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Date:  Sun, 2 May 1999 16:42:48 +0900
From: Hendrik
To: Multiple recipients of NETSOURCE-L <netsource-l@mail.think.service>
Subject:  [NS] Voices on NATO's engagement in Yugoslavia (1)

Tuesday, April 13, 1999

BALKAN FALLOUT FROM NATO BOMBING

VIVIAN STROMBERG, madre1998@aol.SPAMTRAP.com, http://www.madre.org Executive
director of MADRE (a group which has been working with multi-ethnic,
democratic women's organizations in the Balkans since 1993), Stromberg
said: "We must move beyond a yearning for 'good guys' in the Yugoslav
conflict and remember that behind the various political formations and
armed groups are communities of people. In Kosovo, whole towns and villages
are being burned out and butchered. In Serbia, people are being terrorized
by NATO bombing... Both must stop; instead, the United Nations must do its
job."

MICHAEL SIMMONS, msimmons@afsc.SPAMTRAP.org, http://www.afsc.org Director of
European Programs for the American Friends Service Committee, which has
been involved in relief efforts in the Balkans for six years, Simmons said:
"NATO has been very insensitive to how disastrous the accelerated 'ethnic
cleansing' has been for already-weak Albania and Macedonia. Albania is
extremely poor and has been unstable with a fragile democracy that barely
has control over the entire country. Macedonia already has internal ethnic
conflict between the Slavic Macedonian majority and the Albanian minority.
This has the potential to do in the Balkans what the Vietnam War did to
Southeast Asia. It could spill over into Albania and Macedonia. The KLA is
going to be recruiting in the refugee camps. The camps will become more
politicized and will be seen as legitimate targets by the Yugoslavian
military... The per capita effect of the hundreds of thousands of Kosovar
refugees flooding across their borders is the equivalent of something like
15 million refugees suddenly entering the United States. AFSC will continue
to give aid to citizens of all of Serbia, not just the ethnic Albanians."

ZOLTAN GROSSMAN, zoltan@geography.SPAMTRAP.wisc.edu Grossman, a geographer at the
University of Wisconsin, said: "NATO claims the bombing of Yugoslavia is a
'humanitarian intervention' to prevent the ethnic cleansing, but the
bombing and the ethnic cleansing actually feed off of each other. NATO
claims that it favors a multi-ethnic future for Kosovo and the rest of the
Balkans -- yet a 1995 offensive by the Croatian army ethnically cleansed at
least 100,000 Serbs from the Krajina region. Washington not only failed to
object to that violent ethnic cleansing but actually helped facilitate it.
Some of those expelled Serbs resettled in Kosovo, exacerbating the ethnic
tensions that have now erupted into war. In the Dayton Accords, the U.S.
continued to undermine the prospects for multi-ethnic cooperation in
Bosnia. Now we are told that the NATO bombers are attacking Milosevic and
'the Serbs.' Yet bombs have fallen on neutral Montenegro, the ethnically
Hungarian northern region of Vojvodina in Yugoslavia and Serbian democratic
opposition cities such as Nis. The war may yet result in the ethnic
partition of what remains of Yugoslavia into two or three countries."

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

--

Source:
Institute for Public Accuracy
915 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045
Tel. (202) 347-0020
URL: http://www.accuracy.org
E-Mail: <ipa@accuracy.SPAMTRAP.org>

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