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December 15

  • The UN administrator in Kosovo Bernard Coushner and Kosovo Albanian leaders have agreed to form a temporary power-sharing executive in the province. According to sources of the UN mission in Kosovo, the agreement was reached without Serbs. It is still unclear whether the self-styled government of Kosovo Albanians headed by Hashim Thaqi, the leader of the former Kosovo Liberation Army, will be dissolved.

  • The Yugoslav opposition intends to again demand that the West lift sanctions imposed on Belgrade in 1992. The press secretary of the biggest opposition party "Serbian movement for renovation" Ivan Kovacevic said in Belgrade that would be done at meeting with representatives of the United States and Europe in Berlin on Friday this week. The Western countries refuse to lift sanctions and take part in restoring Yugoslavia which had suffered from NATO bombing raids daring the Kosovo crisis as long as president Slobodan Milosevic remains in power.

December 14

  • As a result of NATO's bombings, Yugoslavia's territory was heavily polluted with poisonous substances, which constitute a threat to people's health. This is what the report, prepared by Pasi Rinne, a worker with the UN ecological programme for the Balkans, says. His report notes that among the most contaminated areas the locations near Panchevo on the Danube, near Belgrade and Novi Sad, Yugoslavia's north, and also Kraguevats in the central part of Yugoslavia. The situation in Panchevo is very serious, as the toxic smoke and mercury from the destroyed chemical works leaked not only into the soil but also into the Danube.

  • Russia will increase the deliveries of oil and gas to Yugoslavia. The agreement to this end was reached at a meeting of the bilateral intergovernmental commission in Belgrade. According to the chief Russian delegate. Economics Minister Audrey Shapovalyants issues have also been settled relating to liberalizing bilateral trade and Russian companies' participation in restoring the Yugoslav economy, which was badly damaged during NATO's aggressive war.

December 13

  • According to the Yugoslav agency TANYUG, a 29-year-old Serb man received serious bullet wounds when a car he was travelling in came under automatic gunfire near a checkpoint of the Kosovo Force in Pristina on Sunday. He was rushed to a Russian military hospital nearby. The attack is believed to be the work of ethnic Albanian separatists.
  • The head of the United Nations mission to Kosovo Bernard Couchner has admitted that people continue to be killed and abducted, and house are still set on fire in the province. But he denies the fact that ethnic cleansing is still under way, even though more than 80 percent of non-Albanian residents have had to flee Kosovo. Couchner was speaking with a group of Serbs in the village Partes near the city Gnilane in the southeast of the province on Sunday, December 12. Responding to a question by an Orthodox priest, who reminded the U. N. mission head of the fact that Serbs and Albanians had been co-existing in Kosovo for 1,500 years, Couchner tried to1 counter by placing the responsibility for the eruption of ethnic animosity on the policy Belgrade has been pursuing in the past few years.

December 12

  • The command of the NATO-led force and the United Nations mission in Kosovo are to hold reception to six months of their presence in the Serbian region. NATO forces crossed into Kosovo on the 12 th of June after the end of airstrikes on Yugoslavia and on the basis of an agreement with Belgrade on the implementation of the UN Security Council resolution on settling the Kosovo problem. A unit of Russian peacekeeping troops arrived in Kosovo even earlier than NATO forces. The Russian servicemen arrived from the Bosnian Serb republic through Yugoslav territory. Observers say the presence of Russian troops is the main obstacle for the policy aimed at spreading separatism and ethnic hatred in Kosovo.

December 10

  • A human rights fact-finding conference is opening in the capital city of Kosovo - Pristina. The two-day international event is timed to the day of human rights which falls on today. Earlier this week the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe came out with a report that voices concern about the wide-spread cases of human rights abuse in Kosovo. People of non-Albanian descent, in particular Serbs, have been victimized in Kosovo since the Yugoslav security forces pulled out of that province and, the OSCE report says, a NATO-led peacemaking contingent took up positions there.

December 9

  • The head of the United Nations' refugee agency has admitted the international community's failure to preserve the multiethnic makeup of Kosovo. Speaking in Geneva on Thursday, Mrs. Sadako Ogata said that persecution, killings and ousters of ethnic minorities by local Albanians contrasted sharply with the goals the international community had initially set itself in this Serbian province. She said that the introduction of a NATO-led international peacekeeping force had failed to end the violence.
  • About three times as many Yugoslavs may fall ill with cancer as a result of the NATO's use of depleted uranium bombs during its recent military operation in the Balkans. The head of a research center in Belgrade sounded the alarm on Thursday. Miodrag Djordjevic said that 25 cities and towns with a total population of about 2.5 million people had been contaminated and warned that contamination could spread to neighboring countries.

  • Ethnic Albanians are, with increasing frequency, assaulting ethnic Serbs in Kosovo. KFOR spokesmen are reporting 22 Serb deaths over this week. The bullet-ridden bodies of a married couple were found in Pristina Tuesday. Ethnic Albanians hurled a hand grenade inside a Serb home, in the village of Gnilane. A woman was killed, and her husband and son were wounded. As many as 400 ethnic Serbs have been shot down dead since an international peacekeeping contingent entered Kosovo, last June. Thousands have fled home province. The peacekeepers have made no serious effort to end the violence.

December 8

  • The World Church Council of Russia has called on the international community to help end hostile acts against the Serbs in Kosovo, the Council met in Moscow on Monday and Tuesday. In an address to believers, the Council stressed that the mass driving of Serbs and other non-Albanians from their homeland, murder, destruction and desecration of churches turn into nothing the original objectives of the peace process in Kosovo. On Tuesday the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Alexei the Second received a letter from the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, patriarch Paul which says that 80 churches and cultural monuments have been destroyed in Kosovo. The Serbian population is made to leave their homes and land, Hostages are being seized and people killed. And all that goes on despite the presence in Kosovo of international peace-keeping forces with NATO countries playing a chief role in them.

December 7

  • The British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, has urged the ethnic Albanian leaders in Kosovo to condemn acts of terror against non-Albanians. Mr. Cook's statement, issued in London, comes in the wake of the publication in Pristina on Monday of a report by a commission of the OSCE on continuing terror against non-Albanians in Kosovo after the deployment of the NATO-led force. The British Foreign Secretary underlines in his statement that the attacks on Serbs are appalling and must be stopped. He says the ethnic Albanian leaders must take all necessary measures to ensure this.
     
  • The European member-states of NATO have decided to increase military might. The European Union foreign ministers' meeting in Brussels on Monday came out in favour of forming additional military units which would be under the EU control. The Europeans hope this will somewhat slacken Washington's control which was very evident during the US-led NATO aggression against Yugoslavia.

December 6

  • All orders, issued by the head of the UN civilian mission in Kosovo Bernard Coushner, are infringing on Yugoslavia's sovereignty and territorial integrity. This is the opinion of the popular Yugoslav "Politika" newspaper. Among other things, today's issue of the "Politika" newspaper says that Mr. Coushner's order, providing for the introduction of the new car registration numbers means the realization of the idea on independent Kosovo, which is running counter to the resolution of the UN Security Council on Kosovo. The "Politika" newspaper mentions that before holding his post Mr. Coushner said that this resolution is his "bible" and that under that document, autonomous Kosovo must exist as part of Yugoslavia and that task No.1 is the creation of multinational and safe Kosovo. The "Politika" newspaper notes that the continued violence and murders of the representatives of the national minorities in the Kosovo Province have shown how seriously Mr. Coushner is performing his task.

  • The organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, OSCE, has admitted that the loss of human life in Kosovo was not heavy before the NATO bombing raids on the Serbian province. Violence registered within the area where Albanian separatists were active. This comes in a report that's been made public in Kosovo's main city Pristina by an OSCE commission. The commission just as US FBI agents and experts from a number of NATO countries has been collecting anti-Serb evidence for The Hague-based Tribunal. Most of the materials thus gathered are based on stories by Kosovo Albanians. Conspicuously absent report cavried by the France Presse news agency, are any facts of violence against Serbs after the NATO peacekeepers had been deployed in the province. All that the report says on the matter is that over the period, the Serbian population of Pristina has diminshed from 21,000 to 600 people.
     
  • Albanian women are being used to clear various Kosovo facilities of mines, on the initiative of a western organization with the headquarters in Oslo. The spokesman for the Organization has told the France Presse new agency that it is the first ever experiment of this kind and that Kosovo Albanian women are given a chance to make good money. They could earn up to 800 Deutsche Marks per month. The NATO peacekeepers who are reluctant to risk their lives toll the Albanian women where exactly mines have been planted.

December 5

  • One Serb is reported to have been killed and three seriously wounded when a powerful explosion shook a village near the Kosovo city of Gnilane in the early hours of Saturday morning. Witnesses say a number of Serb houses have bean destroyed. A KFOR unit which arrived at the scene did not allow the locals to clear up the rubble to help the wounded. The organizers of the terrorist act have yet to be found.

December 4

  • Complying with a pertinent Yugoslav request, the UN mission in Kosovo has agreed to beef up police presence in predominantly Serb-populated areas to protect them against ethnic Albanian violence. Earlier, the mission's chief Bernard Coushner made repeated calls for efforts to speed up the establishment of a multinational police force in Kosovo, but the UN member states have so far, contributed only 17 hundred instead of the 6,000 actually needed in the province.

December 3

  • General Ivashov, one of the chiefs of Russian Defense Ministry, has accused the international forces in Kosovo, KFOR, of conniving terror by Albanians against Serbs. Since the KFOR was deployed in the province last June, 400 Serbs have been killed and thousands of Serbs have been driven away from the province. General Ivashov emphasized that the Kosovo Liberation Army has not yet been disarmed and no attempts were taken to persuade the Albanian separatists from declaring independence of Kosovo from Yugoslavia.

  • Moscow demands that the United Nations bring to account the commander of NATO forces and head of the UN mission in Kosovo Klaus Rainhardt and Bernard Koushner for failing to act against Albanian terrorists. The Russian news agency Novosti was told that on Thursday by General Leonid Ivashov, head of the department for international contacts of Russia's Defence Ministry. The General stressed that under cover of the United Nations NATO violates norms of international law in the Balkans. He did not rule out that Moscow could review the conditions of the presence in Kosovo of Russia's peacekeeping contingent.

December 2

  • The head of Kosovo's self-proclaimed government Hashim Thaqi advises the Albanian community of his province to meet other nations' calls for ethnic tolerance. Hashim Thaqi was speaking in reference to what happened last Sunday, that is the brutal killing, by ethnic Albanians, of Serb professor Dragoslav Bashic. Bashic was gunned down with his wife and mother-in-law looking at it. Ethnic Serbs hold the radically-oriented members of the Kosovar leadership responsible for what happened as well as part of the NATO command in Kosovo. They feel the NATO forces are fomenting separatism and interethnic strife in their province.

December 1

  • The Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov accuses the West of turning a blind eye to and building a wall of silence around the genocide of the Serbs waged by ethnic Albanian radicals in Kosovo. In an interview with the agency RIA-NOVOSTI on Tuesday, he said the Kosovo Force and the UN administration in Kosovo have disastrously failed to implement Security Council resolutions that call to provide security for all ethnic groups in the province and create conditions for the return of all refugees. Russia, he said, is going to ask the Security Council to ensure compliance with its resolutions on Kosovo. Latest estimates say more than 200 thousand Serbs have fled the region in the five and a half months since NATO moved in.

November 30

  • The commander of the international forces in Kosovo, German General Klaus Reinhardt has accused the local Albanians of lack of humanness and tolerance towards the representatives of other nationalities. Staking in Pristina, he denounced the murder of a 62-year-old Serb, a professor of the local university, that occurred last Sunday, and also savage beating of his wife and mother-in-law. These three were driving in a car along the central Pristina street but were stopped by a group of Albanians, who noisily celebrated Albania's National Flag Day. She Albanians killed the man, beat the two women and burned down the car.
     
  • The United Nations Balkans envoy Karl Bildt has acknowledged the failure of the UN mission and KFOR international force in Kosovo to guarantee security to Serbs and other non-Albanians. Mr.Bildt was commenting on the pogrom of the Jewish community in Pristina and creation of a Serb ghetto in Orakhovats and other cities. According to Yugoslav authorities, more than 330 thousand non-Albanians have had to leave Kosovo since the deployment of the UN mission and the KFOR force.

November 29

  • Since NATO struck at industrial and chemical production facilities in Yugoslavia, it is safe to claim that the alliance fought an ecological war against the Balkan country. This has come in an interview with Swiss television by engineer Werner Hirschbruenner, who forms part of a group of experts from Switzerland, Russia, Greece and Austria who try to clear of mercury and oil the areas that were contaminated as a result of destruction of a petro-chemical conglomerate in the Yugoslav city Panshevo by NATO's airstrikes. Werner Hirschbruenner stressed that it was hard to estimate the dangerous aftermath of the ecological war against Yugoslavia, and especially the contamination of the Danube, for the whole of Europe.

November 27

  • President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia has accused the NATO countries and Albanian separatists of seeking to establish a Nazi regime in the Serbian province Kosovo. As President Milosevic presented military awards in Belgrade on Friday to the Yugoslav servicemen, policemen and civilians who distinguished themselves in repulsing NATO's aggression against Yugoslavia he stressed that the Union Republic of Yugoslavia would continue to struggle for a Kosovo, where all nations would enjoy equal rights. After the Yugoslav troops pulled out of Kosovo in June this year, more than 230,000 Serbs, Gypsies and other national minorities had to flee the province to escape attacks by Albanians fighters.

November 26

  • The leader of Serbia's opposition Renovation Movement Vuk Draskovic has told media people in Moscow that no respect is shown the UN Security Council resolution on Kosovo and that Kosovo has become part of Albania. There is practically no border between Kosovo and Albania, Draskovic said, but ethnic Serbs will surely return to their home province and once they have returned, they will refrain from taking revenge on those who did them wrong. Draskovic feels the Serb community and Albania will base relations on trust and tolerance.

  • Russia is for full implementation of the UN Security Council's resolution on Kosovo. This was stated by Russia's Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov after meeting with the leader of the Serbian opposition Vuk Draskovic in Moscow on Thursday. According to the minister the Kosovo problem could be settled only if the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia are fully respected. He also pointed out that Russia is for lifting sanction imposed on Yugoslavia from which people suffer. Vuk Draskovic, on his part, supported Russia's actions in Chechnya.
     
  • The Yugoslav police has arrested five men suspected of preparing a life-attempt on President Slobodan Milosevic. Information minister of Yugoslavia Goran Matic said in Belgrade on Thursday that the arrested men were Serbs and were connected with the French secret service . The five were actually the backbone of a terrorist group which prepared four ways of physically removing Milosevic, said the minister. High French officials refused to comment on Thursday the accusation of the French secret service of being involved in the plot against the President of Yugoslavia.

November 25

  • The lower house of the Russian Parliament, known as the State Duma decided on Wednesday to sent its emissaries to the Hague where they will brief the International War Crimes Tribunal on what the North Atlantic Alliance did to Yugoslavia. The Duma decision crowns a report by a Duma ad hoc commission which feels the North Atlantic Alliance violated the United Nations Charter and OSCE resolutions in Yugoslavia.
     
  • The West has sent a meagre 15 tankfuls of fuel to Serbia, which is crying out for fuel now that its power plants are yet to be rebuilt after the NATO aggression and in the face of the western blockade. The West is sending fuel only to opposition-controlled areas.

November 24

  • Yugoslavia has described Mr.Clinton's visit to Kosovo yesterday as a violation of its sovereignty. President Clinton's tour took in a base of the American contingent within the KFOR force was carried out without permission from the Yugoslav authorities. The ruling Socialist party in Serbia has said the visit ran counter to international law. Mr.Clinton's tour of Southern Europe comprised Turkey, Greece, Italy and Bulgaria. In Turkey and Greece he was met with fierce protests. And a visit to Macedonia had to be cancelled altogether because President Kiro Gligorov refused to meet with his American counterpart.

  • Belgrade assesses the visit of US president Bill Clinton to the Serbian province Kosovo as a violation of Yugoslavia's sovereignty. The ruling socialist party in Serbia in its statement pointed out that the United States which organized the aggression against Yugoslavia is responsible for violence in Kosovo. According to the UN High commissioner for refugees, some 240,000 Serbs and people of other non-Albanian nationalities left the Serbian province after forces under NATO's command were deployed in Kosovo. Clinton's visit to Kosovo was made without any previous agreement with Yugoslavia's authorities.
     
  • A so called forum for restoration in the Balkans meets in Paris today at the initiative of France. The leaders of the Kosovo Albanians Ibragim Rugova and Hashim Thaqi have been invited. Among those invited are also leaders of the Serbian opposition which seeks the removal of the president of Yugoslavia Slobodan Milosevic. Representatives of Yugoslavia's lawful authorities were not asked to attend. Officially the NATO countries are against interference in the affairs of other countries and are for preserving Yugoslavia's sovereignty. In reality, however they finance and direct the Serbian opposition and also the leaders of the Kosovo Albanian-separatists.

November 23

  • President Clinton urged the Kosovo Albanians to stop persecuting and expelling Serbs. He was speaking on a one-day visit to Kosovo on Tuesday. His trip included meetings with the U. N. administrator in Kosovo Bernard Couchner, Commander of the Kosovo Force General Klaus Reinhardt and leaders of the Albanian and Serb communities in Kosovo. He also met with American soldiers deployed in the province. In a parallel development in Belgrade, Serbia's governing Socialists accused Mr. Clinton of whipping up communal tensions and encouraging ethnic Albanian separatism by delivering speeches in Kosovo.

  • The regional committee of the ruling Socialist party of Serbia has voiced a protest over President Clinton's tour of Kosovo due to begin today. A statement made by the committee says the visit will only aggravate the situation in the province and provoke Albanian separatists into new terrorist acts. NATO's recent aggression in Yugoslavia resulted in the terror against the Serbs, the statement says, and the US President is seen as symbolizing the terror.
     
  • Kosovo Albanians have removed the barricades they set up on August 23rd on the roads leading to the city of Orakhovats. According to the KFOR press center in Pristina, movement in the area is now free but the problem of the deployment of Russian peace-keepers is still open. The Albanians placed the barricades under the pretext of the Russians being traditional allies with the Serbs.

November 22

  • The Yugoslav Ambassador to Russia Borislav Milosevic accuses the Kosovo Force of violating the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Federal Yugoslavia and says the NATO-led contingent has been flouting UN resolutions on Kosovo ever since it was deployed in that region. He also accuses the UN administrator in Kosovo Bernard Couchner of pursuing a policy to separate Kosovo from Yugoslavia. Kosovo is the scene of genocide and ethnic cleansing, the Ambassador says. Two hundred and 50 thousand Serbs have fled Kosovo since NATO troops arrived; 450 have been killed, and 650 have been abducted or gone missing over the same period of time. Mr Milosevic was speaking in Moscow today. He reiterated Yugoslav demands for the safe return of all refugees to Kosovo.

  • The US President Bill Clinton, now on a tour of South-East Europe, arrived in Bulgaria on Sunday. This is the first time that an American President has visited Sofia in the 98-year Bulgarian-American diplomatic relationship. Meanwhile, the Bulgarian newspaper MONITOR writes in connection with Mr.Clinton's brief visit that NATO's military presence in the Balkans and the planned setting up of NATO military bases in Bulgaria is fraught with a direct danger that big or small wars may break out in the region. That the United States and NATO seek to destabilize the whole of Eurasia, the newspaper writes, is borne out by the fact that they launched an aggressive war against Yugoslavia.
     
  • In Kosovo two Serbian policemen were killed and six others wounded when their jeep hit a mine close to the administrative border of the province with the rest of Serbia. According to a Belgrade Radio report, the incident coincided with an increase in Albanian fighters' activities. Recently the fighters have been regularly bringing Serbian settlements in area under fire.

November 21

  • The NATO-led Kosovo Force has suspended all civilian flights to the province pending the adoption of civilian terminology by NATO air traffic controllers who are now in charge. Investigators blame misunderstandings from the use of military terms for the crash of a UN relief plane near Pristina 9 days ago. The ill-fated plane ploughed into a hilltop killing all 24 people on board.
     
  • President Bill Clinton has cancelled a visit to Macedonia where he was due on Tuesday. He took the decision after his counterpart there Kiro Gligorov refused to meet him and the capital Skopje reverberated to mass anti-American protests. Demonstrators there branded the American President 'murderer' for his role in the American-led aggression against neighbouring Yugoslavia. Very similar demonstrations shook Athens and Saloniki during Clinton's visit to Greece on Friday and Saturday.

November 20

  • Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov appreciates the wording of what the Istanbul summit had to say, in its final declaration, on Kosovo. It is very important, Ivanov said, that the Istanbul declaration reaffirmed respect of the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia and rejected as inadmissible moves for the ethnic and religious purity of Kosovo. As many as 220,000 ethnic Serbs have been driven out of Kosovo since the international peacekeeping contingent introduced there, last June.

November 19

  • Belgrade has protested the recent ouster of Serb doctors from the medical center of the city of Gnjilane, Kosovo. The United Nations mission in Kosovo moved to sack the Serb doctors. Yugoslav Ambassador to the United Nations Vladislav Jovanovic says only 4 Serb doctors and 8 nurses are still practicing in Gnjilane. They render medical assistance to the 15000 Serb residents of the neighbouring villages. Belgrade sees the situation as catastrophic.

  • The leaders of the Albanian community in the city Orakhovac, in Kosovo, have yielded to the pressure, brought to bear on them by the KFOR Command and the heads of the UN civilian mission to Kosovo, and have signed an agreement to guarantee security for the local Serbs. The agreement, circulated on Thursday, says that Albanians will not prevent the freedom of travel of the Serbs. However, the Serbs are suspicious about the pledges made since Albanians had to sign the agreement under pressure in Orakhovac. Several thousand Serbs have been living in a kind of ghetto, with a great many Albanians making their home all around the place, ever since the KFOR force entered the province. The several attempts to leave the city cost the Serbs numerous deaths.

November 18

  • OSCE chairman Knut Vollebaek has urged the Kosovo Albanians to stop harassing the region's ethnic minorities. Opening the summit of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Istanbul, Turkey, the Norwegian Foreign Minister said that the Albanians were responsible for ensuring stability and constitutional order in Kosovo. Addressing the summit, the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan acknowledged the problems facing international attempts at establishing a free, multiethnic and democratic society in this troubled Serbian province.

  • The West has taken steps to exclude Kosovo from the Yugoslav financial system and to hand control of that Serbian province over to the international financiers. It was announced in Pristina on Wednesday that a bank and payment authority was to be formed. It would be headed by Jimmy Barton, the man who used to serve as chief financial controller of the United States. The authority will be playing the role of the central bank of Kosovo.
     
  • Belgrade has voiced condolence with respect to the recent crash of a United Nations plane in Kosovo and the resulting death of 24 people who were flying that plane. It has also protested unauthorized flight by foreign planes over Kosovo, which remains part of the Yugoslavia.

November 17

  • The European Union promises to give more than 500 million dollars at a long-term perspective for restoring the economy of Kosovo. The European commissioner for foreign contacts Chris Patten declared this at the debates in the Europarliament in Strasbourg. The World Band and the European Commission consider that about 2.3 billion dollars will be needed for restoring Kosovo in the next 5 years.

  • NATO continues ignore the request of the United Nations to provide information about ammunition with a depleted uranium filling being used in NATO's aggression against Yugoslavia. The ITAR-TASS news agency in Geneva was told that by Pekka Haavisto, head of the special group for the Balkans of the United Nations Environmental Program. He said that such information is very much needed to assess the risk and take special preventive measures in the affected regions.

November 16

  • Russia's ambassador to the United Nations Sergei Lavroy has strongly criticized the KFOR for its inability to protect the local Serbs from the Albanians' terror. Speaking at the session of the UK Security Council, Sergei Lavrov has said that the remaining Serbs are being ousted from Kosovo with the connivance of the KFOR. In early November Sergei Lavrov visited the Serb enclaves and settlements in Kosovo that were destroyed as a result of the NATO bombings. He has said that the KFOR force is not implementing the resolution of the U. N. Security Council on the disarmament of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), on the protection of people of all nationalities living in Kosovo and on the return of the refugees.

  • The Serbian Socialist Party has accused the head of the United Nations administration in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, of making decisions designed to make the region ethnic Albanian. The Committee of the Serbian Socialist Party in Kosovo sharply condemned Mr Kouchner's decision to hold a census in Kosovo next spring. The committee stressed in a statement that such an action would create a possibility for legalizing a false ethnic structure in the region since more than 330 thousand Serbs had been driven out of the region and half a million foreigners had arrived there.

November 15

  • Russian peacekeepers is Kosovo may be deployed not in Orakhovac, but in some other built-up area. This has come in a statement for the RIA-Novosti news agency by a commander of the Russian military contingent. According to him, the proposal to this end, to break the current stalemate, has been made to the KFOR Command and is now under study. Under previous agreement, the Russian peacekeepers were to have been deployed and assumed their functions in the area three months ago. But the Albanian extremists have used the farfetched pretext that Russians have a very special attitude to the Serbs to prevent the Russian peackeepers from entering Orakhovac.

November 14

  • The United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan has extended his condolences to the families of those killed as a plane chartered by the World Food Program crashed in Kosovo on Friday. All 21 passengers, mainly representatives of international humanitarian organizations from Italy, Spain, Britain and Canada, and 3 crew members were killed in the crash which occurred in thick fog 15 kilometers north of the city of Kosovska-Mitrovitsa. The plane is believed to have crashed into the side of a 1400-metre-high mountain. The flight recorder has been recovered but there have been no reports as to the information it contains. A NATO official said a helicopter view of the site reveals scattered bodies and the badly damaged hull of the plane. Investigation is underway.

November 13

  • 24 people died when a plane chartered by the World Food Program went down in the hills on Friday afternoon some 15 kilometers away from the Kosovo town of Kosovska-Mitrovica. Fragments of the plane were only found after dark. The Pristina-bound two-engine aircraft was flying from Rome carrying a number of UN and humanitarian workers.
     
  • General Klaus Reinhardt who commands the international peacekeepers in Kosovo, does not rule out the possible return of Yugoslav troops to the troubled Serbian province. Speaking in Tirana at the close of a brief visit to the Albanian capital on Saturday, he said that, despite a pertinent resolution by the UN Security Council allowing a Yugoslav military presence to demine roads, protect border and Serbian historical monuments, KFOR was unable to guarantee the security of the Yugoslav troops. General Reinhardt said that the NATO-led peacekeepers have successfully been providing protection for the Orthodox shrines in Kosovo. Still, more than a hundred Orthodox churches have either been destroyed of desecrated since the international peacemakers entered the region in June.

November 12

  • The Kosovo Albanians have burnt down another Orthodox church near the border between Kosovo and Serbia. A correspondent of a Swiss newspaper " Le Tan" said that a KFOR patrol guarding the church was called to another place - and that was what the terrorists waited for. More than a hundred religious sites of the Orthodox Serbs have been destroyed, burn down or desecrated since NATO troops entered Kosovo in June. The Russian news agency Novosti has said the dean of one of the biggest monasteries Savva Yanic believes that attacks on religious sites began only after the arrival of NATO forces in June. And that, in his opinion is an expression of a coordinated strategy aimed at preventing the Serbs from returning to the province.
     
  • US president Bill Clinton will visit Kosovo on the 23rd of this month in the course of his tour of southern Europe. He will attend the OSCE summit in Istanbul and after Turkey he will go to Bulgaria, Greece and Italy. A spokesman of the White House said that in Kosovo the president will greet American servicemen. The Americans entered Kosovo together with the international forces in which NATO servicemen prevail - this followed an 11 week long NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. In the five months of NATO's military control of Kosovo there began violence and terror against the non-Albanian population.
     
  • Representatives of NATO's stabilization forces neither confirm nor deny the possibility of there being camps for training militants for Chechnya from among the Moslem part of the population of Bosnia-Herzegovina. A Serbian deputy of the parliament of the republic Nikola Shpiric has said there are at least two such camps and that about a hundred militants are being trained there.

November 11

  • Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Gennady Gatilov has lashed out against the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. He described as a serious blunder the Tribunal's decision to bring charges against the Yugoslav and Serbian top leaders and the detention, in Vienna, of General Talic who'd gone to that city on an invitation from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Gatilov accused the Tribunal of a biased approach to the Yugoslav developments. He said the Tribunal was looking primarily into crimes committed against ethnic Albanians while paying no attention to crimes committed by radically-oriented Albanians.
     
  • The Russian ambassador to the United Nations Sergei Lavrov has described the situation in Kosovo as abnormal and held the international forces responsible for the continuing terror against the Serbs. As he visited the province Mr. Lavrov said the KFOR international force did not implement in full the UN Security Council resolution on Kosovo under which they must guarantee security to all its residents regardless of nationality, the return of refugees and demilitarization of the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army.
     
  • The French military accuses the United States of disregarding the NATO Charter in Kosovo. The French defense ministry says Washington had, in defiance of the NATO Charter, seized all the command levers and been paying no attention to its allies view of the Alliance strategies for Kosovo. Washington and London had, for example, made an arbitrary decision to use cruise missiles in Serbia, which, the French military said, put their country and the other members of the North Atlantic Alliance in the position of outside observers.

November 10

  • The Commander of the international forces in Kosovo General Klaus Reinhardt has called for a quick deployment of Russian servicemen in the city of Orakhovats under an earlier agreement between Russia and NATO. Local Albanian extremists have for more than three months been blocking the way to the city to prevent the Russians from entering it. The 3,600-strong Russian contingent in Kosovo is deployed in the American, French and German sectors and its arrival there this summer caused no trouble.

  • In Kosovo, unknown persons have burnt down an Orthodox church in the village of Gornya Zhakut which NATO forces were supposed to protect. This was announced by a representative of the force major Irgens, in Pristina. The fire took place early in the morning on Tuesday. The terrorists made a passage through the barbed wire surrounding the church and forced the door of the building. NATO forces regard the incident as a well planned action carried out by criminal elements.

November 9

  • The Russian Ambassador to the UN Sergei Lavrov is in Belgrade to discuss progress towards the implementation of Security Council resolutions on Kosovo. Speaking in Pristina on Monday, he accused the UN administration in Kosovo and the Kosovo Force of failing to comply with those guidelines. The province of Kosovo, he also reminded, is an integral part of Federal Yugoslavia.

  • The Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Sergei Lavrov, has underlined the need for solving the problems of Kosovo with Yugoslavia. At the end of his two-day visit to Kosovo he said in an interview with the Russian news agency ITAR-TASS in Belgrade on Monday Russia was very much concerned about the security of non-Albanians in Kosovo. He stressed that despite the presence of the international force, the attempts were continuing to intimidate Serbs and make them leave their historical homeland.
     
  • Four hundred Serbs have been killed and more than five hundred kidnapped in Kosovo since June when the international security force was deployed in the region. The Serb leader of Kosovo Momcilo Trajkovic made the statement, in Belgrade yesterday. Mr Trajkovic himself was wounded by ethnic Albanian fighters in the Kosovo capital - Pristina last week. He said tens of thousands of Serbs had left Kosovo and those who were there were subjected to insult and abuse by ethnic Albanian fighters. Mr. Trajkovic underscored that the life of Serbs in Kosovo was constantly in danger.

 
 


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