The Defence Ministry of Germany does not consider the negotiations between NATO and the commanders of the Yugoslavian army regarding realisation of the plan on peaceful regulation of the Kosovo problem to have been wrecked. According to the Minister, the heads of NATO agree to prolong for several days the time of withdrawal of the Serbian troops from the province. The advisor of the German chancellor Michael Stainer announced that the negotiations would be recommenced today (June 7). The negotiations held in Macedonia were postponed early this morning due to refusal of Belgrade to sign the document containing details of the withdrawal of the Serbian army from Kosovo. The Foreign Minister of France expressed his confidence, that the barriers arisen due to the new demands of the Serbs would be overcome. The head of the External Policy Department Robin Kuk stated that the negotiations had come to the deadlock because of the demands of Belgrade to leave about 15000 soldiers in Kosovo.
Today (June 7) the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the seven leading industrial countries and Russia were planning to discuss the final text of the resolution on Kosovo, which is supposed to be offered to the UN Security Council. However, after the negotiations between NATO and the commanders of the Yugoslavian army collapsed, the situation became more difficult. Previously the meeting had been postponed by a day due to the fact that the negotiations were prolonged. According to the representative of the US State department James Rubin, the Group of 8 activate their operations to regulate the Kosovo crisis.
Today for the first time for 44 years the first democratic Parliamentary election is to be held in Indonesia. International observers have not revealed any obvious infringements or violence while conducting the election. Forty-eight political parties are fighting for 462 out of the 500 seats in the Parliament. The remaining mandates will be received by representatives of the army, which continues to have the political influence.
Indian troops continue to strike the positions of the Muslim separatists in Kashmir, trying to dislodge the latter from the strategically important mountain regions. The intense battles have taken place in the suburbs of Srinagar and Kargil. Indian ground forces and military air forces are taking part in the operation. According to the Indian commanders, from the beginning of the military actions on May 26, the separatists have lost 200 people. The Indian army lost 50 men. According to REUTERS, the military forces of India have closed access to the journalists to the region of military actions.
Advocates of the Kurdish leader Abdullakh Ocalan blame the Turkish mass media of a prejudiced attitude towards the court process, which has accused Ocalan of high treason. In a letter sent to the western information agencies, the advocates announce that the court had refused to satisfy some of the defence�s requests, in particular to listen to relatives of the fighters of Kurdish working party killed by Turkish soldiers. The court has already heard relatives of the Turkish soldiers killed in the battles with the Kurds, who have been fighting for the independence of Kurdistan for 15 years. About 30000 people have become victims of this opposition. If Ocalan is recognised guilty, he will be executed.
According to US commanders of the Military Air Forces, American and British planes bombed two military objects in the south of Iraq, in the zone forbidden for Iraqi aviation. The strikes were launched after the planes had been shot at by the Iraqi guns. The Iraqi information agency announced that the western planes attacked targets in the provinces Mutanna and Di Kar. However the planes had to retreat under fire from the Iraqi anti-aircraft guns.
Today the Afghan Taliban movement began a mass attack against the troops of the northern coalition in the province Samangan in the northern Afghanistan. Intense battles have been fought in Dar-e-suf region, a strategically important region. Military operations are continuing in the suburbs of Kabul. Representatives of the northern coalition announced that there have been civilian casualties.
Yesterday, Pope John Paul II on a tour of Poland, visited the largest church in the country. Construction of the temple, located in a small village in the central Poland cost US$ 50 million. This temple was erected with believer�s donations. This church, constructed in the style of the St. Peter Cathedral is the seventh largest in Europe. The objective of the Pope�s visit is to strengthen the influence of the church in this country on the threshold of the 2000th anniversary of the birth of Jesus Christ.
The famous American financier and philanthropist George Soros recently arrived to Moscow, and has met with the participants of the project �Pushkin�s library�, dedicated to the 200th anniversary of the prominent poet. The Soros Fund allotted more than US$ 100 million to this project. A solemn ceremony where Soros will be awarded the gold Pushkin medal will be held in the Bolshoi Theatre.
(�Svoboda� radio)
By Wallace Kaufman
Pittsboro, NC, June 6
(The GLOBE)
My brother, who presides over a United Church of Christ congregation in America, has argued with me since March about NATO�s war in Yugoslavia. �Meeting violence with violence,� is always wrong he argues. He said it as if it were the 11th commandment brought by Moses from the mountain. This general principle found its voice among many Americans who pleaded with president Clinton to stop the bombing and resume negotiating.
I tried my best arguments with no success. We had been negotiating with Milosevic for almost ten years. He has always used negotiations to destabilize and torment his neighbors. In Bosnia and Croatia he proved he would murder, torture and rape innocent people to achieve his ends. Finally, I argued strategy: Milosevic did not stop the war in Bosnia and Croatia with negotiations, but when Americans and Europeans launched air strikes, when they gave quiet permission for the Iranians to arm the Bosnians, and when the Croat military became a fighting force winning back territory. These arguments, my brother and many other Americans replied, did not justify bombing Yugoslavia and killing innocent civilians.
I sent my brother irrefutable eye witness accounts of the rape and torture in Kosovo verified by dozens of sources. I sent him the reports from Berlenitz where young boys had their ears and noses cut off before their throats were slit; and where many pregnant women�s stomachs were cut open and the fetus knifed to death. He said again, �Evil for evil is not a correct response.�
These arguments, my brother and many other Americans replied, did not justify bombing Yugoslavia and killing innocent civilians
I tried to compromise with my brother. Okay, I said, the bombing is killing innocent people and making life miserable for hundreds of thousands of Serbs. To kill innocent people because NATO leaders were not willing to risk a single one of their soldiers and airmen in ground combat is wrong. I was following the bipartisan views of Republican Senator John McCain and Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman in this argument. If we believe so strongly in that what Milosevic was evil, McCain said over and over, the President and NATO leaders must have the courage to risk their own troops and their own political careers. The President should never have promised Milosevic he would not use ground forces. Senator Lieberman is a rabbi and I thought perhaps that would soften my brother�s moral certainty. No luck.
In times like this there is a certain perverseness in some Americans that moves them to embarrass America by finding and emphasizing some little virtue in a source of great vice. So it was that my brothers and many others compared NATO�s bombing to Russia�s insistence on diplomacy and negotiation. In one voice with the former KGB officer Evgeny Primakov they said, �stop the bombing now and negotiate.� The government that killed tens of thousands of innocent Chechens and leveled two major cities was now an acceptable advocate of ending war by negotiation. How sweet the harmony when sinners and saints sing the same tune!
I decided to reshape the debate about justified violence in personal terms that might test my brother�s principled defense of non-violence. I put to him a series of propositions and questions: �You come home and your wife is being raped by a man much larger than you and he has a knife. Would you attack him or negotiate with him? (Maybe this is unfair because this is his wife we are talking about.) �You are coming home and you see your neighbor�s wife being raped by an armed man. Do you intervene or do you ask him to negotiate? Or maybe you go in to your house and call the police and ask them to send a negotiator? �You are a tourist in another country. You see a man struggling with a woman. It�s clear he is about to rape her. You are the only other person there. You tell him to stop but he tells you to mind your own business. You are sure you can beat up her attacker. You tell him to stop again, just leave her alone and you will leave him alone. He rips off her blouse and knocks her down. You shout at him to stop but he jumps on the woman and has her pinned down. Do you continue to plead with him? �If you would not fight with the man in the foreign country, how do you explain that your wife or your neighbor is more worthy than the unknown woman? The Good Samaritan, after all, helped a total stranger.
I thought I had my brother in a moral corner, checkmate.
�Why didn�t we intervene in Rwanda? In Tibet? In Sierra Leone?� he asked me. He didn�t answer the questions about the rapes.
I found myself in the uncomfortable position of seeming to defend a war that did indeed sacrifice innocent Serbian lives rather than risk one American or European combatant or the political fortunes of President Clinton, Gerhardt Schroeder, and other European leaders. America, with great publicity, sent Apache attack helicopters, but then refused to use them because they flew too close to the ground. Then toward the middle of May when it became clear that Milosevic might endure the bombing until oncoming winter made ground troops unlikely, Britain�s Tony Blair and the military professionals began talking about ground troops. President Clinton who began the war declaring ground troops would never be sent in, began to say they were a possibility. The generals prevailed with a second important tactic. Since they could not commit their own ground troops, they began to help the Kosovo Liberation Army. The war had begun with NATO officials emphasizing that the KLA had agreed not to take advantage of the bombing to improve their positions. In late April NATO officials began to talk positively about KLA fighting on. By mid May they admitted regular contacts with the KLA. By the end of May NATO planes were a de facto air support force for the KLA. Suddenly in the last week of May Milosevic was facing two overwhelming realities: 1. A real ground war had begun, with NATO support. The troops were the KLA but they had the most powerful air force in the world flying cover for them. 2. NATO was not going to let him wait out the bombing until winter. It was intensifying the bombing. The fear of civilian casualties might make the bombing in Serbia bearable, but in Kosovo it had begun to paralyze Milosevic�s police, paramilitary, and regular army troops. The bombing was shattering them into small unworkable pieces. They were barely holding their own against the KLA and would fall quickly if NATO came in.
In short, as in the last days in Bosnia and Croatia Milosevic had to face the fact that he was about to lose territory, and he had already lost a great deal of the armed power that kept him in the presidential palace. As he did in Bosnia and Croatia, he changed tactics from war to negotiation. Negotiation for Milosevic has been as much a means of winning as war. He may well be hoping for the same kind of sloppy success he got when negotiators led by America�s David Holbrooke agreed to divide Bosnia into Serb and Bosnian republics and Croatia yielded some territory occupied by Serbs.
By the end of May NATO planes were a de facto air support force for the KLA
The longer term results of NATO�s violent intervention in Yugoslavia no one can predict. It depends greatly on the skill of negotiators and Milosevic remains in power and honors his agreements. The short term result is that the murder and rape. No one can read Milosevic�s mind, but the timing of his military surrender is no accident. It mirrors the conditions that forced him to change in earlier wars. It came only after the KLA became a proxy ground force for NATO and NATO itself threatened to send in ground troops rather than have winter condemn its leaders to a politically unpopular continuation of the bombing.
Just before Milosevic agreed to NATO�s peace terms, my brother modified his commandment that meeting violence with violence was always wrong. In an imperfect world, he said, sometimes violent force had to be used to conquer violence. There it is� the justification for the attack on Yugoslavia and for the continued existence of NATO. The world will continue to be imperfect for the foreseeable future.
By Alessandro RAIMONDI, LUGANO, June 4 (THE GLOBE)
�Swiss Rocks� is the name of an interesting exhibition being displayed these days in Lugano at the Cantonal Museum of Natural History. The show, meant as a didactic project, started on the 1st of April and will go on until Saturday, June 12th and concerns the fascinating world of rocks.
As the name of the exhibition indicates the rocks in question are all coming from the rock-rich territory of the Helvetic Confederation.
Actually what the display is all about, is an interesting series of 99 specimens, 14 of which coming from Canton Ticino, the hosting region. Conceived for teaching and information purposes, and as so particularly suited for student-bodies, the display draws attention also from people acquainted with this sort of science. But, as some visitors have observed, the presentation of the whole display is ideal for all those that would like to start the study of such an interesting discipline.
Matter of fact, beyond the 99 rocks visitors can be struck by a geological puzzle of Switzerland, or being lured by two geology manuals, an excursion guide, three brochures of explanations and an interestinf field lab to determine right on the field the nature of rocks and minerals. In all, a well planned effort to explain some of the secrets of mother Earth.
The rocks display is made in a way that they are introduced in their tectonic and stratigraphic context, and as per their places of origin and their formation conditions to attain, that way, a far clearer idea of those rocks formation process. A new approach indeed to Switzerland�s geology.
Following the closure of the exhibition, the display will not be dismantled but transferred to the Cantonal Didactic Centre of Bellinzona, Canton Ticino�s capital.
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