Sunday April 18, 1999

Air raid alert has been in effect in Pristina since Saturday, and was repeated on Sunday at 1 p.m. Only ten minutes after the repeated sirens, three strong detonations were heard northwest of Pristina in the direction of Vucitrn.

A little before 3:30 p.m. the NATO aggressor aviation once again acted in the vicinity of Pristina. Three strong detonations blasted from the direction of Mount Cicavica, and another four were heard from the same direction ten minutes later.

In Saturday night's attack by the NATO aggressor on the Slatina civilian airport, the criminal planes flew in from the direction of Albania and four missiles from Macedonia. The criminal NATO aviation fired around 25 missiles at Slatin airport in the course of the night. Apart from the airport, according to information of the provincial information secretariat, from 2 o'clock to 5:40 a.m., the aggressor aviation targeted the region of Goles, the broader region of Obilic and the Pristina excursion place of Grmlja. On Saturday evening, in three waves, the NATO armada targeted the relay on Mokra Gora with eight missiles.

On Saturday night, the NATO's criminal aviation's targets were a number of regions and cities throughout Yugoslavia. In Belgrade, they pounded the Strazevica hill in Rakovica and housing facilities in Batajnica. One three year-old girl was killed in the strikes, while a number of citizens were injured. On Saturday night again, the NATO missiles' targets was the petrochemical complex in Pancevo, and hit were the nitrogen plant, the petrochemical plant and the refinery.

In Saturday night's brutal bombing attack by the NATO aviation on Novi Sad, eight persons were injured. The enemy aviation kept overflying Novi Sad and its environs in three big waves until 2 a.m. In that period, six detonations were heard from the direction of the industrial zone and the oil refinery. In Novi Sad on Saturday night, in the aggressor's so far fiercest air raid of the city, the Yugoslav Army's anti-aircraft defense prevented, with incessant action, the enemy planes' low flights and greater destruction. In the course of the night, enemy planes also flew over Ruma, Fruska Gora and other parts of Vojvodina, with the Yugoslav Army's anti-aircraft defense strongly acting and downing one of the aggressor's missiles above Sremska Mitrovica.

The NATO criminals acted in the regions of Uzice and Cacak. In Saturday night's attack by the NATO aviation on the village of Prijanovici near Pozega, Miroslav Milic was slightly injured. material damage was inflicted on the village, as well as on the town of Pozega itself where roofs were damaged and windows burst. Targeted were also Divcibare and the village of Pricevici near Valjevo. In the course of the night, NATO planes flew over the region of Loznica from the direction of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The NATO criminal aviation also targeted facilities in the Valjevo region. The targets was once again the village of Pricevic, on the slopes of Mount Medvednik, where bombs of great strength were dropped. The aggressor also targeted facilities on Mount Maljen and the mountain resort of Divcibare at which air-to-earth missiles were launched.

***

A briefing for ambassadors and heads of foreign diplomatic missions in Belgrade was held at the Yugoslav foreign ministry on Saturday, where information was presented about the latest developments and consequences of NATO's aggression against Yugoslavia.

The foreign diplomats were informed about the Yugoslav government's stands presented to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on April 16 and about the fact that the Security Council has so far not met its obligations stemming from the UN Charter, nor has it reacted to the Yugoslav government's request for NATO's brutal aggression to be condemned and halted. Expressed was the expectation that all peace-loving countries in the world would speak in favor of the Security Council finally condemning NATO's aggression and of establishing the authority of law over brutal force. It was also pointed to the NATO aggressors' attempt to deceive the international public with manipulation and falsehoods, to prevent the spreading of the truth about the crimes they are committing against peace and mankind. Special emphasis was laid on the fact that the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia continues its efforts for a peaceful, political solution, by means of direct dialogue with legitimate representatives of the national communities in Kosovo-Metohija.

***

Professor Mira Markovic, the wife of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, has addressed an open letter to British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. It reads as follows:

With a ten-days' delay, I learned you had publicly stated that my children and I are currently not in Yugoslavia. My first reaction at hearing such a thing was puzzlement. Is it really possible that the Foreign Secretary of Great Britain does not have more pressing business than to keep track of the whereabouts of my children and myself?

The next one was naturally less naive. Your statement that my children and I have left Yugoslavia is not merely a result of your idleness, but primarily of your bad intentions. You have been well-known for your bad intentions ever since the beginning of your term in the office, and especially in the last couple of months.

We have you to thank for the four weeks of relentless air-strikes in which many people have already been killed and the country is mercilessly being destroyed.

Your statement that my children and I have fled the country was aimed at giving the world public a picture of my children and myself as dishonourable people and cowards.

Much to your regret but to our content, your intentions will not prove successful, neither as regards my country nor my family.

When it comes to my country, it has already become the world capital of resistance to the domination of one country's will and interest over the entire humankind.

As regards my family, we stay in Yugoslavia.

My daughter is still editor-in-chief of the most popular teenage - radio station 'Kosava'.

My son is wearing a uniform and watching over his small, newly-formed family.

I, myself am actively spending every day at the Yugoslav Left's Directorate's headquarters. Several times a week, citizens of Yugoslavia can see me in the TV news.

The things stand when it comes to your morality, I might soon have to prove that my husband, the President of the FR Yugoslavia, is in the country as well, since you might also bring that into question in a few days time and claim he is actually ruling the country and receiving foreign diplomats in Tahiti.

My children and myself are where we belong, just like the rest of the Yugoslav people. Furthermore, we have to intention of leaving the country despite the terror which is to a great extent your idea in which you wholeheartedly participate.

Wherever did you get the idea that we have left the country? Could it be the case that, were you in our place, you would have fled with your family your country - if you had it, that is.

I paid no attention to the usual courtesies, Dear Sir, since you do not behave as one. So I finish this letter the way I began it,

With utmost contempt,

prof. Mira Markovic PhD

Belgrade University professor

director of the Yugoslav Left's Directorate

wife to the President of Yugoslavia

mother to daughter Marija and son Marko

***

The Kosovo-Metohija conflict can be solved exclusively by political rather than military means, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said in an interview with the Spanish El Pais newspaper, Itar Tass reports.

Ivano said that the Yugoslav nation was united as ever in defending the country from the aggressors. Russia supports a diplomatic solution to the Kosmet problem through dialogue among all interested parties and with the participation of the UN and OSCE, the Russian foreign minister said. According to him, nobody speaks of the Kosmet or Yugoslav problem any longer but the Balkan conflict since Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bulgaria are also involved in it and bombs are falling on them as well.

***

The secretary of the Yugoslav Left's Directorate for international cooperation, Professor Vladimir Stambuk, has received a delegation of Czech parliamentarians comprising members of the Czech and Moravian Communist party, headed by Karel Vimechtal.

The parliamentarians came to take part in the events demonstrating the citizens' resistance to the aggression, which are being held throughout Yugoslavia.

***

Greece has concrete proposals for finding the final solution to the problem in Kosovo-Metohija, Greek Foreign Minister Giorgios Papandreu said pending his trip to the US in the capacity of member of a delegation headed by Prime Minister Kostas Simitis.

It is our intention to acquaint the US with the agony the Balkan region is facing, Papanreu said and added he hoped Athens' peace initiative would contribute to putting an end to the war in the region. In a telephone conversation with Giorgios Papandreu, Madeleine Albright has already asked to be fully acquainted with Greece's initiative. Prime Minister Simitis will inform the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan about this on Monday and President Clinton and European leaders on the eve of Nato's session in Washington on Wednesday.

***

The special envoy of the UN Human Rights Commission, Yiri Dinstbier, has said that there is still time to find a political solution for the crisis in Kosovo-Metohija which must be a complex one and include the entire Balkans.

In an interview to the Slovak newspaper SLOVENSKA REPUBLIKA, Dinstbier stressed that the use of arms, the bombing of factories, bridges and everything else that is currently happening in Yugoslavia, has no sense. Dinstbier spoke in favor of immediately ceasing the humiliation of the Serbian nation, and of finding a solution to the problem. In view of the problems in the Balkans, many more other countries could be drawn into the conflict, like Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey for instance, Dinstbier warned.

***

The president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, sharply condemned the savage NATO aggression on FR of Yugoslavia.

President Mugabe requested the UN Security Council and the non-aligned movement promptly to take appropriate action in order to stop Washington and London, which are seriously compromising peace and security in the world with their interference into the internal affairs of sovereign countries, Mugabe said in an exclusive interview to the Sunday Mail weekly.

***

NATO aggressors on Sunday bombed the municipality of Kursumilja. The bridge in the village of Visoka was hit with two missiles and cannot be used for transport.

The bridge is located at the confluence of the Kostajnica river into Toplica, on part of the Kursumilja-Podujevo highway. The railway bridge located nearby was also bombed and put out of function.

***

Yet another NATO plane on Saturday failed gloriously to complete its deadly journey towards the slopes of the Skopje Black Mountain in the region of the Macedonian village of Tanusevci, only 4 kilometers from the Yugoslav border.

Tanjug has learned that the western military alliance's plane was shot above Kosovo-Metohija, after which it attempted to reach Skopje's Petrovac airport, but did not succeed.

***

The Macedonian Ministry for Town Planning and Construction on Sunday stated that NATO had withdrawn the entire equipment it had given the refugee camp in Neprosten, northwest of Skopje.

Only twenty days ago, says the statement, all the media worldwide released the information that NATO was participating in the accommodation of refugees. When NATO soldiers finished taking pictures aimed at presenting themselves as helping the building of camps for the afflicted population, they announced they were withdrawing on Sunday, together with the equipment.

***

The inhabitant of the village of Paroj near Tetovo in Western Macedonia, Ujdin Aliju, who was killed in the southern Serbian province, was buried in the village on Sunday. Aliju had come to help the Albanian terrorists in their fight for an independent Kosovo.

Young Aliju, it is learned from reliable sources in Tetovo, was killed in a clash between Albanian terrorists, divided in the further concept of the so-called KLA's action, after the break-up of the terrorist organization in the southern Serbian province. The village of Paroj, inhabited exclusively by Albanians, has been in the past days in the focus of interest of the Macedonian public, because a recruit centre of the so-called KLA was discovered in it, from where terrorists were sent to "killing schools" located in northern Albanian and Macedonia. The terrorist training camps are financed by western countries, which also hire theory and practice teachers, through the mediation of NATO.

***

A special YAK-42 plane carrying humanitarian assistance for Yugoslavia took off on Sunday from the Russian city of Saratov.

According to Tanjug, the plane will land in Macedonia, from where medicine, food and other goods will be distributed to the Yugoslav regions exposed to NATO bombardment. In the plane is also a delegation of the Saratov district, entrusted by the district head, Dimitri Ayachkov, with acquainting themselves with the situation on the spot and of resolving the issue of sending refugees and the wounded to Russia for treatment and rehabilitation.

***

Nobel literature prize winner, Dario Fo, voiced sharp protest against NATO's barbarian aggression against FR of Yugoslavia.

At a gallery near the Duomo in downtown Milan, Dario Fo is collecting signatures against war, but also against the Italian government, which dares not check in Parliament its unconstitutional decision on Italy's participation in the aggression against Yugoslavia.

***

Member of British Parliament Alice Man on Sunday toured the Zastava car factory of Kragujevac hit in an attack by Nato's warplanes on April 9 and 12 in which 160 workers who created a human shield to defend the factory, were wounded.

Alice Man told reporters she wished to talk to ordinary people, primarily those who were in the factory during the strikes and along with other war opponents contribute to the establishment of peace.

***

Ljubodrag Popcic of Vrnjacka Banja in Serbia, whose father offered shelter to Madeleine Albright's family which fled Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II, addressed Albright to stop destroying the Serbian nation.

According to Popcic, the entire Jewish family of the present US Secretary of State which fled Prague before the Nazi pogrom in 1939, spent an entire summer in his father's house - Villa riviera. He showed journalists a number of photos of the then three-and-a-half-year-old Albright and members of her family with Popcic himself, his parents and sisters. Albright is paying her debt with bombs, missiles and irrational hatred to the Serbian nation.

***

In the framework of the event entitled Belgrade, the World and Me staged by the Children's Friends organization, the children of Belgrade expressed their wish for peace and an end to Nato's aggression through drawings, songs and verse at several locations in the capital Belgrade. We wish to grow in peace, the children of Belgrade said and called on adults across the world to throw them candies and chocolate rather than bombs and not to destroy their schools, kindergartens and houses. The event was also attended by the chairman of the Yugoslav commission for co-operation with UNICEF, Margit Savovic.

HUMAN SHIELDS ON THE BRIDGES

Since the moment when the NATO criminals tore down the first bridges in their aggression on Yugoslavia, with their spontaneously rallying on bridges throughout our country, citizens have been demonstrating resoluteness to defend them from bombs with their own bodies if necessary. Thus, a human shield has been created, a new form of the defense of squares and cities, as well as bridges.

Thousands of Belgraders rally on a daily basis on the bridges across the Sava and the Danube protecting them. The same is done by the citizens of Novi Sad who want to preserve the Zezeljev bridge, the only remaining of the three bridges over the Danube, which was bombed by the NATO criminals but was not destroyed. the Guarding of bridges, as a form of defending these constructions which were created to join people has been accepted throughout the country. On them, sports events are organized and concerts are held, day and night.

The defenders of the Belgrade bridges: the Gazela, Branko's Bridge and the Pancevo bridge, are reinforced every day by people from all over Yugoslavia, and the world as well. Thus, the citizens, students and taxi drivers in the middle of Branko's Bridge, a symbol of resistance to force, were joined by sportsmen of Republika Srpska and a group of citizens from Montenegro, expressing their patriotism and love towards the people of Serbia suffering from NATO's brutal attacks. A Montenegrin delegation, in which there are federal and republican MPs, eminent sportsmen, writers and actors, as well as citizens of Podgorica, Niksic, Kolasin and other towns, has sent a message saying that "the patriots from Montenegro have arrived to help their brothers and show that they have not betrayed their ancestors and descendants, and that they will never betray Serbia."

On the Belgrade bridges, there have also been poets from Russia, Greece, Germany, France, musicians from many countries, and new arrivals are already being announced. The impression made by the defense of the Yugoslav bridges is evident by the rallies of citizens throughout Europe who, on their bridges, with lit candles express their solidarity with our peoples and condemn the brutal aggression on Yugoslavia.

The events on Branko's Bridge were broadcast live on the Italian MOBY DICK television, at the moment when the sirens sounded air raid alert. The viewers of this television therefore saw not only the people on the bridge defending it with their lives, but the fight of the Yugoslav Army's air defenses against the criminal NATO airplanes. The human shield on the bridge did not yield even at the time of the air-strike, but rather the Belgraders and their guests continued to defend the bridge with songs.

THEATRE PREMIERES, DESPITE

Since NATO's aggression against FR Yugoslavia, the theatres in Belgrade have been over-crowded. The time when performances are held has been altered, repertoires are adjusted to the conditions, and the tickets are free. Last week, certain premieres were held. Radio Yugoslavia's Jasna Novakovic has a report.

Only three weeks after the first bombardment, theatres are returning to creative and aesthetic criterions, that in peace time, made this one of the most popular arts in FR Yugoslavia. Throughout the past decade, at the time of great challenges and international pressures, the public and artists felt the need to react to the events around them. Theatre scenes throughout the country became the reflection of the spirit, resistance to aggression and demonization of the Serbian people, an expression of the need to remain part of the world and the overall artistic heritage.

"You know, at this moment when bombs are falling on people and children, what really keeps us going is the spirit." said Svetislav Goncic, manager of the Theatre on Terazije, on the eve of the opening night of the farce called: "The hotel - free exchange" , held on April 15, 1999. Film named:" Hotel Paradiso" starring Alec Ginnis has been made on the basis of this play. Today, it is played in Belgrade, due to its repertoire structure and for emotional reasons. "Our urban task, and I believe the cultural task of the theatre is to rise above the circumstances, to guide people and give them relief. And what is the best means of a struggle in the theatre. It is precisely the comedy." Goncic stresses.

At the National Theatre in Belgrade, an urgent repertoire move was made in reaction to the bombardment of Yugoslavia in the name of alleged humanitarian aims - this being the most hypocritical alibi of modern man for his expansionist goals. After only three to four rehearsals, the leading cast of this theatre performed a playreading of Aeschylus' "Persae". Director Bozidar Djurovic explains why they have chosen Aeschylus' only tragedy inspired by a true event.

"Numerous analogies link the events Yugoslavia is now going through and the events took place in one of the Persian-Greek wars. Aeshylus tells how a mighty power, desiring to conquer the Athenians, experienced the greatest historical debacle, and how Persian empire afterwards disintegrated."

And Ivana Vujic, who directed "The Star Child" by Oscar Wilde at the 'Dusko Radovic' children's theatre, believes that in these cruel times fairy tales have healing powers both for children and their parents in Yugoslavia.

"A time for fairy tales is not a time for escapism, but for a return to archetypes, a return to the truth. I think that the play "The Star Child" deals with the anatomy of vanity and the consequences it produces, as well as with the ways of redemption from vanity. In it, a boy grows into a man who lives in accordance with the nature and the world, who knows his place and his size, but all his faults as well."

Copyright (C.) Radio Yugoslavia