Word: kosovo
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...addition to the military struggle, the Serbs are evidently continuing their campaign of generalized terror. In particular, there are reports of rape inside Kosovo, something that the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees' Chris Janowski calls credible. But allegations of an orchestrated rape campaign by Serbs, he says, have not yet been confirmed. U.S. satellites do seem to have picked up solid visual evidence--pictures of abandoned towns and farms--of the ethnic cleansing, which has now flushed Albanians from almost all of western Kosovo. One stark image shows Serb armor apparently "herding" a group of civilians out of their village...
...being used as human shields. "We certainly hear that [Serb forces] have surrounded military vehicles with civilians," says Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon. Such stories are particularly difficult to confirm, but there is special concern after the disappearance of tens of thousands of refugees who had been seen just inside Kosovo trying to get out. Last Tuesday night, at least 70,000 refugees had gathered on the Kosovo side of border crossings into Montenegro, Albania and Macedonia. At dawn on Wednesday, the crossings were empty...
...danger. "I don't think anyone took the measure of Milosevic's capacity for brutality," says J. Brian Atwood, director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, who is coordinating the U.S. refugee response. Now "the problem we fear is the humanitarian crisis that isn't being managed inside Kosovo." And as fighting between the K.L.A. and Serbian forces begins to pick up, that problem will only grow worse...
Sending a stream of bullets into the sky at 10:05 p.m. on Tuesday, a lone army gunner manning an antiaircraft gun in the heart of Podgorica opened up on NATO planes flying over Montenegro toward targets in Kosovo and Serbia. An hour later explosions from a NATO retaliatory raid rocked the city. Almost immediately, a cacophony filled the night. It wasn't air-raid sirens or the wails of the wounded, but the ringing of mobile phones. "Who cares about bombing! Is this the coup?" worried government officials asked one another...
...NATO will intervene to help; others argue that the alliance is far too divided to rescue such a small province. Milosevic is starting to turn up the pressure. He has issued a draft order for all battle-age Montenegrins, and his promises that no locals would be sent to Kosovo have been abandoned. Trees along boulevards now sprout the death notices of local soldiers killed in Kosovo. A civil war here would surely bring the dying closer to home...