Kosovo denies oxygen delivery to infants

The hospital in the town of Kosovska Mitrovica, one of the last remaining Christian Serb enclaves in the U.N.-administered Serbian province of Kosovo, is being denied oxygen shipments, imperiling the lives of infants in incubators as well as several dozen patients awaiting surgery.

The crisis began on Friday, June 14, when U.N. personnel at the Kosovo administrative border turned back a truck carrying oxygen and a nitrogen-based component used for anesthesia, citing lack of proper documentation, i.e., approval from the Muslim Albanian-controlled Kosovo Ministry of Health. By late Monday, the hospital in Kosovska Mitrovica was down to a 24-hour supply of oxygen, which was set aside for the patients in the coronary unit, maternity ward and the pediatric ambulance, according to Dr. Milena Cvetkovic, the head of Anesthesiology. Twenty surgeries were postponed, while emergency cases were transferred to hospitals in Serbia proper.

"We didn't have this kind of a situation even during the hardest times of war," said Dr. Milan Ivanovic, deputy chief of the hospital, in a statement for the Belgrade daily Glas Javnosti. Underlining the fact that babies in incubators were in the greatest need, Ivanovic accused the U.N. administration in Kosovo, or UNMIK, of collaborating with the Muslim Albanian-led Kosovo provisional government in applying pressure on the remaining Serbs in the province, who are making their last stand in the northern part of Kosovska Mitrovica against attempts to eradicate the Christian Serb population from Kosovo.

Dr. Vuko Antonijevic, director of the provincial Bureau of Health Protection said that he "couldn't find words for what was happening in time of supposed peace, in the presence of the international community," adding that "patients, among whom there are children, have been sentenced to death."

WND has learned that, on Tuesday, the hospital managed to get new supplies of oxygen via clandestine smuggling channels, but that the situation was still alarming. Attempts to reach hospital personnel on Wednesday have proved unsuccessful, as has been the case with the Glas Javnosti reporter Ljiljana Staletovic, who broke the story.

The province of Kosovo has been under U.N. administration since June 1999, when the 78-day long NATO bombing campaign led to a peace agreement by which Serbian police and Yugoslav army forces were replaced by a NATO-led force of 50,000 troops, or KFOR. During the KFOR mandate, more than 250,000 Serbs and other non-Albanians have been forced to leave the province, while scores of Serb civilians have been killed in terrorist attacks. The province, the spiritual and political heart of the Serb medieval kingdom, has seen 110 Orthodox churches and numerous Christian cemeteries desecrated or razed since June 1999. Kosovo has become the main transit route for drug smuggling into Western Europe, accounting for approximately 90 percent of the heroin shipments from Pakistan and Afghanistan. It has also become a center of white slavery, prostitution and arms smuggling, raising alarms in the EU.

As WND reported earlier this year, the current head of the UNMIK administration, German diplomat Michael Steiner, has warned that Kosovo could become "Afghanistan in Europe" if current trends continued. So far, however, it appears that little has changed. The former Kosovo Liberation Army, an organization formerly labeled by the U.S. State Department as "terrorist," has been transformed by the U.N. and KFOR into the Kosovo Protection Corps, which has legalized and legitimized its status.

Last January, the U.N. administration installed a declared former terrorist leader, Dr. Bajram Rexhepi, a surgeon, as prime minister of the province's provisional government.

The northern part of Kosovska Mitrovica is the largest remaining compact Serb enclave in the province and has been under intense pressure by both the Albanian-controlled government and UNMIK to "integrate." At the same time, efforts of Serb refugees to return to their homes in other areas of Kosovo have been consistently impeded, often violently, as the province has become the place of some of the worst Christian persecution in the world.

In response to the oxygen-withholding scandal, medical workers from Kosovska Mitrovica have sent letters of protest to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Anan, the World Health Organization and Steiner. It remains to be seen whether this will be enough to prevent yet another Kosovo tragedy in the making.

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