From: MikePiet@aol.com
Subject: SNET: [piml] ..Albanian Convoy
Date: 14 Apr 1999 15:25:32 -0400
To: piml@egroups.com, FPE@onelist.com


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..In addition to what is below - I just heard Kenneth Bacon giving a Press 
Conf. at the Pentagon. This lying piece of garbage said - and I heard this 
myself - we are investigating the possibilities that the Serbs themselves 
bombed this convoy - we have had reports of Serb air activity in the area. 

This is absolute utter crap. There is nothing flying over Yugoslavia other 
than NATO aircraft. We have 24 hour a day AWACS coverage to insure instant 
response to any Serb air activity.

Talk about propaganda - Goebbels would be proud of this.  SOB's     Mike P

Kosovo targeted in latest air raids, Serb center reports convoys struck
2.58 p.m. ET (1859 GMT) April 14, 1999

[an error occurred while processing this directive] 
By Veselin Toshkov, Associated Press

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP)  As NATO warplanes hammered Serb targets in Kosovo 
today, Yugoslavia said one of the strikes hit a convoy of ethnic Albanian 
refugees, killing at least 64 and wounding 20. 

While NATO did not confirm the report, it said NATO warplanes had orders to 
take on "military targets'' on the road in question in southern Kosovo near 
the town of Djakovica. 

Video taken under Serb control showed smashed bodies scattered along a 
roadway, damaged farm vehicles and bombed-out farm buildings nearby. People 
in rough peasant clothing, some with blood streaming down their faces, loaded 
bodies of the dead and wounded into trunks of cars or wheelbarrows to 
transport them. 

Old men and women wept by the roadside. A young boy sat on a trailer rig, 
sobbing. 

The Serb-run Media Center in the Kosovo capital, Pristina, said two separate 
refugee convoys were bombed, most of them made up of women, children and 
elderly ethnic Albanians who were being escorted by Serbian police. 

>From just across the Albanian border at Tropoja, 12 miles away, enormous 
booms were heard. 

Yugoslav Foreign Ministry spokesman Nebojsa Vujevic, who along with the media 
center reported a figure of 64 dead, denounced the strike as a "crime against 
humanity.'' 

"The bodies are literally littered on the highway,'' he said. 

While there was no independent confirmation, if the account were true, it 
would mark by far the largest single loss of civilian life reported during 
the 3-week-old NATO bombing campaign. [an error occurred while processing 
this directive] In Belgium, NATO military spokesman Jamie Shea, asked about 
the report, said: "I don't have, by any means, all of the details. 

"All I have been told by the operational commanders is that military vehicles 
were a target on that road this afternoon,'' Shea said. 

"We are processing the battle damage assessment in order to know more. As 
soon as we have more information, I will provide it to you.'' 

NATO has said repeatedly it held Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic 
responsible for the safety of ethnic Albanians driven from their homes in 
Kosovo but unable to leave the province. Estimates have put the number of 
displaced within Kosovo in the hundreds of thousands. 

The Serb Media Center said the first refugee column made up of more than 
1,000 people on tractors, trailers, in private cars or on foot, was hit  
twice  near the villages of Madanaj and Meja, adjacent to Djakovica. 

The second convoy of refugees was hit on the road between Prizren and 
Djakovica, the Media Center said. It said three policemen escorting the 
convoy were also injured. 

On the Albanian side of the border, an aid worker said he had spoken to 
refugees who witnessed the attack and could not say whether the aircraft were 
NATO planes. 

According to Jeff Rowand of the World Food Program, refugees crossing the 
Albanian border said they saw three aircraft drop three bombs that hit two 
tractors, killing many people. Other refugees said they saw dead, mutilated 
bodies by the road, including those of women and children, Rowand said. 

During the three weeks of allied air raids, several military targets have 
been hit in Djakovica, but so too was part of Djakovica's old town, in what 
appeared to be stray strikes. 

A half-million Kosovar Albanians have fled or been driven out of the province 
since last month, the greatest mass displacement in Europe since World War 
II. More than 2,000 people have died in Kosovo since Milosevic cracked down 
on ethnic Albanians in February 1998. 

At the Yugoslav-Macedonian border, another group of arrivals  an estimated 
2,000 people  crossed over today, and more flooded into Albania as well. 

In other developments today: 

On Albania's border with Yugoslavia, Serb forces shelled a deserted Albanian 
village they had briefly seized a day earlier, international observers said. 

The fresh round of border shelling began at 9 a.m. near the village of 
Padesh, witnesses said. One shell hit Kamenica, the hamlet briefly occupied 
by Serb forces who pushed across the frontier a day earlier and then withdrew 
after a short skirmish with Albanian troops. 

Smoke could be seen rising from Kamenica  whose residents had fled earlier  
but no new Serb incursion was seen or reported. 

Tensions have risen sharply in recent weeks along the Yugoslav-Albania 
frontier, long the scene of fighting between Serb troops and the rebel Kosovo 
Liberation Army. Tuesday's Serb incursion  denied by Yugoslavia  drew a 
warning from Washington to Milosevic not to widen the Kosovo conflict. 

In Belgrade, a rare daytime air-raid alert sounded at mid-morning while jets 
were heard flying overhead. Loud sonic booms echoed through the city center. 
Daytime alerts also briefly sounded in the Montenegrin capital of Podgorica 
and cities including Novi Sad, Serbia's second-largest. 

In overnight airstrikes, NATO hit a hydroelectric power plant and a major 
food-processing factory early today. 

The action on the ground came amid a flurry of diplomatic consultations, 
including a German peace initiative that would provide for a 24-hour 
suspension of allied airstrikes if Milosevic began withdrawing his forces 
from Kosovo. 

NATO welcomed the German-drafted peace plan as a "food-for-thought paper'' 
but said it would not immediately endorse it because it opens the way to a 
suspension of airstrikes. 

Alliance officials have been stressing how successful the air campaign is in 
destroying Milosevic's war machine, despite bad weather that has hampered 
airstrikes and at least two missiles that accidentally struck a passenger 
train, killing 10 people, and civilian sites. 

The three-stage German plan called for a heavily armed U.N. military force to 
move in as Yugoslav forces withdraw, a return of Kosovo refugees, and for 
Kosovo to be put under U.N. administration until a permanent peace settlement 
is agreed. 

In a sign NATO raids were starting to affect basic supplies, the first known 
report of food rationing surfaced since the allied air campaign started. 

A U.N. agency warned today that Kosovo faces a long-term food shortage 
because most fields have been destroyed, crops have not been harvested, and a 
huge number of livestock have died due to the violence and abandonment. 

In the southeastern Serb city of Pirot, authorities began distributing 
coupons for food staples, the Yugoslav state news agency Tanjug reported 
today. Fuel has been rationed nationwide since shortly after the strikes 
began. 



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