Neocon, a sad and interesting read from Olga.
keepfaith.com
17 May 99.
(Phone) There was an amazing story about a set-up being prepared to force the Western people to support the sending of the ground troops. Papers said that it was first published on the Internet and is unconfirmed. According to it, some American pilots are training to fly planes painted to look like Yugoslav ones, with a mission to bomb a couple of Albanian refugee camps in Albania - all to reinforce the need to send ground troops in. According to the story, the prominent US journalist and wife of the major US official Rubin, Ms. Amapour, was sent to Albania to prepare to push the made up story in the way she did it in Bosnia. It came out yesterday... It's hard to believe, but after such stories that she embellished in the past, everything's possible. (Silvia - The Washington Times- Amapour strikes Yugoslavia "in the CNN coverage the [Serbian Orthodox] priest had been cropped out [of the funeral scene], leaving the American audience to believe that Serbs were not only the assassins, but were also responsible for the grenade attack [on the funeral]."). Of course, now that this story came out, I am sure that there's going to be some other atrocity all of a sudden, that demands a public outcry.
I went to show my rental apartment to some students (since my daughter left, I am renting it out, but the last tenant- an Italian relief worker, left at the beginning of the trouble). They liked it, but one of them was very, very quiet. Then, he said that he's unsure if he wanted to live there, that it's too close to the bombed TV station. It turns out that he was actually working in the building at the night of the bombing, in the archives - everything around him was breaking and falling, and he hid under the table. His part of the building was not directly hit, so he survived to walk out into pure horror. I don't know if he's going to stay, with the memories he must be carrying. They'll think for five days and then decide.
I hope I manage to rent the apartment soon - the rental values have plummeted lately. We can use some more money. We are getting to be so poor that buying meat and cheese is a rare luxury. No wonder that the stores are completely stocked. There's an uneasy feeling among people though, that the goods all come from reserves, and that once those reserves are gone, there'll be nothing left. I am unsure how true this is, as the farmers are reporting that they continued planting and sowing despite the natural and man-made disasters.
As for the NATO allegations about the returnees being bombed because they were herded to a military installation, it's a complete crock like so much else that they say. There's no more military objects there than there were in the Chinese Embassy. Apparently, they came up with even more obscene weapons than the cluster bombs that they used before - something called thermal bombs that develop temperatures of over 2000 C. It's supposed to burn everything in sight, including people, which explains why so many bodies we saw were just lumps of ashes. The interviews with the surviving Albanians were tragic.
So far, they counted 87 bodies and over 80 wounded, but no one knows if that's the final number, as they say that some of the wounded managed to crawl quite a way away from the scene, and not all bodies are pieced together yet either. One 14 year old, wounded boy, Daniel Dushi, said that they stopped at the village to sleep over on the way to their own village. He said that he was under the tractor, sleeping, when all of a sudden he woke up to the blinding light and pain in his chest. When he tried to get up, he couldn't, so he started crawling towards the forest where he fainted. He said "This morning, my neighbor told me that my father had burned alive". In the same room lies Salja Balji, 29, whose left hand was amputated. She said that 14 people from her family were lying together on some mattresses, when there was a flash and screaming of the sleeping children. Then, she said, she fainted. Her arm burned clean to the elbow. Her older girl has died, and so had her father in law and one of his children.
Is there any sense in my relating of these things, when we are only a tiny little voice and they are always booming their ugly things all over all the press and media? We are now the country with the most refugees residing in it in the entire Europe - and no one even thinks about it when they bomb...
Silvia- see three NATO takes on the story, quote from the eyewitness Western journalist &,video clips.
People in Yugoslavia were also in sorrow over the destruction of the Memorial monument in Kragujevac, where 7,000 were shot on the spot during WWII. It's unbelievable. We heard Shea state that he doesn't guarantee the safety of any humanitarian relief.
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