Another one showing the effects of the humanitaring bombing you support against people you clearly hate...oops the victims here included Albanian and Turk civilians along with some Serbian children...
Thursday, April 8, 1999
DISPATCH FROM KOSOVO
Provincial Capital Reeling From Impact of Air Raid
latimes.com
By PAUL WATSON, Times Staff Writer
Wednesday afternoon, an older ethnic Albanian couple
were eating bread amid shattered glass in their small,
dark kitchen as the last flames burned through the
house next door. Dazed and bloodied, the couple fought
back tears as they wondered what had become of the
people next door. The couple, ages 64 and 77, were too
frightened to give their names because they had fought
the blaze themselves with a garden hose while the
Serbian fire brigade concentrated on other buildings.
But as the woman and her husband led a foreign
journalist through the ruins, they left no doubt as to
whom they blamed. "I will send the bill to Mr. Clinton," the
retired ethnic Albanian professor said, and he gestured
at the smoldering destruction that surrounded him. "He
has to pay for all of this. We are not soldiers. We are
civilians." Flying rubble from the massive blasts that
shook the city center like an earthquake downed the
steel security gates at the couple's driveway and
crushed their small car. Parts of other vehicles were
strewn all around. A section of what looked like a
transmission sat on a neighbor's roof, while a
suspension spring hung from a branch of the tree in
their frontyard. NATO's attack was concentrated on
several government buildings nearby: the headquarters
for the Provincial Executive Council, the national bank
tower, the social security administration and a post
office. All suffered heavy damage from several bombs or
missiles, but the six-story Provincial Executive Council
building, where Kosovo's top Serbian official, Zoran
Andjelkovic, had his offices, was hit hardest. Most of the
building's top floor was blown away, and the force of the
explosions tossed twisted steel reinforcing rods more
than a block away and threw chunks of concrete even
farther.
'Genocidal NATO Armada' The airstrikes came less than
an hour after the April 6 anniversary of Nazi Germany's
bombing of Belgrade in 1941, an event as important to
Serbian history as the Japanese bombing of Pearl
Harbor is to America's past. The Serb-dominated
executive council did not miss the opportunity to score
propaganda points from the civilian casualties in
Wednesday morning's strikes. It condemned what it
called a "barbarian attack" by the "neo-fascist, genocidal
NATO armada." The shock wave from the NATO bombs
was so powerful that it snapped dozens of limbs from
trees and smashed plate-glass windows in shops and
restaurants hundreds of yards away from blast sites. A
jagged piece of bomb shrapnel as long as a man's
finger landed about two blocks away from the intended
targets of the airstrikes. Mesut Gash, his wife and their
four children lived in a two-story house just behind the
post office, on Zanatska Street, one of Pristina's oldest
neighborhoods. It was best known for its handicrafts.
Neighbors said Gash, who was an ethnic Turk, his wife
and three of his daughters, ages 6, 7 and 9, were buried
in the rubble of their house, which was a flattened ruin
Wednesday afternoon. Rescuers managed to carry
Gash's 2-year-old daughter from the remains of the
burning house before it collapsed. She lay unconscious
Wednesday in intensive care at Pristina's hospital, Dr.
Nebojsa Brankovic said in an interview.
Neighbor's Son Comes to Victim's Aid Brankovic, a
Serb, was speaking just a few feet away from the
crackling pit that was once the Gashes' home. He had
come to care for his elderly father, Sasha, a longtime
friend of the Gashes, and ended up swhere several Serbs' graves used to
be. A man
staggered around the toppled and cracked marble
tombstones searching for the grave of his son. It was
obliterated. He fell to his knees at the crater's edge and
sobbed uncontrollably. "Is it possible something like this
could happen?" he wailed. "Clinton, you will pay for this."
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