The Serbian prime minister says Serb forces should return to KosovoPosted on 02/11/2003 11:06:43 PM PST by Destro
Wednesday, 12 February, 2003, 02:18 GMT
Serb alert for Kosovo border troops
By Matthew Price
BBC Belgrade correspondent
The Serbian prime minister says Serb forces should return to Kosovo
The Serbian authorities have announced that they are putting their police and army units which patrol the border with Kosovo on a state of alert.
The announcement follows rising tension in the area over recent days.
The United Nations - which is in charge of the southern Serbian province of Kosovo - says it has no information which would suggest that a forthcoming attack is likely.
The Serbian authorities say they are reacting to information they have received that terrorists, in their words, are getting ready in Kosovo to head into southern Serbia.
Tension 'declined'
The information, they say, comes from the United Nations mission in Kosovo, or Unmik.
A spokesman for Unmik told BBC News Online he was not aware that any information to that effect had been passed to the Serb authorities and he said there is nothing to suggest an attack is likely to take place.
Overall, it is felt that tension in Kosovo has dramatically declined since the conflict there between Serb forces and the majority ethnic Albanian population in the late 1990s.
However from time to time tension does rise and it appears to be doing so right now.
Dangerous game
Recently around one-third of MPs in Kosovo's parliament supported a motion on independence, although that was later put on the back burner.
And just the other day the Serbian prime minister said that Serb forces should be allowed to return to Kosovo.
Some dismiss the moves on both sides as playing politics.
In the Balkans that can be a dangerous game.
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How deep are the snows in Kacanik now, Destro?
Seems as though Bill Clinton's tenure was even shorter than Suleyman's.
Your predictions are proving invariably wrong, no matter what the subject.
What ever is left of NATO will waste away in the coming Balkan correction.
Balkan correction?
The only Balkan correction that needs to be made is to your corpus of posts, which have been wrong from the start and show no tendency to veer towards reality.
Where's that KLA offensive you kept running your suck about? You're so far behind schedule on that one it's now both joke and punchline.
"Nato is dead."
"Pericles is dead."
Only one of these statements has any basis in reality, bub.
If NATO cannot survive, then the EU will founder upon the same rocks, the importance of Germany and France in the world will diminish, and Brussels will lose it's position as the administrative capital of Europe.
None of this is any of the three's interests.
We see the issue differently, you and I.
Joke and punchline, Destro.
By David Rennie in Washington
February 12 2003
The Pentagon is drawing up plans to pull thousands of American troops out of bases in Germany, replacing Cold War-era garrisons with lightly manned bases scattered across eastern Europe.
The plans predate the row over Iraq, but their leaking to the media on Monday will be taken as another signal to the German Government that American attitudes towards Europe are changing.
Although no decision has been taken, the plan to scale down the United States military presence in Germany, the mainstay of US forces in Europe since World War II, marks a strategic shift welcomed by the insecure post-communist countries of central Europe.
The plans were outlined to senators by the new NATO supreme commander, General James Jones.
In the words of one US diplomat, the policy discussion is not punishment for German obstructionism, but its timing is "certainly opportune", wrote William Safire, a commentator for The New York Times.
General Jones told senators attending a security conference in Munich that the 70,000 US troops garrisoned in Germany, with 70,000 dependants, were an unwieldy, expensive relic of the past.
The momentum for moving out of Germany is being increased by the US-German estrangement. Last month, the Pentagon ordered all non-essential investment in the sprawling US bases in Germany to be frozen, according to the
German Christian Democrat MP Michael Billen, whose constituency in south-west Germany includes US air bases that over the past 50 years have grown into large American communities.
Polish newspapers reported recently from Washington that the US was to shift bases from Germany to Poland, the biggest and most important new NATO member, the most pro-American, and one of the key countries in what Mr Rumsfeld calls "new Europe".
The Polish reports were denied in Washington, but when he was asked about the issue in Rome last week, Mr Rumsfeld said: "We are reviewing our bases ... the centre of gravity is shifting in the [NATO] alliance. The interest and the enthusiasm that the countries that had lived under repressive regimes previously is a good thing for NATO."
General Jones told senior US congressmen and senators in Brussels last Friday that the large US garrisons in Germany could be radically transformed by the need for more flexible and mobile rapid response structures that may halve the number of US troops required in Germany and lead to new bases being opened from Poland to Romania, according to US press reports on Sunday.
In contrast to those of western Europe, the governments of eastern Europe are queuing up to offer military assets, resources and staff for the US war effort against Iraq.
Romania and Bulgaria are the latest governments to make bases available to the US air force. The first US aircraft are expected in Bulgaria on Monday.
The Telegraph, London; The Guardian
Belgrade - Secretary general of Democratic Alternative, Igor Jovicic said that state bodies of Serbia have data according to which '453 Albanians, mainly children without parents, from the territory of the south of Serbia went in Kosovo and Metohija to attend training for handling explosive devices'.
According to Jovicic this terrorist organization is called 'Security of the homeland'. It is led by Sefcet Musliu and Ljiram Jakupi and financed by some Islamic non-government organizations. 'The goal of this terrorist organization is destabilization of situation in the south of Serbia at the moment when the international community and especially USA are focused on Iraq crisis.
'Since international projects in the south of Serbia are jeopardized, in the first place the project of multiethnic police, we call representatives of the international community to give us their help. We have OSCE in mind in the first place', Jovicic said.
'The international community, and KFOR and UNMIK in the first place, still have not reacted to oral and written requests of our state bodies to condemn new terrorist wave in the region', Nebojsa Covic, one of Serbian deputy Prime Ministers said.
In reaction to threats by illegal Albanian national army that said to 'have been mobilizing parts of Adem Jashari division to protect Albanians from Serbian repression', Covic said that 'Albanians terrorists are obviously trying to take advantage of international community being preoccupied with Iraq'. 'This is classical terrorism and we are ready to react adequately. Excuses such as violation of human rights, extremism and similar will not be accepted', Covic said.
In the corridors of City Hall in Bujanovac yesterday there appeared several slogans of AKS, Albanian liberation army. They are on the second floor in the vicinity of press center offices of Coordination center for the South of Serbia.
AKS slogans appeared for the first time ten days ago in the village of Dobrosin at a commemoration service to Sacipi brothers. After that the slogans appeared on all Albanian houses by the streets where army and police are passing through.
Hey, hey, my, my.
NATO's continued existence is a poke in Destro's eye.
Ok, so maybe my tape was garbled after being on the dash one summer day, but that's what it sounds like to me.
At least that's how it sounded on my 8 track.
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