- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon News

Chicago hope
In the wake of two recent police shootings, rhetoric about police reform in the Windy City remains nothing more than hot air.
By Neal Pollack
[06/14/99]

Cops in the 'hood
Does it help to have police live in the neighborhoods they patrol?
By Debra Dickerson
[06/14/99]

First as tragedy, then as farce
Russia engages NATO in a game of chicken, threatening to send its own troops to Kosovo.
By Laura Rozen
[06/11/99]

Search for a boogeyman
With Clinton and Gingrich out of the picture come Election Day 2000, how will Democrats and Republicans scare the voters? Hint: Imagine Dick Gephardt with horns.
By Jake Tapper
[06/11/99]

Crying wolf
Ellis Cose's Newsweek cover story set out to celebrate America's racial good news. So why did it wind up singing the same old despairing song?
By Joan Walsh
[06/11/99]

Complete archives for News

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

The soldiers, who arrived in Kosovo only a day ago, look to be guarding the graveyard, which has white marble headstones decades old. But if you stand at the wrought iron fence, the smell that greets you is of flesh not buried. A tall mound of loose dirt stands at the back of the cemetery, containing what local villagers say is more than 80 bodies of Kosovo Albanians killed by Serbian forces in early April, shortly after NATO began bombing Serbia. Some of those in the mass grave, local villagers say, are old people who refused or were unable to leave their homes after Serbian forces demanded they leave Kosovo, and were then burned with their homes. Others insist some of the people were shot.

The American soldiers won't let anybody onto the site to verify. They are under orders to guard the site until forensic experts -- with the FBI or international war crimes tribunal -- come to investigate. Villagers gathered in a mosque nearby say there is another mass grave on the other side of the road. But because the hills surrounding the main road have been mined, it was not yet safe to investigate.

This is the mixed homecoming scene that greets the dozens of Kosovo Albanian refugees who have ventured back to the province since a peace agreement was reached late last week. Despite the fact that the first NATO troops moved into Kosovo early Saturday morning, and some 15,000 had deployed into the Connecticut-sized province by Monday, the peace that had settled in Kosovo by then appeared extremely uncertain. Heavily mined fields and hills, and the lingering presence of some uniformed Serbian soldiers and civilian-dressed Serbian paramilitaries just off Kosovo's main roads, has so far prevented NATO troops from venturing very far off Kosovo's four main paved roads, for fear of an unwanted early confrontation.

Meanwhile, some 200 Russian troops led by a three-star general have blockaded themselves inside Kosovo's main airport west of the capital Pristina. For days now, a tense standoff has ensued between the Russians and British NATO troops who had intended to make the airport the headquarters for the NATO Kosovo peacekeeping force, known as KFOR. While diplomats tried to iron-out the increasingly alarming standoff, and Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin spoke by phone, those efforts had not, by late Monday night, succeeded. On Sunday, British NATO soldiers tried to pass the Russian blockade, which only led to the Russians reinforcing their barricade with an additional armored personnel carrier. Ominously, some of the Russian troops at Pristina airport have painted over the KFOR insignia on their armored vehicles with black paint, and are allowing only Yugoslav military vehicles to pass through what they describe as their "sector."

The Russians are not the only hiccup troubling the NATO peacekeeping mission to Kosovo. Two German journalists working for the magazine "Der Stern," were found dead, apparently shot in separate incidents on Sunday, about 30 kilometers south of Pristina. It is not clear yet who killed them or why, but there is a suggestion that some Serbian paramilitary units were deliberately targeting them because they were German. German NATO soldiers also had two separate serious run-ins with Serbian forces who had not yet pulled out of the southwestern Kosovo city of Prizren when the German troops arrived Sunday. One incident led to two German troops being shot, and the other led to two Serbs being killed.

In the Kosovo capital Pristina, under British control, British NATO soldiers shot dead an off-duty Serbian police officer after he reportedly opened pistol fire on them Sunday.

Next page | Soldiers weep at the sight of refugees