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Osama bin Laden has escaped the encroaching American dragnet in Eastern Afghanistan and is headed west, possibly helped by Iraq -- with an ultimate destination believed to be Africa or the Balkans according to US diplomatic officials. Bin Laden and a group of some twenty lieutenants and bodyguards departed his Afghan lair early this week, crossing into Pakistan via caravan along ancient mountain tracks at high altitudes. "We missed him," says Mike Scanlan of the US Embassy in Banja Luka. While the western media trumpets the impending elimination of Osama bin Laden and the apparent collapse of Taliban forces, Washington ...

LONDON, Nov. 29 (UPI) -- Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica told an Oxford University audience Thursday that the Hague tribunal prosecuting Balkan war criminals should reach out for Albanians, and possibly some NATO leaders, and charge them along with Serbians for actions during the 1999 intervention in the breakaway Kosovo territory. He said cooperation with The Hague has been made into an "outsized" problem but one that is "not possible to bypass." But he said the cooperation should allow probing responsibility of "all players in the Yugoslav drama, including the perpetrators of the 'humanitarian intervention' in 1999," Kostunica said referring to ...

The leader of HADEP (Peoples Democracy Party), the largest Kurdish political party in Turkey, Murat Bozlak has made a number of surprising comments in a press conference today. ... "We also see the presence of 5000 armed PKK members as a potential threat to Turkey. This is a correct assesment. What must be done is to determine how to disarm these 5000 people with guns." In response to the question from a reporter as to what he thought about recent scenarios about a military intervention to Iraq he said: "The US, as the sole superpower in the world, wishes to ...

Foreign Affairs Magazine The Clash of Civilizations? By Samuel P. Huntington From Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993 THE NEXT PATTERN OF CONFLICT World politics is entering a new phase, and intellectuals have not hesitated to proliferate visions of what it will be-the end of history, the return of traditional rivalries between nation states, and the decline of the nation state from the conflicting pulls of tribalism and globalism, among others. Each of these visions catches aspects of the emerging reality. Yet they all miss a crucial, indeed a central, aspect of what global politics is likely to be in the coming ...

The EU Should Reach Out to Muslims in Europe Wolfgang Petritsch New York Times Thursday, November 29, 2001 SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina The Sept. 11 attack on America has sparked a debate about Islam that has, unfortunately, been framed in terms of us (the civilized, Western world) and them (the dangerous, suspect Muslims). Even well-intentioned statements dismissing the rhetoric of crusades have not softened the skepticism among many people toward Islam. This wariness is of immediate concern to the 12 million Muslims who are citizens of European Union countries. While Europe is searching for its response to global terrorism, it must ...

Know we hear that Bin Laden had operatives undermining the Yugoslav Government while directing drug traffic all over the world from Kosovo and Albania. So why did Bill Clinton and Tony Blair Bomb Yugoslav Catholics and Christians in their defense? Something just does not add up, opinions Please. Ops4

<p>JALALABAD, Afghanistan — Plastic explosives, timing devices and sketches of the best places to hide a bomb on an airplane filled the files of Osama bin Laden's terrorist training camps near here. Gas masks, cyanide and recipes for biological agents lined the shelves of his chemical weapons laboratory. Kalashnikov rifles, silhouetted targets and lesson plans teaching children to shoot at their victims' faces lay among the toys and near the swing set at the elementary school bin Laden established.</p>

The war on journalism As seven western correspondents are killed in one week in Afghanistan, author Phillip Knightley asks if frontline reporters are now considered legitimate targets Monday November 26, 2001 The Guardian So far, not a single British or American soldier has died in action in Afghanistan. On the other hand, in just one week, seven Western war correspondents were killed there. The conclusion is inescapable - it is now safer to be a member of the fighting forces than a representative of the media. What's going on? All those killed were experienced correspondents who would have considered the ...

Friday November 23 5:44 AM ET Kosovo Serb Woman Shot Dead, Husband Hurt PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (Reuters) - Gunmen killed a 60-year-old Kosovo Serb woman and seriously injured her husband in a drive-by shooting, a U.N. spokesman said on Friday. Spokesman Andrea Angeli for the U.N. mission in Kosovo said they were shot near the town of Obilic west of the provincial capital Pristina on Thursday evening after getting off a train. He said Milica Mirosavljevic and her 70-year-old husband Stojadin were attacked with gunfire from a passing vehicle. He said an explosion was also heard. It was not immediately clear ...

TIRANA - A power struggle between Albania's prime minister and the leader of his Socialist party is prompting warnings of a political crisis that could threaten the stability of the country. The latest such warning came on Thursday from Prime Minister Ilir Meta, in response to attacks by Socialist Party leader Fatos Nano that his government was corrupt, incompetent and maintained ties to organized crime. "I want to assure all citizens and our international partners that the government will not allow the artificial debates and conflicts inside the Socialist Party to turn into a (government) crisis," Meta told reporters after ...

Extremism lingers after Balkan wars Muslim fighters gained experience in Bosnia conflict By Stephen J. Hedges Tribune staff reporter Published November 25, 2001 ZENICA, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Inside a simple two-story home with mustard-colored walls and a single phone, police found few personal belongings as they searched Bansayah Belkacem's half of the block-and-spackle house three weeks ago. But officers found what they needed: a scrap of paper, folded into a book of Arabic text, containing a scribbled name and a 12-digit phone number in Afghanistan. The name and number belonged to Abu Zabaydah, who intelligence officials believe coordinates attacks for ...

Could the violent break up of Yugoslavia have been avoided? What role did Western interventions play in the tragedy that consumed the multi-ethnic country? "Yugoslavia - The Avoidable War," a two hour and forty-five minute film, addresses theese questions in a well-documented, powerful indictment of misguided intervention in the region. An updated version, including the NATO intervention in Kosovo, recently debuted at the Raindance Film Festival in London on October 20.The documentary, which took five years to produce, investigates how serious errors and misjudgments made by Western powers - particularly Germany and the United States - helped spark the violent ...

Federal Republic of Yugoslavia Kosovo Elections: Time to Right the Wrongs AI Index: EUR 70/018/2001 Publish date: 20/11/2001 The new government of Kosovo must commit itself to ending the climate of impunity for abuses of the human rights of minority communities, Amnesty International urged Ibrahim Rugova, leader of the ethnic Albanian LDK (Democratic League of Kosovo) and the new government, following the announcement of a majority for the LDK party in the Kosovo elections. "The president, government and members of the newly elected and multi-ethnic assembly should use this opportunity to lay the foundation stones for a society which ...

The second Friday prayers of this Moslem holy month of Ramadan - at which 130,000 worshipers took part on the Temple Mount - are over, and once again there were no disturbances. No thanks to PLO-appointee Jerusalem mufti Akrama Sabri, however; in a sermon before the prayers, he told his flock, "The residents of Jerusalem are temporary, we will get rid of them and conquer all of holy Palestine." Sabri has called in the past for the killing of Arab collaborators with Israel and those who sell land to Jews. No action has yet been taken on the police recommendation ...

TETOVO (Reuters) - Investigators found human body parts yesterday at an alleged mass grave site in the northwest of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), a police source said. FYROM authorities have insisted that the site contains the bodies of missing Slav-Macedonian civilians who were executed by ethnic Albanian guerrillas. The rebels have denied all knowledge of the fate of the alleged victims. The police source said that the investigators, who began excavation of the site near the village of Trebos yesterday using mechanical diggers, had found body parts including bones buried around 2 meters (over 6 feet) deep. ...

November 22, 2001 Surrender in KosovoAnd the Next Balkan War Last Saturday's electoral farce in occupied Kosovo turned up entirely predictable results. Albanian separatists got their victory, though no single faction triumphed outright. The UN and NATO got exactly what they wanted: an official acceptance of their occupation by both the Kosovo Serbs and official Belgrade. Even the Serb politicians had the chance to present this as a great victory for their policy of groveling appeasement. The post-election euphoria was rife with careless statements, many of which offered insight into the real purposes behind the fiction of "meaningful self-government" that ...

Thursday November 22, 12:37 AM Remains found in mass grave in Macedonia Human remains, believed to be those of six Macedonian civilians killed during a six-month ethnic Albanian rebellion, were found in a mass grave in the northwest of the country, police said. Exhumation work at the site, between the northwestern villages of Neprosteno and Dzepciste, began earlier in the day under the supervision of observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and NATO troops. Representatives of the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague were also present. "Police believe that six bodies are buried at ...

Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion. CIA Role In Successful Break-Up Of Albanian Terrorism Cell Examined The Bulletin's Frontrunner SECTION: Leading The News November 20, 2001 The Wall Street Journal (11/20, Higgins, Cooper) reports, "Ahmed Osman Saleh stepped off a minibus here in (Tirana) the Albanian capital in July 1998 and caught what would be his last glimpse of daylight for three days. As he paid the driver, Albanian security agents slipped a white cloth bag over Mr. Saleh's head, bound his limbs with plastic shackles and tossed him ...

Macedonia Capitulates by Christopher Deliso November 20, 2001 A NEW WAR, OR JUST THE OLD ONE AGAIN? After September 11th, life has gone on in Macedonia, though the world has taken but little notice. Violence too has continued unabated, though Macedonia's complaints of Albanian terrorism have fallen on deaf ears in the West. The failure to get the NLA labeled as "terrorists" has led to its logical conclusion: the passing of major constitutional capitulations, as envisaged in the treacherous Treaty of Ochrid. The US has announced, with much fanfare, that the "war on terrorism" will not be a conventional one ...

Over 100,000 Balkan villagers may have died from kidney failure brought on by toxic chemicals seeping into their well water from shallow coal deposits. Robert Finkelman of the US Geological Survey in Reston, Virginia, has found that well water in regions where people suffer from Balkan endemic nephropathy has elevated levels of organic poisons such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. First recognised in 1956, the condition affects villagers aged 40 to 60 in valleys along tributaries of the Danube. Unlike most victims of kidney failure, only about 20 per cent of them have high blood pressure, but 40 to 50 per ...