Kosovo

If you visited Kosovo's shabby capital, briefly, you might think the war was really over. NATO bomb damage is minimal; Serb-shattered homes are found only in certain districts; food markets are busy, even if the water and phone service are spotty. A new restaurant appears every day, with names like Hollywood and Panorama, catering to the army of international aid workers and United Nations bureaucrats that is beginning to assemble. British tanks rumble through the streets, stop at red lights, and children climb up on them, even as the Brits search cars for weapons.

There is an American city on a hill in southeast Kosovo called Camp Bondsteel. A tent town already houses most of the 4,500 troops, vehicles, mobile surgical tents and field artillery that belong to the American contingent of KFOR, the mainly NATO force that now rules Kosovo. Soon the numbers will rise to 7,000, and the U.S. firm of Brown & Root will begin constructing a $50 million base with winterized barracks. Visit Camp Bondsteel and you soon realize how the Kosovo war has changed NATO's mission.

Prospect Hill Baptist Church, 703 Lincoln Ave., will hold a special candlelight prayer service at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. The one-hour program of readings, song and prayer will center on the crisis in Kosovo. Perry Dane of the Rutgers School of Law will speak on Judaism and the law from 9 to 11 a.m. Sunday at Main Line Reform Temple, 410 Montgomery Ave., Wynnewood. ST. VINCENT DE PAUL The Society of St. Vincent de Paul will be collecting donations of clothing, linens, small appliances, books and toys at the following locations: From 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. June 1: St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church, 1901 Chester Pike, Eddystone, and Holy Cross Catholic Church, 651 E. Springfield Rd., Springfield.

BRUSSELS - Serbia and Kosovo reached a potentially historic agreement Friday to normalize relations between the Balkan neighbors, end years of acrimony and put them both on a solid path to European Union membership. The tentative deal culminated months of tense negotiations and showed determination of both Serbian Prime Minister Ivica Dacic and Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, said EU negotiator Catherine Ashton. "What we are seeing is a step away from the past and for both of them a step closer to Europe," Ashton, the EU's foreign policy chief, said.

A Feb. 25 CBS news broadcast gave us the following statistics: "Fifty percent of Americans in a poll do not know where to find Kosovo on a map - 54 percent favor sending U.S. troops there. " So what are to conclude from the above? That 54 percent of Americans favor shooting first, aiming later? That the other 46 percent of Americans would also send U.S. troops to Kosovo, if only they could find it on a map? That 4 percent of Americans (54 percent minus 50 percent) would send U.S. troops anywhere, even if the place is not on any map?

Even if the fighting ends soon in Kosovo, most refugees will not be able to return to their towns before the arrival of winter, because there are few houses left, according to international relief workers who returned recently from the province. The London-based organization Save the Children released a grim report yesterday on conditions in Kosovo after accompanying a team of U.N. inspectors on a 10-day tour of Serbia and the province with the permission of the Belgrade government.

As NATO bombs drop over Kosovo, I am reminded of a conversation that I had with President Clinton in mid-1994. The President met with The Inquirer Editorial Board while visiting Philadelphia, and I asked him why he hadn't carried out his campaign threats to crack down on Serb attackers in Bosnia. For 20 minutes, the President laid out, in great detail, all the obstacles that prevented him from acting. I felt as if I was speaking with, well, a smart professor, not the most powerful man in the world, who was elected to make tough decisions despite the obstacles.

Commentators in the Asia-Pacific region are comparing the slaughter in the Indonesian territory of East Timor to Serb massacres of Kosovar Albanians. "The world wonders whether these atrocities are so different from the war crimes perpetrated in Kosovo," editorialized the Melbourne Herald-Sun. The Australian paper called for U.N. peacekeepers to stop military thugs from murdering East Timorese - in churches, in Red Cross headquarters, in their homes - in revenge for choosing independence in a U.N.-sponsored referendum 10 days ago. The assumption is that Kosovo set a precedent for international intervention in the name of humanitarian goals, even if such intervention means ignoring sovereign boundaries.

The consequences to the civilian population seem totally out of proportion with any military targets. Albert Rohan, Austrian diplomat (Reuters, July 31) Conditions are pretty horrible. . . . It won't take much more before we have a full-blown disaster on our hands. Thomas Vargas, U.N. Commission on Human Rights (Washington Post, Aug. 2) The West was naive in thinking that it could just let [President Slobodan Milosevic] tip the balance and then call a halt.

The patrol halts and Sgt. Mitchell Call scans the cornfields with night-vision goggles as Cpl. Daniel Woodrum rests atop a Bradley fighting vehicle, smoking a cigarette, gazing up at a star-filled sky and singing "You Are My Sunshine. " A NATO helicopter thuds overhead. Pfc. Michael McLeskey checks his M-16. A radio squawks inside the Bradley, then falls quiet, and the only sounds are the scruff of boots and voices of infantrymen turned peacekeepers in a mean slice of the world Staff Sgt. Perry Flowers tells his guys "Let's go," and two Bradleys whisk over tight, winding roads, their rubber cleats rattling the asphalt.

BRUSSELS - Serbia and Kosovo reached a potentially historic agreement Friday to normalize relations between the Balkan neighbors, end years of acrimony and put them both on a solid path to European Union membership. The tentative deal culminated months of tense negotiations and showed determination of both Serbian Prime Minister Ivica Dacic and Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, said EU negotiator Catherine Ashton. "What we are seeing is a step away from the past and for both of them a step closer to Europe," Ashton, the EU's foreign policy chief, said.

BELGRADE, Serbia - European Union leaders urged Serbia's new prime minister, a nationalist who served as Slobodan Milosevic's spokesman during the Balkan wars, to reopen talks with the former province of Kosovo and move forward with pro-EU reforms. Prime Minister Ivica Dacic was sworn in Friday, marking the first time the late Milosevic's Socialist Party will dominate the government since ruling Serbia for a decade in the 1990s - an era of wars, international sanctions, and economic downturn.

Grenade attacks in Kenya kill 1 NAIROBI, Kenya - Two grenade attacks on the Kenyan coast killed at least one person and wounded around a dozen others Saturday night, officials said. One grenade was thrown into a crowd of people in the small town of Mpwapa, which is north of Mombasa, police official Jacinta Kinywa. At least 10 people were wounded and the attacker escaped on foot, Kinywa said. A witness, Dan Maithya, said the grenade landed on a woman, and that the blast severed her head.

BRUSSELS, Belgium - European Union leaders formally made Serbia a candidate for membership in the bloc, in a remarkable turnaround for a country considered a pariah just over a decade ago. Serbia had been widely expected to get EU candidacy in December after it captured two top war-crimes suspects. But it was disappointed when Germany delayed the move, saying it wanted to see more progress in talks with Kosovo, its former province whose independence Serbia refuses to recognize. "We agreed tonight to grant Serbia the status of candidate country," EU President Herman Van Rompuy said after a meeting Thursday of the bloc's heads of state and government.

RESTELICA, Kosovo - Rescuers pulled a 5-year-old girl alive from the rubble of a house flattened by an avalanche that killed her parents and at least seven of her relatives in a remote mountain village in southern Kosovo. Col. Shemsi Syla, a spokesman for the Kosovo Security Force, said Sunday that officers had discovered the girl when they heard her voice and cellphone. Her home was buried under 33 feet of snow. A video broadcast on Klan Kosova TV showed rescuers covering the girl with blankets before she was rushed to a hospital.

PODGORICA, Montenegro - An avalanche hit a village in Kosovo's mountainous south Saturday, killing a married couple and their 17-year-old son and leaving nine others missing, police said, as heavy snow continued to blanket the Balkans. The village of Restelica, where the deaths occurred, and its region bordering Macedonia and Albania have been blocked by snow for several days, Kosovo police spokesman Baki Kelani said. NATO peacekeepers have been called in to help local authorities in the rescue operation.

BRUSSELS, Belgium - The European Union granted Serbia candidate status Wednesday but refused to set a date to begin formal talks for its accession into the 27-nation bloc until Serbia and neighboring Kosovo improve relations. The move was bittersweet for Serbia, which had expected to be given a date for the start of negotiations after the arrest earlier this year of war-crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic and his extradition to the international war-crimes court. "We recommend that accession negotiations be opened as soon as Serbia achieves further progress in the one key priority . . . the negotiations with Kosovo," EU Enlargement Commissioner Stefan Fule said Wednesday.