NATO - the self proclaimed World Policeman watches as KLA drug dealers murder Serbs, Gypsies, rape the Serbian, Christian nuns, topple monuments,... They just watch.

From Hospital Beds, Tales of Revenge

LA Times, June 18, 1999

By PAUL WATSON, Times Staff Writer

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia -- The intensive care unit of the main hospital here was full Thursday, and the hisses, clicks and beeps of the machines that give life could not drown out an unspoken word: revenge.

The victims of revenge, along with those who sought it, lay in the six beds in the unit's two rooms. They had come from across Kosovo in the days since international peacekeepers arrived in the province...

Dr. Rade Maksimovic, a Serbian physician whose specialty is blood diseases, lay in one room of the intensive care unit with six bullet wounds to his chest, hip, arms and legs.

Ethnic Albanians wearing the uniform of the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, sprayed the doctor's car with about 50 bullets Wednesday as he left the southern Kosovo city of Suva Reka, he said in an interview.

The doctor had many ethnic Albanian patients before the war and insisted that he will not run from what he sees as terrorists.

"This was the only way they could chase me from Kosovo," the doctor
said. "But I will not leave. That's for certain."

Unconscious Victim Symbol of Confusion

In the bed next to the wounded hematologist was Florim Imeri, a 23-year-old ethnic Albanian ... Serbian doctors trying to save Imeri's life, however, said British troops shot him and brought him to the hospital for treatment.

Imeri couldn't speak for himself because he was unconscious and taking labored breaths through a powder-blue tube taped to his mouth and connected to a respirator....

Across the hall, an 11-year-old Kosovo Albanian boy named Bitim Iladi was recovering from a grenade blast. The boy's uncle died beside him when the man tried to throw a grenade at retreating Yugoslav troops and it exploded in his hand, according to doctors.

[I]n Kosovo, where an international force of about 48,000 soldiers will try to keep the peace without saying how it can reconcile ethnic Albanians' demands for independence with NATO's insistence that they can't have it--and how it will combat the lingering threat of revenge...

"I'm well aware that you are concerned about the so-called KLA," [British commander, Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson] told a crowd of about 3,000 skeptical Serbs. "The United Nations Security Council resolution makes it absolutely clear that this organization is to be demilitarized." ...

The British are soldiers trained to fight wars, not detectives with the skills needed to solve murders,...

KOSOVO REBELS RAPED SERB NUN, SAY FRENCH OFFICIALS

New York Post, June 19, 1999

By Uri Dan

BELGRADE - Three days after NATO troops refused a mother superior's pleas for protection, Kosovar rebels looted her monastery and raped a young nun, officials said yesterday.

French commandos and members of the French Foreign Legion arrived as the Kosovar Liberation Army guerrillas were leaving the isolated mountain religious community in Devic, about 30 miles northwest of the Kosovo capital of Pristina.

The Post reported Monday how Mother Makariadrove to Pristina on Sunday to plead with arriving British troops for protection for herself, a priest and nine nuns at Devic.

"Please come and save us. You have the guns, all I have is a cross," she told an Irish Guard lieutenant.

But she was told that no protection was possible until NATO reinforcements arrived.

Three days later the unguarded medieval monastery was raided by KLA members, French officers confirmed yesterday.

The French gave few details but a spokesman for Serb Orthodox Patriarch Pavle said the guerrillas showed no mercy.

"They desecrated the church, including the altar and icons, and humiliated the nuns," Deacon Luka Novakovic told The Post.

He said a 24-year-old nun was taken to a back room and raped.

The rebels looted the building of anything valuable and fired guns into the air as they left, just as the French arrived Thursday.

"When they saw us, they stopped a while, shouted 'NATO, NATO,' and then beat a hasty retreat," the officer said.

Among the evidence of the attack were the initials "UCK" - which stands for KLA - scratched into a pane of glass over an icon.

"The monastery had been stripped bare," a French officer told CNN. He added that the priest had been beaten.

Novakovic said: "They even desecrated the tomb
of St. Joanikije.

"This saint was even respected by the Albanians. They used to visit the church to pay tribute to his tomb because they believed it helped them recover from illness."

About 1,200 French troops secured Devic and the countryside yesterday...
(End quote).

Vandals take revenge on Serb shrines

Chicago Tribune, June 21, 1999

By Paul Salopek

VUCITERN, Yugoslavia-- The 13th Century Orthodox monastery in this small Kosovar town must have been beautiful once.

An open, tree-shaded courtyard with fountains leads to a tiny chapel decorated with spectacular medieval frescoes. The paintings, done in the Byzantine style, depict a stunning parade of Orthodox saints and angels --almond-eyed figures in flowing robes who stare out serenely from a bygone age.

The six-century-old patina of candle soot can't dim their glory--nor, unfortunately, does it protect them from the bullets that have gouged knuckle-size holes in their surfaces.

Today, the interior of the monastery is a gutted ruin, the victim of a mob of enraged ethnic Albanians who sought to wreak revenge on a cultural symbol... The saints gaze down on a scab of shattered glass, stomped crosses, censers and soiled vestments littering the chapel floor.

"We destroyed it because the Serbs were killing us,... " said Fetije Cakaj, 39, who lives across the street from the pillaged monastery compound. "I don't feel bad about it at all. They deserve it. They're all war criminals, even the priests."

Friday's assault on the monastery at Vucitern was one of several attacks against Serbian Orthodox religious sites in Kosovo in recent days, as ethnic Albanians--who are nominally Muslim--react with growing outrage to the devastation unleashed...

Vandalism attacks were reported at 13th Century Samadraxha monastery, the oldest in Kosovo. At Vucitern, an Orthodox priest who struggled to stop the frenzied crowd was roughed up and had to be rescued by French NATO forces. At Devic, an Orthodox nunnery, nuns were threatened with rape and expelled by armed men who may have been guerrillas with the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army..

This grubby spasm of violence in the final phase of the Yugoslav army pullout from Kosovo was long expected, according to experts in the region, given the extreme nationalistic mythology Yugoslav leaders have erected [sic!] around Serb sacred sites in the war-battered province...

Nonetheless, in a nod to Serb sensibilities, the recent peace deal that brought an end to NATO's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia permits a token number of Yugoslav police to return to Kosovo and guard the Serbs' sacred shrines.

That move may prove a hard sell to Kosovo's Albanians, who see more than mere symbolism in the Serbian Orthodox monasteries here.

"This was not senseless revenge," said Nyseret Lapashtica, [an Albanian woman] 49, who said he watched but did not participate in the sacking of the Vucitern monastery... Like many other ethnic Albanians, Lapashtica said the powerful Serbian Orthodox Church was one of the key supporters of Milosevic's violent campaign to carve out a "Greater Serbia" in the former Yugoslavia. [Wow! Kosovo was part of Serbia since before World War one. Very few international borders in Europe are so old as old Serbian-Albanian border that NATO-fascists heve deleded in these days.]

Despite an almost unprecedented condemnation of Milosevic's role in the Kosovo war last week [i.e. capitulation to some of the key NATO demands], the Orthodox Patriarchy in Yugoslavia, much like its counterpart in Russia, long has played a strong, conservative role in politics. [Read: they refused to participate in politics.]


"The people of Serbia and the president of Serbia will not accept this peace," said Velimir Stojanovic, a priest at the church in Mitrovica, a mining town being evacuated Saturday by Serb civilians. "Now the Albanians will have to kill all the Serbs... for there to be peace here."

...Stojanovic insisted that the aggressors in the war were the Albanians and their Western defenders.

"Clinton, Albright, Solana, Blair and Wesley Clark are all murderers," he said bitterly, listing the U.S. president and secretary of state, the secretary general of NATO, the British prime minister, and the military commander of NATO forces in Kosovo....

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