Proof May Exist to Blame Serbs for Atrocity
Kosovo: Monitors apparently intercepted police radio conversations tied to killing of more than 40 ethnic Albanians.
By PAUL WATSON, Times Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 20, 1999 PRISTINA, Yugoslavia-- As Belgrade does its best to block an independent probe into the massacre of more than 40 ethnic Albanian villagers in the separatist province of Kosovo, foreign monitors are hinting that they have damning evidence from the killers' own mouths.
Information gleaned from eavesdropping on Serbian police radio conversations may be the ace up the sleeve of U.S. diplomat William Walker in his high-stakes confrontation with the Yugoslav government.
On Monday, Belgrade had ordered Walker, who leads an international monitoring team in Kosovo, to leave the country within 48 hours after he accused Serbian police of mass murder in the village of Racak, but on Tuesday the Yugoslav government extended the deadline by 24 hours.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization's two top generals kept up the pressure Tuesday by warning Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to rescind the expulsion order altogether and restrain his security forces or else brace for airstrikes.
U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO's supreme commander, and German Gen. Klaus Naumann, the chairman of NATO's military committee, met with Milosevic for several hours and delivered what Clark called a "very blunt" warning that the alliance is prepared to attack.
The generals also discussed Belgrade's refusal to allow Louise Arbour, the Canadian chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, to enter Kosovo and investigate the massacre allegations.
But after the talks in Belgrade with the generals, there was no immediate sign that Milosevic is about to back away from the brink, as he did when NATO first issued its threat of airstrikes last fall.
In Washington, State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said the results of the Belgrade talks were "not encouraging."
Rubin supplied no details but said Clark and Naumann returned to Brussels after a day of apparently fruitless meetings. He said the generals will report to NATO ambassadors today and discuss the alliance's next move with them.
The U.N. Security Council late Tuesday condemned the massacre and called for an immediate investigation into the killings. It also told Belgrade to rescind its decision to expel Walker.
Serbian police and separatist Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas clashed in Racak again Tuesday, the Serb-run Media Center said. A local deputy police chief was killed and two other police officers were wounded, the center said. They were guarding Yugoslav authorities who are investigating Friday's killings in Racak, which Walker called an "unspeakable atrocity."
In explaining the massacre, Yugoslav authorities insist that police were fighting terrorists who had killed a police officer five days earlier, and Serbian leaders have labeled Walker a guerrilla supporter and protector.
Walker heads the team of more than 700 unarmed monitors that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe set up last fall to verify a cease-fire in Kosovo, a Serbian province where 90% of the population is ethnic Albanian.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, in Washington, demanded Tuesday that Walker be allowed to resume his duties, and she warned Milosevic that NATO's "activation order" authorizing force, issued last fall, remains in effect.
"It is essential for Ambassador Walker to be able to do his job," Albright told reporters after she and other national security officials briefed key members of Congress.
"The activation order is on the table, it is effective," she said. "And I think that the main point here is for President Milosevic to get the message that the actions that have been taken in Kosovo, the atrocities that were committed, must be investigated by the war crimes tribunal" or another independent panel.
Albright, who has conferred with a lengthening list of other foreign ministers, said she has found "unanimous" support for Walker and the monitoring mission.
If Walker is forced to leave Kosovo, his observer mission might go with him, all but eliminating hope of averting a return to all-out war in Kosovo.
At such a critical moment, neither Walker nor his monitors will say publicly what he meant when he told reporters that the victims' bodies and eyewitness accounts weren't his only evidence.
But Walker wouldn't have made such an explosive allegation of mass murder without proof--beyond the horrific scene of so many corpses or the accounts of villagers who say they saw what happened, mission spokesman Sandy Blyth said.
"This is an experienced guy," he said. "He doesn't come out with an open, clear statement like that unless he is sure of his facts."
In interviews, survivors said the killers gave and received orders over walkie-talkies as they rounded up victims. Walker's monitors confide they are able to eavesdrop on police communications.
Although Walker is a career foreign service officer, his resume doesn't suggest a cocktails-and-canapes diplomat.
His postings include a stint in Honduras from 1980 to 1982, when the Central American country was Washington's secret conduit for weapons and other support to right-wing Contras fighting to overthrow the Sandinistas in neighboring Nicaragua.
He also served as chief of the U.S. Embassy's political section in El Salvador, another Central American hot spot, from 1974 to 1977, and later as the country's U.S. ambassador from 1988 to 1992.
As a diplomat in countries so high on Washington's national security agenda, Walker couldn't help knowing something about spying, said John Pike, a defense analyst at Washington's Federation of American Scientists.
"Those are front-line postings where he would have unavoidably developed an acquaintance with the capabilities and limitations of intelligence sources and methods," Pike said from Washington.
And it would be surprising if Walker's team of ex-military and other experts came to verify Kosovo's cease-fire without equipment to listen in on radio communications, Pike said. "Put it this way: They would be idiots if they weren't doing that," he added. "What are they going to do, read about it in the paper the next day?"
It doesn't take "rocket science" to eavesdrop on basic police walkie-talkies, or even more advanced military models that encrypt voice transmissions or hop from frequency to frequency, Pike said.
It could be as simple as listening to a hobby shop radio scanner or as sophisticated as intercepting radio transmissions with spy planes and satellites, he added.
That's probably no secret to the Serbian police, who see Walker's monitors watching them through binoculars or shadowing their convoys every day.
The Serbian police have suspected that foreigners were eavesdropping on them before.
In early January, police accused the relief agency Doctors Without Borders of listening in on police radio communications, a charge the organization denied.
Some of Walker's monitors were near Racak when the villagers were killed Friday, Walker confirmed the next day.
The monitors watched Serbian paramilitary police shelling the village and firing antiaircraft guns at farmhouses, and they tried to persuade the attackers to stop, Walker told reporters.
"Did they witness the massacre? No, they did not," Walker said.
But if it turns out that his monitors heard enough of what the police were saying to use it as evidence against them, the next question is likely to be: Why didn't they stop the killings?
The next day, when Walker saw the victims' bodies for himself and then held a news conference to accuse the Serbian police of "a crime against humanity," a reporter put a similar question to him.
"As you well know, my people are unarmed," Walker replied. "They cannot go up against artillery and antiaircraft weapons. And we do what we can. Obviously, in this case, we were not enough to prevent this sort of atrocity."
Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.Copyright 1999 Los Angeles Times. All Rights Reserved