Bosnia

Saturday night, long after his 4-year-old twins were asleep, Keith Northrup stayed up late reading children's books into a tape recorder, including a family favorite: "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day." A warrant officer for the Maryland Army National Guard, Northrup, 32, of Odenton left yesterday to spend about nine months in Bosnia-Herzegovina on a peacekeeping mission. He wanted to leave part of himself for the twins while he was away. When he signed up to join the Maryland Army National Guard four years ago, he said, he never expected to be deployed.

Taxpayers' dollars for Bosnia were not lost or stolenOn Aug. 17, The Sun carried a report from the New York Times indicating that up to $1 billion in local money and international aid had been stolen or lost in Bosnia ("Bosnian corruption cost as much as $1 billion"). Some news organizations even reported that all $1 billion allegedly lost or stolen was international aid -- some of it from U.S. taxpayers.These reports are false and, if left unchallenged, could have a pernicious effect on American foreign policy.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- As much as $1 billion dollars has disappeared from public funds or been stolen from international aid projects through fraud carried out by the Muslim, Croatian and Serbian nationalist leaders who keep Bosnia rigidly partitioned into three ethnic enclaves, according to an exhaustive investigation by an American-led anti-fraud unit.The anti-fraud unit, set up by the Office of the High Representative, the international agency responsible for carrying out the civilian aspects of the Dayton peace agreement, has exposed so much corruption that relief agencies and embassies are reluctant to publicize the thefts for fear of frightening away international donors.

WASHINGTON -- As international troops stream into Kosovo, plans are under way to pull thousands of U.S. and allied soldiers out of Bosnia and Herzegovina, prompting fears that a tenuous peace and unfinished business in the former Yugoslav republic may be sacrificed on the altar of a new peacekeeping effort.About 34,000 NATO-led troops -- including 6,200 Americans -- are patrolling in Bosnia, enforcing the Dayton peace accords that four years ago halted fighting between Serbs, Croats and Muslims that cost 250,000 lives and produced 2.7 million refugees and displaced persons, nearly a million of whom have not returned to their homes.

Albanian refugees fresh from the crime scene of Kosovo have documented the world's case against Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic.By bearing witness to the brutal campaign of expulsion and massacre carried out by his army and police force, they brought on the May 27 indictment of Milosevic by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, in The Hague, Netherlands.But the tribunal's investigators, an idealistic bunch with an eye on the bigger picture, are working an even bigger case, one that has yet to yield results.

THE OVERDUE indictment of Slobodan Milosevic by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia is based on facts and law. It also disturbs the peace process that must come in Kosovo.The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide became world law in 1951. It outlaws acts with intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.This is not a meaningless gesture. A war crimes court sitting in Tanzania last September sentenced a former Rwandan prime minister to life in prison.

WASHINGTON -- War crimes prosecutors are using some of NATO's most secret intelligence to build cases against Yugoslavia's top political and military leaders. But there are concerns that the alliance's diplomatic deal-making will allow Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic to escape justice.While leaders in the United States, Russia and other countries work feverishly on a diplomatic plan to end the 8-week-old conflict, prosecutors with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague, Netherlands, are collecting information on the roles of Milosevic and his top commanders in atrocities in Kosovo.

This is an excerpt of remarks by Christiane Amanpour, chief international correspondent for CNN, to the Freedom Forum in New York on April 13. IN MY years of covering Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, the most terrible things were often first reported by journalists from eyewitness accounts. And then they were proven true: the death camps in Bosnia, the mass graves, for instance. Of course, none of the Albanian refugees on Serbian television are portrayed as fleeing the terror campaign; Serb officials insist they are only fleeing NATO bombing.

WATERTOWN, N.Y. -- They're known simply as "the Tenth," and since 1991 they've become the most called-upon Army unit in a generation. They've marched across Iraqi deserts, skirmished with ragtag troops on Somalian streets and stood tall in Haiti.Now the 10th Mountain Division is preparing for its biggest deployment since it was created to ski and fight in Italy in World War II. Beginning in July, the first wave of 5,600 soldiers will depart from this corner of New York. They'll take with them months of intensive training in urban warfare, Balkan culture and refugee assistance.

On a pleasant May morning six years ago, Mother Teodora, 72, welcomed her visitor to the Gracanica monastery in the middle of Kosovo. A hundred miles away in Bosnia a war was raging. But at this medieval shrine of Serbian Orthodox Christianity, pastoral tranquillity reigned.She wiped the dirt of an onion field from her hands to pour a shot of homemade plum brandy. Then she spoke of the Albanians who decades earlier had taken root in her Serbian heartland and now made up 90 percent of the population.