NATO Will Stage Mock Raids to Pressure Serbs

NATO defense ministers, trying to squeeze Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic into halting a bloody crackdown in Serbia’s Albanian enclave, Thursday ordered a series of mock bombing raids in the Balkans and a review of plans for possible military action there.

“Patience is running out,” British Defense Secretary George Robertson said. “Belgrade needs to get the message that NATO means business.”

The simulated air raids, to be staged in the skies above Albania and Macedonia, two of Yugoslavia’s immediate neighbors, are intended to push Milosevic into halting a three-month military and police operation in the breakaway province of Kosovo that has led to at least 250 deaths, mostly among the ethnic Albanian majority.

For some in the West, the crisis is an acid test of whether the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has learned the lessons of the debacle in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where it spent more than three years engaging in ineffective half-measures before the political will was mustered in August 1995 to order strikes by alliance warplanes on Bosnian Serb targets.

“This is to demonstrate NATO’s capacity, get some planes in the air, make a lot of noise and give a warning to President Milosevic,” a high-ranking NATO official who attended the ministers’ meeting in Brussels said of Thursday’s decision.

A U.S. official, speaking to reporters in the Belgian capital, said the sorties will occur in the next few days and might include rocket-equipped helicopters as well as airplanes. Warplanes based aboard American, French and British aircraft carriers in the Adriatic Sea may participate.

NATO officials said they hoped that the demonstration of air power will persuade Yugoslavia’s president to pull back the most heavily armed Serbian-led police and Yugoslav army units from Kosovo and secure a cease-fire and a resumption of peace talks.

In Paris on Wednesday, senior diplomats of the Contact Group--six nations that monitor the Balkans--agreed to pressure Milosevic to resume talks with leaders of Kosovo’s 2 million people, 90% of whom are ethnic Albanian, and to threaten military action if clashes between government forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army, the armed wing of the secession movement, persist.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov and their counterparts from the other Contact Group countries--Germany, Italy, France and Britain--are to meet in London today to search for consensus on what the next steps should be.

On Wednesday, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said only the “credible threat of military force” would compel Milosevic to pay heed to diplomacy.

To further ratchet up the pressure on Milosevic, the defense ministers of the 16 NATO member countries also ordered the alliance’s military planners to study the options for direct military action in Kosovo.

German Defense Minister Volker Ruehe said he and his European colleagues are ready to consider eight possible steps, up to and including air strikes throughout Serbia and the deployment of NATO ground troops in Kosovo.

“The massacres and the violence must cease,” Ruehe said.

In recent weeks, 65,000 residents of the province have fled their homes to escape the fighting, and neighboring Albania and Macedonia have been swamped with refugees. At the beginning of a weeklong tour of Europe, U.S. Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, who attended the meeting in Brussels, said NATO countries felt “an increased sense of urgency” over the possibility that the crisis could spread, possibly involving NATO members Greece and Turkey.

German Gen. Klaus Naumann, president of the alliance’s Military Affairs Committee, said genuine, and not mock, air raids could be staged “in several days.”

NATO officials acknowledged that any use of force will need the approval of President Clinton and the rest of the alliance’s political leaders, an authorizing resolution from the U.N. Security Council and the blessing of the Kremlin.

Problems with any of these requirements could stymie action.

In Moscow, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin’s office announced that Milosevic will come to the Kremlin next week for talks on the Kosovo crisis. Milosevic will arrive Monday and meet with Yeltsin the next morning, the presidential press service reported.

The planned visit by Milosevic was obviously the outcome of pressure applied to Yeltsin by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl at the Kremlin leader’s summit in Bonn earlier this week.

Kohl, mindful of the staggering cost borne by his country to shelter 250,000 Bosnian refugees in the last bloody conflict in former Yugoslav territory, asked Yeltsin to use Russia’s influence with Serb-led Yugoslavia to ease tensions in Kosovo before another war explodes.

Russia shares the Christian Orthodox religion and Slavic heritage with the Serbs, and it has been one of the few countries to speak out against sanctions imposed on Yugoslavia, as well as threats of NATO intervention to police Kosovo’s border with Albania.

While Russia has steadfastly backed Yugoslavia’s position that the Kosovo unrest is an internal matter, Yeltsin was forced to hold his tongue during the Bonn visit to win support from Germany for financial aid to avert Russia’s latest economic crisis.

Yeltsin said nothing on the subject of NATO involvement during his Germany visit, but Foreign Ministry spokesman Vladimir Rakhmanin on Thursday repeated the Kremlin view by saying “the use of force is an extreme measure.”

Times staff writer Carol J. Williams in Moscow contributed to this report.