Few people from the south of Serbia are prepared to comment on the legacy of the ground security zone which stretches through the territory of Bujanovac and Presevo municipalities for the total length of 90 kilometers and the width of five kilometers. Multiplication gives us a large area of 450 square kilometers belonging "to no one and everyone" immediately adjacent to the [administrative] border with Kosovo.
"This is not the Gaza Strip but it is the Presevo Valley and we have no idea what happened yet. The Kumanovo agreement verified the uncertainty and necessity for the West to hold the threads over Yugoslavia and the new government in Belgrade. This is a remnant of Milosevic's destructive policies and a very crude metaphor for the actual situation which has left our diplomacy, economy and politics all tied up," explains Dragan Janjic, a future Democratic Party (DS) representative in the Serbian parliament.
The coordination body of the Serbian state and Federal governments for the municipalities of Bujanovac, Presevo and Medvedja is the official title of a political body headed by Dr. Nebojsa Covic and his deputy, Rasim Ljajic. The formation of this body amounts to an official recognition of the problem in the south of Serbia.
In the area of the ground security zone, that is, in the demilitarized zone in the five-kilometer wide belt on the territory of the municipalities of Bujanovac and Presevo there are 24 villages. Except for the villages of Gramada and Letovica where the population is of mixed ethnicity, all the remaining villages are inhabited exclusively by Albanians.
A portion of the regional road from Bujanovac to Gnjilane passes a few hundred meters below the village. From the village, the armed Albanians have visibility over more than three kilometers of the road; they have enough time to descend from the village and ambush a vehicle driving down this road.
Last year United Nations representatives Vladimir Azalov and Marcel Grogan were almost killed on this part of the road after becoming the target of gunfire from Dobrosin itself.
The first checkpoint of the multinational KFOR forces is set up a few kilometers from Dobrosin, on this road. The checkpoint is already in Kosovo. Since neither representatives of the Yugoslav Army or KFOR are able to go into this area because this would constitute a violation of the Kumanovo agreement, it was agreed that convoys of automobiles would be escorted as far as the KFOR checkpoint by representatives of OSCE. Despite this, there have been instances of Albanian extremists searching and harassing passengers on this route, including several Albanians.
These villages are scattered along the regional road toward Gnjilane, on both sides, and are between 10 to 20 kilometers away from Presevo.
There are three kilometers from the Cerevajka checkpoint to the administrative border with the southern province. The distance to the first KFOR checkpoint presently represents a high risk zone.
The road itself winds through a dense forest where Albanian extremists lie in ambush. To date many Serbs have fallen into their trap and been abducted. The most recent occurrence was the night of December 31 when six Serbs were kidnapped on this part of the road. They were subsequently released after mediation by KFOR and the FRY presidency. Serbian sources claim that in this battle zone there are between 300 and 500 armed Albanians under the command of a certain Shaqir Shaqiri from the village of Karadak near Presevo. The name of this Albanian has also been tied to the role of a "political advisor" within the terrorist formation of the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac. Armed extremists in the Cerevajka area are specialized for abductions due to the configuration of the terrain. This group became active during recent months.
All villages in this region fall in the ranks of the extremely underdeveloped and a significant number of Albanians have left their homes due to tense situation and gone to Macedonia and Kosovo.
"We are constantly making people aware of the risk of traveling by way of either Dobrosin or Cerevajka. Our role and the role of the coordinating body is to secure, in cooperation with the international community and KFOR, a passably satisfactory level of travel security in this region," explains Novica Zdravkovic, a colonel in the ministry of internal affairs and the head of police for Pcinja district.
It is interesting that the road from Presevo to Gnjilane is regularly traveled by a bus operated by the Vranje transportation company "Jedinstvo". The employees on the bus are Albanians and almost all the passengers are ethnic Albanians. "Jedinstvo" representatives emphasize that there have been no problems to date and the income from this route is deposited regularly with the company cashier.
The village of Lucane, an easy ten-minute drive down a paved road from Bujanovac, is at the entrance to the Konculj Gorge. It is surrounded by hills. Danas' reporter had an opportunity to see for himself through a pair of binoculars that in the surrounding hills, slightly more than 200 meters away as the bird flies, terrorists have set up observation posts. Snipers have been deployed as well. Members of MUP say that the extremists even have mortars but that "they are aware that just one fired mortar shell could cost them dearly". It has been observed in the last few days that the Albanians are using sandbags to create new fortifications. There were previously seven of them and now there are 15, state Serbian sources, pointing out that "there is still no intention on the Albanian side to increase the level of security and reduce tension".
Taking care because of the snipers, one can clearly see the terrorists on the other side of the Binacka Morava River through the window of a house under construction. The angle of movement, members of MUP warn us, must always be adjusted to avoid coming under sniper fire. Everything appears eerie especially at night and when the fog sets in. This is the most forward point of demarcation in the ground security zone in Bujanovac municipality. The November 21 and 22 attack on members of MUP [Police] during which three policemen were killed and five were wounded came from this direction.
Mali Trnovac and Veliki Trnovac are also in this sector. Veliki Trnovac is inhabited by approximately 10,000 Albanians. The most recent events have slowed down the flow of people and essential goods. Members of the International Red Cross distributed food and medicine here.
Based on an agreement between the Serbian and Albanian sides guaranteed by Sean Sullivan, the political advisor to the KFOR commander in chief, General Cabigiosu, and Colonel Serge Labbe, all checkpoints of MUP [Police] and the Albanian terrorists were to be removed. That agreement was concluded on December 30. The Serbian side honored it and the Police removed its checkpoint in the direction of Veliki Trnovac. However, the Albanian side failed to do the same. What is more, after the agreement "a victory through peaceful means" was celebrated in Veliki Trnovac in the presence of three to five thousand Albanians by the raising of the Albanian flag. Not a single Serb can enter the village. The existing Albanian checkpoints have been reinforced with the addition of more armed men.
UCPMB operations in Veliki Trnovac are under the command of a certain Ridvan Qazimi Vaja, who is also called "commander Leshi" in the Western media. Qazimi is a tailor by trade; there is no information on his place in the hierarchy of these paramilitary formations.
Many claim that the hardliners are represented by a certain Shefket Aslani from Dobrosin, where everything began. There is no reliable information at this time regarding Aslani's role; however, it is known that his name is connected to the illegal procurement of weapons and munitions which is in various ways, despite rigorous KFOR control, arriving in Dobrosin from where it is distributed by way of Konculj to the Albanians in the village of Lucane.
The peak of Sveti Ilija [St. Elijah] is located six kilometers southwest of Vranje. It is at an elevation of 1,274 meters above sea level at the very edge of the five kilometer-wide buffer zone. This inaccessible point was occupied at one time by the terrorists. Through effective action by members of MUP this highly important strategic point was recaptured and is now under the control of Serbian security forces. Albanian extremists from the region of the villages of Muhovac and Ravno Bucje are constantly attacking the members of MUP stationed on the peak.
Members of the Yugoslav Army are located outside the buffer zone, that is, the ground security zone, due to the Kumanovo agreement. However, they are not spared from armed provocation by the terrorists who are opening fire on them from the buffer zone. So far, members of the Yugoslav Army have rarely been responding to these provocations. On Tuesday, for example, fire was opened on members of the Yugoslav Army from Oslarski Rid in Bujanovac municipality. The terrorists fired multiple mortar shells and members of the Yugoslav Army were forced to respond.
The reduction of the ground security zone from five to one kilometer, on which the Yugoslav side is expending great diplomatic efforts, may contribute to a reduction of tensions. Here the assessment is that in that case the Albanians would have to be disarmed and their terrain for terrorist activities against members of MUP and the Yugoslav Army would be significantly reduced. It is furthermore assessed that this would make it easier for members of KFOR to control the administrative border with Kosovo which would also become more secure as a result.
A total of 14 people were abducted of whom ten were released while the fate of another four missing citizens remains unknown. They are Vlada and Persa Miletic of Mali Trnovac, Zoran Stankovic of Rakovac and Zoran Tomic of Lopardice. As many as 285 terrorist attacks out of the total number were carried out in the region of Bujanovac municipality, the majority of them at a former Serbian police checkpoint in Konculj - as many as 166. In the region of Bujanovac municipality 16 landmines were placed of which six were activated. Three members of the police were killed after stepping on five individual landmines.
43 criminal cases involving 32 individuals are filed with the district public prosecutor's office in Vranje as a result of strong evidence that the culprits carried out criminal acts described in section 125 of the criminal law of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia - terrorism.
During the last days of the century, the "Balkan Syndrome" shook up the European and world public after it was announced that six Italians, five Belgians, one Portugese and one Czech who participated in the NATO mission in Kosovo had died of leukemia and that this was believed to be a result of the effects of depleted uranium on the "Serbian holy land". The object of interest, namely, are the projectiles which are used to destroy tanks and other armored vehicles. Projectiles with depleted uranium are more effective in penetrating the armor and destroying the vehicles and crews, and upon penetration they explode in a fiery cloud. Depleted uranium is mildly radioactive in solid form but the vapors which are created upon explosion are both toxic and radioactive.
There is no medical evidence that depleted uranium is dangerous to health and some experts claim that it is necessary for some time to pass before determining the possible connection between exposure and an increase in the number of people suffering from leukemia and other malignant illnesses. However, alarming facts are already arriving from Kosovo regarding an increase in the number of patients; Dr. Marko Jaksic, the head of the orthopedic department at the Kosovska Mitrovica Hospital, emphasizes that the number of patients treated at this hospital during 2000 for malignant illnesses has increased enormously by 200 percent in comparison with 1998 and that the number of spontaneous miscarriages has doubled.
The "small risk" acknowledged by NATO is growing more dramatic with each passing day and gives a new dimension to the resolution of the Kosovo dilemma with "Tomahawks". Concern in Serbia is spreading because depleted uranium munitions hit not only Kosovo but also targets in the Pcinja district, six of them in total. A further reason for concern is the presence of a large number of policemen, regular troops and reservists in the danger zones during the time of the NATO campaign in 1999.
"It is a fortunate circumstance to some degree that all depleted uranium projectiles in the Pcinja district are embedded in the earth because in those locations radiation is two thousand times greater while only one meter away it is within acceptable limits," says Dr. Miroslav Simic of the Vranje Institute for Health Protection, an expert for radioactivity measurement.
The health risks are certainly not the only aspect of the uranium affair.
"You wrote that we were defeated and that everyone had the right not to participate in it but I claim that it was a victory because our army left Kosovo as if ready for a parade and NATO officers could not believe that so many tanks got out," a senior officer of the Yugoslav Army General Staff told Danas. Facts which are now coming to the surface suggest that the accomplishments of the NATO bombers were catastrophically poor. They sowed at least 30,000 projectiles while the Yugoslav Army, according to its official figures, lost a total of seven tanks and 13 transporters. According to the military weekly "Vojska" NATO was only successful in hitting decoy targets; for example, of the 185 decoys set up by one unit in Kosovo, 175 were hit.
"Depleted uranium munitions were also fired at buildings which they suspected of having underground annexes significant to the military but most hits were decoys," a senior Yugoslav Army officer who wished to remain anonymous told "Danas". However, he rejected the possibility that, by the same logic, such projectiles were also fired on the Air Force Command Center on the Strazevica hill in Belgrade. "There they just used bombs with a great quantity of explosives weighing more than two tons."
Yet another paradox: the Americans and their allies, "the reluctant aggressors", hit green plywood in the shape of tank; we think we fooled them and then at the end of the video game we perish together in Kosovo like the [Turk] Murat and all ten [Serb] Jugovic brothers [characters from folk poems about the Kosovo battle]. In our "holy land", which to them is "terrain" where they must civilize savages. The "civil", that is, civilian view of Kosovo today, like that of Serbia, offers a frightening picture - the paradoxes are multiplying but here they do not represent phenomena to be interpreted - lives are at stake.
"The center is also leading a campaign against landmines; the two things are quite similar, the deferred effects of war," emphasizes Pesic.
Reactions to the "Balkan Syndrome" have been mainly Balkan or expected: it is notable that only the Kosovo Albanians are not too excited about the fact that, with a few Serbs or without them, they will be living in a radioactive Kosovo. The Albanians believe it is all Serbian propaganda allegedly directed at chasing KFOR out of Kosovo. The Ljubljana [Slovenia] daily "Delo", in a typically Pavlovian reaction, favors their statement and points out that "a good portion of the world has fallen" for the Serbian propaganda. A similar opinion regarding the power of "the Serbian propaganda" probably does not exist elsewhere in the world. A good reminder of our former homeland, Stari Trg and Cankarjev Dom, the loss of hearing among the speakers on the terrace in front of the SFRY parliament [referring to the events preceding the break up of the former Yugoslavia]. Lest there be any confusion, "Politika" reacts "globally" placing emphasis, as in previous years, on a will-o'-the-wisp story about "a division in NATO" this time. A treat for Yugonostalgics.
With benefits of a decade of hindsight it is apparent that the Kosovo circle of disintegration of the joint state of the Slavs "and others" has left us with other, now radioactive, unsettled accounts. Viewed from a global perspective, the use of radioactive munitions - or of any other form of munitions, for that matter - is a far cry from the ecological maxim according to which we have not inherited the earth from our ancestors but borrowed it from our heirs.
The Serbian reality, on the other hand, urges us to rethink earlier reactions: depending on the measure of one's personal intelligence and one's political orientation, everyone will classify the threat posed by radiation as yet another sin of the people who until recently were considered responsible for the general downfall of the civilization. On the one hand, Kosovo is radioactive; on the other, the Serbs see deaths on the NATO side as well. Perhaps it is not really a new development that someone is wheeling and dealing with a piece of Balkan territory over which the neighbors are feuding and even killing each other.
There is definitely no reason for the increased concern as a result of the "discovery" of radioactivity from the craters made by NATO bombs. There is a need for the state to get involved in cleaning up the consequences and preventing possible new ones. By now the level of concern for the future should be at the highest level in Serbia. Uranium exposure, no matter what it entails, is only an ornamental detail in the terrible health of the citizens of Serbia. Everything which appears to be healthy and survived Milosevic's regime bears within it a delayed-response bomb - first and foremost, due to extreme stress. Depleted uranium, perhaps? What's next?
Photographs of phantom polling booths, data from UNMIK, which also controlled the federal elections in Kosovo, that 45,000 voters in the Province went to the polling booths, the poor calculations of the Federal Electoral Commission, whose lack of logic is obvious even to lay persons, clearly show that most vote rigging and manipulation took place in electoral districts 24 Prokuplje and 26 Vranje, which under the new election law are also collection centers for the Kosovo municipalities.
Irregularities in the electoral district of Vranje were so great that the Electoral Commission was forced to accept DOS complaints and cancel the results from some polling stations in Kosovo and Metohija. This did not prevent official counters from leaving 63,000 votes from this electoral district in the common database and distributing them among other electoral districts according to need in favor of the presidential candidate of the SPS-JUL coalition, as the experts of G17 plus discovered after a visit to the Federal Bureau of Statistics and the "procurement" of the software from the opposing [government's] ranks. The scope of the theft and adjustment of the results in the electoral district of Prokuplje could be detected from the fact that the Federal Constitutional Court, after giving the DOS commission access to polling station results, made the decision to annul the presidential elections.
DOS observers in the field claim that all sort of things went on polling stations throughout Kosovo and Metohija, least of all voting. Voter lists which at some polling booths were signed by DOS and SRS (Serbian Radical Party) representatives were subsequently torn up and falsified. DOS in central Kosovo provided information on SPS violation of the pre-election silence, threats and pressure by SPS officials applied on the voters in some polling stations in the Gracanica enclave, prohibiting refugees from other parts of the province from voting (which also happened to two people with the same last name, Momcilo and Rada Trajkovic) as well as persons between the ages of 18 and 21 due to the assessment that they likely to vote for the opposition...
Slavisa Kostic, the DOS candidate for a representative in the Chamber of Citizens, advised that only in the central part of Kosovo, the SPS-JUL coalition spent 53,000 German marks for bribing voters and members of electoral boards. Sources in Gracanica say that the day before the elections SPS representatives were giving financial assistance of 1,000 dinars to the local Serbs. Those who found themselves at the polling station in Caglavica the next day did better. Each voter received a packet of smoked meat products and 1,500 dinars.
The Kosovo Serbs repeated their role of victims because of whom the regime allegedly decided to hold presidential and parliamentary elections in the southern Serbian province even though the collection centers for the Kosovo electoral districts were just in case, legally moved to Prokuplje and Vranje. Now it is clear that the chief target was to acquire those "nonexistent Albanian ballots" because no one even expected Kosovo Albanians to really vote in these elections. At the same time, the annulment of the presidential elections as the fruit of intermediary diplomacy (Rondos-Ivanov) gives weight to the theory that the remaining Kosovo Serbs are a thorn in everyone's side - Milosevic's regime, the Kosovo Albanians, the international community - because if it were not for them "business" would flow much more smoothly. Their misfortune is that many of them still do not comprehend this and so the majority of those who did vote gave their votes to Milosevic.
The Kosovo Albanians, who for years have been boycotting anything remotely resembling Yugoslav statehood (according to UNMIK data, among the previously mentioned 45,000 Kosovo votes there were a total of eight Albanians) again played a key role in the Kosovo version of the electoral story of the blind man and the deaf man. Voter lists coming from polling stations in ethnically pure Albanian locations were duly completed and signed in the same neat handwriting. Consequently, one can conclude that thousands of "honest Kosovo Albanians" with an expediency equal to that of Speedy Gonzales and a transit time of 13 seconds in the polling booth (the record is held by Urosevac with phenomenal 3.5 seconds) per voter, massively (and in some places exclusively) voted for Slobodan Milosevic.
Representatives of the government now deny the existence of such voter records because DOS has determined beyond doubt and presented to the Federal Constitutional Court that, for example, in the electoral district of Prokuplje, elections in Kosovo and Metohija were held at only 18 polling stations, mostly in the northern part of the province. The greatest irregularities were recorded in Prizren (30,000), Pec (10,000), Urosevac (8,500), Gora (8,000)...
The dejection and refusal of the Albanian leaders in Kosovo and Metohija to comment publicly on the result of the first round of presidential elections in FRY is interpreted by Serbian sources as being due to the missed opportunity to finally get rid of Serbia, even though the most recent decision of the Federal Constitutional Court gives them an opportunity for a make up exam and does not exclude the possibility that before the new presidential elections a deal will be cut by Dedinje and Thaci, no matter how much this may look like science fiction even in the Balkan madhouse.
Before calling the elections, the Federal Electoral Commission advised that in FRY there were 7,861,327 registered voters. In Serbia, 7,417,197 voters were documented; in Montenegro, 444,130 (in the final commission document on the election results, all the data are different), and in the electoral districts of Prokuplje and Vranje, to which three electoral districts from Kosovo have been appended, as many as 1,512,501 voters. The leaders of DOS immediately guessed that such a large number of voters registered in the lists in Vranje and Prokuplje meant that the regime was attempting to manipulate the results of the elections by the votes of Albanian citizens.
The regime, according to unofficial statements by "Danas" sources, counted on more than 1,100,000 ballots from Kosovo, whose printing began before the voter lists were established. It was expecting a return of 650,000 Kosovo Albanian votes and approximately 350,000 Kosovo Serb votes which included both those who stayed and those who were expelled from Kosovo and Metohija. According to unofficial data, voting took place at approximately 300 polling stations in Kosovo, while more than 360 were not opened.
Although the Federal Election Commission did not publish the election results broken down according to electoral districts, it was unofficially leaked that they expected approximately 140,000 voters in the entire province (three times more than UNMIK data suggested) plus more than 40,000 votes from expelled Serbs who voted in central Serbia and Montenegro. This would mean that all remaining Serbs, whose number according to the most optimistic estimates does not exceed 120,000, in Kosovo and Metohija also voted, as well as 10,000 Kosovo Albanians, which is rather unlikely.
Those in the know regarding the whole situation say that the theft of Albanian votes in Kosovo and Metohija is Milosevic's specialty, perfected over ten years and that, most probably, he has not won an election outright since 1990. Only no one had proof of this before - until now. After the lex specialis of 1997, even the Serbs are no longer naive and on September 24 the leader got all tangled up in unexpected controls which ruined his favorite electoral formula.