Canadian
Member of Parliament, Svend Robinson, who is also the NDP's Foreign Affairs
Critic has become the first western politician to have ventured into Kosova
and walked out of the war ravaged region on his own.
Lone walk out of Kosovo ends
Robinson's odyssey
MP says he was first Western politician
inside since air strikes
Patrick Graham
National Post
http://www.nationalpost.com/network.asp?f=990521/2625559
BLACE, Macedonia - Svend Robinson
arrived in Macedonia yesterday having travelled through the Balkans
the hard way. After driving for two days through a devastated Kosovo accompanied
by Serb government officials, the NDP's foreign affairs critic walked alone
across the border.
During what he claimed was the
first visit to Kosovo by a Western politician, Mr. Robinson toured NATO
bombing sites and Albanian villages emptied of their inhabitants. Sporting
a tie and rumpled jacket and carrying a flight bag over his shoulder, he
said: "I was shocked by what I saw. It was a humbling but overpowering
experience.'' Less than an hour after crossing the border, Mr. Robinson
was jumping aboard buses full of refugees waiting to be taken from Brazde
refugee camp to Canada and welcoming them to the ''cold country with a
warm heart.''
It is unusual, to say the least,
for a citizen of a NATO country to drive from Belgrade to Pristina, the
capital of Kosovo, and virtually unheard for someone to make the final
leg through southern Kosovo to Macedonia. Mr. Robinson, a pugnacious parliamentarian
at the best of times, clearly has
grit.
Leaving early on Wednesday morning
in a convoy of two cars, Mr. Robinson drove on and off the main southern
highway out of Belgrade to avoid bomb damage. He passed a UN convoy on
his way to Pristina, where he spent the night. On
the road to Macedonia yesterday,
Mr. Robinson said he did not see a single person in the burned villages
along the road.
''From Pristina to the border
was devastating. Towns and villages were completely empty, houses burnt
and destroyed,'' he said. Despite warnings from the Canadian government,
Mr. Robinson made the journey in order to see for himself what was happening
in Kosovo. His arrival surprised even Canadian diplomats who had been skeptical
that Mr. Robinson
would succeed both in gaining
permission and navigating the dangerous routes where Yugoslav forces and
NATO warplanes have systematically levelled the province.
In his bag, Mr. Robinson carried
a fragment of a NATO cluster bomb he found in a Kosovo village and that
now serves, he says, as a symbol of the political message he intends to
convey back home. Once a proponent of NATO air strikes on humanitarian
grounds, Mr. Robinson now believes they are a failed tactic and ''profoundly
inhuman,'' he said. ''My view is that the NATO bombing strategy has been
a profound disaster, a human disaster, an environmental disaster, and a
political disaster,'' said Mr. Robinson. ''It has succeeded in crushing
and silencing a very fragile and emerging democratic movement.'' Mr. Robinson
indicated a negotiated settlement will be possible without providing Slobodan
Milosevic, the president, with immunity from a war crimes trial.
Like many of the Western journalists
who have been bused into Kosovo from Belgrade, Mr. Robinson was given a
grisly tour of sites where NATO bombs killed civilians. This is the view
of the war that the Yugoslav government wants to show the world even if
it requires taking outspoken human rights activists like Mr. Robinson on
a tour of areas clearly scarred by ethnic cleansing.
Supervised by foreign ministry
officials, Mr. Robinson had little unfettered contact with ethnic Albanians
while in Kosovo. When Mr. Robinson stopped in the town of Podujevo, he
was told ethnic Albanians had fled from NATO air strikes and the fear of
''terrorist'' attacks by the Kosovo Liberation Army.
At a hospital in Pristina, Mr.
Robinson angered his escort when he refused to see victims of NATO bombings
unless he was also shown patients wounded by Yugoslav police and paramilitaries.
A doctor told Mr. Robinson that there were no such victims there. In a
chilling encounter at the Grand Hotel in Pristina, Mr. Robinson reported
talking to six mercenaries working with the Yugoslav forces. The four Russians,
one Israeli, and one Ukrainian were some of the hundreds
of soldiers, many of them volunteers,
who have arrived in Kosovo since the conflict began.
''One of the Russians said to
me 'I'm here to kill Muslims,' '' said Mr. Robinson. ''I asked whether
they had killed a lot Muslims and they said 'Yes we have killed a lot Muslims
-- but only the men, we don't kill the women and children. All Muslim men
are terrorists.' ''
After crossing into Macedonia yesterday,
Mr. Robinson was driven to Brazde camp by members of the Canadian embassy
staff in Macedonia. He was taken on a tour similar to the ones given to
over a dozen celebrity visitors in the last month, including Richard Gere.
On Monday, more Canadian parliamentarians will arrive for what aid workers
and journalists call the packaged misery tour.
While five buses full of refugees
waited to be transported to the airport for a flight to Canada, Mr. Robinson
entered each one carrying a bag of Canadian flag pins and welcomed them:
''My government is doing everything we can so that every refugee who wants
to return to Kosovo can with security.''
Mr. Robinson also assured them
that those responsible for their plight would be brought to justice. And
then he broke their hearts.
Dozens of people on the buses
broke into tears as Mr. Robinson described his drive through Kosovo. After
asking repeatedly whether anybody was from Podujevo, Mr. Robinson graphically
described the empty streets and charred remains of the houses. Nazifi Hetem,
a 48-year-old father of three who had escaped Podujevo, sobbed quietly
as Mr. Robinson, hand on Mr. Hetem's shoulder, told him what had happened
to his home town of 13,000 people.
However, Mr. Robinson did not
mention either his views on the use of ground troops or his views on negotiating
an end to the bombing. In the refugee camps of Macedonia, where Tony Blair
received a hero's welcome for his aggressive views on the use of ground
forces, criticisms of NATO are not well received.
Mr. Robinson was content to leave
the buses following light applause from future Canadians and, possibly,
future constituents. |
