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A refugee's escape from hell
With rumors of peace, Serbs are making a last-ditch attempt to change the ethnic mix inside Kosovo forever.
By Laura Rozen
[06/02/99]

Under the volcano
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By David Lazarus
[06/02/99]

Three strikes and you're in
California's Democratic governor and Legislature fight each other over whether to build a new prison.
By Anthony York
[06/01/99]

Naked city?
A class-action suit seeks damages for thousands of New Yorkers the Giuliani administration admits were strip-searched after being arrested for misdemeanors.
By Ron Feemster
[06/01/99]

New York stakes
The GOP is putting out a line that Hillary Clinton's entry into the Senate race would hurt Al Gore's presidential bid, but the opposite is true.
By Joe Conason
[06/01/99]

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For Milosevic, the distinction between a NATO and U.N. peacekeeping force has been one of the primary obstacles to negotiating Balkan peace. But why has Milosevic held out for an expanded U.N. role in the former Yugoslavia?

Is it peace yet? By Laura Rozen The beginning of the end By Daryl Lindsey

It is not as if the United Nations is on his side. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has yet to condemn the NATO bombing. Last month, a U.N. tribunal indicted Milosevic and his associates as war criminals, while the U.N.'s World Court has thrown out Belgrade's lawsuit against NATO. Not only has the U.N. Security Council issued more than 50 resolutions against his regime in the last decade, Mary Robinson, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, has also blasted the genocide in Kosovo. Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N.'s humanitarian coordinator, returned from a visit there to tell the Security Council that there was a "rampage of killing, burning, looting, forced expulsion, violence, vendetta and terror." He concluded that nothing Belgrade had said "could account for, explain or justify the extent and magnitude of the brutal treatment of civilians." The U.N. Fund For Population Activities has released a report detailing extensive raping of Kosovar women by the Serbian forces. The list of condemnatory U.N. reports is as long as the refugee trails out of the devastated province.

If, despite all this, Milosevic entertains such warm feelings toward the United Nations, he is, clearly, seriously short of friends. But that is the secret. He only needs one friend on the Security Council with a veto, and he actually has two -- Russia and China. He probably entertains fond memories of his relationship with the U.N. peacekeepers in Bosnia and Croatia, who, almost to the end, were politely obliging to the Serbian forces. In particular, he will remember the performance of the Russian contingent in Eastern Slavonia, where Col. Victor Loginov dealt so generously with the Serbian military that he joined the indicted Serbian war criminal Arkan as an advisor.

Conversely, the Kosovars, though they appreciate the indictment, the reports and the help of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, have only to cast their minds back to the U.N. monitors who stood next to the Serbian batteries and counted the shells as they fell on Sarajevo, year after year. They think of Srebrenica and the 7,000 men who were never seen again after the Serbs took them from under the complacent noses of the U.N. troops.

Next page | The U.N. fig leaf