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| NATO MILITARY BRIEFING | |
 April 2, 1999 
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NATO Spokesman Jamie Shea and Air Commodore David Welby brief the press on the latest military and political developments. |
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AIR COMMODORE DAVID WILBY: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm afraid you've got the B team again today. As SACEUR reiterated yesterday, NATO continues with its responsive and adaptable air operation against the military forces and structure of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. This will intensify the degradation of strategic targets and FRY forces in Kosovo, despite the risks. The FRY army and special police are already paying a heavy price for their campaign of terror and crimes against humanity in Kosovo. In Kosovo, as you can see on the ground activity slide, Yugoslav army and MUP continue to press their offensive in the Malisevo and Pagarusa region, while continuing to mop up in other areas. However, the UCK has not been defeated. They continue to gather recruits and regroup and regenerate in preparation to re-enter their struggle. Serb paramilitaries, locally raised militias, continue to terrorize ethnic Albanians and take advantage of the situation to loot and pillage. We have some before-and-after pictures of houses in Kosovo, giving evidence of the destruction. This is by FRY forces of ethnic Albanian property. As you can see from the slide, whereas their previous actions were scattered through Kosovo, the results of their brutal activity has now produced a single large triangular area of ethnic cleansing operations. Our first series of images shows the homes in the city of Dakovica in southwest Kosovo. The first shows the houses as they were prior to Serb security force action. The second follows the action. And if you can see from the slide and look at the roofs, there is definite and precise degradation and destruction of those buildings. As I told you earlier this week, and as a result of our attacks, when not engaged in their offensive operations, the FRY military are going to great lengths to conceal their tanks and artillery pieces. In many cases, they are taking up positions in deserted villages and towns. This cat-and-mouse activity is causing them to use up critical fuel supplies. We know that one battle group of the 549th motorized brigade was yesterday immobilized in the vicinity of Dakovica awaiting fuel. Therefore, NATO air-to-ground operations against fielded forces in Kosovo are already degrading and disrupting the FRY's military ability to deploy their armor. It is becoming increasingly clear that President Milosevic, having ethnically cleansed large areas, is now driving the enormous number of refugees south and west to destabilize neighboring countries such as Albania and Macedonia. But I will leave Jamie to cover these humanitarian issues in more detail. Turning to our air operations, threats radar levels in FRY air defenses were noticeably reduced last night. Surface-to-air missile activity was light, and all our aircraft returned safely. There were no kills of Serbian aircraft in the air. This slide shows some of the target areas, and I stress these are areas. Remember, I have said earlier this week that we may have several targets within those areas. As you can see, our activities were concentrated in and around Kosovo. Weather again hampered our operations, but again, did our operations follow a thoroughly planned military rationale. We are well on track, and it will become harder and harder for the FRY forces to continue their aggression against their own people, a people with whom we are not at war. Rather, we are at war with a regime and an apparatus of oppression, terror and ethnic cleansing. Jamie. |
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| The political update. | ||||||||||||||||||||
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JAMIE SHEA, NATO Spokesperson: David, thank you very much for the operational update. The NATO ambassadors met this morning, as they have met every day throughout this crisis, and their foremost concern remains with the forced depopulation of Kosovo, which continues unabated. Indeed, yesterday 36,500 Kosovars were forced to leave. That compares with 21,000 on Wednesday. At the moment, we see a 10-kilometer queue of people at the border with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. That's about 25,000 people who are stacked up, waiting to be able to leave. Many of them have died in that queue, and others have had to cross a minefield in order to get there. In fact, we now know -- we see that refugees are being herded into trucks, buses, trains, to get them out as quickly as possible. In many cases, there's clear evidence of a hasty departure. We see families with very little luggage, ladies in slippers, children with no shoes or socks. And often we have reports that they have had to hand over their life savings to the Serb security forces in order to be finally able to leave, thereby depriving them of the means, albeit limited, to even begin to build some kind of new life as refugees in the neighboring countries. This is an extortion racket which I would describe as institutionalized gangsterism. The refugee situation in the neighboring countries is extremely grave and is becoming graver by the hour. We have now 17,500 that are in the process of entering the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, an extra 14,500 in Albania in the last 24 hours, and 7,000 into Montenegro In fact, the latest estimates that we have are that the number of internally displaced persons -- in other words, those people who are not living where they used to live before this terrible conflict began -- is now upwards of 634,000. In other words, it's reached one-third of the pre-conflict population of Kosovo. At the same time, we are extremely worried about what has happened to the men. We also have reports that those Kosovar Albanians who cooperated with the international presence in Kosovo, notably the OSCE, the Organization for Security & Cooperation in Europe, as bodyguards, drivers, cooks, interpreters, translators, have also been -- (audio problems). Moreover, it's clear that the strategy of creating a series of ghost towns throughout Kosovo continues. The latest example is Pristina, the major city, where 30,000 people have been rounded up and forced to leave in the last 24 hours. This refugee situation means that we are no longer facing an internal Yugoslav crisis. We are facing a crisis of the entire region, with far-reaching consequences. And therefore, NATO has to address this situation alongside our efforts to do what we can to halt the violence in Kosovo quickly, and thereby create the conditions for the refugees to turn around and to go back and to try to rebuild their lives. And the focus of the ambassador's meeting this morning, ladies and gentlemen, was very much on what can we do rapidly, urgently, to mobilize our resources to help deal with this refugee calamity which is now facing the entire region. As you know, I reported on this just a short while ago. We have a team from NATO Headquarters Southern Europe in Albania assessing the needs. The Italian government has sent its San Marco battalion to Albania to help with the immediate task of food distribution, building tent cities, dealing with sanitation and medical assistance. The Greek forces that have been in Albania, helping the government for some time, are also being redeployed to this effort. This morning the North Atlantic Council directed SACEUR, General Clark, to in turn direct General Jackson, the commander of NATO's enabling force in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, to do whatever he can within his means and capabilities to use the NATO soldiers there to assist with the inflow of refugees, particularly with the border crossings. And we will be doing whatever we can there immediately and in the very near future. At the same time, this morning the NATO military authorities were tasked to look, on an urgent basis, at additional things that we may be able to do to support the United Nations High Commission for Refugees with logistics, with transports, with planning, with any other type of activity which the military tends to be able to do well in these type of situations. And I will be reporting on this subject, of course, in coming briefings. We have sent a NATO liaison team to Geneva to the UNHCR. And, working over the weekend with them, we will be attempting to come up with a package of NATO support that we can present to the donors' conference, the UNHCR donors' conference, which is going to take place on April the 6th, and then thereafter to the special E.U. meeting on the same topic in Brussels next week. So I'd like to stress that we are mobilized fully now in addressing this problem. NATO did not create this problem. We all know who created it. But NATO countries and NATO itself will do everything in their power to provide at least part of the solution, and on an urgent basis. We continue, as you know, to take a very close interest in the stability and the security of the neighboring countries. Yesterday we met them all together -- that is to say, Albania, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, Slovenia and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia -- to exchange views, news, information. And those group meetings will continue. The next one will be next Tuesday. Now, David has commented in his briefings and again today on the impact, growing impact, that we are having on the Serb military machine. But I think there is a topic which I'd like to mention briefly which I don't think really has been picked up by many in the international press over the last few days, which is the impact of Milosevic's military machine on Yugoslavia itself. We all know of the impact that it's having naturally on the people of Kosovo. That is too graphic to be ignored. But there are also growing signs that these military activities are having an increasingly straining effect on Yugoslavia itself already in 1997, even before the current round of operations in Kosovo began. Well over 8 percent of GDP in Yugoslavia was going on defense, which is four times the European norm in a country where the GDP per capita was assessed then at 5,000 U.S. dollars per individual. And we see now increasing signs over the last few days of shortages of fuel, even bread becoming increasingly scarce. Diesel has disappeared almost entirely because it's all going to the military effort, even though the government has tried to explain this by saying that it's gone to the agricultural sector. There is now a call-up, increasing call-ups going out towards males between 18 and 60 who are not able to leave the country; as a result, the reports of confiscations of passports as well. I'm going to be examining this. I think it's something worth examining as well, because, as I've tried to point out in these briefings, the consequences for what is happening in Kosovo is, first and foremost, of course, a tragedy for the Kosovar Albanians, but I think there are also signs that this is hardly serving the other peoples of Yugoslavia either. And I will conclude where David concluded. We are going to continue, including over this weekend. We are going to do everything we can. Because we haven't been able to prevent evil from occurring over the past few days is not a reason not to try to stop more evil occurring in the future. And that's what we're going to do, and we will be increasingly successful. But I can only repeat what the secretary general said yesterday. We will stop only when President Milosevic stops. |
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