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

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (16093)	2/23/2000 6:19:00 PM
From: goldsnow	Respond to of 17770

"If NATO gets tough, then Milosevic can say the Serbs are victims and Kosovo has been ethnically cleansed," he said. In that circumstance NATO would escort Albanians back to their homes in northern Mitrovica, a maneuver that would almost certainly make most of the Serbs there flee. "If NATO shrinks from doing anything, the situation gets worse and NATO loses," the official said. He added, "It's a terrible situation for KFOR to be in," referring to the peacekeeping force in Kosovo. aol://4344:3167.nymilos.21062462.635800887 NATO Says Milosevic Incites Violence Covertly in Kosovo -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Related Article Serbs on Edge After a Rally by Albanians in a Kosovo City -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By JANE PERLEZ ASHINGTON, Feb. 22 -- American and NATO officials today accused the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, of fomenting violence in Kosovo and infiltrating his plainclothes police into the province in a deliberate attempt to thwart NATO's peacekeeping efforts. The United States and allied governments have detected direct radio links between Mr. Milosevic's special police in Serbia and Serbian militants in the city of Mitrovica in northern Kosovo, officials said. Issue in Depth Kosovo in Transition Complete Coverage of NATO Actions in Yugoslavia, Through June 23, 1999 Special Report Horror By Design: The Ravaging of Kosovo Notebook Milosevic's Vision of Glory Unleashes Decade of Ruin Kosovo Roundtable The Roots of the Conflict Map Yugoslavia from Merriam Webster's Atlas Text Text of the Kosovo Liberation Army Demilitarization Agreement Full Text of the U.N. Resolution on Kosovo Full Text of the Military Technical Agreement Classroom Resources Recent News Background Information Lesson Plans -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Yugoslav leader is also encouraging his plainclothes police to travel to Mitrovica, the officials said, and has ordered a buildup of special police units along the border between Kosovo and the rest of Serbia. "Guidance, men, radios and arms" is the order of importance of Mr. Milsoevic's help to the Serbs of Mitrovica, a senior official said. Another official said that much of the violence carried out by the Serbs in Mitrovica in the last two weeks had been "planned in advance and comes from Belgrade." At NATO headquarters and at the Pentagon, officials said they were concerned that Mr. Milosevic was doing everything possible to undo NATO's control of Mitrovica, the ethnically divided mining town of 90,000 that has become Kosovo's most volatile spot. Just a few miles south of the border with Serbia proper, it is in effect where the Albanian-dominated province ends and Serbia begins, with the part of town north of the Ibar River 90 percent Serbian and the southern part mainly Albanian. Thousands of Albanians have been unable to return to their homes in the north side as the Serbian community has determinedly defended a safe area for itself. The few hundred Serbs who lived on the south side have long since fled. The officials said Mr. Milosevic did not appear to be planning to send the Yugoslav Army or uniformed units of his police forces into Kosovo. Nor does he seem to want control of the province back, the officials said, but rather to keep up the tension and then divide Kosovo into distinct Serbian and Albanian parts. American troops were sent to Mitrovica from their southern Kosovo base last weekend along with British and Canadian soldiers to reinforce French troops after the violence got out of hand. For the Clinton administration, the biggest fear about Kosovo is that the explosive situation in Mitrovica could blow up in a presidential election year. One of the worst fears is having NATO -- and American -- troops caught between Albanian and Serbian snipers in an "urban Belfast" situation in Mitrovica, a NATO official said today. In a series of public statements in the last two days, American and NATO officials have warned Mr. Milosevic, in general ways, to desist from interfering in Kosovo. The American representative at the United Nations, Richard C. Holbrooke, and the NATO secretary general, Lord Robertson, said Belgrade was directing the trouble in northern Kosovo. The State Department spokesman, James P. Rubin, said that "we certainly would be prepared to to respond if Serbian forces made the grave mistake of trying to interfere" with NATO operations. NATO officials described the messages between Serbian radio operators in Mitrovica and Serbian intelligence operators in Serbia as being of a tactical nature. The messages included statements like "they are going here, they are going there," -- referring to movements by Albanian militants -- rather than direct orders, the officials said. "We do know they are receiving transmission coming from MUP radio links inside Serbia," an official said, using the acronym for Mr. Milosevic's Interior Ministry special police. "They are from the locations and frequencies used by MUP." Some of the radio links used by the special police in northern Kosovo have not been dismantled since NATO took over Kosovo last summer, a NATO official said. As well as meddling inside Mitrovica, Mr. Milosevic has "preserved his options" by increasing the number of special police in the area of the Presevo Valley in Serbia, an area next to Kosovo, where about 80,000 Albanians live and have become increasingly restless. The officials said that they could not be precise about the number of special police officers now in the area but that the buildup had been under way for several months. The policemen, whose presence was regularly reported by Albanian refugees, were in the same area to which the Pristina Corps of the Yugoslav Army had withdrawn at the end of the Kosovo war, they said. Mr. Milosevic, who is regarded by the administration as a master tactician unable to resist the opportunity presented to him in Mitrovica, has maneuvered himself into a strong position, said an administration official involved in day-to-day Kosovo policy. "Belgrade is in a great position -- a win-win position -- and NATO in a lose-lose position," the official said. "If NATO gets tough, then Milosevic can say the Serbs are victims and Kosovo has been ethnically cleansed," he said. In that circumstance NATO would escort Albanians back to their homes in northern Mitrovica, a maneuver that would almost certainly make most of the Serbs there flee. "If NATO shrinks from doing anything, the situation gets worse and NATO loses," the official said. He added, "It's a terrible situation for KFOR to be in," referring to the peacekeeping force in Kosovo.

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (16093)	2/25/2000 4:37:00 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

Former CIA Director John Deutch a mere damfool?? Aha! Close, but no cigar!! Note that disparaging a public servant or any other kind of government official as an allegedly thoroughgoing goofer is the classic "crisis tactics" executed by any administration --worldwide. Even here, in Belgium, the official story about the so-called Dutroux fiasco was that most police officers, gendarmes, and magistrates were basically a bunch of nogooders.... Such a deceptive premise is always very helpful when the Establishment is anxiously working at concealing the real story. That's why all the folks who don't buy the official crap are simultaneously branded as paranoid conspiracy theorists.... Here's an additional clue supporting my analysis: Excerpted from Gideon's Spies - The secret history of the Mossad by Gordon Thomas. page 91. Then, in April 1997, Rafi Eitan's name began to surface in connection with a Mossad spy in Washington whom the FBI identified and code-named "Mega." His own well-placed source within Mossad had told Rafi Eitan that the FBI had begun to explore the role Mega could have had in the way Jonathan Pollard had been run. Had Mega been the source for some of the ultrasecret material Pollard had passed on? The FBI had recently reinterviewed Pollard in prison and he had admitted that even his high security clearance had not been enough to obtain some of the documents his handler, the funereal Yagur, had requested. The FBI knew such documents had a special code word through which they had to be accessed, which changed frequently, sometimes even on a daily basis. Yet Yagur had seemed to know the code within a matter of hours to give to Pollard. Had Mega provided it? Was Mega the second Israeli spy in Washington the FBI had long suspected? How close had he been to Rafi Eitan? These were the dangerous questions now being asked in Washington that could shatter the relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv. After the FBI had identified him as the puppet master behind Pollard, Rafi Eitan had accepted that his time in Israeli intelligence was finally over. He had looked forward to ending his days facing no greater risk than being scorched from the blowtorch he wielded when forming his sculptures. Instinctively he knew that events in Washington posed a threat not only to him --a CIA snatch squad could try to grab him as he came and went from Cuba and bring him to Washington for questioning, and there was no way of telling what would happen then; but the discovery of Mega's existence would also be exercising minds in the upper echelons of the Israeli intelligence community's Va'adat Rashei Hesherytin-- the Committee of the Heads of Service whose primary function is to coordinate all intelligence and security activities at home and abroad. But even they knew nothing about who Mega was. All they had been told was that he was highly placed in the Clinton administration. Whether the president had inherited him from the Bush government was another carefully guarded secret. Only the incumbent Mossad memune [ie boss] knew how long Mega had been in place. The committee members did, however, know that the FBI's counterintelligence division finally believed that the lack of action against Mossad was due to the power of the Jewish lobby in Washington, and the reluctance of successive administrations to confront it. Once more that lobby could be called upon to dampen the firestorm building since Mega had first been discovered by the FBI. On February 16, 1997, the National Security Agency (NSA) had provided the FBI with an intercept of a late-night telephone conversation from the Israeli embassy between a Mossad intelligence officer identified only as Dov, and his superior in Tel Aviv, whose name had not been revealed during the short conversation. Dov had asked "for guidance" as to whether he "should go to Mega" for a copy of a letter written by Warren Christopher, then Secretary of State, to PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. The letter contained a set of assurances given to Arafat by Christopher on January 16 about the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the West Bank city of Hebron. Dov was instructed by the voice in tel Aviv "to forget the letter. This is not something we use Mega for." The brief conversation had been the first clue the FBI had of the importance of Mega. The code name had not been heard before in its around-the-clock surveillance of the Israeli embassy and its diplomats. Using state-of-the-art computers, the FBI narrowed the urgent search for the identity of Mega to someone who either worked there or had access to a senior official employed by the National Security Council, the body that advises the president on intelligence and defense-related matters. Its office is in the White House, and its members include the vice president and the secretaries of state and defense. The director of Central Intelligence [Agency] and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staffs serve in an advisory role. The permanent staff is headed by the president's national security adviser. [...] __________________ Now, don't get confused by the timetable: we know that John Deutch resigned as CIA chief in December '96, so, the phone chat the NSA reported to the FBI apparently could not involve Deutch --only apparently. I suspect that such a high-ranking official as Deutch had been granted some extra time to "advise" the National Security Council through February 1997....