale of Serbian mayhem, but a Red Cross
volunteer exchanged a glance with a Macedonian interpreter. "These men
don't look as though they have walked 20 miles," she said, staring
pointedly at Kucu's spotless white running shoes. "They look as though
they arrived by Mercedes."

The unusually dapper would-be refugees were not the only sign last
week that all is not what it seems in the latest western attempt to
impose order on Balkan chaos. A conflict promoted in Washington, London
and elsewhere as a crusade against a despot looks a lot more complicated
to those who live within earshot of exploding Tomahawk missiles.

To be sure, many of the refugees arriving from Kosovo had sinister
stories to tell of Serbian barbarity. Some spoke of relatives murdered,
of random executions and of groups of ethnic Albanians being led away at
gunpoint.

However, not everyone reaching Macedonia had encountered a genocidal
Serb. Many had been scared from their homes not by Milosevic's marauding
troops, but by the threat of Nato attacks. Others, like the well dressed
Albanians, had motives that were hard to fathom through the
centuries-old fog of Balkan intrigue and deceit.

In Tetovo, there was speculation that the Kotlina Albanians had
fallen foul of their own side. Reports reaching Skopje have suggested
that the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), the underdog resistance unit of
Albanian separatist guerrillas, is not always as heroic as it is
sometimes portrayed.

The KLA has been accused in the past of forcibly conscripting Kosovo
Albanian men into its ranks. Serbian officials have accused it of
attacking its own villages if local men refuse to join up.

There were so many discrepancies in the stories of Kucu and his
friends last week that Red Cross officials declared it impossible to
know the truth about the supposed burning of Kotlina. The men might have
been victims of Serbian aggression; they might have skipped town to
avoid being drummed into KLA uniforms. These are the kind of Balkan
conundrums that are rarely solved by B52 bombers.

Nor was there much fodder for Nato propagandists among the 200 or so
refugees waiting to register at a Skopje district police station early
on Friday. Mirvei, a tall Albanian woman clutching her four-month-old
baby, looked bewildered when asked if Serbian troops had driven her out.
"There were no Serbs," she said. "We were frightened of the bombs."

Hunched uncomfortably together on a kerb, an exhausted pair of
elderly Albanian Kosovars puffed wearily on Turkish cigarettes as their
Macedonian niece launched into a tirade - not against vicious Serbian
oppression, but against the "cowardly" immigration policies of the West.

Her 86-year-old uncle, Ajredien, and his wife, Celebija, 78, had a
son and grandchildren living in America and other children in Holland,
Switzerland and France. All four countries had refused the elderly
couple visas. Resigned to their plight in Kosovo, they had abandoned
their home in Gnjilane only when Nato bombs began to fall.

By contrast, Shaban Latifi told the kind of story that last week
encouraged Tony Blair to label Milosevic a "vile dictator". Latifi
stumbled into the Tetovo Red Cross office on Friday and slumped on a
step in the muddy garden. He was there for hours before the
Albanian-Macedonian interpreter had time to listen to his story.
Clutching a wooden walking stick and a blue sponge bag, Latifi, 76,
related in a croaking voice how the Serbian army had swept through the
village of Ajrodila, near Pristina.

"In half an hour they killed 38 people," he said. His wife and four
grown-up children were murdered. The Serbs spared Latifi, who is sick
and nearly deaf, but ordered him to leave. A series of bus rides brought
him to Tetovo, where he had been told that a Macedonian-Albanian family
would take him in.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Latifi's story was that there
seemed to be so few others like it in Macedonia, where no more than a
trickle of refugees was arriving. This may have been because of fear of
encountering Serbian troops, apprehension about the Nato bombardment or
a preference for other exit routes.

Red Cross officials say many of the most recent arrivals intend to
return to Kosovo as soon as the Nato bombardment stops. Some claim that
the end of the Nato airstrikes could bring a fresh wave of 100,000 or
more Albanian refugees. Yet there is no sign that the government
seriously expects the refugee problem to become unmanageable.

The return of war to the Balkans has in other ways proved a crushing
blow for the one former Yugoslav province that had managed to break away
from its parent state without bloodshed. During the past few years
Macedonia has quietly been emerging as a stable and potentially
prosperous mini-state. "Now it doesn't matter whether Serbia bombs us or
not," said Margarita Manceva, an English teacher in Skopje. "The
economic damage has been done. We have journalists visiting us now, but
no tourists."

Perhaps the most threatening development last week was the alienation
of Macedonia's 40,000-strong Serbian minority, as witnessed in attacks
on western embassies in Skopje. In a seemingly co-ordinated eruption,
hundreds of protesters skirmished with police after hurling stones at
the American, British and German missions.

The presence in Macedonia of more than 10,000 Nato troops -
originally intended for peacekeeping duties in Kosovo but now widely
suspected by Serbs of being a back-up offensive force - has had an
unsettling effect.

Ljubco Georgievski, the Macedonian prime minister, acknowledged that
in addition to the Kosovo refugees the biggest problem facing his
country was "the anti-American and anti-Nato sentiment growing among the
population".

For many Macedonians there was little consolation when Christopher
Hill, the American ambassador, emphasised that Nato forces were "in no
way here to threaten or attack Serbia". In the next breath Hill warned
Serbia that "any attempt to attack these forces would have severe
consequences". Whether Nato likes it or not, its soldiers have become,
like so many Balkan armies before them, a part of the problem they were
sent to solve.  *****

Yoshie