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Israel Bombs Lebanon,
Killing Nine
BEIRUT, Lebanon -- Beirut was
blacked out and residents in northern Israel huddled in bomb
shelters today during the heaviest fighting between Israel and
Lebanon in three years. The attacks killed seven Lebanese and two
Israelis.
The Israeli airstrikes against
Lebanon's infrastructure also wounded 57 people since they began
Thursday.
Israeli jets and helicopters hit
two power substations outside the capital, Beirut; guerrilla
targets in the eastern city of Baalbek, a stronghold of the
Hezbollah militants; and bridges on Lebanon's main coastal road.
The Israeli army said in a
statement that its planes carried out the bombings in response to
Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel Thursday that wounded
one soldier and four civilians. Those rockets were fired after
Israeli shelling wounded a Lebanese civilian.
About a dozen Hezbollah Katyusha
rockets hit the Israeli border town Kiryat Shemonah. Two
municipal workers were killed when a rocket smashed into City
Hall at midnight Thursday. Both men were part of the city's
emergency response team to rocket attacks, Israeli radio reports
said.
At least 13 others were injured,
one seriously.
At a news conference in Tel Aviv,
Israel, Maj. Gen. Dan Halutz said the army would reassess its
activities today. He said the goal was to restore calm, but
"if we determine that this is not the intention of the other
side, we will continue to operate until we return to a peaceful
situation.''
He warned that if the rocket
attacks continue, "the Israeli reaction will continue to be
harsh.'' He said Hezbollah and those who aid the guerrillas would
be targeted.
In Beirut, Lebanese Prime Minister
Salim Hoss deplored the Israeli attacks and met the U.S.
ambassador to ask for Washington's intervention.
"What happened amounts to a
catastrophe and is new proof of Israel's unlimited
barbarianism,'' Hoss said in a statement.
Lebanese President Emile Lahoud
called an emergency Cabinet meeting for today.
In Jerusalem, Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, scheduled to hand over power to Ehud
Barak in two weeks, issued a warning today after a meeting of his
security Cabinet ended.
"If there's no quiet on the
border, there's no quiet in Lebanon,'' Israeli radio stations
quoted Netanyahu as saying.
Incoming Prime Minister Ehud Barak
has pledged to withdraw Israeli troops from Lebanon within a
year, and some fear the withdrawal could intensify Hezbollah
attacks on northern Israel.
The exchange of fire was the most
serious escalation of hostilities since a 1996 Israeli offensive
in Lebanon killed 175 people.
Hezbollah is leading a guerrilla
war to oust 1,500 Israeli soldiers and 2,500 militiamen of the
Israeli-allied South Lebanon Army from a zone that Israel has
occupied in southern Lebanon since 1985.
In the Beirut attacks, the
warplanes wrecked the Jamhour substation, blacking out a large
part of the city, killing five firefighters and wounding 12
people.
Early today, six hours after the
Jamhour strike, Israeli aircraft struck the Bsalim substation,
setting it on fire. The attack left more Beirut districts without
power. There were no reports of casualties.
In scenes reminiscent of the
1975-90 civil war, Beirut shopkeepers dusted off neighborhood
generators to supply customers with electricity. Lebanese troops
took up positions at major roads and intersections. Soldiers set
up checkpoints and patrolled the streets.
Beirut International Airport,
which closed for several hours as a precaution, resumed
operations this morning.
In Baalbek, 30 people were wounded
in the Israeli attacks, security officials reported.
Israeli planes also hit three
bridges on the coastal highway between Beirut and Sidon, 25 miles
to the south. Two people were killed and eight others were
wounded at Damour, a town on the highway.
The airstrikes destroyed the Awali
River Bridge outside Sidon, the main bridge between south and
central Lebanon. Two Lebanese soldiers and five civilians were
wounded.
Residents of northern Israel
remained in underground bomb shelters today. In Kiryat Shemonah,
streets were deserted. A few grocery stores remained open to
allow residents to stock up on supplies.
Russian Lawmakers OK
Troops
MOSCOW -- The deployment of 3,600
Russian peacekeeping troops in Kosovo was approved today by
lawmakers, despite fears the soldiers may be threatened by the
province's ethnic Albanian population.
The Federation Council, the upper
chamber of parliament, gave approval for the move after
closed-door hearings. The vote clears the way for the rapid
dispatch of several battalions of Russian paratroopers.
Oleg Korolyov, the chamber's
deputy speaker, said the deployment was needed to help preserve
Yugoslavia's territorial integrity and to ensure stability in
that part of Europe. Russia opposes any move for independence for
Kosovo.
Some council members opposed the
plan, saying the troops could be threatened by the Kosovo
Albanians. Russia is an ally of Yugoslavia and expressed strong
support for Belgrade during the conflict with NATO.
The Kosovo Liberation Army has
said Russians would be unwelcome because Russian mercenaries
allegedly took part in wartime Serb atrocities.
A Defense Ministry spokesman said
the government had no information about any Russian volunteers
having fought in Kosovo.
Other lawmakers complained that
Russia did not have a commanding position in the peacekeeping
force and would be junior to NATO commanders. Mintimer Shaimiyev,
president of the Tatarstan Republic, said the Russians would be
"incapable of radically influencing the situation.''
There was also concern about who
would pay for the deployment, estimated to cost $60 million a
year. The Russian government is desperately short of money and
already unable to fund much of the defense budget.
Senior defense officials had said
the deployment could begin within hours of approval, but other
commanders said today it would be a week before the first troops
arrived.
The force is to join 200
paratroopers who dashed into Kosovo 12 days ago from their camp
in Bosnia, where they were serving as peacekeepers.
The Russians entered Kosovo before
any NATO troops and quickly seized the province's airport.
Russian and U.S. representatives subsequently reached a
compromise on the peacekeepers' deployment.
Russia dropped its initial demand
for a separate sector in Kosovo, agreeing to place its forces in
the U.S., British, French and German sectors. However, it
insisted that its soldiers remain under Russian command.
Also today, the Russian airline
Aeroflot said it had resumed regular passenger flights to
Belgrade.
Aeroflot will provide four flights
a week to the Yugoslav capital, the ITAR-Tass news agency
reported. The service was suspended March 26 after the start of
NATO air attacks on Yugoslavia.
Plans to resume the passenger
service earlier were stalled after Hungary delayed permission for
Aeroflot flights to cross its territory en route to Yugoslavia,
according to Russian officials.
Ethnic Albanians
Torch Serb Homes
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia -- Ethnic
Albanians reportedly torched Serb houses and looted Serb-owned
shops in Kosovo as Washington offered a $5 million reward for
help in convicting Slobodan Milosevic and others wanted for war
crimes in the Balkans.
In Belgrade, the Yugoslav
parliament was scheduled to vote today on measures giving
Milosevic's government power to crack down on dissent and keep
its wartime controls over banking and the economy, despite the
assembly's decision to lift the state of war imposed after NATO
began bombing March 24.
Milosevic's autocratic rule has
been shaken by the Kosovo conflict, in which Serb-led Yugoslavia
sustained heavy bombing damage and was forced to agree to
withdraw troops from Kosovo and allow a NATO-led force into the
province.
Ethnic Albanians made up 90
percent of Kosovo's prewar population of 2.1 million, and many
favored independence for the province.
In Pristina, British soldiers
swarmed around the commercial center of the Kosovo capital late
Thursday in an attempt to curb looting. During the 78-day NATO
air bombardment, ethnic Albanians fleeing to nearby countries
spoke of Serbs looting Albanian-owned businesses.
Now that Yugoslav forces have left
the province under an international peace plan, ethnic Albanians
are seeking revenge.
Fires believed set by ethnic
Albanians leveled Serb homes and much of the Gypsy quarter
Thursday in the western Kosovo city of Pec. Serbs complained of
an intensifying campaign of retaliation that was driving some
from their homes.
The fires started before daybreak,
and columns of smoke rose into the sky over the city throughout
the day. A dozen homes burned by early evening, one in sight of a
Serbian Orthodox monastery where the city's Serbs are taking
shelter.
Gavrilo Gojkovic, a Serb in Pec,
said Kosovo Liberation Army rebels pushed him from his home with
guns and a knife at his back.
"This is Kosovo. You have no
place here now,'' Gojkovic claimed the KLA fighters told him.
Scores of Serbs sat in packed cars lined up outside the
monastery, waiting for a NATO escort into neighboring Montenegro.
The reprisals continued despite
appeals by NATO and Western governments for ethnic Albanians to
allow peacekeepers and international investigators to bring to
justice those responsible for the brutal crackdown, which ended
with the peace accord.
"I would like to call on all
Kosovo Albanians, and indeed on all the other people of Kosovo,
not to allow ethnic hatred or the desire for revenge to cut their
hearts,'' NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana told reporters
Thursday during a visit to Pristina.
He spoke after meeting for more
than 90 minutes with Serb and Albanian representatives, including
Hashim Thaci, political leader of the KLA.
"After this conversation, I
really think there is hope,'' Solana said. He praised Thaci for
signing an agreement with NATO calling for the KLA to
demilitarize.
The New York Times reported today
that Thaci and two of his lieutenants directed a campaign to
thwart potential rivals within the KLA, ordering purges, arrests
and the killing of as many as half a dozen top rebel commanders.
The newspaper said the charges
were made in interviews with about a dozen former and current KLA
officials, two former Albanian officials and several Western
diplomats.
None of the rebel officials
interviewed said they saw Thaci or his aides execute anyone.
However, they described incidents in which rivals had been killed
shortly after Thaci or an aide had threatened them with death.
Through a spokesman, Thaci denied
responsibility for any such killings.
An estimated 50,000 Serbs have
fled Kosovo since the end of the war, fearing Albanian revenge
for Serb atrocities and for years of oppression. Some 860,000
ethnic Albanians fled Kosovo beginning in March.
In an effort to bring justice to
the thousands of victims of the Serb crackdown, the U.S. State
Department announced the $5 million reward for information
leading to the arrest and conviction of people sought by the U.N.
tribunal trying war crimes cases from the conflicts in Bosnia and
Kosovo.
In addition to Milosevic and four
colleagues indicted last month for alleged crimes in Kosovo, the
tribunal also has indicted former Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan
Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. They were charged in the massacre of
6,000 Bosnian Muslims in 1995.
In Belgrade, the Yugoslav
parliament Thursday rescinded the state of war imposed March 24.
Effective Saturday, the decision lifts media restrictions, a
prohibition on military-age men leaving the country and a ban on
public gatherings.
But the government is seeking to
maintain some controls to prevent dissent from spreading in the
wake of the destruction of the country and the loss of Kosovo,
the cradle of Serbian culture.
Adding to the pressure,
disgruntled Yugoslav army reservists blocked roads in central
Serbia for the second straight day Thursday, demanding back pay
for service during the bombing campaign.
Food Shop Broken Into
In Kosovo Capital
PRISTINA - NATO peacekeepers arrested five people after a food shop run by a Serbian woman was broken into in the Kosovo capital Pristina Thursday night, but calm was restored Friday and NATO forces were on patrol.
NATO officials did not disclose the nationalities or identities of those arrested.
All goods from the shop were loaded onto two vehicles of the KFOR peacekeeping force and taken to KFOR headquarters.
In another incident Thursday night, a car was set on fire in an underground garage in the center of Pristina. KFOR cordoned off the area and about 200 people were evacuated from flats in the building above the garage.
Elsewhere in the southern Serbian province, a Reuters photographer saw a house burning Friday morning in the center of Urosevac about 30 km (18 miles) south of Pristina. U.S. soldiers in the peacekeeping force were in the area.
Kosovo remained tense despite NATO's huge presence as ethnic Albanian refugees flooded back by the thousands and many Serbs fled, fearing revenge for Serb forces' atrocities.
Adding to the turmoil and confusion, NATO sources reported that thousands of Gypsies were fleeing their homes in the province because of revenge attacks by ethnic Albanians who accuse them of collaborating with their Serb oppressors.
In Moscow, Russia's upper house of parliament Friday gave the green light to participation of Russian peacekeepers in the international security force. Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev said earlier this week that the troops, expected to total around 3,600, could start leaving as early as Friday.
RIA news agency said the first contingent of 50 would leave Moscow within hours. About 200 Russian troops are already in Pristina, having driven there from Bosnia in a surprise thrust ahead of NATO forces after NATO halted its bombing campaign.
Also Friday, Russia's Aeroflot airline restarted flights to Belgrade from Moscow nearly three months after they were stopped due to NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia.
Outside of Kosovo, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic faced unrest from unpaid troops and emboldened political opponents.
The United States Thursday offered a reward of up to $5 million to anyone providing information leading to the capture of alleged war criminals in Yugoslavia, including Milosevic.
Yugoslavia's parliament late Thursday approved a government proposal to end a three-month-old "state of war" which had imposed draconian controls on citizens, four days after NATO officially terminated its bombing campaign.
As parliament met, crowds of cheering ethnic Albanians embraced, kissed and garlanded NATO's two top leaders during a visit to Pristina which took on the air of a victory parade.
More than 1,000 supporters swarmed around NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana and Supreme Commander Wesley Clark, chanting "NATO, NATO, NATO" after the two men appeared unannounced on the streets of the Kosovo capital.
On the other side of the province, Italian peacekeeping troops escorted terrified Serbs as they fled their homes in the town of Pec, forced out by Albanians in retaliation for atrocities committed by Serb forces in recent months.
The bodies of a Serb professor, night guard and canteen manager were found at Pristina University Thursday. A NATO forensic expert said they appeared to have been shot.
Reuters reporters who visited the southeastern village of Zegra, where U.S. marines killed one attacker and wounded two others, said local Serbs were also forming a convoy there, preparing to flee the area.
Since the Serb pullout, many refugees have returned to their homes to find mangled corpses, burned-out houses, poisoned wells and farmland seeded with landmines. Survivors have told horror stories of massacres, torture and rape.
"They say you could hear the screams of the children above the crackle of the fire," an old ethnic Albanian woman said at the scene of an April massacre of 20 Albanians in the southwestern town of Djakovica.
FBI experts began Thursday to investigate the site, named in the indictment of Milosevic.
An estimated 50,000 Kosovo Serbs -- about one quarter of the total number in the province -- have fled to the rest of Serbia following the withdrawal of Yugoslav soldiers and police.
The U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said ethnic Albanian refugees continued to ignore pleas to stay put and were returning to Kosovo from Macedonia by the thousands daily.
Altogether 240,000 from a total of almost one million displaced people have returned to Kosovo from neighboring Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro, a UNHCR spokeswoman said.
In central Serbia, angry Yugoslav Army reservists brought traffic to a halt for the second day running in growing protests to demand payment of wages for their time under NATO bombardment on Kosovo front lines.
Serbs See No Takers
For U.S. Milosevic Reward
BELGRADE - The few Belgraders who had heard of it ridiculed Friday the $5 million U.S. bounty on the head of President Slobodan Milosevic and other alleged Yugoslav war criminals, and said they saw no likely takers.
"Five million? That's tempting, but I don't believe anyone who might go for it would live long enough to enjoy the money," said one young man who declined to be named.
The United States offered the reward Thursday for any information that would lead to the transfer of indicted Yugoslav war crimes suspects, who include Milosevic, to the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague.
Washington has helped the Hague court to pursue cases against those responsible for atrocities in Kosovo in recent months, when Serb forces forced hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians to flee the country.
No one interviewed in the Yugoslav capital appeared keen to take up the offer.
"I've been waiting for his (Milosevic's) disappearance from our political scene for years, but come on, I'm not going to chase him for money," said Stojan Vasiljevic, 32, a private shop owner.
His wife Sonja, 25, laughed. "How do the Americans think anyone can do that? It's not a movie, it's real life," she said.
"Unless they had in mind someone from his (Milosevic's) security, I really don't see a Sherlock Holmes here, spying on the president and passing such information to the U.S., or whoever," she added.
Many others interviewed at random in Belgrade said they had not heard about the reward. Local media did not report it and only those with access to satellite programs and the Internet knew of it.
"We are poorer now than ever before, but life is more important than money," one man said. "And what are their (U.S.) spies doing if they need to bribe people for such information? It's simply stupid."
The Hague Tribunal indicted Milosevic and four of his top aides for alleged crimes by his security forces in Kosovo before NATO troops deployed in the province two weeks ago under a peace deal that ended 11 weeks of alliance bombing.
Milosevic accepted the deal after Yugoslavia suffered devastating damage in the air raids. He agreed to an effective end to his direct rule over the province where Serbs accounted for less than 10 percent of 1.9 million people.
The Hague Tribunal has indicted a number of people in former Yugoslavia, most of them Serbs, but has so far failed to arrest key figures like Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, former civilian and military leaders of the Bosnian Serbs.
The State Department said the reward of up to $5 million applied also to past indictees and any others that the Tribunal might name in future.
U.S. officials say the reward program has led to successful arrests in several unrelated cases in the past, mainly involving people accused of guerrilla attacks against U.S. targets. Informants are guaranteed anonymity and can be offered residence and a new identity in the United States.
