Week in Review

Thursday, October 15
Belgrade – Wesley Clark, NATO’s Commander-in-Chief for Europe, and Momcilo Perisic, Head of the Yugoslav Army General Staff, sign an agreement on reconnaissance flights over Kosovo.
The Serbian Information Ministry bans the daily Nasa Borba
Hague – Louise Arbour, chief prosecutor of the Hague Tribunal for war crimes, informs Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic in writing that she will personally head a team of experts to investigate atrocities that occurred in Kosovo.

Friday, October 16
Brussels – NATO Council decides to extend the deadline for Yugoslavia’s compliance with the UN Resolution 1199 until October 27.
Belgrade – Zivadin Jovanovic, the Yugolav foreign minister, and Brocislav Geremek, the OSCE chairman, signed an agreement on the deployment of 2,000 OSCE verifyers in Kosovo and their one-year ongoing mission in Serbia’s southern province.
Pristina – The illegal Kosovo Liberation Army says it disagrees with the Milosevic – Holbrooke treaty but lends support to the international community’s threats to take military action against Serbia.

Saturday, October 17
Belgrade – NATO’s U-2 aircraft start reconnaissance missions in Kosovo. OSCE logistic teams arrive in Yugoslavia.
London – Augusto Pinoche, the former Chilean dictator, is arrested.

Sunday, October 18
Belgrade – The UN mission to assess the situation in Kosovo and elsewhere in Yugoslavia arrives in the Yugoslav capital.
Washington D.C. – The US authorities say the initial reports provided by U-2 reconnaissance missions over Kosovo are encouraging. The authorities say that shots taken from the air clearly show that two of the seven required battalions of the Yugoslav army have withdrawn from the southern Serbian province.
Pristina – Nebojsa Radosevic and Vladimir Dobricic, reporters of the Tanjug news agency, disappear in Magura, a Kosovo village near the provincial capital Pristina.
 
Monday, October 19
Pristina – Kosovo’s exile self-declared government, lead by Bujar Bukoshi, expresses concern with the non-revealing of the details concerning the Milosevic – Holbrooke agreement and warns that the Kosovo conflict can’t be resolved without the participation of “the people’s legitimate representatives”.

Tuesday, October 20
Belgrade – The Serbian parliament adopts new laws on the media, the police academy and the effects of the recent earthquake. Bogoljub Karic is appointed minister without portfolio for privatization while Zeljko Simic is the new minister for cultural issues.
Boris Oljecik, a Ukrainean writer, opens the Belgrade book show.
Vienna – William Walker, a US diplomat, is elected head of the OSCE verifying mission in Kosovo.
Wolfgang Schiesel, the chairman of the European Union, forwards the proposition that the EU should allocate 50 million dollars for refugees in Kosovo so that they could survive the coming winter.

Wednesday, October 21
Belgrade – More than 29,000 companies employing 650,000 workers are declared non-liquid. The overall loss of Yugoslav enterprises rose to 24.3 billion dinars in September.
The average monthly income in Yugoslavia stood at 1,138 dinars in Yugoslavia, 1,125 dinars in Serbia and 1,326 dinars in Montenegro.

The Margin
Four policemen were killed and seven wounded in Kosovo last week.
Belgrade – A few hundred reporters and citizens started daily protests on October 15 against the regime’s ban on free media.
Oslo – A protestant and a catholic leader in Northern Ireland, David Trimble and John Hume, get he Nobel peace prize for their efforts to put an end to ethnic violence in the Ulster.
Washington D.C. – Milan Panic and Milena Kitic protest outside the State Department against threats of a military interventio against Serbia.