jankee swastikka -> ww 0+3

f1f0 at m9ndfukc.com f1f0 at m9ndfukc.com
Thu Apr 22 17:36:45 CEST 1999



jankee swastikka  ->  ww 0+3




To Kill
(Last updated 10:46 AM ET April 22)


BELGRADE (Reuters) - NATO blew up President
Slobodan Milosevic's Belgrade home Thursday but
denied trying to kill him, as the Western alliance edged
closer to sending ground troops into Yugoslavia.

Milosevic and his family were not in the house in the
exclusive Dedinje area at the time of the predawn
attack.

"It was an assassination attempt on the president of
Yugoslavia," Goran Matic, Yugoslav minister without
portfolio, told a news conference.

He said three laser-guided bombs hit the house, one
landing in the main bedroom in an "organized terrorist
criminal act."

Yugoslav television showed the burned-out shell of
the villa with gaping holes where missiles had
smashed through the walls.

Political sources said Milosevic began sleeping in a bunker after a
building close to
his presidential palace, not far from the villa, was destroyed by NATO two weeks
ago.

Wednesday, NATO planes blasted Milosevic's ruling party headquarters.

"We are not targeting President Milosevic or the Serb people. We are
targeting the
military and the military infrastructure that supports the instruments of
oppression in
Kosovo," a Pentagon spokesman told reporters.

A NATO official in Brussels said the residence had functioned as a "presidential
command post."

Seemingly unmoved, Milosevic held talks in Belgrade with Russia's new Balkans
envoy, Viktor Chernomyrdin, who is trying to mediate an end to NATO's clash
with Yugoslavia over its persecution of the ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo.

"We came with specific proposals to put an end to the tragedy in Yugoslavia,"
Yugoslav state-run news agency Tanjug quoted Chernomyrdin as saying.

State television later showed pictures of the pair meeting in the Beli Dvor
presidential palace in a Belgrade suburb.

In Washington, U.S. officials said NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana had
authorized the alliance's military command to review plans for the possible
use of
ground troops in Kosovo.

But one added: "The president has no intention of introducing ground troops
into a
non-permissive environment. We have complete confidence in our air campaign.
We will prosecute it until our demands are met."

British and French officials said no decision on whether to send troops
into Kosovo
would be taken at this weekend's NATO 50th anniversary summit in Washington.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a German radio interview he believed a
U.N. mandate would be sought for any international troop presence in Kosovo.
None was sought for the air war under way against Yugoslavia.

Defense Secretary William Cohen said a study last year concluded that as many as
75,000 ground troops would be needed in Kosovo alone and that fighting through
to Belgrade and the rest of Serbia could require 200,000 soldiers or more.

In Brussels, EU officials said the European Union was rushing through a ban on
the shipment of oil to Yugoslavia and the measure could take effect from
the middle
of next week. Montenegro, Serbia's Western-leaning partner within federal
Yugoslavia, said it hoped to be excluded from any oil ban.

The conflict continued to send shock waves through Serbia's Balkan neighbors.
Serb forces and Albanian guards exchanged fire on their border Thursday,
international officials said.

In Montenegro the border with Croatia was operating normally after the Yugoslav
army closed it for two days. Tensions in the capital, Podgorica, were high
ahead of
an anti-NATO rally.

In Sofia, hundreds of protesters denouncing the NATO strikes gathered outside
Bulgaria's parliament as the government worked to win legal backing for NATO to
use its air space.

In Romania, parliament voted overwhelmingly to grant a NATO request for
unrestricted use of its airspace.

President Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair met at the White
House and
agreed the NATO summit would show the alliance's strong resolve to defeat
"ethnic
cleansing" in Kosovo.

Three powerful explosions shook Belgrade early Thursday, 20 missiles rained
down on the Batajnica military air field on the capital's outskirts and a
factory in
central Serbia was hit, the Serbian news agency Beta said.

Tanjug said warplanes bombed an ethnic Albanian area of the Kosovo capital
Pristina later Thursday morning.

A Pentagon spokesman said air strikes had damaged all four major routes from the
Serbian heartland to Kosovo, cutting supplies to Yugoslav forces there by
half. But
he said they were "still responding to political guidance and still conducting
operations."

Air raids appear to have done little to stop Milosevic's forces from
driving ethnic
Albanians around and out of Kosovo.

A U.N. aid official in Macedonia said Thursday a child died in a snowbound
mountain hamlet while Macedonian authorities kept relief workers waiting
for days
for access to some 6,000 Kosovo refugees stranded there without food.

Milosevic, in an interview broadcast by a Texas television station, denied
having a
policy of expelling ethnic Albanians. He blamed the refugee floods on NATO
bombing.

"There was never a policy of this country -- and my policy -- to expel any
citizen of
Yugoslavia from any part of this country," he said from Belgrade.

"You know that before the 24th of March, when they started their damn bombing
and they started their dirty aggression against this country, there was not
one single
refugee.

"I believe when aggression stop, when bombing stop, then it will be very easy to
continue political process," Milosevic said in English.

International organizations say some 960,000 people have fled or been expelled
from Kosovo in the last year, 590,000 of them since NATO began air attacks on
Yugoslavia.



jankee swastikka  ->  ww 0+3




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