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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cody andre who wrote (39803)	3/23/1999 3:47:00 AM
From: JBL	Respond to of 67261

For info about Kosovo : NATO Strikes At Yugoslavia Deemed Unlikely To Succeed The Washington Times March 12, 1999 Ben Barber A defense official questioned yesterday whether NATO air strikes on Yugoslavia would succeed in forcing Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to stop his assault on ethnic Albanians in the province of Kosovo. "In all likelihood, attacks won't have the desired effect unless they do something Milosevic wants, such as resolving the Kosovo uprising by blaming it on the West. "If he can weather air strikes --and reports say the majority of people are falling in place behind him, seeing Serb honor at stake -- the question is how long the allies can sustain the strikes," said the source, who has long experience in the Balkans. Some U.S. allies and many Americans question the wisdom of attacking Yugoslavia as a means of forcing it to grant Kosovo autonomy. Air strikes on Kosovo will "poison relations with the United States for a long time to come," warned the defense official, who spoke on the condition he not be named. "I think we are almost at a point where we will have to launch some form of strikes," he said. "The question is, 'Will it have the effect we want?'" The NATO strikes are aimed at forcing Mr. Milosevic to order his security forces to cease fire and back out of Kosovo and to allow the 90 percent ethnic Albanian majority of Kosovo to govern themselves within the Yugoslav federal government. But in the past three days, as 1,400 European peace monitors in Kosovo were withdrawn, Mr. Milosevic has thumbed his nose at the West by sending 40,000 troops blasting through Kosovo. One person was killed and seven others were injured late yesterday when bombs exploded at two ethnic Albanian-owned cafes in the provincial capital, Pristina. Serbian police patrolled Pristina in armored personnel carriers with turret-mounted machine guns, and tensions were running high. Yesterday, the ethnic Albanian-run Kosovo Information Center said at least five villages were burning in the central Drenica region and Lapastica, the rebel headquarters for northeastern Kosovo. Mr. Milosevic's open defiance of an October agreement to end the fighting was, according to the defense source, aimed at: ...Showing he is prepared to defend Yugoslavia's borders from a NATO ground invasion. ... Showing the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo they are at the mercy of Serbian forces -- he can now punish them for their actions against Serbs. ...*Demonstrating to the West that he can't be dallied with. The defense source said that so far the Serbs appear to be carrying out mass punishments that stay below the threshold of ethnic cleansing and genocide. U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke was not hopeful yesterday before his talks with Mr. Milosevic. "I do not want to leave you with the impression that we are optimistic," Mr. Holbrooke said during a stopover in Brussels. He stopped for talks with the North Atlantic Council, NATO's top policy-making body, which authorized air strikes in the event Mr. Holbrooke's diplomacy fails. Mr. Milosevic told a European diplomat yesterday he was not ready to yield. And in a letter read on state television, he criticized the NATO threats. "Your people should be ashamed because you are getting ready to use force against a small European nation because it protects its territory against separatism and its people against terrorism," Mr. Milosevic was quoted as saying in a letter to the French and British foreign ministers. President Clinton meanwhile scheduled a meeting for today with congressional leaders to firm up support for the use of U.S. aircraft and -- in the event of a peace accord -- 4,000 peacekeeping troops. He warned that U.S. national interests are threatened by the conflict, which could spread to Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey. Russian backing for the Serbs also has dampened the Western appetite for Balkan intervention. "We are categorically against the use of force against Yugoslavia," Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov told reporters one day before he was to fly to Washington for meetings with Mr. Clinton.