By Paul Hockenos
The Christian Science Monitor - May 10, 2000

KOZARAC, BOSNIA - As if self-conscious of their own presence, the workmen issue terse shouts as the sharp cracks of their hammers pierce the eerie stillness of this weed-infested ghost town.

Few words are spoken as saws and cement mixers grind away. The workers are Bosnian Muslims returning home after being expelled by Bosnian Serbs in 1992, during one of their first large-scale "ethnic cleansing" campaigns.

In a month-long terror spree, masked paramilitaries raped Bosnian Muslim women and either killed the men or imprisoned them in camps. Televised images of emaciated prisoners behind barbed-wire fences shocked viewers around the world. Every house in the town was stripped and dynamited.

Today, about 900 refugees have moved back to Kozarac, into homes rebuilt with European Union funding.

"This is our house. We have nowhere else," says Farudin Kapetanovic, who spent time in the notorious Trnopolje prison camp down the road. He still has nightmares about the experience. "So many were killed. It's like every second neighbor I had is now gone," he says.

"The war is over, and things will be better soon," he continues, his face streaked with sweat and dust, his hands sunburned. "We're coming back."

The right of all Bosnian refugees, regardless of ethnicity, to reclaim their homes is a key element of the 1995 Dayton peace accord. But in the nearly five years since the agreement was signed, only a sporadic trickle of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats have returned to the Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb sector within Bosnia. Yet minority returns are now on the rise.

Every week, three or four new homes go up here. The ongoing reconstruction of 500 houses will cost the EU more than $10 million, but projects like this are only the first step in a cycle of return.

Kozarac refugees, most of whom are living in Bosnian Muslim-controlled towns nearby, must pledge to live in their rebuilt houses. Their repatriation opens up their current accommodations, many of which were occupied by Bosnian Serbs before the war.

While Kozarac is a success story, life here is far from normal. The newly reconstructed houses with their red-tile roofs stand out among the skeleton-like ruins that line street after street.

The destruction of Kozarac, once a prosperous little town of 25,000, was carried out deliberately, much of it by local Serbs, with the intention of leaving it unfit for human habitation.

"It's all a bit different now, but it's good," says Azra Kapetanovic, Farudin's cousin. "We've had to start a new life, start everything from scratch. It's difficult because no one in the family works." She and her family live on her father-in-law's $100 a month pension.

Ms. Kapetanovic's seven-year-old daughter attends a separate school from Bosnian Serb children. "It's a divided city now," she says. "The Serbs have their part, and we have ours."

As Kapetanovic stands in her garden, the prerecorded call of the muezzin echoes across the surrounding foothills. During the war, Bosnian Serbs destroyed mosques on their territory, blotting out the last reminders of the long Ottoman Turkish rule.

Down on the main road, three bare-chested men - one the local priest - take a water break. "We don't mind the Muslims there," says Petar Tekic, a refugee from Livno, a town now under Bosnian Croat control. "But if I try to go back, I'm sure to have my throat slit," he says.

Unlike other towns in Bosnian Serb territory, where returning Bosnian Muslims have met with harassment and attacks, Kozarac has been quiet for the past 10 months. When reconstruction began two years ago, building sites were bombed and one person was killed. But the heavy presence of NATO-led SFOR troops and persistent international pressure have cowed local authorities.

"There are three factors that made this work," says Milburn Line, an international official working on refugee returns. "The SFOR presence, international community investment, and the determination of the people of Kozarac."

But what will happen once the international community leaves Bosnia?

"These police are the same people, the exact same people who were wearing military uniforms in the war," says Mr. Kapetanovic. The UN intends to introduce Bosnian Muslims into the local force as soon as possible.

Yet 4-1/2 years into the peace process, even optimist admit that the scattered return of refugees is woefully inadequate. Kozarac is a hopeful illustration of the slow and laborious progress in healing the wounds of postwar Bosnia.

But at this rate, many worry that the international community's patience will run out before Bosnia is healthy enough to stand on its own.

PARIS - Newsweek magazine's revelation that NATO lied about its air war over Kosovo a year ago poses a question: What other lies may have been told?

Newsweek publishes what it says are the suppressed findings of a U.S. Air Force investigation into the results of the air campaign against Serbian army forces in Kosovo.

Last year NATO claimed that it had destroyed 120 tanks, 220 armored personnel carriers and 450 artillery pieces in 744 ''confirmed'' air strikes. In Washington, Secretary of Defense William Cohen said these attacks had ''severely crippled [Serbian] military forces in Kosovo by destroying more than 50 percent of [their] artillery and one-third of the armored vehicles.''

The reality, according to the new air force report, is that NATO destroyed 14 tanks, 18 armored personnel carriers and 20 artillery pieces - more or less what the Serbian government said at the time, which was dismissed by NATO as Serbian ''disinformation''.

Alas, the disinformation was coming from Brussels and Washington. What compelled the Serbian government to surrender was not attacks against its forces in Kosovo but the bombing of strategic targets in Serbia - bringing down the power system in Belgrade and destroying selected industrial plants, including those belonging to Slobodan Milosevic's political supporters.

Newsweek, incidentally, calls this ''terror-bombing civilians,'' which is utter nonsense. The carpet-bombing of Hamburg and Berlin, or the fire-bomb raids to destroy Tokyo during World War II, producing millions of civilian deaths - that is terror-bombing of civilians.

What NATO did to Serbia was seriously inconvenience a large part of the civilian population while putting a few civilians at mortal risk through collateral bomb damage or by cutting off power to hospitals. It does no good to accuse NATO of disinformation while grossly misusing language in telling what actually happened.

When the air campaign was over last year, General Wesley Clark wanted to know what had happened. According to Newsweek's report, in late June he sent a 30-man team, mostly from the U.S. Air Force, to investigate. They found that while fixed targets generally were hit (although many proved to be spoof targets - fake bridges and bunkers), the mobile targets hit were mostly dummies, or civilian vehicles.

The real tanks, APCs and other military equipment had been successfully camouflaged or entrenched, just as the Serbian army claimed after the war.

General Clark, dismayed, sent the team back to check the targets on the ground, rather than from helicopters. They came back with 2,600 photos backing their original report.

The U.S. Air Force then produced a report of its own, based on cockpit videos or flashes detected by satellites, which backed its own claims of success. But General Clark's British and German deputies, and also the CIA, warned him not to believe the air force figures.

The survey was proof that tactical air campaigns against ground troops are not successfully conducted from 60,000 feet. This finding comes as no surprise to anyone who has seen tactical air action elsewhere.

But at the low altitudes at which tactical air attacks work, pilots risk getting killed, and U.S. doctrine (and, perforce, NATO doctrine) is that nobody on your side should risk his or her life. If that doesn't work in practice, you lie about it.

What other lies were told about the Kosovo war? Did the ethnic cleansing inside Kosovo really begin before NATO's attacks started? The Serbs and some reports in the international press say ''no.''

There have been claims that the United States deliberately sabotaged the Rambouillet conferences in order to provoke a bombing campaign that it expected to be quick and decisive. We know that panic was produced in Brussels when it proved to be neither.

We also know that General Clark has been forced into early retirement, apparently because he insisted that ground intervention was the only sure way to get Serbia's capitulation.

His offense seems to have been to attempt to introduce realism into plans drafted in Washington to please officials afraid of casualties.

Ground war proved not to be needed. Strategic bombing contributed to the victory, but Russia actually handed victory to NATO by telling Slobodan Milosevic that Moscow would no longer support him.

What happened in Kosovo has led to a number of conclusions about a new and antiseptic Western way of making war and about ''humanitarian war,'' or disinterested war conducted in defense of principles. That is why it is important to know what really happened.

What else is there to comeout about what went on in Kosovo before the NATO intervention? About the American connection with the Kosovo Liberation Army and the promises, if any, made to them? About the diplomacy that ledup to the war, and the diplomacy that ended it?

Eventually it will all come out, just as the truth about the air campaign has now come out. It would be better if the rest of the truth were told now. Otherwise the alliance that fought the war is undermined, and so are the reputations of NATO and the United States.

Sierra Leone Truce Ends as Loyalists Mobilize

As the trucks roared by crammed with men waving AK-47 assault rifles and other weapons, crowds along the road outside Freetown broke into applause and shouted encouragement. The militiamen are concentrating in Waterloo, about 35 miles southeast of Freetown on the main road out of this Atlantic port city, apparently in preparation for a swing to the northeast, where the rebel forces are concentrated.

While reports of actual fighting were sketchy, senior military commanders and diplomats here said the decision by President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah's government to authorize allied militia forces to take the offensive against the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF) has crippled a 10-month-old peace process that was designed to end the eight-year civil war in this West African country.

Pro-government militia groups had largely complied with the peace accord by disarming, but they said they were returning to action in response to recent truce violations by the RUF rebels – including the killing of civilians and U.N. peacekeeping troops and the abduction of as many as 500 peacekeepers. The new violence has embarrassed the United Nations and major international powers, including the United States, that had backed the peace agreement, even though it required the elected government to share power with RUF leader Foday Sankoh and other rebel commanders. This week's developments – including a bloody melee Monday outside Sankoh's official Freetown residence, in which seven civilians and a number of Sankoh's guards were killed – and a firefight in Masiaka, east of the capital, have placed the 8,700-member peacekeeping force here in an uncertain position.

Bernard Miyet, the U.N. undersecretary general for peacekeeping, said here that the United Nations is reassessing its role but is not considering withdrawing. And Oluyemi Odeniji, the representative here of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, said that he has requested that U.N. forces be given the authority to strike back at rebel forces if they come under attack.

U.N. officials also stressed that the multinational peacekeeping force is committed to defending Freetown. At U.N. headquarters in New York, Annan said the peacekeepers would reinforce a U.N. outpost on the main highway south of Freetown. "If the RUF is indeed moving," Annan told reporters, "they will be checked." At the same time, the United Nations pledged to send about 400 additional Jordanian and Indian troops if they are needed to deter an offensive.

Meanwhile, about 800 elite British troops patrolled a section of the Freetown peninsula where British nationals and other foreigners were awaiting evacuation. The British also have taken control of the international airport at Lungi, across the bay from Freetown, to ensure that evacuation flights continue.

But the pro-government militia groups, spearheaded by the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), described the U.N. moves as too little, too late. "We have taken the step of mobilizing, with the authorization of the president as commander-in-chief to get rid of the threat of the RUF once and for all," said Prince Nicol, a senior leader of the AFRC, a group made up largely of former government troops. "Our men on the move know the terrain, and we will end this carnage once and for all."

"It seems the United Nations does not know what it is doing," Nicol added. "We are not going to wait for them to react, or we will all be dead. We have to take the initiative." Nicol confirmed that his militiamen had detained eight senior RUF commanders in Freetown and that they were being held at a maximum security prison.

AFRC commanders said their men would be at a disadvantage in any clash with RUF forces because they had turned in many of their weapons. While thousands of people were clamoring today to join the militia group because of widespread public revulsion for the rebels, many could not be accepted because they had no equipment. But those who did join up were treated like heroes. Crowds banged on the trucks carrying them south to Waterloo, clapped, cheered and chanted, "Now we will kill the RUF," and "Show no mercy." In the capital, radio stations praised the AFRC leader, Lt. Col. Johnny Paul Koromah, as the savior of Freetown and repeatedly played the reggae classic "Don't Give up the Fight," in his honor.

At Jui Junction, 15 miles south of Freetown, they encountered streaming throngs of fearful refugees loaded down with bags, baskets and other bundles. "Last time the RUF came they killed my 16-year-old daughter right in front of my eyes and burned my house," said one of the refugees, Rosalyn Kamara, 34. "I don't want to wait this time." Many refugees said they left their homes after hearing mortar fire and small arms fire Monday and Tuesday in the hills near Waterloo.

"We are very afraid," said Emanuel Joseph, carrying a bag strapped to his chest and a small suitcase. "We heard that if the RUF caught us they would destroy our lives. Life is not safe, so we left."

At a U.N.-manned checkpoint in Jui Junction, AFRC officer J.S. Jalloh said his men were being sent to halt any RUF advance. "How can there be a cease-fire?" he asked. "People are coming to kill you, so you have to fight. The [militiamen] are in good swing. We are ready to fight. The RUF will get to Freetown over my dead body."

RUF leader Sankoh, who had been under U.N. protection, vanished from his Freetown residence during the melee there Monday, and U.N. officials say he may still be in the capital under the protection of a rebel cadre. The officials have been trying to communicate with him in the hope he can order a halt to the rebel movements, and Odeniji said today that Liberian President Charles Taylor, a long-time Sankoh ally, had agreed to try to contact him.

Under a controversial peace accord signed June 1999 in Lome, Togo, the RUF was given amnesty for wartime atrocities – including mutilation of civilians – and its leaders were given senior government positions. In exchange, the rebel group was to disarm and take part in free elections. But the RUF largely refused to disarm and, when U.N. peacekeepers tried to deploy in rebel-controlled diamond-rich areas, the wave of kidnappings and firefights began.

The civil war began in 1991 after Sankoh formed the RUF with a core of disenfranchised rural youths. It soon grew to a force of 15,000, with support from Libya and Taylor; throughout the war, Taylor has acted as a conduit for weapons to the RUF and has helped the rebels smuggle out millions of dollars of diamonds to finance the war.

The RUF soon established itself as one of the world's most brutal guerrilla forces. Rebels began hacking off the hands and legs of civilians who did not embrace them, abducted thousands of children to train as combatants, razed scores of villages and began a systematic campaign of raping women and holding them as sex slaves.

Following a military coup in May 1997, young army officers led by Koromah – who later styled themselves after the AFRC – took over the government and asked the RUF to join them. But in February 1998, a Nigerian-led West African peacekeeping force drove the joint RUF and AFRC forces from power. After the Lome accord was reached last summer, Koromah's men largely complied by disarming and observing the cease-fire, leading to a bitter split with the RUF and Sankoh. Because of that split, Koromah's AFRC and other, smaller pro-government groups are leading the fight against the RUF.

The United States said it is willing to provide airlift and logistical support to deploy thousands of Nigerian and West African troops in Sierra Leone, but Annan noted that "we are some way away from" the arrival of West African forces.

Meanwhile, the fate of the peacekeepers held by the rebels remains unclear. The captive soldiers are from Zambia, Kenya, Nigeria and India.

ISTOK, Yugoslavia, May 10 (AFP) - At least 2,000 Kosovo Albanians demonstrated Wednesday in this western town to protest plans for the return of thousands of Serbian refugees to nearby villages, UN police officals said.

The protestors marched through the town centre, some 10 kilometres (six miles) from the border with Montenegro.

They called for all ethnic Albanians in Serb prisons be freed before any Serbs return to their homes in the Osojane valley.

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and all his political and military allies implicated in the "genocide" in Kosovo should also be arrested before any Serbs returned, said the protest's

organisers.

Milosevic is among five top Yugoslav officials indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Hague for crimes allegedly committed in Kosovo during Belgrade's crackdown on the ethnic Albanian majority.

Other conditions included the release of all information concerning thousands of ethnic Albanians still missing after the war, the arrest of all alleged war criminals still in Kosovo and the reconstruction of the devastated province.

The organisers said in a statement that talks started last month to set up a committee for the return of the Serbs were the main cause for the protest.

They said the return of Serbs to Kosovo at present would be a "serious provocation."

"There will be no talks and no return of Serbs unless these conditions are fulfilled," the statement said.

About 200,000 Serbs have fled the province since KFOR international peacekeepers moved in last June.

The leader of Kosovo's hardline northern Serbs, who have refused to join the UN-backed Joint Committee on Returns, said last week he wanted the first Serbs to return to Osojane by mid June.

But the village, 10 kilometres southeast of Istok, is in ruins after being destroyed by unknown attackers.

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, May 10 (AFP) - The United Nations is alarmed by a flourishing industry of "tax collectors" extracting money, often by force, from restaurants and hotels throughout Kosovo, a UN official said Wednesday.

"We have reports that there is still a parallel tax collection system," said Allen Gilmore Woodhouse, who works for the taxation department at the UN mission administering the province.

"There is pressure and coercion," he added.

The official said he did not know who was behind the "collectors." "We don't know under what organisation or umbrella," he admitted.

He said he could not even be sure that the former Kosovo provisional government, which was supposed to have ceased activity in January under a UN accord, was not behind the shady operation.

"They're not supposed to be collecting taxes today," Woodhouse explained.

"In December, an agreement was signed by the main political parties, indicating that this tax collection should stop by the end of January. Any tax collection after that time should be done by the (UN) tax administration."

Woodhouse recounted that people were appearing in restaurants and hotels saying they were collecting taxes "for the widows, for building schools, and structures for the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC)" -- and that the sums collected were much higher than those

taken by the UN.

The KPC is a civilian force made out of members of the now disbanded ethnic Albanian guerrilla force, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA.)

Packets of cigarettes currently on sale in the province thicken the plot by carrying a label in Albanian with the words: "Kosovo Finance Ministry." The precise origin of the label has not yet

transpired.

Woodhouse said the unofficial tax-collection system was already in existence when Kosovo was under Serbian administration, and had helped fund parallel Kosovar institutions set up after the

province's autonomous status was abolished by Belgrade in 1989.

Unofficial taxation had survived down to the present because "they're aware of the confusion here, we're in a transition period," the UN officer explained.

UN authorities are collecting customs duties and imposing certain taxes on about 100 restaurants and hotels with turnover of more than 15,000 deutschmarks (7,000 US dollars/7,700 euros) a

month.

The international administration hopes to stem the tax racket by setting up a specialist team to fight the collectors. "For the moment, we want to educate the tax payers and show patience,"

Woodhouse said.

But if the taxes continue, "it'll have to be enforced at the highest levels, and (UN administrator) Bernard Kouchner will have to address the violation of the December agreement," he added.

May 10, 2000

PRISTINA, Kosovo (Reuters) -- Kosovo's Albanians and Serbs drew closer on the political front on Wednesday but out on the streets thousands of ethnic Albanians demonstrated against plans to resettle Serbs in their region.

In a move hailed by a top international official as historic, Albanian and Serb politicians issued a statement in which each community condemned crimes committed against the other and urged all citizens not to resort to violence.

The declaration came at a meeting of a multi-ethnic council set up by the United Nations to foster cooperation after more than a year of armed conflict -- which culminated in the 1999 NATO bombing to drive Serbian security forces out of Kosovo.

"This is the most important meeting we've had," said Bernard Kouchner, the French head of Kosovo's United Nations-led administration. "This is, according to my opinion, the historic statement of the tenth of May."

The U.N. has been working for months to bring Serbs and Albanians closer after a decade of increasingly violent Serbian repression of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority, which has been followed by a post-war plague of revenge attacks on Serbs.

But a protest in the western town of Istok showed how far the United Nations and NATO, which took control of Kosovo last June, still have to go to achieve genuine reconciliation.

The demonstrators, marching just as the politicians in the capital Pristina issued their statement, carried placards with slogans such as "Shed blood has not dried up yet," "Don't hurt the wounds of Kosovo" and "Stop Serb colonies in Kosovo."

They were protesting against plans floated by Kosovo Serb leaders and U.S. officials to return Serbs to the area.

"We say this project should be stopped. Even talks about returning Serbs to Kosovo should be stopped," said Remzije Zeqiraj, the head of the committee which organized the protest.

A figure estimated at more than 200,000 Serbs and members of other minorities fled Kosovo during and after NATO's air war against the forces of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic last year, fearing revenge attacks by ethnic Albanians.

Despite the presence of around 40,000 peacekeepers from the NATO-led KFOR force since last June, attacks on minorities or cases of harassment against them are still reported daily.

Protesters at Wednesday's rally, who appeared to number more than 2,000, said Serbs would not be welcome back until a host of conditions had been met, including the release of Albanians detained during the conflict and now in Serbian jails.

The issue of the prisoners is highly emotive for ethnic Albanians, who see it as unfinished business from the conflict. International agencies say at least 1,200 Kosovo Albanians are in Serbian jails.

Wednesday's statement by the Kosovo Transitional Council, agreed by all of the around 35 members present except one who objected on a technicality, demanded the handover of all ethnic Albanian prisoners by Yugoslav authorities.

BELGRADE, May 10 (Reuters) - Several hundred relatives of Serbs missing in Kosovo marched in Belgrade on Wednesday calling for help to find their loved ones.

They carried pictures of those missing and banners saying: "Where are our children?" and "Return those dearest to us."

At the same time in Kosovo, a multi-ethnic council demanded that Yugoslavia hand over all ethnic Albanian prisoners held in Serbian prisons to its U.N.-led administration (UNMIK).

It made no mention of the Serbs missing in the province.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said in its latest report that 1,279 ethnic Albanians were still in prisons in Serbia and that 3,000 people were still missing. Most were Kosovo Albanians, but the figure also included Serbs and other minority groups.

In the Yugoslav capital, the Belgrade-based Association of Families of Kidnapped Persons from Kosovo, which organised Wednesday's rally, said 1,200 Serbs and other non-Albanians had been kidnapped in Kosovo since 1998.

"Seventy-five percent of the total figure are people who were kidnapped since KFOR (NATO-led peacekeepers) came to Kosovo," the head of the organisation, Ranko Djinovic, told reporters.

"We are calling all those who can in the U.N. Mission in Kosovo, in KFOR to help us," said Djinovic.

He said families of the missing reported that their relatives had been kidnapped by armed people in uniforms of the now disbanded ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army.

KFOR peacekeepers took control of Serbia's Kosovo province last June following NATO's air campaign against Yugoslavia over Belgrade's repression of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority.

Kosovo's Serbs have since been the targets of revenge attacks by ethnic Albanians.

"CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE"

The Serbian demonstrators on Wednesday went to embassies of KFOR countries to ask for help to find those missing. They had earlier submitted a plea to Serb authorities.

"No one is saying anything about this problem. It is a conspiracy of silence we want to break," Djinovic said.

Serbian Justice Minister Dragoljub Jankovic said separately on Wednesday that families knew the whereabouts of imprisoned Albanians in Serbia, but this was not the case with Serbs missing in Kosovo.

"The fate of abducted and missing Serbs is completely unknown and unclear. It is not known where they are, if they are alive and visits or contacts with these persons are impossible," Jankovic was quoted as saying by state news agency Tanjug.

The Humanitarian Law Fund in Belgrade, which follows the issue of missing people, said it had registered some 900 non-Albanians missing in Kosovo.

Valentina Tanaskovic, one of the marchers in Belgrade, said her father and boyfriend had disappeared: "We came out today to tell the whole world, to tell our people that we are also asking for our right, for our dearest ones, our blood to be returned to us."

BELGRADE, May 10 (Reuters) - A journalist working for local and international media who was detained this week in Serbia may have to face a military court, his lawyer said on Wednesday.

Miroslav Filipovic, a local part-time correspondent for the independent Belgrade daily Blic and Agence France Presse, was taken from his home in the central town of Kraljevo by four plain clothes Serbian state security officers late on Monday.

"The Kraljevo district court has ordered a 30-day detention for my client pending investigation. It also decided to pass the case on to the military court in Nis," attorney Goran Draganic told Reuters.

Draganic said the case was being passed on because Filipovic was suspected of serious criminal espionage and undermining the national defence system, which carry prison terms of between three and 15 years.

Filipovic is also charged with spreading false information, which carried a milder punishment.

Draganic said it was now up to the court in Nis to decide whether to accept the case. If it does not, the case will be heard by the Yugoslav federal court.

Filipovic's wife Slavica said the officers who had taken him away had produced a document saying he was being detained to prevent him destroying or hiding evidence in legal proceedings.

They confiscated Filipovic's computer hard drive and floppy disks, texts, passport, address book and personal papers.

"I knew he was working as a journalist, the most dangerous job at the moment, but he never tried to hide anything. He signed all his texts and anybody could read them," she told Reuters.

Filipovic also works for the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), for which he has recently written about the Yugoslav security services, police repression in southern Serbia and a Yugoslav Army reservists' protest.

He also wrote about atrocities committed by Yugoslav army soldiers in Kosovo during last year's NATO air strikes, based on soldiers' own accounts, and about the plight of Kosovo Serbs who have faced reprisals from ethnic Albanians since Serb forces withdrew last June.

Draganic said he had been unable to reach Kraljevo to be with his client for questioning on Wednesday because the court had brought the hearing forward three hours.

WASHINGTON, May 10 (Reuters) - Former NATO commander General Wesley Clark on Wednesday said there was no suppression of a bomb damage assessment on the 1999 air war on Yugoslavia; and the count of Serb military vehicles hit differed because of what was seen from the air versus reports from the ground.

Clark echoed Pentagon and Air Force officials who denied a Newsweek report that the U.S. military and NATO vastly inflated bomb damage to Serb armour in the 78-day air campaign while quashing disappointing results of the strikes.

Newsweek said an Air Force report was suppressed that showed only 14 Serb Army tanks were verifiably destroyed compared to U.S. and NATO claims of 100 or more, and only 18 armoured personnel carriers were destroyed instead of 220.

The magazine also said only 20 artillery pieces not 450 were destroyed by U.S.-led air strikes aimed at forcing Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw troops from Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians were fleeing violence.

"The numbers were different because first of all there were a certain number of vehicles that were found on the ground. These were vehicles that were conclusively destroyed," Clark told Reuters after briefing a closed session of the Senate Intelligence Committee, where he gave an assessment of successes and lessons learned from last year's NATO air campaign.

"There were other cases where you could look in the instrumentation that the pilots had, television monitors and other things, and clearly see the vehicle that was struck, but when we went to the spot, that vehicle wasn't there," Clark said.

POSSIBLE DECOYS

"Now in some cases those may have been decoys; in other cases they weren't, and we had to leave it to the best judgment of the experts as to how they assessed the results on the ground. What happened to it (vehicle)? It's anybody's guess; I don't know," he said. "But there was no effort to suppress any data," Clark added.

The Yugoslav Army on Wednesday, in response to the Newsweek article, said it had suffered minimal losses during the NATO air strikes -- 13 tanks, eight artillery pieces and 19 anti-aircraft guns, state news agency Tanjug reported.

On Monday, U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. John Corley, director of studies and analysis at U.S. Air Force headquarters in Europe, stood by the official figures.

Corley conceded that only about 26 destroyed and burned-out Serb tanks were found by his team of military and civilian investigators after the bombing ended. But he said the total count was 93 destroyed after information from sources such as searches, satellite pictures and gun-camera film was considered.

Clark, who handed over NATO military command to U.S. Air Force General Joseph Ralston earlier this month, said he has not made any decisions on what he will do next, but has ruled out working for a defence contractor.

BELGRADE, May 10 (Reuters) - A Serb opposition leader said on Wednesday that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic lacked support even in his own home town and vowed to intensify street protests against the Serbian strongman.

"Everyone saw Milosevic fired from an empty rifle yesterday when he couldn't gather a decent number of people for a (counter) rally in his home town," Democratic Party leader Zoran Djindjic told Reuters.

He spoke after the opposition on Tuesday called off a rally in Pozarevac, accusing authorities of preventing it by detaining activists and blocking access roads into the eastern town.

Later on Wednesday, in two central Serbian opposition-run cities of Cacak and Kragujevac, anti-government supporters staged rallies.

In Kragujevac, some 10,000 people protested in the centre and than marched through the city with many more joining. "Let us unite and launch the liberation of Serbia," Veroljub Stevanovic, the mayor of Kragujevac told the cheering crowd.

In Cacak, police banned the gathering organised by the Otpor (Resistance) movement, and it was held in the Cultural Hall packed with over 1,000 people and hundreds outside.

On Tuesday, the opposition had scheduled the rally in Pozarevac to protest against the alleged beatings of three opposition supporters in a town cafe last week.

The incident reportedly involved associates of Milosevic's powerful son Marko. The authorities have blamed the opposition for the fight.

Instead, local authorities -- led by Milosevic's Socialist Party and its coalition partner the Yugoslav Left of his wife Mirjana Markovic -- staged a street celebration to mark World War Two Victory Day, drawing only about 150 people.

Djindjic and leaders of other parties of Serbia's recently reunited opposition said they called off their rally to avoid clashes between foes and supporters of the government.

They said the police action to prevent demonstrators from entering Pozarevac showed that it had become a "forbidden city."

"There hasn't been a single day like Tuesday in Serbia in the last decade, when all civic and human rights -- the right to gather, report, move -- have been violated at the same time," Djindjic said.

"The opposition must continue with protests, must intensify the pressure for fair and early elections in Serbia," he said.

The opposition has agreed to hold another rally in Belgrade on May 15, instead of the one cancelled in Pozarevac.

An opposition rally on April 14 in Belgrade drew more than 100,000 people and Djindjic said he expected a similar turnout on Monday.

Djindjic said Milosevic had shown that he was not ready to compromise with his political opponents, referring to the Serbian strongman's speech on Tuesday on the occasion of World War Two Victory Day.

Milosevic, indicted for war crimes by a U.N. court, accused his political foes of being "little servants and bloody allies of the occupier who explain their treason as patriotic concern and patriotic moves."

"His speech clearly proved he was not going to go for a compromise with the opposition and people in Serbia who want him out of power," Djindjic said.