Go to: [irish news]

Escaping refugees just glad to be alive

LUMNIJE MEHMETI did not mind leaving her home behind or that it took nearly a day to drive 30 miles. Even abandoning her car in the no-man's land between Yugoslavia and Macedonia meant nothing to her.
"Thank God I escaped and I am still alive. Who cares what happens to what we left behind?" the 28-year-old said. She came from Urosevac, a town outside Kosovo's capital of Pristina she said has almost been emptied of Albanians. Linda, a 26-year-old woman next to her, had red eyes from crying much of the way from Vitina, south-east of Urosevac. "I don't care where I am or how I got here. It smells like freedom here," she said.
Both were among more than 5,000 people stretching for more than three miles into Yugoslavia at the Blace border crossing, near the Macedonian capital Skopje. Kosovo's other neighbours, Montenegro and Albania, have also been coping with the onslaught of refugees, a total of 118,000 since NATO air strikes began a week ago.
International relief agencies and governments have started rushing supplies to those who have reached Kosovo's neighbours in recent days. Top UN relief officials plan to meet today to draw up a new international appeal for Kosovo, given that the existing appeal for £40 million was no longer enough.
Mehmeti was one of the lucky ones. More than 3,000 fellow Kosovo Albanians spent three days on top a nearby snow-covered mountain without food and water, sleeping in the freezing cold. They said at least five people, including two infants, died in the trek.
To make things worse, they were unwelcome. After slogging for more than 18 hours through mud tracks and streams and then scrambling up goat tracks to reach the summit of the 4,200-foot mountain that separates Kosovo from Macedonia, they ran into the Macedonian army.
Although government and Albanian minority leaders have tried to play it down, many nationalists fear Macedonia's delicate ethnic balance could be affected by the influx of refugees. Ethnic Albanians are thought to make up as much as 40% of Macedonia's 2.2 million population.
The number of refugees has neared 30,000, one-third more than Macedonia has said it can handle, officials have made repeated appeals for help from neighbouring countries.
With the Yugoslavs behind them and the Macedonians in front of them blocking their way, the refugees had nowhere to go. Most were from villages and towns around the border, so they knew the frontier was mined. Cows in recent days have set off a number of anti-tank mines.
In addition, no-one knew they were on top of the mountain except for local villagers. It was only after they alerted the media and humanitarian agencies that their plight became known and they straggled down into the valley and shelter.
For one man, the wait was especially hard. His wife had been shot in the town of Kacanik, close to Blace. "We were hiding in a basement, and my wife went out, and they started shooting," he said, asking not to be identified. He sat over his pregnant wife in a nearby village. She had two bullet wounds in her thigh. They carried her on a stretcher to get her to Macedonia after their house was shelled.
It was even worse for the ethnic Albanians fleeing Pristina. Unlike many of the rural people on the mountain, most are white-collar city dwellers. The snail's pace at the border was not what they expected, and the realisation that they also might not be wanted suddenly hit.
"I don't know why they are doing this, one maltreatment to the next," said Arta, a 26-year-old university student. But for many, the wait was certainly worth it.
In Pristina, people rarely leave their homes, shops are closed or looted, and electricity is shut off at night.
Many said that although they had not seen any killings, they had heard about executions, hangings and other atrocities. Serb paramilitary forces and armed civilians drove through the streets shooting in the air and randomly looting and burning houses.
"It was becoming more and more scary every day. People are scared of Serb paramilitary attacks. We never know what is going to happen. You never sleep. You live in constant fear," Arta said.
The decision to go varied for many. Some just decided to leave with their neighbours, others decided to go in groups. Yugoslav police made things easy for them.
"It's almost as if they organised this. Police are helping. Many times on the road they say faster, faster," said Valdan Haliti, a 25-year-old engineer, who said he decided to leave early Monday along with a university professor after they heard a rumour that a convoy was being organised.
"It was the shooting in the streets that morning that did it," he said.

NATO to intensify bombing of Yugoslavia

SERBIAN troops and tanks were reported closing in on a huge gathering of refugees inside the province as NATO said it was intensifying its bombing of Yugoslavia and there was no end date for the campaign.
The KLA, the guerrilla Kosovan group armed by many of the NATO member states, are recruiting any men trying to leave the Serbian province.
As well as intensifying the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo of its majority Albanian residents, the Serbs have also been trying to identify all history of the ethnic population by destroying all property, birth, marriage, death, financial and other records.
Russia alarmed Washington by announcing it was sending a naval ship to the Mediterranean and might send six more.
With more than 125,000 ethnic Albanians having fled their homes, and hundreds of thousands more on their way into Albania and Macedonia, World Food Programme executive director Catherine Bertini said without immediate aid inside ten days many of the refugees would be facing starvation.
A NATO spokesman said Secretary-General Javier Solana had authorised the military to extend the range and tempo of operations to maximise the effectiveness of the campaign.
Western diplomats in the Balkans said Serbian forces with tanks and heavy artillery had overrun ethnic Albanian guerrillas trying to defend the Pagarusa Valley in central Kosovo, where as many as 50,000 refugees are sheltering.
"The KLA put up a fight but from what I can gather they were blown away by T-55 tanks. There's nothing between the civilians sheltering in the valley and the Serbs. There's obviously the potential for a huge tragedy," said one diplomat in frequent contact with the KLA.
The valley, about 30 miles southwest of Kosovo's capital Pristina, does not lie near international borders and there is no easy escape route.
US diplomatic and Kosovan sources said two Kosovo Albanian leaders reported to have been summarily executed at the weekend — Fehmi Agani, a veteran politician who played a key role in the Rambouillet peace talks, and Baton Haxhiu, the Koha Ditore newspaper's editor-in-chief — were alive.
The Serb-run Media Centre in Pristina said that Kosovo Albanian so called president Ibrahim Rugova, who had been reported missing, was alive and under Serbian police protection.

Hackers launch blitz in cyberspace

AS the Kosovo crisis continued to escalate and NATO forces prepared to step up their air strikes it emerged the conflict was also being played out on the Internet.
NATO spokesman Jamie Shea announced the organisation's home page had been targeted by anonymous hackers in Belgrade, making it difficult to access information which is regularly posted there.
He told a news conference in Brussels: ''Since Sunday the service from our Internet home page has been erratic. We have looked at this very carefully and it seems that we have been dealing with some hackers in Belgrade who have hacked into our website and caused line saturation of the server by using 'ping' bombardment strategy.''
He added: ''It has also been saturated by one individual who is currently sending us 2,000 e-mails a day and we are dealing with macro viruses from Yugoslavia into our e-mail system.''
Since the start of the conflict, the information superhighway has emerged as one of the key weapons in the battle by both sides to win the hearts and minds of the public.
Rivalries on the ground in the Balkans are being mirrored in cyberspace where websites can be found representing both sides of the escalating crisis in a propaganda war.
By simply accessing the World Wide Web computer network, people can download the latest news on the Kosovo crisis, whether it be through official governmental web pages, independent organisations and groups, or through chat lines and e-mail sites.
One of the major Serbian sites is the home page of the Serbian Ministry of Information, which, among other things, contains reports on what it describes as Albanian terrorist activity.
A slightly more aggressive stance is taken by the Serbian Network which uses humour to denigrate the action by NATO and claims it was awarded Political Site of The Year in October last year. The site is a rallying point against Western figures such as Tony Blair, President Clinton and Robin Cook, who are photographed with the caption Wanted – War Criminal.
On the same page, readers can find a spoof of a statement from the United States which claims: ''We and our NATO allies are attacking a country that has not attacked us or any other country. We are not acting under the sanction of the UN or any other font of international law. We are in fact acting in direct contravention of the UN Charter.'' Another site set up by the Serbs, and based in Kosovo's capital, Pristina, reports heavily on every attack by the Kosovo Liberation Army, often giving hourly updates and bulletins.
The British Government has also joined the fray, posting up-to-date information on several of its official sites, including the Ministry of Defence, Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
Yesterday, Defence Secretary George Robertson disclosed the MoD had translated its Internet website into Serbian to counter censorship by Belgrade of the news.
He said that 1,400 of the 150,000 hits on the site in the last 24 hours had come from within Yugoslavia.
And he later encouraged people with direct information about violence in Kosovo to contact the internet site of the War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
Cliff Jones, group editor of news for AOL, one of the world's largest online service providers, said this was the first major war in which the internet had played such a significant role.
He said that this was true in terms of it aiding propaganda campaigns, but also true in terms of the volume of information available to the public.
Mr Jones said: ''It is pretty spectacular. There are so many eye witness reports and people are clambering over each other with their websites, desperate to get them out.
''There is so much information that, at worst, it may be confusing, but at best it is the ultimate freedom of information.''
Among the services AOL has provided over the past weeks was a live online auditorium which entailed an AOL member in Belgrade speaking over the Net to other members as the allied bombing took place.
Mr Jones said: ''After most of the official news gatherers were forced to leave Kosovo, the war seemed further away, but the internet helps to lessen that distance.''

Judges confirm very real risk of heart disease in diet of burgers

by Stephen Howard and Cathy Gordon, PA News
A DIET of McDonald's burgers may lead to the very real risk of heart disease, three Court of Appeal judges ruled yesterday.
This finding alone meant another triumph for Britain's most famous do-it-yourself lawyers, who took on the might of the giant fast food chain after it accused them of libel.
Supporters of environmental campaigners Dave Morris and Helen Steel celebrated outside the Law Courts as the pair overturned some of the High Court rulings in their mammoth legal battle with McDonald's.
Lords Justices Pill, May and Keane handed down a 309-page judgment which ruled that it was fair comment to say McDonald's employees worldwide ''do badly in terms of pay and conditions.''
They also said it was true that ''if one eats enough McDonald's food, one's diet may well become high in fat etc, with the very real risk of heart disease.''
The judges said their findings ''must have a serious effect on their trading reputation since it goes to the very business in which they are engaged.
''In our judgment it must have a greater impact on the respondent's (McDonald's) reputation than any other of the charges that the trial judge had found to be true.''
The judges said they had ''considerable sympathy'' with the pair's argument that the leaflet meant ''that there is a respectable (not cranky) body of medical opinion which links a junk food diet with a risk of cancer and heart disease.''
But they said the allegations about cancer were not justified. And there was no truth in the charge about food poisoning and this was ''especially serious'' for a company in the restaurant business.
The judges also upheld that McDonald's was not responsible for starvation in the Third World or for the destruction of the rainforests , allegations which they said were ''very harmful to a company's reputation.''
They reduced McDonald's £60,000 damages awarded in the High Court against Ms Steel and Mr Morris to £40,000.

Pope sends peace envoy to Belgrade in search of truce

POPE John Paul's decision to send his foreign minister to Belgrade with a personal peace appeal to Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic is a dramatic move that underscores his worry about the Balkan conflict.
The Vatican said Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran would travel to Belgrade today. The Pope's move was even more bold considering that Serbs, who are mostly Orthodox, in the past have often portrayed the Vatican as being their foe.
Germany and the Vatican were the first to recognise the independence of overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Croatia in 1991, which Serbs saw as precipitating the breakup of Yugoslavia.
During the Bosnian war, the Pope tried to send another envoy, Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, to the Balkans during the Easter season to say services on his behalf. But Bosnian Serbs did not agree to the trip.
The Vatican summoned ambassadors from NATO countries and from UN Security Council members on Tuesday and said later that military operations should stop on both sides. It also told the envoys the UN and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) should be involved in a Kosovo peace process.
The Pope's move could mark a new frontier in Vatican diplomacy because most of the Holy See's past mediation attempts have involved mainly Catholic countries or Catholic groups.
The Vatican successfully mediated a territorial dispute between Chile and Argentina in the early 1980s but a papal envoy in 1981 failed to convince the IRA's Bobby Sands to stop his hunger strike in a Belfast prison.
The papal letter that Tauran will be bearing may include an appeal to Milosevic to stop violence in Kosovo in exchange for Vatican promises to try to convince NATO to halt air strikes, Church sources said.
The Pope wants this Easter season not to be marred by violence and warfare.
Father Giacomo Bini, head of the Catholic Franciscan order, founded by St Francis, appealed for an Easter truce. He said: "We Franciscans, who are in every area of the Balkans, ask for peace. We beg that everyone be allowed to celebrate Easter in peace. We dare to ask for this in the name of all those who are not allowed to have their voices heard."
If Bini's appeal for a Easter truce becomes reality, it would recall October 27, 1986, when the Pope managed to silence nearly all the guns around the world for a day. He held an unprecedented gathering of world religious leaders who prayed for peace in Assisi, birthplace of St Francis. Nearly every guerrilla group and government in conflict around the world heeded his call for a day's truce.

Sailor found guilty of 52 murders

A MASS KILLER stood impassively in an iron cage yesterday as judge read the verdict finding him guilty of murdering 52 people, including 10 children.
A Ukrainian state prosecutor has demanded the death sentence for Anatoli Onoprienko, 39, and a 15-year prison term for Serhiy Rogozin, a 36-year-old Afghan war veteran who was his alleged accomplice.
Onoprienko, a sailor, was arrested in April 1996. A stream of killings first drew public attention in December 1995 with the murder of an entire family in a secluded village home.
He has repeatedly confessed to all the killings, among them some carried out in 1989 together with Rogozin and the rest in 1995-96.
The start of Onoprienko's trial last November in Zhytomyr, 87 miles west of the capital Kiev, drew hundreds of city residents to the courtroom.
But the court was nearly empty yesterday and both the spectators and two accused displayed little emotion. The small, thin-faced and balding Onoprienko, in customary running shoes and an oversized jacket, kept looking at the floor as the reading went on.
Onoprienko has refused the right to make any last statements, but said in a prison interview with Associated Press that he was not afraid of the likely death sentence.
''I've been close to death so many times that it's even interesting for me now to venture into the after world, to see what is there, after this death,'' Onoprienko said.
After killing and robbing nine people in 1989, prosecutors said that Onoprienko went on a rampage in October 1995, leaving a bloody trail that spread terror across this former Soviet republic.
In western Ukraine, the anxiety was so high that few villagers ventured outside after dark. Police launched a nationwide manhunt for the killer, who left few clues and no live witnesses.
Prosecutors said Onoprienko, armed with a sawed-off hunting rifle, continued to elude police, murdering 43 men, women and children in less than six months. He was finally arrested at his girlfriend's home in Yavoriv, near the Polish border.
''I'm a sinner. I've done much evil in my life. I've robbed and killed,'' Onoprienko said in the interview. ''But I'm a robot, I don't feel anything.''

Russian punch-up over Kosovo

A DEBATE in the raucous Russian parliament on calls to end NATO air strikes on Yugoslavia turned violent yesterday when Communist and liberal MPs ended up in a punch-up.
The scuffle started after Communists and other hardliners criticised a failed peacemaking mission to Belgrade this week by a group of Russian liberals, including former senior Cabinet members, Yegor Gaidar, Boris Nemtsov and Boris Fyodorov.
The three liberals are favourite targets for hardliners, who assail them as Western agents who have ruined Russia's economy with botched free-market reforms.
When hardliner Vladimir Semago called the trio ''political parrots,'' liberal Sergei Yushenkov responded by calling Semago a ''political prostitute.''
Semago approached Yushenkov from behind and slapped a microphone away from his face. Yushenkov jumped to his feet and hit Semago in the chest as the two men called each other names.
Communist Vasily Shandybin came to Semago's aid and began boxing with Yushenkov, but other MPs quickly pulled them apart.
Russia's parliament has seen numerous scuffles in the last several years, mostly involving right-wing politician, Vladimir Zhirinovksy, who once threw water at his colleagues. Another time he pulled the hair of a female deputy and traded punches with her.

Serbs burn Kosovars out and herd them onto refugee trains at gunpoint

ETHNIC Albanians arriving in Macedonia from the Kosovo capital Pristina yesterday recounted how Serb police burned their homes, herded them into a train and shipped them off to Macedonia.
''I left while my house was still burning,'' said Selvete Gujunovsci, 28, the mother of a three-month-old baby and five-year-old child.
They said on yesterday afternoon they were forced out of their houses and onto the train — some at gunpoint.
The train proceeded to the next town, Lipjan, where they stopped and remained for six or seven hours. Serb paramilitary forces surrounded the train, they said and no one was allowed to leave.
''We left people behind. They are in terrible danger. We don't care about our houses, which were burned. We will rebuild those. But we need help,'' said one weeping woman.
''Bring us bread,'' said the woman, who was afraid to give her name. ''If they stay there one more day they will die. Someone help our people.''
Before the Kosovo conflict began last year, Pristina had about 200,000 residents — 25,000 were Serbs.
Victor Krasniqi, 26, a Catholic Albanian, said paramilitary forces forced him and other Albanians from one neighbourhood to the next, before reaching the station.
''First they pushed us towards Dragodan, then they said to us to go to go Vranevc and there we heard lots of shooting and people said there was fighting between Serbs and KLA,'' he said.
''I have one message,'' said Krasniqi. ''With Pristina now empty, Nato can just bomb all the city.''
Others told of how they forced to leave dead and dying relatives behind.
''His sisters, we left them dead because they were shot, dead. We couldn't get them because of the sniper fire,'' said one woman of her husband. ''We left another sister and her daughter behind because they were wounded.''
The situation was just as bad at the Blace vehicle crossing. Refugees coming across said cars were piled up along a 17-mile stretch that backs up to Kacanik, in Kosovo.
Many people arrived on foot, saying they were forced to leave their cars behind, while Yugoslav forces confiscated the vehicles.
Macedonian authorities were also hampering the passage of cars, often letting women and children across and holding up the men for extensive document checks. Those who made across the border said hundreds of others remained in the neutral zone.

Serbs accused of shelling fleeing refugees in Albania 

ALBANIA yesterday accused Yugoslav forces of firing on two Albanian border villages where refugees from Kosovo were being housed.
Albania's ambassador to NATO, Artur Kuko, could not say if there had been casualties in the incidents, which took place in the previous 24 hours.
He was unable to name the villages concerned or give further details, but said in the past week Yugoslav soldiers had also made incursions into his country, crossing into Albanian territory.
"I can tell you that as of last evening there have been provocations. Two Albanian villages in Albanian territory have been shelled. There are plenty of refugees, it is a very small area," he told a news conference at NATO headquarters in Brussels.
Since hostilities erupted a year ago between Yugoslav forces and the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army, Albania has on a number of occasions accused Yugoslav forces of firing into its territory. Kuko did not say what kind of weapons the Yugoslavs had used in the most recent incident, but mountainous terrain would probably preclude the deployment of heavy weapons.
Kuko appealed for international relief aid for the thousands of refugees forced across Albania's borders by what he called Yugoslav ethnic cleansing.
He said there were now more than 100,000 Kosovo refugees in his country and a similar number were heading for the border from in and around the southern Kosovo town of Prizren.
"Thousands more are coming every hour," he said.
Kuko said the situation demanded urgent action and named Italy, Greece, Turkey, the United States, Germany, Britain and France as nations best placed to help.
"The crisis is being aggravated every hour and is well beyond what we can do," Kuko said.
The thousands of refugees arriving in Albania were in desperate need of food, hygiene and shelter materials and clothing, all of which Kuko said were beginning to arrive.

© Examiner Publications Ltd, 1999