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| REFUGEE REPORTS FROM NATO | |
 March 29, 1999 
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As NATO accounced it was stepping up its attacks against Yugoslavian military and police units, Jamie Shea, the NATO spokesman, highlighted the deteriorating refugee situation in and around the Kosovo province. |
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JAMIE SHEA, NATO Spokesman: I would 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 outpour of refugees in to the neighbouring 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 is 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 is particularly disturbing is that cars are being asked to pay between 1000 DM - 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 ID cards, their papers. It's almost as if their identities are being cancelled out, as if they are being declared non-persons and of course that makes any subsequent effort to return to Yugoslavia much more difficult. But at least I think we see from everything that is happening now, and this is no longer speculation, this is now from all of what these refugees are telling us, an established fact, that we clearly see who is the victim and who is the victimiser in this very difficult situation. We have an impression from the current sweep operations of the Yugoslav Forces in Kosovo that there is a campaign underway to ethnically reengineer the make-up of Kosovo, particularly in the northern and central parts of that province, to reshape the political map of Kosovo, so that Milosovic later on would hope to achieve a negotiated solution more favourable to Belgrade and in this effort we have reports that whole towns and villages, including the city of Pec, have now been substantially destroyed. Together with this strategy of ethnic cleansing, I think that these terms are now wholly appropriate, we see an effort to destabilise neighbouring 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 our resources to try to help Albania, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and other countries in the forefront receiving these refugees to help them with money, to help them with supplies, whatever is necessary. Yesterday evening the Secretary General spoke to Madam Ogetir, the Head of the UNHCR, and assured her that all of the resources of our Euro-Atlantic Disaster Response Coordination Centre have been activated to coordinate the assistance of NATO to the 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 humanitarian 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 would 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 would like to recall in this respect the agreement last October 25th between NATO and President Milosovic, when as you recall Milosovic 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 the barracks and to respect a ceasefire. But already by December there was mounting evidence that the Yugoslav army unit in Kosovo were not in their barracks, but were going back in to the field as well as the special police and that this agreement was being violated and we already had, 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 special 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 FRY and therefore to our eyes all of these activities clearly indicate a hostile intention towards the Kosovor Albanian community. I cannot think of any other explanation. And therefore once again I would stress that the current campaign is not a spontaneous outburst following NATO's operations. It looks much more like a planned, conceived and executed new campaign against the civil population which was being finalised 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 Milosovic's record as an ethnic cleanser we see that he has been involved in this activity for some time already and well before the Kosovo crisis began. Particularly in Croatia and Bosnia where we have seen the same systematic efforts to create mono-ethnic territories by permanently changing the identities of towns and villages. Unfortunately we are seeing the same again and it's NATO's conviction and we have seen this before in our experience in Bosnia that the only time President Milosovic has stopped doing this has been when he has met with a combination of firm diplomacy and a readiness of the international community to use force as a last resort. It is true that President Milosovic is very tenacious, 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 neutralising the integrated air defence 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 Milosovic 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, on timetable and we're on target and we are going in the next few days to progressively tighten the noose around the Serb war machine in Kosovo. |
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