Kosovo: A special report

How correspondents are dealing with the hazards, harassments, and hassles of getting the news out of the Balkans

When NATO bombs began falling on Yugoslavia on March 24, correspondents for U.S. news organizations found themselves close to ground zero. But with a little ingenuity - and the aid of the latest generation of Information Age devices they've been managing to get an impressive amount of the story out.

Serb authorities, backed by machine guns, swooped down on Belgrade's Hyatt Hotel, home base for most Western journalists, while the first air raids on the city were still under way - trapping a group of newspeople on the rooftop and expelling nearly thirty. The scene had elements of the surreal. In mid-dragnet, the dreaded paramilitary leader Arkan strutted into the Hyatt and, even as a bomb was landing on the nearby Interior Ministry, granted a one-onone interview to Massimo Calabresi of Time - who was at that moment having his accreditation revoked.

Though some correspondents were herded to the police station and ordered to hand over their cell phones, Boston Globe stringer Susan Milligan, inexplicably, managed to hold onto hers; she quickly called her foreign editor, Nils Bruzelius, right after leaving the station. CBS and ABC were booted out, although ABC later got back in; NBC was allowed to stay. CNN was singled out by Serb propaganda as a "factory of lies," and suffered an estimated $500,000 loss in equipment that was stolen, damaged, or destroyed as part of a harassment campaign. But Serbian television continued to carry CNN.

Tom Hundley of the Chicago Tribune was expelled, but his partner Guy Denmore, a Yugoslavia resident, was not. The New York Times's Steve Erlanger was ordered out, then allowed to return - but his colleague Carlotta Gall was less fortunate. As part of the media contingent based in the Kosovar capital of Pristina, she got to watch one fellow reporter's car being set on fire as they were forced across the border into Albania. She has been covering the rest of the story from refugee camps in Albania and Macedonia.

Most in the media echoed NBC News veep Bill Wheatley that "there seems to be no rhyme or reason" to the expulsions. (One theory offered by Time's Calabresi: an internal power struggle between moderate Yugoslav officials willing to accommodate Western media and firebrand Serbian radicals fiercely loyal to Slobodan Milosevic.) Still, it was apparent that Serbian authorities had a short list of reporters - and media outlets -- slated for special treatment. CBS's Mark Phillips was awakened at 3:30 A.M. by a knock from "room service" that turned out to be Serbian police, who arrested him and held him for ten hours before dumping him off at the Croatian border.

When the network sent London correspondent Richard Roth to replace Phillips, the Yugoslavs decided suddenly that his visa was invalid. More than two weeks into the hostilities, CBS was still cooling its heels for access. But then in mid-April, Dan Rather got into Belgrade, the only network anchorman to report from the Yugoslav capital.

Both Washington Post correspondents on the scene at the outset of hostilities were arrested -- Peter Finn in the first-night roundup, and R. Jeffrey Smith while trying to drive from Montenegro to Belgrade - and expelled, with no replacements allowed in for ten crucial days. One probable cause, thinks Post foreign news editor Phil Bennett: the pair did a story on Serb massacres in Kosovo that U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke personally showed to Milosevic during one of their meetings when Holbrooke led a last-minute mission to head off the bombing.

Reporters banished to the border camps in Macedonia and Albania had to cover the "ethnic cleansing" mass atrocities after the fact from refugee accounts, but several -- notably The New York Times's John Kifner - did superb jobs of reconstructing the massacres. Those assignments had one blessed advantage: they did not have to contend with a fear factor on the ground inside Serbia the likes of which American journalists have not experienced in decades.

Even veteran foreign correspondents were fazed. Mark Phillips had been in Iraq for the U.S.-British December cruise missile attacks, and with fellow correspondents, taped that action with no hassle from Iraq officials. In Belgrade, the attitude toward journalists has been far more aggressive and threatening. Says NBC's Wheatley: "In Baghdad, there was no lawless atmosphere as you have now. Here, they just don't like us. And, while we'd all love to be in Kosovo, we have to look very carefully about sending any of our people into a lawless atmosphere."

As of mid-April, NBC and other outlets still in Belgrade were complying with the rules. "They've asked to see our tapes, and we've shown them, and to my knowledge they have asked us to remove nothing," Wheatley says. New York Times international news editor Andrew Rosenthal and Chicago Tribune foreign editor Garry Thatcher likewise report that their dispatches aren't being censored and correspondents have been free to move around without overt surveillance.