The relatives were joined in their one-hour protest outside the
prison gates by several hundred Serbs from this northern town in Serbia's
Kosovo and Metohija province.
>
> Serb National Forum Kosovska Mitrovica regional Executive
>Committee President Oliver Ivanovic pointed out that Serbs are still leaving
>the province in large numbers, and that the prison and court in this Kosovo
>town are strictly political bodies.
>
> "The people in this prison have been arrested on the grounds of
>statements by dubious witnesses and they have been charged with misdemeanours,
>and yet they have been in prison for ten months now," he said.
>
> Ivanovic said the protests outside the district prison would
>continue.
>
> The two Serb detainees who were transferred to hospital on Sunday
>and Monday are still in critical condition.
>
> KOSOVO AND METOHIJA-TERRORISM
>
> FIVE SERBS WOUNDED IN ETHNIC ALBANIAN TERRORIST ATTACK NEAR
>GNJILANE
>
> GNJILANE, May 10 (Tanjug) - Five Serbs were wounded in the village
>of Cernica at Gnjilane, Kosovo and Metohija, late on Tuesday as an
>unidentified ethnic Albanian terrorist threw a hand grenade into a Serb shop
>crowded with people and then opened fire with an automatic weapon on them,
>local radio enthusiasts said. One of the Serbs sustained serious injuries.
>
> The shop is located in the Serb section of the mixedly-populated
>village.
>
> The attacker escaped from the scene barricading himself in a yard
>in the ethnic Albanian section of the village. Troops of the U.N. peacekeeping
>force KFOR are still trying to gain entrance to the yard, the radio
>enthusiasts said.
>
> The wounded Serbs were escorted by a KFOR patrol to Partes whence
>they were escorted to the nearest outpatient clinic.
>
> KOSOVO AND METOHIJA - INTERNATIONAL REACTIONS
>
> KFOR CANNOT SIMPLY WITNESS KLA VIOLENCE
>
> ROME, May 10 (Tanjug) - Head of the parliamentarian deputy group
>of the strongest opposition party in Italy Forza Italia, Dario Rivolta, said
>on Wednesday that the KLA was increasingly coming to resemble a mafia
>organization.
>
> According to Rivolta, that is evidenced by the incessant killings
>of non-Albanian populations in Kosovo-Metohija, the ethnic cleansing of Serbs
>but also the mutual bloody clashes inside the KLA.
>
> That is why it would be better for the international community,
>instead of organizing different meetings on peace and stability in the
>Balkans, to press for the creation of a demilitarized region, Rivolta told the
>Italian news agency ADNORONOS.
>
> KFOR troops should really disarm "KLA" members and not simply
>witness the aggressive attacks as the recent wounding of two Serbian girls in
>Kosovska Vitina, Rivolta specified.
>
> FROM FOREIGN PRESS
>
> NEWSWEEK: THE KOSOVO COVER-UP
>
> NEWYORK, May 5, 2000 (Newsweek) - It was acclaimed as the most
>successful air campaign ever. "A turning point in the history of warfare,"
>wrote the noted military historian John Keegan, proof positive that "a war can
>be won by airpower alone." At a press conference last June, after Serbian
>strongman Slobodan Milosevic agreed to pull his Army from Kosovo at the end of
>a 78-day aerial bombardment that had not cost the life of a single NATO
>soldier or airman, Defense Secretary William Cohen declared, "We severely
>crippled the [Serb] military forces in Kosovo by destroying more than 50
>percent of the artillery and one third of the armoured vehicles." Displaying
>colourful charts, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Henry Shelton claimed that
>NATO's air forces had killed "around 120 tanks," "about 220 armoured personnel
>carriers" and "up to 450 artillery and mortar pieces."
>
> An antiseptic war, fought by pilots flying safely three miles
>high. It seems almost too good to be true�and it was. In fact�as some critics
>suspected at the time�the air campaign against the Serb military in Kosovo was
>largely ineffective. NATO bombs lowed up some fields, blew up hundreds of
>cars, trucks and decoys, and barely dented Serb artillery and armour.
>According to a suppressed Air Force report obtained by NEWSWEEK, the number of
>targets verifiably destroyed was a tiny fraction of those claimed: 14 tanks,
>not 120; 18 armoured personnel carriers, not 220; 20 artillery pieces, not
>450. Out of the 744 "confirmed" strikes by NATO pilots during the war, the Air
>Force investigators, who spent weeks combing Kosovo by helicopter and by foot,
>found evidence of just 58.
>
> The damage report has been buried by top military officers and
>Pentagon officials, who in interviews with NEWSWEEK over the last three weeks
>were still glossing over or denying its significance. Why the evasions and
>dissembling, with the disturbing echoes of the inflated "body counts" of the
>Vietnam War? All during the Balkan war, Gen. Wesley Clark, the top NATO
>commander, was under pressure from Washington to produce positive bombing
>results from politicians who were desperate not to commit ground troops to
>combat. The Air Force protested that tanks are hard to hit from 15,000 feet,
>but Clark insisted. Now that the war is long over, neither the generals nor
>their civilian masters are eager to delve into what really happened. Asked how
>many Serb tanks and other vehicles were destroyed in Kosovo, General Clark
>will only answer, "Enough."
>
> In one sense, history is simply repeating itself. Pilots have been
>exaggerating their "kills" at least since the Battle of Britain in 1940. But
>this latest distortion could badly mislead future policymakers. Air power was
>effective in the Kosovo war not against military targets but against civilian
>ones. Military planners do not like to talk frankly about terror-bombing
>civilians ("strategic targeting" is the preferred euphemism), but what got
>Milosevic's attention was turning out the lights in downtown Belgrade. Making
>the Serb populace suffer by striking power stations�not "plinking" tanks in
>the Kosovo countryside�threatened his hold on power. The Serb dictator was not
>so much defeated as pushed back into his lair�for a time. The surgical strike
>remains a mirage. Even with the best technology, pilots can destroy mobile
>targets on the ground only by flying low and slow, exposed to ground fire. But
>NATO didn't want to see pilots killed or captured.
>
> Instead, the Pentagon essentially declared victory and hushed up
>any doubts about what the air war exactly had achieved. The story of the
>cover-up is revealing of the way military bureaucracies can twist the
>truth�not so much by outright lying, but by "reanalysing" the problem and
>winking at inconvenient facts. Caught in the middle was General Clark, who
>last week relinquished his post in a controversial early retirement.
>Mistrusted by his masters in Washington, Clark will retire from the Army next
>month with none of the fanfare that greeted other conquering heroes like
>Dwight Eisenhower after World War II or Norman Schwarzkopf after Desert Storm.
>To his credit, Clark was dubious about Air Force claims and tried�at least at
>first�to gain an accurate picture of the bombing in Kosovo. At the end of the
>war the Serbs' ground commander, Gen. Nobojsa Pavkovic, claimed to have lost
>only 13 tanks. "Serb disinformation," scoffed Clark. But quietly, Clark's own
>staff told him the Serb general might be right. "We need to get to the bottom
>of this," Clark said. So at the end of June, Clark dispatched a team into
>Kosovo to do an on-the-ground survey. The 30 experts, some from NATO but most
>from the U.S. Air Force, were known as the Munitions Effectiveness Assessment
>Team, or MEAT. Later, a few of the officers would refer to themselves as "dead
>meat."
>
> The bombing, they discovered, was highly accurate against fixed
>targets, like bunkers and bridges. "But we were spoofed a lot," said one team
>member. The Serbs protected one bridge from the high-flying NATO bombers by
>constructing, 300 yards upstream, a fake bridge made of polyethylene sheeting
>stretched over the river. NATO "destroyed" the phony bridge many times.
>Artillery pieces were faked out of long black logs stuck on old truck wheels.
>A two-thirds scale SA-9 antiaircraft missile launcher was fabricated from the
>metal-lined paper used to make European milk cartons. "It would have looked
>perfect from three miles up," said a MEAT analyst.
>
> The team found dozens of burnt-out cars, buses and trucks�but very
>few tanks. When General Clark heard this unwelcome news, he ordered the team
>out of their helicopters: "Goddammit, drive to each one of those places. Walk
>the terrain." The team grubbed about in bomb craters, where more than once
>they were showered with garbage the local villagers were throwing into these
>impromptu rubbish pits. At the beginning of August, MEAT returned to Air Force
>headquarters at Ramstein air base in Germany with 2,600 photographs. They
>briefed Gen. Walter Begert, the Air Force deputy commander in Europe. "What do
>you mean we didn't hit tanks?" Begert demanded. Clark had the same reaction.
>"This can't be," he said. "I don't believe it." Clark insisted that the Serbs
>had hidden their damaged equipment and that the team hadn't looked hard
>enough. Not so, he was told. A 50-ton tank can't be dragged away without
>leaving raw gouges in the earth, which the team had not seen.
>
> The Air Force was ordered to prepare a new report. In a month,
>Brig. Gen. John Corley was able to turn around a survey that pleased Clark. It
>showed that NATO had successfully struck 93 tanks, close to the 120 claimed by
>General Shelton at the end of the war, and 153 armoured personnel carriers,
>not far off the 220 touted by Shelton. Corley's team did not do any new field
>research. Rather, they looked for any support for the pilots' claims. "The
>methodology is rock solid," said Corley, who strongly denied any attempt to
>obfuscate. "Smoke and mirrors" is more like it, according to a senior officer
>at NATO headquarters who examined the data. For more than half of the hits
>declared by Corley to be "validated kills," there was only one piece of
>evidence�usually, a blurred cockpit video or a flash detected by a spy
>satellite. But satellites usually can't discern whether a bomb hits anything
>when it explodes.
>
> The Corley report was greeted with quiet disbelief outside the Air
>Force. NATO sources say that Clark's deputy, British Gen. Sir Rupert Smith,
>and his chief of staff, German Gen. Dieter Stockmann, both privately cautioned
>Clark not to accept Corley's numbers. The U.S. intelligence community was also
>doubtful. The CIA puts far more credence in a November get-together of U.S.
>and British intelligence experts, which determined that the Yugoslav Army
>after the war was only marginally smaller than it had been before. "Nobody is
>very keen to talk about this topic," a CIA official told NEWSWEEK.
>
> Lately, the Defense Department has tried to fudge. In January
>Defense Secretary Cohen and General Shelton put their names to a formal
>After-Action Report to Congress on the Kosovo war. The 194-page report was so
>devoid of hard data that Pentagon officials jokingly called it "fibber-free."
>The report did include Corley's chart showing that NATO killed 93 tanks. But
>the text included a caveat: "the assessment provides no data on what
>proportion of total mobile targets were hit or the level of damage inflicted."
>Translation, according to a senior Pentagon official: "Here's the Air Force
>chart. We don't think it means anything." In its most recent report extolling
>the triumph of the air war, even the Air Force stopped using data from the
>Corley report.
>
> Interviewed by NEWSWEEK, General Clark refused to get into an
>on-the-record discussion of the numbers. A spokesman for General Shelton
>asserted that the media, not the military, are obsessed with "bean-counting."
>But there are a lot of beans at stake. After the November election, the
>Pentagon will go through one of its quadrennial reviews, assigning spending
>priorities. The Air Force will claim the lion's share. A slide shown by one of
>the lecturers at a recent symposium on air power organized by the Air Force
>Association, a potent Washington lobby, proclaimed: "It's no myth... the
>American Way of War."
>
> The risk is that policymakers and politicians will become even
>more wedded to myths like "surgical strikes." The lesson of Kosovo is that
>civilian bombing works, though it raises moral qualms and may not suffice to
>oust tyrants like Milosevic. Against military targets, high-altitude bombing
>is overrated. Any commander in chief who does not face up to those hard
>realities will be fooling himself. (by John Barry and Evan Thomas)
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