Nato freedom fighters....no thank you.
Sunday, May 2, 1999
DISPATCH FROM KOSOVO: NATO Bombs Civilian Bus,
Causing Scenes of Horror War: At least 24 die when vehicle
crossing bridge is torn in half. It is the fifth accidental attack of
the air campaign.
"As ambulances raced to and from the bus' burning
wreckage, half of which fell about 60 feet to a riverbank below,
a fighter-bomber struck again..."
By PAUL WATSON, Times Staff Writer
LUZANE, Yugoslavia--A NATO airstrike blew a civilian bus in
half Saturday afternoon on a bridge in this Kosovo village,
killing at least 24 people and critically wounding 16 others. At
least four of the victims were ethnic Albanian children who had
boarded the southbound bus in the Serbian province at
Podujevo, a once-deserted town six miles up the road where
more than 50,000 refugees had returned only 11 days earlier.
A statement issued early today at NATO military headquarters
in Brussels confirmed the attack on the bridge, which the
statement termed part of "a key north-south supply route for
Yugoslav military and special police operating between
Pristina and Podujevo in Kosovo." "Unfortunately, after weapon
release a bus crossed the bridge," NATO said, adding that the
alliance "is not in a position to confirm civilian loss of life."
NATO bombs have mistakenly struck civilians at least five
times since the air war began; alliance officials have
expressed regret for what they call "collateral damage" but say
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is to blame for
provoking the bombing. As ambulances raced to and from the
bus' burning wreckage, half of which fell about 60 feet to a
riverbank below, a fighter-bomber struck again with two
bombs that hit a short bridge at Jug Bogdan, about two miles
away. A small group of journalists was about 300 yards from
the second bridge when a bomb exploded in a ball of orange
flame. They watched another detonation minutes later when
an ambulance was trying to cross. Shrapnel from that blast
wounded a civilian medical technician in the forehead and
prevented other ambulances from reaching the carnage at the
destroyed bus, where mangled bodies included the severed
arm of a small child. The limb was barely a foot long, and it lay
among the corpses below the bridge in a grassy field where
spring daisies were in full bloom. The rest of the child's body
was nowhere to be found. A North Atlantic Treaty Organization
jet attacked the bridge, which is less than 300 feet long, about
1 p.m. when the bus was heading south from the Serbian city
of Nis to Pristina, Kosovo's provincial capital. "I heard a plane
and then the explosion, and everything started to burn,"
Flamur Behluli, 15, said in Pristina's main hospital as a
Kosovo Albanian nurse translated. "I don't know how I got out
of the bus and reached here. "The bus was full of civilians,
most of them old people and children," he said. "There were
two or three soldiers." And then the boy, his arms wrapped in
bandages and his face speckled with small cuts, had a
question for the nurse. "Can you tell me something about my
sister?" he pleaded, but she didn't answer. Two of Flamur's
sisters lay in hospital beds just a few feet away. Egzona
Behluli, 8, suffered burns to several parts of her body. The
other sister, Adulena, 12, was in the bed by the door, and both
her arms were wrapped in bandages. A badly burned fourth
child, much younger, was in the room too. Four hours after the
attack, all available surgeons and medical technicians at the
Pristina hospital were in operating rooms trying to save the
lives of the survivors that ambulances had managed to reach.
"Each of the 16 patients has serious wounds caused by blast
syndrome--second- and third-degree burns as well as
massive limb fractures," Dr. Rade Grbic, the hospital's
director, said later. At least 40 people were believed to be
riding in the bus that was destroyed Saturday, but the number
of casualties might never be known because highway bus
companies don't normally keep passenger lists. Tanjug,
Yugoslavia's official news agency, reported that 40 people had
been killed. Because NATO's bombing campaign has
destroyed oil refineries and fuel storage depots across
Yugoslavia, most buses are running full of passengers who
might have made their trips in cars if gas wasn't being
rationed. Saturday's bombardment caused only minimal
damage to the bridge, where the blast took out a piece about 9
feet long and 3 feet wide at the very edge of one lane. Even if
the strike had hit its target squarely, and destroyed the bridge
instead of a bus, it wouldn't have stopped traffic along the road
because another route adds only a matter of seconds to the
trip. About 1:25 p.m., two ambulances sped through the center
of Pristina toward the wreckage, and 25 minutes later five
ambulances sped near the Jug Bogdan bridge en route to the
Pristina hospital. A bomb exploded on that bridge at 1:51 p.m.,
and when a civilian ambulance tried to cross along a smaller,
parallel bridge at 1:55 p.m., a second bomb struck. The
explosions hit both sides of the bridge but took only small
bites from the very edges, so the intended target escaped
serious damage. But the heavy blasts blew out the
ambulance's windows, smashed in its roof and injured one
member of the medical team inside. Another ambulance
rushing some of the wounded from the destroyed bus had to
stop and pick up the medical technician bleeding from his
forehead, along with a doctor and driver, who subsequently
broken sections of the bus, which had almost made it across
the bridge when it was struck at least once. The blast
snapped off the back half, which tore out a section of guardrail
and fell to the field below. NATO's daily slow-motion replays of
air attacks videotaped from a pilot's-eye view high above the
targets might leave the impression of a bloodless war fought
with "smart" bombs. This is what Saturday's attack looked like
from the ground: The explosion threw a passenger's arm at
least 75 yards from the bridge. From the slender fingers and
long, polished nails, it was obviously a woman's. Closer to the
bus' rear section, mangled pieces of passengers' bodies lay
twisted among bent window frames, seat cushions and
luggage. One piece of luggage was a black carry-on bag with
the label USA 1902 Russell Athletic stitched across the top. It
was full of cartons of Lucky Strike cigarettes, a cherished
commodity in Yugoslavia because NATO blew up one of the
country's largest cigarette factories weeks ago. Two of the
corpses were in military uniforms, one of which was the olive
drab of a reservist. Around the severed child's arm that lay
alone were the things a mother might pack for a short journey.
There were onions and boiled potatoes, bags of ground coffee
and orange-flavored Vitamin C tablets, and 70 German marks
that might have blown away if they hadn't been weighed down
by mud. Beside the bus wreckage, a small, crackling fire was
slowly consuming three bodies, two of which were lying on
their backs with fists raised, as if grasping at the air. Under the
bridge, a few yards from a jar of Nivea cream, a bottle of hair
spray, a deck of cards and a TV remote control, there was a
small crater. Two aluminum fins from whatever was fired at
the bridge were stuck in the ground along with broken pieces
of a circuit board, the same telltale signs found after other
NATO airstrikes across Kosovo. NATO's bombing continued
well into Saturday night and frequently shook the Pristina
hospital even as frantic people gathered to see if any of their
relatives were wounded or killed in the bus. One woman, in
tears at the hospital's gate around 5 p.m., thought her son
might have been a passenger because he left the bus station
in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia and Yugoslavia, at 9 a.m.
Long after he should have arrived in Pristina, his mother
couldn't find him. As the woman left for home, knowing no
more than when she had come, a bang made everyone look
up at the sky, where a Yugoslav surface-to-air missile burning
yellow left a trail of gray smoke. Another fired, and then a third,
while a NATO fighter plane did several barrel rolls high
overhead and then disappeared, apparently untouched. The
Yugoslav missiles had missed their mark too. * * *
Time staff
writer Carol J. Williams in Brussels contributed to this report.
All of Paul Watson's dispatches from Kosovo are available on
The Times' Web site at latimes.com.
|
