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| REPORTED EXECUTIONS | |
 March 29, 1999 
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NATO reports that several prominent Kosovar Albanian leaders have been executed and hundreds of thousands have been displaced.
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COMMODORE DAVID WILBY: Thank you very much indeed, Jamie. President Milosevic has adopted what can only be described as a siege mentality. He believes he can realign his ethnic problems in one week and that NATO unity will crack in that same period. In Kosovo, he continues his violence against Kosovo Albanians. Helicopters are being used against the civil population. Paramilitaries enter towns and villages and terrify the people. They are followed by the FRY military and police, who give an official slant to these activities and cynically issue leaflets stating that "now it is safe to leave" the town or village. I can cite Pristina as such an example of this ethnic cleansing. The main outflow of refugees is towards Montenegro and Albania. This graphic will give you an indication of some of the actual incidents that have taken place to date, and I'll pause a second while you take some of it in. If you need to look at it closer, I am sure there will be a handout at the end. Additionally, seven villages were set on fire between Pec and Klina. Three villages west of Pristina were also burning, more examples of the scorched-earth policy to discourage refugee returns. I received this next inject just before coming to the stage. Reliable sources report that -- and you'll have to excuse my pronunciation -- Fehmi Agani, a member of the Kosovar Albanian delegation at Rambouillet, principal Rugova adviser and peace negotiator over much of the past year, was executed on Sunday, some time after he attended the funeral of Bajram Kelmendi. |
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| Reported executions . | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Four other prominent ethnic Albanians were reportedly executed on Sunday, including editor in chief of Koha Ditore, Veton Surroi. Serb police ordered ethnic Albanians on Sunday to leave Pec by Monday or be slaughtered. On Saturday night Serbian forces rounded up Albanian men throughout Pec and marched them off in an unknown direction. Looking at our own air operations against targets in the FRY and Kosovo, these are the areas in which last night's targets were located: Weapons were launched or dropped with considerable success, and we suffered no aircraft losses. And whilst we did not shoot down any FRY aircraft, we did hit one MiG-21, one Galeb (sp), and one -- and some MUP helicopters on the ground. We have also located the second MiG that was shot down two nights ago. It is lying in a minefield some 15 miles southwest of the town of Bijelina, on the Federation side of the zone of separation between the RS and the Federation. Our technical experts are visiting it. Let us look at some of the images now from our recent attacks. The first is a SAM-3 radar site. You'll see around the edges where the missiles are located. But the heart of the SAM site is in the middle, the low-blow radar, and without that low-blow radar, the site will not function. Let's look at the post-strike. And on the post-strike, it may not be terribly obvious to you, but I can assure you, under the scope, that low-blow radar has been completely destroyed. The second image is of a headquarters in Pristina. And here you will see the building that was targeted, and let's have a look at the post-strike, and you'll see quite clearly that they are having to find a new location for that headquarters. Most significantly, we have begun our operations against field forces in Kosovo. Major attacks last night took place at Donja Somanja, where we struck a deployed combat group, the 243rd, which participated in ethnic cleansing and other deplorable activities in south Kosovo. Finally, we have always stated that our objectives have been to signal NATO resolve and unity, coerce the FRY to cease hostile action, and withdraw VJ and MUP forces from EKosovoF, and to restart negotiations. Those remain our objectives. Jamie, can I hand over to you, please? MR. JAMIE SHEA, NATO spokesman: David, thanks very much indeed for the operational update. I'd like just to say a few words first of all on the current humanitarian situation. Just before coming along to the briefing today, I was in contact with the UNHCR, which of course is in the forefront of international efforts to address this enormous outpouring of refugees into the neighboring countries. I understand that the UNHCR has just confirmed that 60,000 Kosovo refugees are now in Albania. That's almost double the figure of just a few days ago. The OSCE, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has monitors at the border, reports that the ethnic Albanian refugees are now arriving at the rate of 4,000 people per hour. And obviously this is putting an enormous strain on Albania, which has appealed to the international community for urgent help. We calculate that at the moment there are about 280,000 displaced people inside Kosovo. I mentioned yesterday the figure of over half a million who have been displaced since the beginning of the current fighting a year ago. This is an absolutely horrendous figure, and it's going up, unfortunately, all the time Now at the same time, as these refugees come out, they are able to tell us what is happening. One thing that's particularly disturbing is that cars are being asked to pay between 1,000 or -- 1,000 deutsche marks, or rather the occupants of the cars, before they are allowed to cross the border. Refugees entering Albania are being stripped by the Serb border forces of their passports, their I.D. cards, their papers. It's almost as if their identities are being cancelled out, as if they're being declared non-persons. And, of course, that makes any subsequent effort to return them to Yugoslavia much more difficult. But at least I think we see, from everything that's happening now -- and this is no longer speculation, this is now from all of what these refugees are telling us, established fact -- we clearly see who is the victim and who is the victimizer in this very, very difficult situation. |
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| Yugoslav army operations. | ||||||||||||||||||||
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We're having the impression from the current sweep operations of the Yugoslav forces in Kosovo that there is a campaign underway to ethnically re-engineer the makeup of Kosovo, particularly in the northern and central parts of that province, to reshape the political map of Kosovo so that Milosevic later on would hope to achieve a negotiated solution more favorable to Belgrade. And in this effort, we have reports that whole towns or villages, including the city of Pec, have now been substantially destroyed. Together with this strategy of ethnic cleansing -- I think these terms are now wholly appropriate -- we see an effort to destabilize neighboring countries by flooding them with refugees that their economic and social structures are not well-equipped to handle at the moment. Obviously, one of the most urgent things for all of the international community, including the NATO countries, is to mobilize all of our resources to try to help Albania, the former Yugoslavia, Republic of Macedonia and other countries in the forefront of receiving these refugees, to help them with money, to help them with supplies, whatever is necessary. Yesterday evening the secretary- general spoke to Madame Ogata, the head of the UNHCR, and assured her that all of the resources of our EuroAtlantic Disaster Response Coordination Center have been activated to coordinate the assistance of NATO to UNHCR. And I think you know already that in just a few moments, or at least in an hour, Emma Bonino, the EU commissioner who handles EhumanitarianF issues, will be coming in to see the secretary- general to discuss the very grave situation, and they will be here at around a quarter to five to report to you at a short press conference. I'd like to return to the points that I made yesterday and to some of the questions that I had about whether this appalling humanitarian situation is a response to NATO action or is something that was planned well beforehand. And I'd like to recall in this respect, to the agreement last October the 25th between NATO and President Milosevic, when as you recall, Milosevic promised to return his forces in Kosovo to the levels that they were at in March 1998; to put them back in their barracks, including the special police; to have only three companies actually deployed outside of barracks, and to respect a cease-fire. But already by December, there was mounting evidence that the Yugoslav Army units in Kosovo were not in their barracks but were going back into the field, as well as the special police, and that this agreement was being violated. And we had already, as you know, in December, an outbreak of fighting in the north around the town of Podujevo. Then over the next few weeks, we have seen a gradual augmentation of the number of forces operating outside their barracks in the field. We have seen that the special police have received increased armaments, which are not normally associated with police duties. We have seen more forces being taken south and positioned on the border of the province of Kosovo. We have seen, this winter, many live-fire field training exercises. In fact, the exercises of the Yugoslav Armed Forces this winter have predominantly taken place in Kosovo and not elsewhere in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. And, therefore, to our eyes, all of these activities clearly indicate a hostile intention towards the Kosovar Albanian community. I cannot think of any other explanation. And, therefore, once again, I'd stress that the current campaign is not a spontaneous outburst following NATO's operations. It looks much more like a planned, conceived, and executed now, campaign against the civil population, which was being finalized even as Milutinovic and the other members of the Yugoslav delegation were arriving in Rambouillet for the peace negotiations. And it started immediately, the talks in Rambouillet concluded. Moreover, I think if we look at President Milosevic's record as an ethnic cleanser, we see that he has been involved in this activity for some time already, well before the Kosovo crisis began, particularly in Croatia and in Bosnia, where we have seen the same systematic efforts to create monoethnic territories by permanently changing the identities of towns and villages. Unfortunately, we're seeing the same again. And it's NATO's conviction, and we've seen this before from our experience in Bosnia, that the only time President Milosevic has stopped doing this has been when he has met with a combination of firm diplomacy and the readiness of the international community to use force as a last resort. It's true that President Milosevic is very tenacious, but so are we. Finally, are we being effective? Is the mission working? Yes, we are being effective. Yes, the mission is working. This is a methodical, systematic and progressive air campaign to strip the Serb leadership bare of their military capabilities. We have begun by neutralizing the integrated air defense system, taking out the key nodes, the brain of that system that allow it to operate. We are now, as David Wilby told you, targeting the Serb military machine in Kosovo. President Milosevic is beginning to run out of options. And as the days go by, he will have less and less options. So we are having an impact. We're on plan, we're on timetable and we're on target. And we're going in the next few days to progressively tighten the noose around the Serb war machine in Kosovo. |
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