-Caveat Lector- >From SalonMagazine.CoM Shades of Srebrenica REFUGEES TELL OF SERBIAN SOLDIERS COMMANDEERING RELIEF VEHICLES, ECHOING THE BOSNIAN SLAUGHTER. BY LAURA ROZEN | SKOPJE, Macedonia -- Town by town, village by village, they come. Thursday, it was Pristina's turn, as more than 3,000 residents of the Kosovo capital arrived by train at the Macedonian border and were herded into buses to take up new lives as refugees. Hundreds more snaked up the road in a long queue on the Serbian side of the Macedonian border, their winter coats dots of color in a swarm of humanity once more on the run from the brutality of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Begrudgingly, blue-uniformed Macedonian border guards let them in, treating each arrival to an individual long question-and-answer session at their blue glass-and-plastic border patrol booths, as if the thousands of people fleeing their homes were somehow suspected of some unspecified crime, rather than the victims of one -- genocide. Relatives of the new arrivals wait for them anxiously a few hundred meters in from the border, and trade information with other newly arrived refugees to locate missing friends and family members. An ethnic Albanian man from Skopje said he currently has 20 Kosovar relatives in his small apartment in the Macedonian capital, and he's prepared, if he has to, to take in more. Like him, hundreds of Macedonian Albanians have opened their modest homes to their refugee relatives, who have no idea whether they will return to Kosovo. Leka, a man who arrived from Pristina Wednesday, his face gaunt, his eyes watching his two little children playing on top of a hill near the border, scanned the crowd of arrivals from Pristina tensely, searching through the sea of familiar and unfamiliar faces for that of his wife. Macedonian police barked orders at the crowd, some of the women fainting with exhaustion, others crying from unknown traumas, still others anxious to be left alone, to move along from whatever horrors and grief they had left behind. Leka, in a sweater and jeans, looks and sounds to be from Pristina's well-educated middle-class community of professionals, many of whom have fled the city in recent days. Since the Kosovo conflict began last March, he's worked for a U.S. humanitarian aid organization. In good English he tells me that he personally saw three people killed on the street the day he left, including one woman more than 70 years old. He says the Serbian police are all wearing black face masks in Kosovo now, adding to the terror that is fueling this exodus. He says he had to pay Serbian police 200 deutsche marks to get out of the country (he has 3,000 more DM in his pants pockets, to help other family members get over the border), and that police confiscated one of his cars. N E X T+P A G E+| Stolen United Nations vehicles fool desperate Kosovars SHADES OF SREBRENICA | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - Leka says that Serbian police broke into a warehouse where humanitarian organizations had been storing food, supplies and vehicles and stole six U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights four-wheel drive vehicles, in which they're now driving around Kosovo, confusing Kosovo Albanians, who think when they see the familiar white UNHCR vehicles that it might be desperately needed international humanitarian relief workers inside, rather than killers. He said he's also seen Serbian police and paramilitaries driving around Pristina in two Children's Aid Direct vehicles. That story sends chills down the spines of those familiar with the Bosnian war. In July 1995, Bosnian Serbian forces told thousands of people fleeing the fallen U.N. safe haven of Srebrenica that they were Red Cross humanitarian workers. At that beacon of hope, Bosnian Muslim refugees came out of their hiding places in the forests, and subsequently some 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men were slaughtered in the single worst massacre in Europe since the Holocaust. In a voice so low I had to ask him to repeat it, Leka said he knows what he's going to do in his new life as a refugee. "I am going to run guns for the Kosovo Liberation Army." This is a man who's more accustomed to humanitarian aid work than handling weapons, and one who seems to be adeptly minding the children single-handedly while trying to locate his wife. While most of the Kosovo Liberation Army soldiers have come from Kosovo's rural and village populations, particularly from the central Kosovo farming region called Drenica, Leka is urban professional through and through. But the experience of being helpless to protect one's family in the face of death from Serbian police and paramilitaries seems to have created a resolve in Leka to be prepared to protect his own and support those who are protecting his people. People like Leka say that they ultimately don't trust anybody but the KLA to protect the Kosovars in the future -- not NATO, not the Macedonians, nobody else. He says that NATO has made a mess of the bombing. Watching the crowd of refugees arriving, day and night, old and young, peasants and city dwellers, all reduced to the same basic human needs -- warmth, water, food and shelter -- one begins to feel witness to something like a natural disaster -- a flood or a hurricane or an earthquake. Human beings seem terribly fragile, fully mortal, when their well-being depends on escaping black-masked thugs with police badges and scary firearms, appealing to the mercy of border guards growing hostile to the constantly arriving people and the generosity of distant relatives. Each family, each stray child, is hoping against hope that his or her whole family makes it out, that those left behind will be reunited with them sometime in the future, that the violence will spare them. All have the look of awareness, gained at some point on the long journey out of Kosovo, that life will never be the same. Late in the day, Leka's wife finally made it over the border to Macedonia to join her family. SALON | April 2, 1999 Laura Rozen is covering the Kosovo crisis from Macedonia for Salon. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ >From Baghdad to Belgrade SCOTT RITTER SAYS WHEN IT COMES TO WAR, THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION IS THE GANG THAT COULDN'T THINK STRAIGHT. BY JEFF STEIN | Who will be the Scott Ritter of the unfolding Kosovo disaster? That is, who is going to fully expose the Clinton administration's bungling in the Balkans? As the tragedy in Kosovo overshadows the ongoing fiasco in Iraq, readers may not readily recall the name of Ritter, the Marine captain who noisily quit his United Nations inspection post last fall with charges that the Clinton administration had sabotaged his mission in Iraq. But Ritter, a grim young man, has kept his finger in the news flow since then, testifying before Congress and backgrounding a series of stories on Iraq, including last week's bombshell by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, which exposed the Clinton administration at its amateuristic, dissembling, poll-driven worst. The headlines focused on Hersh's evidence that Iraq had wired an $800,000 bribe to Russian Prime Minister Primakov, ensuring Russian support in his fight with the Americans. But the meat of the piece lay in Hersh's spellbinding account of the CIA's subversion and ham-handed sabotage of the U.N. weapons inspection program in Iraq, a disgraceful episode, which Ritter recounts, in different fashion, in his just-released "Endgame: Solving the Iraq Problem Once and For All" (Simon & Schuster). "Endgame" is an invaluable expose, a virtual X-ray of administration decision-making on Iraq that would be garnering front page headlines if it weren't for the new mess in Kosovo. Ritter's j'accuse: First, that Clinton allowed the CIA to spy on Iraq under the cover of the U.N. inspection teams, eventually giving proof to Saddam Hussein's suspicions, and handing the dictator a global propaganda victory. Second, when Saddam stiff-armed Ritter's aggressive hunt for Iraq's hidden chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic missile programs, the White House abandoned all efforts in favor of a doomed conspiracies to overthrow Saddam. Although Saddam has been replaced in the headlines by Slobodan Milosevic, he's still there growling away. Freed from U.N. inspections because of White House bungling, Saddam's busily rebuilding his program of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, Ritter says, and, oh, by the way, advising Milosevic on how to defeat U.S. bombers. The administration snickers that Saddam helping Belgrade thwart U.S. jets doesn't count for much, but after nearly a decade of fighting the U.S., the Iraqi dictator is still standing. Now comes Milosevic. The new crisis shows that this is an administration that can't think straight, much less shoot straight, when it comes to foreign policy. Absent the "decapitation" of both Milosevic and Saddam -- goals that the White House has now embraced because all of its previous maneuvers have proven bankrupt -- President Clinton is on the verge of handing the next White House occupant two third-rate thugs he managed to turn into first-class threats. How did he manage to do that? "The administration could win in the Balkans -- who knows?" Scott Ritter told me with a hollow chuckle Thursday, on the phone from New York. He then he ticked off the parallels between the Clinton administration's handling of Iraq and Yugoslavia. "The failure to realistically asses the situation, from the regional context to the realities on the ground; oversimplifying the problem; coming up with oversimplified solutions; and then, when our diplomacy fails, because we didn't adequately think it out, the reliance on military force to bail ourselves out." The looming trial of the three captured U.S. soldiers is just a Serbian propaganda ploy, Ritter added. "I don't think these guys are in any immediate danger ... They haven't committed any war crimes and the Serbs know this. If [the Serbs] do something stupid like execute these guys, that's it, all the gloves come off. America doesn't stand for that. What they want right now is a debate, to get the media spun up ..." N E X T+P A G E+| The knives are already drawn FROM BAGHDAD TO BELGRADE | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - The knives are already drawn in Washington over the Balkan debacle, with the CIA rushing forward to tell the media that it had warned the White House that the Serbs would escalate "ethnic cleansing" and create a refugee flood in Kosovo. NATO military analysts, meanwhile, are leaking like crazy that they told the White House air power alone would not only not budge Milosevic, but would fan nationalistic sentiment among ordinary Serbs. Only 200,000 ground troops could stop the Serbs in Kosovo, they warned Clintonites. Saddam has been quiet since the Balkans campaign began, apparently not turning on his radar to give an excuse for U.S. planes to bomb him. There have been no attacks on Iraq since March 24. "I don't think there's any chance of us overthrowing him ever, unless we're willing to commit the totality of our resources to the problem, and I don't think there's any support domestically or abroad for that," Ritter says now. He might as well have been talking about Milosevic as Saddam Hussein. So now the United States is in a hole in both places, not to mention the poor people abandoned to live there. As for Iraq, Ritter is glum: "We're going to have to go to war. We're going to have to put in a couple hundred thousand troops, defeat Saddam, overthrow Saddam, occupy Iraq, then rebuild Iraq economically and socially. That's a five- to 10-year process, and that's beyond our national resources." The result of the disastrous Iraq strategy has been to put Russia back into the driver's seat with Saddam. Clinton's mishandling of Kosovo has put the Russians back into play in the Balkans. Not bad for a bankrupt country that can barely scrape up the fuel to send forth a few rust buckets from its Black Sea fleet. Meanwhile, according to sources in Hersh's book, Moscow is helping Iraq build a nuclear bomb. Hersh quotes a dejected former UNSCOM inspections chief, Rolf Ekeus, on the collapsed ability to monitor Russia's help to Saddam. "Russia is hopeless now -- and maybe even dangerous. It's clear that Russia is making a serious effort to control events," Ekeus said. "Saddam will get a bomb, because these materials are floating in. Every day, they are more advanced." "I wrote a book that I really wanted to be a vehicle for informing the American people of the reality of Iraq," Ritter told me. "Iraq's not going to go away, and I just hope when the Kosovo thing ends, people will still realize that we still have a very serious situation there, and maybe look at my book as a vehicle to gather the data they need to make informed judgments." Hersh quotes a United Nations official on the results of the CIA's screw-ups in Iraq, which destroyed the inspection system but left Saddam standing: "The American government walked on its dick -- and with golf shoes." They've got the golf shoes on again in Kosovo. SALON | April 2, 1999 Jeff Stein writes on national security affairs from Washington. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ HERSH BIBILIOGRAPHY AVAILABLE AT AMAZON.COM Against All Enemies : Gulf War Syndrome : The War Between America's Ailing Veterans and Their Government (Library of Contemporary Thought) Seymour M. Hersh / Paperback / Published 1998 Against All Enemies : Gulf War Syndrome : The War Between America's Ailing Veterrans and Their Government (Library of Contemporary Thought (Los angele [ABRIDGED] Seymour M. Hersh, James Sutorius (Reader) / Audio Cassette <Picture: icon> / Published 1998 The Dark Side of Camelot Seymour M. Hersh / Hardcover / Published 1997 Seymour M. Hersh / Paperback / Published 1998 The Dark Side of Camelot (Wheeler Large Print Book Series (Cloth)) [LARGE PRINT] Seymour M. Hersh / Library Binding / Published 1998 La Cara Oculta de J. F. Kennedy Seymour M. Hersh / Paperback / Published 1998 The Samson Option; Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy Seymour M. Hersh / Paperback / Published 1993 Target Is Destroyed (2870) Seymour Hersh / Paperback / Published 1986 Cover-Up: [the Army's Secret Investigation of the Massacre at My Lai 4, Seymour M. Hersh My Lai 4 : A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath Seymour M. Hersh The Price of Power : Kissinger in the Nixon White House Seymour Hersh The Target Is Destroyed : What Really Happened to Flight 007 and What America Knew About It Seymour M. 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