BBC Kosovo Roundup June 14, 1999 Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit source: http://news.bbc.co.uk BBC Roundup of events in Kosovo June 14, 1999 Nato peacekeepers are uncovering new evidence of mass murders in Kosovo as they enter the province. British soldiers with the peacekeeping force have begun investigating a suspected grave of nearly 100 ethnic Albanians in southern Kosovo. Local people in the village of Kacanik have been seen removing up to 100 bodies from holes in the ground and transferring them to a graveyard. A BBC correspondent says the villagers were apparently taking advantage of the withdrawal of Serb forces to give the dead a proper burial. A local man said they were men, women and children killed two months ago when Serbian soldiers threw grenades into a crowd on a nearby bridge and then shot all those left alive. War crimes investigators accompanying the troops are on their way to the site, and the discovery is being reported to the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. If the sites at Kacanik are confirmed as graves, it would be the first discovery of killings on such a scale since peacekeeping forces entered Kosovo. However, there are doubts over earlier reports of an alleged massacre in the northern Kosovo town of Vucitrn. An Irish journalist had been quoted saying she had seen a road covered with bodies. Reports now say she saw just one body but was told of others. 'Living hand to mouth' United Nations relief workers have found 20,000 displaced Kosovo Albanians hiding in the mountainous area west of Pristina. The refugees - the single largest collection of displaced people so far found in Kosovo - fled over the past three months to escape Serb atrocities. The UN team radioed back to base for swift food aid. One official said there could be up to 500,000 people "living hand to mouth" in hiding. Milosevic appears in public Yugoslavia's President Slobodan Milosevic has made his first public appearance since the start of the Nato air campaign. Visiting the town of Beska in the northwest of the country, he announced the start of reconstruction work after the 11-week bombing campaign. Mr Milosevic told a crowd of several thousand people that the work would begin with the rebuilding of the town's destroyed motorway bridge. He said it would be reopened in 40 days' time. In Belgrade, the ultra-nationalist Serbian Radical Party announced it was resigning from the Serbian Government in protest at the deployment of Nato troops in Kosovo. The party, which is led by the Deputy Prime Minister, Vojislav Seselj, held 15 of the 35 ministries in Serbia in coalition with President Milosevic's Socialists. The Radicals are demanding new elections in Serbia - as are pro-Western and reformist opposition parties. (Click here to see an animated map showing timetable of Serb withdrawal and Nato's planned movements) Airport stand-off Nato commanders are resuming negotiations with Russian generals over control of the airport in Kosovo's capital, Pristina. British forces have withdrawn from the airport, leaving Russian forces in sole control of the facilities, which they unexpectedly occupied two days ago. US President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin have been trying to sort out the dispute by phone after agreeing on Sunday that military generals on the ground should decide what happens to the 200 Russian soldiers at the airport. The commander of K-For, Lieutenant General Sir Michael Jackson, played down the situation on Monday, insisting he was not involved in a ''turf war'' with Russian forces. The deadlock has highlighted the dispute over Russia's role in the international peace keeping force for Kosovo, K-For. Russia wants its own sector to control in Kosovo and its own independent chain of command. The United States is resisting any possibility of a Russian enclave in Kosovo, saying it would amount to partition. On Monday, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair firmly ruled it out. "There is no room in my mind at all for separate sectors that fall outside a unified chain of command," he said. "There will be no question of a de facto partition of Kosovo." Serbs flee In Kosovo, thousands of Serb civilians are fleeing the province's second largest city of Prizren - following the arrival of German Nato peacekeeping troops over the weekend. The Serbs fear reprisals from returning Kosovo Albanian refugees, and do not believe Nato will protect them. The main roads out of the southern city are choked with traffic. Nato says some 14,300 K-For troops have already entered Kosovo. The international peacekeeping force has already met its first action in Kosovo cities, with a spate of violent incidents and shootings as Serb troops and paramilitaries withdraw. In the regional capital, Pristina and in Prizren, Nato forces have been involved in gunfights with Serbs. In separate shootouts: British troops shot dead a Serbian special policeman, who is said to have opened fire on them in the centre of the regional capital, Pristina. Two German journalists were killed south of Pristina at the weekend. The body of a third was found near Prizren on Monday. One Serb was shot dead and another injured by German troops in Prizren. ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nyteeu-06.14.99-23:25:33-7640