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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: George Papadopoulos who wrote (12972)	6/26/1999 10:10:00 PM
From: goldsnow	Respond to of 17770

How Tito's training destroyed Nato hopes of a clean war By John Simpson SOMEHOW it was no great surprise to read in last week's newspapers that after 11 weeks of bombing, 40,000 or so sorties and untold thousands of tons of bombs, Nato had managed to hit only 13 Serb tanks in Kosovo. It has claimed, of course, to have knocked out up to 40 per cent of the 280 or so tanks the Serbs were believed to have deployed in Kosovo, plus almost 60 per cent of their artillery and mortars. What Nato really hit were canvas and wood replicas. Colleagues of mine saw some of these in Kosovo, together with old armoured personnel carriers, broken-axled and rusting, which the Serbs had carefully left out for Nato's pilots to see. From the height they were flying it must have looked exactly like the real thing. This was precisely the kind of war the Yugoslav Army had been trained to fight; not the dirty wars of massacre and torture which Serb soldiers ended up fighting in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. For more than 30 years Marshal Tito taught his people that the real danger would be an all-out attack from the Soviet Union, and they trained themselves in the unglamorous business of hiding and dispersing their forces, so the enemy would expend effort pointlessly. That is exactly what happened; only the enemy turned out to be us. Time and again when I was in Belgrade my colleagues back in London used to ask me about signs of casualties. The military death toll must be pretty high by now, they would say; what about the funerals, the death notices, the anecdotal evidence that lives were being lost? I always answered, quite truthfully, that the only casualties I heard anything about were civilians. Not surprisingly, as it turned out. Something like 400 soldiers seem to have been killed, as compared with about 1,700 civilians. Night after night Nato would hit army barracks and government ministries, as though the Yugoslav army were obliging enough to hang around there. So we have the melancholy result that four times as many of the people Nato did not mean to hit were killed, compared with the ones it was trying to target. More schools and hospitals and old people's homes were hit than Serb tanks. Depressingly, this little war, genuinely fought for the best of motives, is a throwback to most of the other wars we have seen in this calamitous century. Victorian wars were mostly fought between armies; the Boer war ushered in an era of total warfare, where the unarmed, the innocent, the non-combatants were regarded as being just as useful a target as the military. In the Eighties and Nineties we have dared to believe that all this might change. Scarcely a single civilian died in the Falklands War; it was like a return to the neat, conclusive campaigns of the 19th century. In the Gulf war it looked as though the precision of the new weaponry meant that Western countries at least would be able, and obliged, to fight clean wars. Defence installations in Baghdad disappeared in a cloud of brick dust, while purely civilian installations were left alone. Even the terrible loss of life at the Al Amariyah shelter, when 340 women and children were killed, was a mistake: the structure was a military command centre of sorts. The fact that Western journalists were able to report wars like this from the enemy capital meant that civilian casualties would have to be kept down; public opinion would not support great loss of life among the innocent. Or so we thought. It did not turn out quite like that. Week after week in Yugoslavia Nato hit the wrong targets; names such as Aleksinac, Nis and Surdulica were thrown into public awareness by some terrible tragedy, and then (after some initial hesitation) explained away. It was enough for Nato to say it was sorry, that it had not meant to do it, for public opinion in the West to forgive and forget. Now we see the terrible evidence that made President Clinton and Tony Blair determined to carry on in spite of everything; and the torture chambers and mass graves of Kosovo will join the other dark horrors of the 20th century. But good intentions are not quite enough. In 1943 Albert Einstein contrasted the clarity of the Allies' ends with the confusion of their means in the war against Hitler. This contrast remains unfortunately as stark as ever. Maybe the evidence of Nato's failures in the face of a small and not particularly well-armed enemy will make us a little less hubristic now. Maybe we will try to get back to the way we made war against Saddam. Maybe civilian casualties will worry us more in future. Maybe. John Simpson is world affairs editor of the BBC. telegraph.co.uk

To: George Papadopoulos who wrote (12972)	6/26/1999 10:18:00 PM
From: goldsnow	Respond to of 17770

BIZZARE? HOW ABOUT THIS? Croatian Soccer Scandal Under Probe Saturday, 26 June 1999 Z A G R E B , C R O A T I A (AP) POLICE SEARCHED the apartment Saturday of an editor who published allegations that intelligence services had rigged soccer matches in favor of the president's favorite team. Ivo Pukanic, editor of the independent weekly Nacional, said a judge ordered the search on suspicion that he is disclosing national secrets, a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Police have already interrogated him and searched his office. Earlier this month, Nacional cited documents from the Bureau of National Security that reportedly indicated that referees were bribed or blackmailed to make rulings in favor of the Croatia Zagreb club, a favorite of politicians in the governing Croatian Democratic Union of President Franjo Tudjman. Croatia Zagreb won its fifth consecutive title this year, in a season marked by dubious refereeing. The Interior Ministry did not deny the authenticity of the documents, but denied involvement in possible match rigging. The former head of the intelligence service, Miroslav Separovic, was arrested and his home ransacked, apparently because he was suspected of leaking documents to Nacional. He was released, but a criminal investigation against him is continuing. The government has been cracking down on what it says is the illegal leaking and publishing of state secrets. Opposition parties and reporters counter that such documents reveal abuses and should not be regarded as state secrets in the first place. Tudjman's party has ordered a review of secret service operations, but critics say they suspect the investigation is aimed only at finding out who is leaking documents.