-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- Der Fuhrer Invades Yugoslavia More NATO, Clinton Lies About "Serbian Atrocities" In One Village, Albanian Men Are Everywhere VETLJE, Yugoslavia--Something strange is going on in this Kosovo Albanian village in what was once a hard-line guerrilla stronghold, where NATO accuses Serbs of committing genocide. An estimated 15,000 displaced ethnic Albanians live in and around Svetlje, in northern Kosovo, and hundreds of young men are everywhere, strolling along the dirt roads or lying on the grass on a spring day. So many fighting-age men in a region where the Kosovo Liberation Army fought some of its fiercest battles against Serbian forces are a challenge to the black-and-white versions of what is happening here. By their own accounts, the men are not living in a concentration camp, nor being forced to labor for the police or army, nor serving as human shields for Serbs. Instead, they are waiting with their families for permission to follow thousands who have risked going back home to nearby villages because they do not want to give up and leave Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic. "We wanted to stay here where we were born," Skender Velia, 39, said through a translator. "Those who wanted to go through Macedonia and on to Europe have already left. We did not want to follow." A foreign journalist spent two hours in Svetlje over the weekend, his second visit in less than a week, without a police or military escort or a Serbian official to monitor what was seen or said. The closest Serbian security forces were two policemen sitting at a checkpoint half a mile up the dirt road, who weren't pleased to see so many refugees moving back into the Podujevo area. Just as NATO accuses Yugoslav forces of using ethnic Albanian refugees as "human shields," the Serbs say KLA fighters hide among ethnic Albanian civilians to carry out "terrorist attacks." But Velia and other ethnic Albanians interviewed in Svetlje said they haven't had any problems with Serbian police since the police allowed them to come back. "For the month that we've been here, the police have come only to sell cigarettes, but there hasn't been any harassment," Velia said. That isn't what North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary-General Javier Solana believes is happening in Kosovo. Solana told BBC television Sunday that he expected much more evidence of "ethnic cleansing" in the province to emerge once the war is over. "You don't see males in their 30s to 60s," he said. And on CBS-TV's "Face the Nation" on Sunday, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen said that as many as 100,000 ethnic Albanian men of fighting age have vanished in Kosovo and may have been killed by Serbian forces. The claims and counterclaims are only part of the tangled web that threatens to trap NATO after nearly two months of bombing intended to make peace here. Kosovo Albanians continue to flee Yugoslavia, often with detailed accounts of atrocities by Serbian security forces or paramilitaries. Yet thousands of other ethnic Albanians are coming out of hiding in forests and in the mountains, hungry and frightened, and either going back home or waiting for police permission to do so. While Serbian police seize the identity documents of Kosovo Albanians crossing the border into Albania or Macedonia, government officials in Pristina, Kosovo's provincial capital, issue new identity cards to ethnic Albanians still here. The Kosovo Democratic Initiative, an ethnic Albanian political party opposed to the KLA's fight for independence, is distributing relief aid, offering membership cards and gathering the names of Serbs accused of committing atrocities. "As an Albanian, I am convinced that the Serbian government and security forces are not committing any kind of genocide," Fatmir Seholi, the party's spokesman, said in an interview Sunday. "But in a war, even innocent people die," Seholi said. "In every war, there are those who want to profit. Here there is a minority of people who wanted to steal, but that's not genocide. These are only crimes." As an Albanian, Seholi also knows the risks of questioning claims that Yugoslavia's leaders, police and military are committing crimes against humanity in Kosovo. His father, Malic Seholi, was killed Jan. 9, 1997, apparently for being too cooperative with Serbian authorities. The KLA later claimed responsibility for the slaying in a statement published in Bujku, a local Albanian-language newspaper, his son said. There are pressures to toe the party line in villages like Svetlje too, where a man who overheard Velia speaking with a Serbian correspondent for Agence France-Presse told him to stop. "Don't talk to the Serbs," the man said angrily in Albanian. "They are to blame for everything that is happening." Velia, his wife, Hajiri, their three children and his mother, Farita, 56, were among as many as 100,000 Kosovo Albanians who fled the northern city of Podujevo in the early days of NATO's air war. Some said Serbs drove them from their homes, while others said they were simply scared and left on their own. But they all ended up moving from one village to another, trying to escape fighting between KLA guerrillas and Serbian security forces. Now they must live with another danger--the NATO bombs that fall ever closer to Svetlje as the alliance intensifies its attacks on Yugoslav forces across Kosovo. Last week, a bomb exploded just 200 yards from the five-room school that currently houses about 60 refugees. The explosion killed an ethnic Albanian man named Bashota, who was about 22 years old and from nearby Lapastica, Velia said. When the foreign visitor asked Velia whether he thought NATO's bombing was helping or hurting, he shifted at the wooden desk where he was sitting in one of the school's classrooms. "My blood is the same as yours," he said. "I just want the situation stabilized. People are not very interested in what is going on with big [political] discussions here and there. They are just interested in going home." Despite the mass exodus of Kosovo Albanians during the NATO bombing, several hundred thousand remain in the province, many of them still hiding without proper food, medicine and shelter. After waves of looting, arson, killings and other attacks turned many of Kosovo's cities into virtual ghost towns, the government took steps to restore order, and ethnic Albanians began to move back, often under police protection. Of an estimated 100,000 people living in Pristina, roughly 80,000 are ethnic Albanians and a quarter of those are displaced people from the Podujevo area living with relatives, friends or in abandoned homes, Seholi said. An additional 32,000 ethnic Albanians are living in and around Podujevo itself, he added. A total of 120,000 ethnic Albanians are waiting to return to their homes in four areas--near Podujevo, Pristina, Stimlje and Prizren--while another 350,000 have proper homes, Seholi estimated. Home for Zajda Hasani, 76, and 10 others in her family is a classroom and an adjoining storage room, where the shelves are stacked with books by writers such as Twain and Tolstoy. "I have no problems at all," Hasani said between long draws on a cigarette. "I'm relaxed." In Svetlje, the biggest problem is getting enough to eat. None of the foreign relief agencies delivering food to refugees outside Kosovo has been able to come to feed those ethnic Albanians left behind. Agencies such as the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees are negotiating with Yugoslav authorities about security guarantees and other matters as a prelude to resuming work in Kosovo. On Friday, the International Committee of the Red Cross sent a four-truck convoy carrying medicine, food and other relief, the first shipment since NATO launched the air war March 24. It wasn't nearly enough to feed the tens of thousands who are going hungry. The last aid Velia's family received was from the Yugoslav Red Cross, which gave them 41-2 [?] pounds of flour and some yeast a month ago. Like many of the children in Svetlje, Velia's 7-month-old daughter, Erinisa, is sick. The baby has received four injections but needs six more. Her mother has to line up with other refugees at the edge of Podujevo for police permission to enter the town and visit the hospital. The refugees have started a small, roadside market in Svetlje that sells pasta, coffee, onions, rubber sandals, cigarettes and a few other assorted items. But in the absence of any jobs, few people can afford to buy much. "The entire day, we just sit here or walk and wander around," Velia said. Although no one in Svetlje has been forced to work for the police or military, "Who knows what may happen tomorrow?" he added. Just a few minutes' walk away, there was a horrible reminder of just how uncertain the future is. It was a human skull, partly charred by fire. It lay in the grass outside a one-story building where refugees once were sheltered in about half a dozen rooms that were previously municipal offices. The floors were covered with hay, where families slept, and the clothes and other belongings they left behind were scattered everywhere. A single, burned corpse lay in the middle of one room, not proof of genocide, but a hint of the dark mystery that is Kosovo. The Los Angeles Times, May 17, 1999 The Binary Buddha Bhutan Joins the Global Village TV and the Internet Invade the Himalayas THIMBU, Bhutan - In this devoutly Buddhist kingdom tucked under the eaves of the mighty Himalayas, four men stood on the roof of their apartment building and committed a crime: They erected a television satellite dish. They fiddled with wrenches and screwdrivers until a soccer game from a distant foreign field came into focus on a television set they had lugged up to the roof. They cheered and stared at the set, something many people here had never seen, and they brought this isolated land a little closer to a world that is banging hard on its door. For centuries, Bhutan has resisted the outside world. Every other Himalayan Buddhist kingdom - Tibet, Sikkim, Ladakh - has been absorbed into neighboring China or India, but Bhutan has refused to let the world in as a means of national survival. Both world wars passed virtually unnoticed by most of the farmers, monks and yak herders. And these days, many have never heard of Monica Lewinsky, mostly because of the government's ban on television. But as the new millennium approaches, one of the last places on Earth virtually untouched by the Information Age is wiring up. Next month the government will allow television for the first time and will launch its own Internet server, connecting the Land of the Thunder Dragon to the land of ''Baywatch'' and ''Barney'' and eBay Inc. ''The whole world is getting smaller, and we need to be part of the global village,'' said Foreign Minister Jigmi Thinley, the head of the Bhutanese government. ''But how to do it while maintaining our traditions is a challenge.'' Mr. Thinley, who has a master's degree from Pennsylvania State University and an ornate Bhutanese sword hanging from his hip, said his country is bracing for the inevitable. ''We are quite happy to be on our own,'' he said. ''But it is very important that the Bhutanese people not remain oblivious to the rest of the world.'' The changes resisted for decades are suddenly coming fast. In the past two months, hundreds of satellite dishes have sprouted on roofs and in backyards. Living rooms across the nation are being rearranged to face the new family television set. Fifty years after Milton Berle and Arthur Godfrey transformed American culture, fashion, humor and dinner conversation, Bhutan is preparing for the same kind of revolution. ''If we were to record the language pattern, interests, sense of humor, values, fashions and behavior of our children now and repeat it six months later, we will see a dramatic difference,'' noted a recent editorial in Kuensel, Bhutan's only newspaper, which urged strict government regulation of television. Change has always been greeted skeptically here, and television was outlawed in order to ward off foreign influences and insulate Bhutan's ancient customs and deeply religious way of life. Officials note that only one of Bhutan's 600,000 people has died from AIDS, and there is almost no crime here. The military is made up of 5,000 lightly armed soldiers with almost nothing to do. But many here worry that all this will change when the television sets are plugged in. ''Our culture, our religion, our distinctiveness, they all may suffer,'' said Dodo Tshering, 48, who runs a guest house in Punakha in central Bhutan. ''Having all these televisions will change people.'' Bhutan's zealous pursuit of isolation has occasionally been controversial. In the early 1990s, the government purged ethnic Nepalese in the southern part of the nation, calling them illegal immigrants. Critics called it ''ethnic cleansing'' by a xenophobic government. To this day, 94,000 of the Nepalese live in refugee camps, and the governments of Bhutan and Nepal are discussing what to do. Few outsiders ever see Bhutan. Foreign tourists were banned until 1974, and they still are allowed in sparingly; 6,000 last year was a record. The introduction of television and the Internet are the latest steps in a long-term program to modernize Bhutan that began in the early 1960s with the current king's father. At that time, Bhutan had no hospitals, electricity, running water, roads, schools, telephones, national currency or postal system. Today, Bhutan is still poor, but developing steadily: Per capita gross domestic product is $520 - twice what it was a decade ago - and the literacy rate has risen with most children attending school. Meanwhile, foreign aid has helped build hospitals, roads and a $48 million digital phone system. Much of the development has been pushed by King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, 43, a British-educated National Basketball Association fanatic who assumed the throne when his father died. Bhutan's first television broadcast will be images from his 25th anniversary celebration. His Majesty, as he is known to all here, also has promoted democracy, largely by giving away his power. Last year the king turned over day-to-day control of the government to an elected council. More remarkably, he also gave the National Assembly the right to dethrone him with a no-confidence vote. The king, who has four wives, all sisters, also has dispensed with many of the traditional court rules: His subjects are now allowed to look him directly in the eye, and they no longer have to bow nine times upon seeing him. ''His Majesty is very nice to all the people; I am happy to have a king like him,'' said Chen Cho, 64, a Buddhist monk sitting on a bench near a rural general store. The monk has never seen television. He cannot name the president of the United States and he has never heard of Kosovo - and he would like that to change. ''It's better to have television,'' he said. ''That way, I can see what people are doing in other countries.'' International Herald Tribune, May 20, 1999 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
