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Jackson Wins Release of POWs
Updated 11.47 a.m. ET (1547 GMT) May 1, 1999
Time in Belgrade: 06:16 PM
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia — The Rev. Jesse Jackson has negotiated the release of the U.S. POWs minutes after being called into an urgent meeting with Yugoslavia's president and foreign minister, Fox News reports.
Earlier Saturday, Jackson emerged from his first meeting with Slobodan Milosevic, saying there were no indications that three captured U.S. soldiers would be freed soon, but offering a glimmer of hope — the second meeting.
Reuters
The meeting produced the most conciliatory language from Milosevic in months
Jackson has met with Milosevic twice, twice spent time with the American POWs and toured the devastation in Belgrade during a trip the White House urged him not to take.
After the leaders' first meeting — a tête à tête that stretched from a scheduled 30 minutes to over three hours — Jackson told Fox News that "I'm waiting for a call back from Milosevic."
"We met with him for three hours today. We got a real sense of his own pain, fears and concerns" Jackson said.
The meeting produced the most conciliatory language from Milosevic in months, including a promise to consider Jackson's pleas for Milosevic to take the first step in resolving the conflict. "In the end he said he would ponder our plea and allowed us to go back to visit our Americans again," Jackson told Fox News.
The Civil Rights leader warned that the soldiers were in danger because they were being held in a military installation, which like other such buildings have been targeted by NATO bombs.
Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports that NATO continued its bombing campaign Saturday, with a missile attack on a bridge north of the Kosovo capital, Pristina, that killed at least 23 people, state-run media and witnesses said.
The Tanjug news agency said the missile cut the vehicle in two, sending part of it plunging off the bridge. Independent journalists saw about 15 bodies trapped in the charred remnants of the part of the bus which fell off the bridge.
On Friday, Assistant Foreign Minister Nebojsa Vujovic said release of the soldiers captured one month ago wasn't "on the agenda." But Jackson said during the meeting he urged Milosevic to free them.
Jackson met with the soldiers Friday and exchanged family letters with them. Afterward, he called their captivity "a long, dark night."
The soldiers, wearing their camouflage uniforms and still showing cuts and bruises they suffered when seized March 31, were "physically very healthy" and showed "a great sense of dignity," Jackson said Friday.
"Our country should be proud of them," the civil rights leader said.
Milosevic met Friday with special Russian envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin for six hours, discussing Belgrade's proposals for ending the five-week conflict.
Vujovic told reporters that Yugoslavia was willing to accept an unarmed U.N. civilian "mission" to oversee a peace deal in Kosovo, a province of the main Yugoslav republic of Serbia but with a majority ethnic Albanian population.
But Vujovic rejected any armed force with NATO at its core, a key alliance demand.
Seeking to maintain an upbeat tone, Chernomyrdin told Russian reporters before leaving for Moscow that "there is some progress," adding, "I hope that leaders of the NATO member countries will take that progress seriously."
At NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, spokesman Jamie Shea said the Yugoslav offer of a U.N. "mission" was "not worthy of serious consideration" and did "not come close to meeting the demands of the international community."
In Washington, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said, "I think we are not anywhere near a serious proposal."
In other NATO attacks today, jets and missiles struck military airports in Sombor and Ponikve, the Lipovica oil depot on the southern edge of Belgrade, industrial towns Kraljevo and Pancevo, and an oil refinery in the second largest Yugoslav city of Novi Sad.
Also today, NATO hit targets in the predominately Muslim Sandzak region in southwest Yugoslavia, hitting the region's largest town, Novi Pazar, state-run media reported. Kosovo's capital of Pristina also came under air attack, Tanjug news agency said. No information on casualties or damage was immediately reported.
Meanwhile, Yugoslav media reported that NATO missiles damaged a maternity hospital and the police station in Pancevo, north of Belgrade.
In Montenegro, the republic which along with Serbia makes up Yugoslavia, local television reported that NATO planes Friday destroyed a bridge leading to Kosovo, killing four people, including two small ethnic Albanian girls.
In Washington, the Pentagon announced that 10 additional B-52 heavy bombers would arrive in England today to join several other B-52s launching attacks against Yugoslavia.
The additional bombers will add 500-pound iron bombs for attacks on troop concentrations, and precision-guided, Israeli-made missiles that carry 1,000-pound warheads.
The alliance launched the air campaign to force Milosevic to accept a Western-dictated peace deal for Kosovo, including widespread autonomy for the province and 28,000 NATO troops to enforce it.
Ethnic Albanians comprised about 90 percent of Kosovo's prewar population of 2 million people. More than 600,000 of them have fled Kosovo and Serb forces since NATO's air campaign began March 24.
The European Union's ban on oil shipments to Yugoslavia took effect today, the latest measure to deny Yugoslav force the use of fuel in the Kosovo conflict. The ban will affect about $67 million in sales, according to 1998 EU statistics. |
