Mer fra Robert Fisk, om hvordan pappmodeller forvirret NATO i følge
jugoslaviske offiserer. Hans Wilhelm Steinfeldt hadde noe av det samme på
TV i går. Interessant at bombing av sivile mål i Kosovo skulle være til
hjelp i kampen mot Arkan og hans bander.
Knut Rognes
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How fake guns and painting the roads fooled Nato
By Robert Fisk in Belgrade
NATO officers began to realise the discrepancy between their own claims and
reality within hours of the start of the Yugoslav military withdrawal. In
just the first stage of the Serbian retreat, they logged 250 tanks moving
out of Kosovo - all undamaged - and at least 40,000 men. This was supposed
to be the troop strength of the entire Third Army; thousands more soldiers
left in the next three days.
All of which casts serious doubt on Nato's wartime propaganda. On 17 April,
for example, Nato spokesman Jamie Shea was boasting that the alliance was
"knocking the stuffing out of Milosevic" while General Wesley Clark, the
Nato commander, said on 27 May that after 27,000 Nato sorties, his pilots
had conducted "the most accurate bombing campaign in history." Although
Nato repeatedly struck power stations and radio-television repeater
stations - and suggested that it had killed more than 500 Yugoslav soldiers
in a B-52 raid on Kosovo in the last week of bombing - it seems to have
caused little damage to Serbian military equipment.
General Pavkovic's claim that the Third Army lost seven tanks, three
transporters, 13 anti-tank guns and other artillery could not be disputed
after a 400-mile tour of some of the most heavily-bombed areas of Kosovo
last week. During my entire journey, I saw only four damaged Yugoslav army
trucks, two abandoned lorries and a destroyed Serbian military jeep.
Numerous barracks had been totally destroyed by cruise missiles - but the
buildings appeared to have been empty when they were struck.
A Yugoslav military official in Belgrade claimed that his troops had
discovered how to avoid attack. "They fired their missiles and then
replaced the batteries with mock-ups," the source said. "The time it took
Nato's photo-reconnaissance people to identify the point of fire and the
vehicle location and return to bomb the mock-up was a minimum of 12 hours.
So we knew when we had to move our equipment - every 12 hours."
The same source also said that army missile technicians had taken apart an
unexploded US Tomahawk missile and concluded that its targeting partly
depended on a chip that guided the rocket by heat sources rather than
imagery. As a result, Yugoslav reservists were set to work burning tyres
beside major road and rail bridges that would emit greater heat than the
surface of the bridges themselves, and also painting the road on Kosovo
bridges in many different colours - because the colours emit different
degrees of heat. The tarmac of many bridges in southern Kosovo are in fact
still coloured in red, yellow, purple and green rectangles.
The Yugoslav air force was meanwhile hidden from view. Although a number of
its machines were destroyed - including three that were shot down - several
MiG-29s were moved around the country, sometimes secreted at night in the
trees off the motorway west of Belgrade, surrounded by farm machinery and
metal sheeting so that Nato's photo-reconnaisance officers would not
recognise their 'signature'. "There wasn't enough room for the MiG-29s to
fly in," an official here said. "As soon as you take off, you're
approaching your own border. We quickly realised that flying was out and
that combat was hopeless. The order was to sit and protect the aircraft, to
save the lives of our pilots."
So why did President Milosevic agree to the entry of international troops
into Kosovo when his army was still ready to fight? Some say he feared that
a ground war would lead Nato troops all the way to Belgrade - and his own
dispatch to the Hague on war crimes charges. But another source suggests
that Viktor Chernomyrdin, Moscow's Balkan peace envoy and the head of
Russia's multi-million dollar Gasprom project, threatened to cut off all
gas to Yugoslavia if Belgrade did not accept the Nato-EU-Russian "peace"
terms.
The Russian military is known to have been angered by Mr Chernomyrdin's
activities - indeed, a Russian general publicly denounced the agreement as
"confused" in the envoy's presence on his return to Moscow. And the Russian
military clearly acted in defiance of its political leadership when it sent
the first Russian contingent into Pristina. The officers involved had
learned of Nato's desire to make their headquarters at Slatina when they
heard Nato radio transmissions referring to Slatina as "Tuzla 2" - Tuzla
being the Nato airstrip in Bosnia. Russia, according to the Yugoslavs,
decided to move into Slatina while Nato commanders were arguing over
whether British or US troops should enter Kosovo first.
Far from being an insignificant Balkan airfield - as British General Sir
Michael Jackson has portrayed Pristina airport - the military airbase is
one of the most sophisticated in the former Yugoslavia with an underground
runway and nuclear bunkers.
At least six Yugoslav MiG-21 jets spent the war there - undamaged by Nato
bombing - and flew out of the airbase before Nato troops arrived in
Pristina. The Russians reportedly want to transport into Kosovo Russian
troops from the 106th Guards Division at Tula (two of whose regiments
fought in Afghanistan) and from the 76th Guards Division based at Pskov
near St Petersburg.
Belgrade's first suspicions that the Americans might be planning a military
campaign against them were aroused last summer when Yugoslav military
intelligence officers learned that US forces were building a Mash-type
hospital in Bulgaria close to the River Yerma.
These suspicions, according to one official, were increased when Belgrade
heard that the Americans were constructing a reserve military airbase at
Kustendil in Bulgaria - a base which they say was used during Nato's war as
a targeting navigation station for B-52s and a transport base for C-130
transport aircraft.
"During the war, the army realised they could survive when Nato started
bombing civilian targets," the Yugoslav source said. "We came to the
conclusion that Nato knew it couldn't find our vehicles concealed in the
hills and forests so it deliberately targeted civilians and civilian
infrastructure. That's when we knew we could maintain our battle
readiness." Despite the bombing of dozens of civilian targets, Nato
repeatedly stated that it never intended to cause civilian casualties.
What has not, predictably, emerged here are the grim statistics of "ethnic
cleansing" and the degree to which the regular Yugoslav army did - or did
not - have a hand in the assault on Kosovo's Albanian population. Most
eyewitness reports of massacres over the past two months suggest that
paramilitary or interior ministry forces rather than regular troops were
principally involved. But last month's indictments against Yugoslav leaders
by the International War Crimes Tribunal include the name of General
Dragoljub Ojdanic, the Yugoslav army chief of staff.
http://www.independent.co.uk/stories/B2106907.html
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