Around the World

Around the World

Yugosalv army prepares for NATO

The war preparations also came as European Union forensic experts issued a report saying that dozens of ethnic Kosovo Albanians slain in January appeared to be civilians, not combatants.

Yugoslav army troops were setting up anti-aircraft missiles in the mountains northwest of Kosovo's capital, Pristina, rebel leader Suleiman Selimi said yesterday in his first interview since being appointed supreme commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army last month.

Speaking to The Associated Press and another reporter at his home, Selimi said KLA fighters dug in at the Cicavica Mountains saw the missiles being unloaded from several covered trucks.

Senior officials with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said the missiles could be the Yugoslav version of a heat-seeking, Soviet-built short-range missile that monitors have seen on regional roads.

Fighting has claimed more than 2,000 lives in the past year in Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic. About 90 percent of Kosovo's 2.2 million people are ethnic Albanians, and most favor independence.

NATO has warned that Serb failure to sign onto a Kosovo peace plan could result in air attacks against Serbian and Yugoslav strategic targets.

A U.S. Defense Department spokesperson warned Tuesday that the government forces "certainly are bracing for war."

Pentagon spokesperson Kenneth Bacon said 16,000 to 21,000 Yugoslav army units are now on the perimeter of the Serbian province, up from about 10,000 reported two weeks ago and 4,500 in late February. Another 14,000 to 18,000 Yugoslav army forces were said to be deployed inside Kosovo - not counting the thousands of heavily armed Serb police forces.

The ethnic-Albanian run Kosovo Information Center reported large movements of Yugoslav army and police forces throughout the province. In the northern Podujevo region, 30 army vehicles arrived yesterday as reinforcements, it said.

In Pristina, the release of the final report on the slayings in the southern Kosovo village of Racak three months ago did little to end the controversy about whether the victims were massacred by Serbs or killed in battle.

While the head of the forensic team, Helena Ranta, called the Racak killings "a crime against humanity," the report did not directly accuse Serb forces of a massacre, nor did it support Yugoslav claims the victims were either rebel fighters or civilians caught in crossfire.

"There were no indications of the people being other than unarmed civilians," said the report.

William Walker, the American head of the OSCE mission in Kosovo, said the report - which concluded the victims were likely unarmed civilians - reinforced "my original conclusion."

Walker initially described the killings as a massacre by Serb forces. On Wednesday, he told the AP that the report "bolsters what I said" back in January.

Zoran Andjelkovic, head of the Kosovo's Serb-led administration, said he hoped the report would "contribute to bringing out the real truth ... and it will be the end of all manipulation about the alleged massacre."

The Yugoslav forensic team that also examined the Racak victims said an important test to determine whether they had been carrying arms was not performed - something Ranta also acknowledged to reporters on yesterday.

More than any other single incident, it was the Jan. 15 killings of at least 45 ethnic Albanians in Racak, a village 25 miles southwest of Pristina, that galvanized international support for U.S.-led peace efforts. Numerous elderly men and a woman were among the victims, the pathologists confirmed.

The report concluded that at least 40 of the victims - the team did not get access to five others - were unarmed civilians who were killed at approximately the same time.

Twenty-two victims, discovered by monitors in a gully on a hill overlooking the village, were "most likely shot where found," and there was no evidence they had used firearms.

In Wednesday's only report of fighting, the Serb-run Media Center said rebels attacked an army border patrol west of Djakovica and Yugoslav forces returned fire, dispersing the guerrillas and heading in pursuit of them.

International officials gave varying reports of the people fleeing the fighting - between 1,000 and 7,000.

Pope backs his rst pop CD and video

Producers will release the first 1 million copies of "Abba Pater" around the world Tuesday, timing it for the Easter holidays and the upcoming 2,000th anniversary of Christianity.

The pope got his copy, the first one produced, at his general audience yesterday in St. Peter's Square.

Culled from Vatican Radio recordings over John Paul's 20-year papacy, "Abba Pater" features the pope reciting psalms, Gospels and other inspirational passages - occasionally singing.

Mixed in the recording studio is world-beat background music as eclectic as it is ecclesiastic: everything from chants from Uganda with African percussion, to Slavonic liturgy from Bratislava, to Celtic flutes to classical.

For a pope who's already embraced the Internet, the pop CD, singlesof spreading the word, church officials said at a Vatican news conference with the president of Sony Classical.

"His mission is essentially the transmission of the message," said Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, president of the Vatican's committee for 2000 Jubilee celebrations.

One video was shown Wednesday: MTV-paced, digitally doctored, rapid-fire cuts of John Paul embracing children, strolling mountains and dungreeting the faithful, appearing pensive, all to an orchestral background.

The spirit of the video is upbeat and warm, although there's a jarring moment in which a man and woman appear in profile - naked or near enough to count as such, for the few seconds they show.

Sony will pay royalties to Radio Vatican and the religious media firm Audiovisivi San Paolo. Sony Classical President Peter Gelb and church officials deflected repeated questions at the packed news conference about just how any profits will be split.

The CD will sell for top price around the world, with a ''normal artist royalty'' and decisions being made with church leaders in every country about the proceeds, Gelb said.

03-18-99