Syndicate: Berlin news

[Andreas Broeckmann <abroeck@v2.nl>]

Dear Dejan and others,

looks like we, quite significantly, share the same weather today - this is
the first day that Berlin actually experiences spring-like sunshine. A good
day for a demonstration ...

While you are getting little or nothing in terms of news about your own
country's situation, we are being fed a balanced diet of images of
airplanes and cruise missiles, tough-talk and worried faces from BBC World,
CNN, N-TV, ARD, and others. Clark, Solana, Scharping are in press
conferences making the same points over and over again:

- the only person responsible for the attacks is Milosevic - this is not a
war against the Yugoslav people - the military objective is to stop the
killing and humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo and to force the Serb
leadership to sign the Rambouillet agreement - this agreement cannot be
negotiated any further - the attacks will be stopped as soon as the Serb
leadership commits itself to signing the Rambouillet agreement - it is not
possible to fully exclude civilian and military casualties, but every
precaution is taken that civilians and allied personal will not get harmed
- the direct aim of the NATO initiative is to disable and ultimately
destroy the Yugoslav military capabilities -

There is now clearly a growing awareness for possible escalations of the
military conflict into Macedonia, Italy, Bosnia, but the party-line is that
NATO is strong and careful enough to prevent any such situations, and that
the current attacks are designed to prevent such an escalation in the first
place.

They are also talking about an 'indefinite length of the operation'.

Some images of burning, damaged or destroyed civilian houses have been
shown and critically analysed; it has been accepted that the damage may
well have been caused by missiles or bombs, but doubt is expressed whether
the civilian victims shown are genuine. On BBC World, the representative of
the YU-embassy is now justifying why journalists from NATO countries have
been expelled from Yugoslavia by saying that they were mostly spies or
involved in a smear-campaign against his country.

For now,

from Berlin with love,

-a