[DTA]

"We obviously did not know who we were dealing with. We bombed the wrong side."

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[duckln]

Bump

Great post from a great newspaper. One of the very few 'newspapers' worthy of the name.

[Tunehead54]

Truth bump!

[reed_inthe_wind]

"Could it be because the international community made a grave mistake and has now found itself in a quagmire with no solution in sight?"

Geopolitically speaking, we shot ourselves in the foot. Handing Kosovo to the Muslims pained me. I can only imagine how Serbs, Greeks, Ukrainians and Russians felt. Allbright brokered the action with the international community, and Clinton tuned out everything except the popularity pole results. Richard Holbrookes foul mouth raged on NPR. I bit my tongue - not that I am anybody - because of the rape camp and ethnic cleansing charges leveled against the Serbs. The whole thing stunk. In the end, we didn't win any brownie points with the Muslim world, and we didn't turn Kosovo into a just place to live. Did we stop the killing or just allow the original aggressors to finish the job?

[miltonim]

Mistake bump

[hobson]

Speaking of Clinton foreign policy, do we still have troops in Haiti? CNN Headline news crawler reported another uprising today.

[Destro]

Damn awesome post.

[Destro]

"How do you begin to go against the very group you supposedly came to help? We obviously did not know who we were dealing with. We bombed the wrong side."

[Destro]

bump

[kingu]

We'll never hear about this in the major media outlets unless they can spin it to blame Bush, because anything else, they'll have to explain how they got us into the place in the first place.

[Destro]

We Bombed the Wrong Side, Kosovo's Terrorists Continue to Wage War

[mark502inf]

The author of this piece is a young Serbian lady named Tanja Gavrilovic. Here's some brave words from Ms. Gavrilovic spoken to the Washington Post in 1999:

Tanja Gavrilovic, 24, of Cleveland, said she is angry NATO is interfering in an internal crisis. "If I were to die, I'd rather die fighting for a noble cause," she said. "For Serbia . . . this is my cause."

She obviously has an agenda that pre-existed her time as a translator in Kosovo. And perhaps its time to update her quote--just substitute the words "write newspaper columns" for "die" and "die fighting".

[mark502inf]

Germany's military contingent used bright yellow tape to mark large Xs on Serbian homes throughout their designated area of responsibility. Similar to the 1940s Nazi-style branding of Jews and other minorities deemed unworthy of life.

Give me a break. After the NATO bombing campaign, returning Albanian refugees & KLA were taking revenge on the Serbian residents of Kosovo. The Germans' idea was for their patrols to be able to readily identify the Serb homes so as to better protect them from the Albanians. As a translator working for KFOR, Ms.Gavrilovic knows that, but has chosen to deliberately mischaracterize their actions.

[mark502inf]

While on a border patrol, monitoring Albanian rebel insurgency, the U.S. unit I was working with came under direct mortar fire in a village named Krivenik. An Associated Press journalist, Kerim Lawton, was seriously injured. I administered first aid and attempted to stop the bleeding from the dozens of shrapnel wounds he incurred, to no avail. He died shortly afterward.

Tending to Mr. Lawton must not have left Ms. Gavrilovic the time to administer first aid to any of the 16 Albanians, including two who died, who were also injured in the mortar shelling. But now that she's back safe and sound in America and writing about the incident, you'd think she could at least mention the Albanian casualties. But why ruin a good story?

How was this incident portrayed to the media? In a noncommittal diplomatic fashion, officials announced that, "An investigation will take place as to the day's chain of events," from all sides, U.S. Army, NATO and U.N.

Well, maybe because they would have said: There are NLA guerillas to the south of Krivenek along the Kosovo-FYROM border. The NLA is shooting to their south at the Macedonian army. Krivenek is north of the guerillas--behind them. The Macedonian Army is shooting back, i.e. north toward the guerillas and Krivenek. The Macedonian Army has 120 mm mortars firing in support of their troops. The gun-target line from the Macedonian mortar position to the NLA, when extended, goes directly to Krivenik. It is most likely that the mortar rounds came from the Macedonian Army and that they were fired across the border from FYROM into Kosovo.

Having said that, when I left they still hadn't figured who fired those mortars--there were actually several incidents that day. KFOR soldiers were doing crater analysis to dtermine approximate back azimuths to gun positions and caliber of the weapons. Don't recall the exact azimuths, but they were to the south and the mortars were definitely 120mm. Most likely the rounds came from the Macedonian Army, either as overshoots--the most common mortar error--or as an effort to hit Krivenik as a presumed source of NLA forces crossing the border into FYROM. The lesser possibility is NLA forces doing the shooting to cause casualties that could be blamed on the Macedonians. The purpose would be an attempt to disrupt the recent KFOR-Macedonian military cooperation that was recently having better effect on interdicting NLA border crossings.

Bottom line, there was an extensive investigation and we couldn't figure it out for sure, but again, Ms Gavrilovic knew this and chose not to let those facts get in the way of her story.