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WACO, Texas (Army News Service, Nov. 28, 2005) — A day after Thanksgiving, more than 1,500 Soldiers bound for a 14-month deployment to Kosovo and Bosnia were honored in a ceremony Nov. 25 at Baylor University’s Ferrell Center. A circular sea of green seats was filled by excited and emotional family members and friends at Baylor’s indoor arena in Waco, Texas. They were there to say goodbye to their Soldiers one last time before they departed for the Balkans. It was the first time 36th Infantry Division Soldiers were deploying to Europe since World War II. During the ceremony, guest...

CAMP BONDSTEEL, Kosovo (Army News Service, Nov. 25, 2005) – For Soldiers of the 40th Infantry Division deployed as part of the Kosovo Forces 6B peacekeeping rotation, Thanksgiving Day provided not only an opportunity for rest and reflection, but also a chance to share one of their traditions with the people of Kosovo. While the mission went on as normal within the Multinational Brigade (East) area of responsibility – from patrolling city streets and rural towns, to providing medical check-ups in remote villages and conducting border and boundary patrols – Soldiers continued also fulfilled their role as peacekeepers in a...

Baltic girls forced into sex slavery By Martha Buckley BBC News Five Albanian pimps have been convicted of sex trafficking offences after a trial at Southwark Crown Court. The inquiry was triggered by an investigation into the trade by the BBC's Six O'Clock News. On 31 October 2004, a 16-year-old Lithuanian girl made what was probably the biggest mistake of her young life when she agreed to go on a trip to the UK with a group of new friends. Instead of the few days of fun she had been promised, she ended up being sold into prostitution in an...

Young women are being imprisoned as sex slaves in secret underground bunkers before being trafficked to Britain, the Sunday Telegraph can reveal. Our investigation uncovered shocking evidence in eastern Europe, including video footage, of groups of women locked in squalid cellars below motels. A police video shows young girls being released from a cellar The victims - found by police in a series of raids - were allowed out of the cramped bunkers only to "service" clients in nearby rooms before being taken straight back underground. The "cellar girls" were among thousands of young women lured to Macedonia from their...

THE US military ran a Guantanamo Bay-type detention centre in Kosovo as an investigation by the organisation into alleged CIA-run secret prisons gathered pace. The camp resembled "a smaller version of Guantanamo", he told France's Le Monde newspaper, referring to the US centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where hundreds of terrorism suspects remain detained without trial. More recently, it has also been accused of maintaining a network of so-called "black sites", covert CIA detention centres in foreign countries, notably in Asia and in eastern Europe, where suspects are subjected to vigorous interrogation techniques some critics say amount to torture. Mr...

Ten years ago, at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base outside Dayton, Ohio, the leaders who had waged a brutal four-year war in Bosnia -- at the center of a volatile region that had launched two world wars -- finally agreed to peace. They took this momentous step only after intense international military and diplomatic pressure led by the United States. At the time, almost everyone predicted that the Dayton Peace Agreement would fail. To enforce the agreement, I sent 20,000 U.S. soldiers to Bosnia as part of a 60,000-troop NATO peacekeeping force, because it was the only way to ensure...

(CNSNews.com) - Rebel forces in Kosovo have threatened to carry out an organized "military operation" against the capital city of Pristina by Wednesday night. Calling NATO and United Nations forces "modern occupiers," the Kosovo Independence Army (KIA) said it was lodging the threat because the Kosovo Assembly has not declared independence. The threat, carried by local media, follows increasing violence against international forces in Kosovo and may lead to an alliance between armed rebel groups and jihadist forces, according to a former security chief from the region. Rebels have blown up several vehicles belonging to the United Nations Mission in...

The Serbian battery commander, whose missiles downed an American F-16, and, most impressively, an F-117, in 1999, has retired, as a colonel, and revealed many of the techniques he used to achieve all this. Colonel Dani Zoltan, in 1999, commanded the 3rd battery of the 250th Missile Brigade. He had search and control radars, as well as a TV tracking unit. The battery had four quad launchers for the 21 foot long, 880 pound SA-3 missiles. The SA-3 entered service in 1961 and, while it had undergone some upgrades, was considered a minor threat to NATO aircraft. Zoltan was an...

Congress Urged to Pay More Attention to Suffering in Kosovo By Sherrie Gossett CNSNews.com Staff Writer November 17, 2005 Washington, D.C. (CNSNews.com) - The U.S. Congress should send observation teams to Kosovo to witness first-hand the deplorable plight of minorities whose suffering over the past six years remains largely ignored by the world, according to a proposition delivered this week by a spokeswoman for the Serbian government. Dr. Sanda Raskovic Ivic, a psychiatrist by profession, is the new head of the Kosovo-Metohija Coordination Center, a non-partisan panel in charge of pooling state, political and social resources to solve problems in...

American financier says Kosovo should be independent Nov 19, 2005 9:54 AM TIRANA, Albania-American billionaire philanthropist George Soros on Saturday said there was no alternative other than independence for Serbia's province of Kosovo, but it should also ensure the future and the status of its minorities. Soros was on a three-day visit to Albania during which he was also awarded Tirana city hall's "Honored Citizen" medal for his contribution to improving Albania's education and infrastructure. "It is really high time to settle the status of Kosovo. My personal opinion is there's no alternative but to give Kosovo independence. But there...

Home / SEE Security Monitor / SEE Security Monitor: Serbia & Montenegro Premier seeks Islamic countries' help in building Kosovo's future November 17, 2005 YU Excerpt from report by independent internet news agency KosovaLive Prishtina [Pristina], 17 November: Kosova [Kosovo] Prime Minister Bajrami Kosumi asked the ambassadors from Islamic countries today to influence positively the creation of the state of Kosova. After a meeting with the ambassadors of several countries of the Organization of the Islamic Conference accredited to Belgrade, Kosumi said that he had informed them about the preparations for the final stage of finalizing the independence of Kosova...

Colonized Kosovo: Muslim demands and Western servitude By Boba Borojevic  Ottawa, November 14, 2005 - The violence that started Oct. 27 among Muslim youths in the dreary industrial suburbs northeast of Paris soon grew into a nationwide insurrection in the banlieus, of arson and clashes with police. Prime Minister de Villepin said the nation faced a "moment of truth" over its failure to integrate Arab and African immigrants and their children into its mainstream. A thousand miles away and 16 months ago, on March 17, 2004, Albanian mobs burned down hundreds of Serbian houses and some thirty Serbian Orthodox churches....

S/E Europe Entity’s independence could stir Albanian separatists in FYROM, analysts say SKOPJE - Granting Kosovo independence from Serbia could stir up separatist movements among ethnic Albanian minorities in other parts of the Balkans, analysts said ahead of the start of talks on the province’s future status. Some leaders in the fragile region, where ethnic tensions have led to a series of wars since 1991, fear another change of borders could provoke separatist demands by ethnic Albanian minorities in countries surrounding Kosovo. “All Kosovo politicians, including President Ibrahim Rugova, should sign a declaration that would exclude any possible unification of...

Explosion at Kosovo market injures three Serbs 17 Nov 2005 10:57:23 GMT PRISTINA, Serbia and Montenegro, Nov 17 (Reuters) - An explosion at a busy vegetable market in southern Kosovo on Thursday injured three Serb boys, the town's mayor said. Police confirmed the blast in the mainly Serb town of Strpce and said they suspected it was an explosive device thrown into the market. Serb mayor Stanko Rakovljevic told Reuters: "It was an explosive device placed under a lorry." The blast occurred shortly after 10 a.m. (0900 GMT) in a market used by Serbs in the south of Serbia's disputed...

A former Serb soldier admitted at a trial Tuesday that he and other paramilitaries had executed about 200 Croat prisoners of war at a pig farm in 1991. Ivan Atanasijevic's testimony was the first open admission of the slaughter by one of the 16 defendants at the landmark war crimes trial in a special court in Belgrade. Since the trial started in December 2003, only a protected Serb witness has admitted taking part in one of the worst massacres of POWs during the brutal Balkan wars in the 1990s. During the fighting in late 1991, the Serb-controlled Yugoslav army advanced...

SERBIA AND MONTENEGRO: Defense Ministry “Selling Arms to Iraq” 2005-09-28 14:30:03 Hundreds of cases of ammunition and weapons produced by the Serbian Zastava factory in Kragujevac are being flown each week from Podgorica to Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries, Podgorica daily Dan claims. According to the report the consignments include Kalashnikov assault rifles, hand grenades and ammunition. All are loaded into Russian Tupolev aircraft at Podgorica’s Golubovci airport after being shipped from the central Serbian state-owned factory to Montenegro in trucks with licence plates from the Serbian city of Cacak. Montenegrin police secure a hundred-metr perimeter around the aircraft...

R. Nicholas Burns, US undersecretary of state for political affairs, recently put Balkan issues back on the front burner when he pressured Bosnia’s Serb, Muslim and Croat leaders to replace the country’s three-person, multiethnic presidency with a single president. That step is needed, he said, to create a stronger, more cohesive state. He added that there should be a firm commitment to such reforms by the time Balkan leaders visit Washington this month to mark the 10th anniversary of the Dayton accords that ended the Bosnian civil war. Dayton, Burns intoned, has served its purpose and now needs to “evolve.”...

A Swedish teenager who is being held in Sarajevo suspected of terrorist offences has been identified by Bosnian police as a radical Islamist known by the code-name Maximus. The 18-year old has had email contact with three men arrested in Britain suspected of planning an attack on the White House, police sources in the Bosnian capital told weekly newspaper Slobodna Bosna. “There is definitely a link between Sweden, Denmark and Britain,” said Mirsad Fasic, a journalist at Slobodna Bosna. “In the computer that was taken from the apartment rented by the Swede and the Dane with Turkish ancestry, there were...

Slobodan Milosevic completed his re-examination of Col. Vlatko Vukovic at the Hague Tribunal on Wednesday. He presented a document detailing the battalion rules of the Yugoslav Army. This document was written in 1988 and used the term “ciscenje” to describe the removal of enemy forces from Yugoslav territory. The term “ciscenje” had been commonplace in Yugoslav Military terminology for more than 10 years before the Kosovo war. Therefore, there is nothing unseemly about the term appearing in the Vukovic’s war diary. During the cross-examination Mr. Nice showed Col. Vukovic a photograph of an Albanian civilian who he said been burned...

WASHINGTON, Nov 8 (Reuters) - The United States will block Serbia from joining NATO unless it resolves a territorial dispute over volatile Kosovo, a senior U.S. official said on Tuesday in what was a new U.S. demand on Belgrade. Nicholas Burns, the No. 3 State Department official, outlined the U.S. condition to persuade Serbia to seek a settlement, even though Belgrade can only lose authority over the province if it reaches an accord. Previously, the United States has said Serbia had to capture two high-profile war criminals before it could enter into negotiations as a first step toward membership in...