U.S. Envoys Urge Serbian Pullback

Senior U.S. envoys sought Monday to step up the pressure on Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to call off his offensive against ethnic Albanian guerrillas in the breakaway Kosovo province.

Assistant Secretary of State John Shattuck and former Sen. Bob Dole told a Belgrade news conference that in a two-day weekend visit to Kosovo, they witnessed an unfolding human disaster.

In a meeting with Milosevic on Monday, they pressed him to allow Red Cross visits to detained men suspected of being guerrillas and to allow outside experts to investigate allegations of atrocities by both sides, they said.

Dole charged that Milosevic’s forces are waging “war against civilians for political purposes” during a six-week summer offensive.

“This weekend, I saw them up close and in person: women and children, the elderly living in fear without adequate food and shelter,” said Dole, the Republican presidential nominee in 1996. “These hungry masses will within weeks face winter and the freezing conditions that come with it. This is a humanitarian catastrophe in the making.”

Shattuck said he and Dole had seen massive destruction in Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians make up 90% of the province’s 2 million people.

The United Nations estimates that 265,000 people have been driven from their homes in Serbia’s southern province since February, the vast majority of them ethnic Albanians. Several hundred people have been killed in the fighting, most of them ethnic Albanian guerrillas and civilians.

Foreign estimates of how many are living in fear without permanent shelter in Kosovo’s forests and fields range up to 50,000 or more. Milosevic has said that only about 16,000 are living out in the open.

The United States is “calling for a reduction of the violence on all sides, but most urgently for a pullback of the Serb security forces so that people could be encouraged to return to their homes,” Shattuck said.

But the Serbian offensive continued Monday, with civilians fleeing Ostrozub in central Kosovo as Serbian police advanced toward the town, which has been hit hard by Serbian shelling in recent weeks.

Dole said that he and Shattuck “also heard chilling testimony from eyewitnesses to some of the crimes and atrocities that have been reported.”

“I have urged President Milosevic to immediately approve visas for forensic teams from Physicians for Human Rights to investigate atrocities against Albanian and Serb victims,” Dole said.

“There is substantial evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity and violations of international humanitarian law,” Shattuck said.

Shattuck said Milosevic promised that Red Cross representatives will be allowed to visit detained ethnic Albanian guerrillas of the secessionist Kosovo Liberation Army. About 450 young men were rounded up as suspected guerrillas in Serbian police action last week. Most were reported to have been released by Monday, but about 60 were believed to still be in custody.

He and Dole were given witness “accounts of security forces separating men and boys from their families,” Shattuck said. Detained men cleared of being guerrilla fighters should be freed, he said.

Milosevic also said he will consider allowing independent experts into Kosovo to investigate charges by each side accusing the other of atrocities and burial of victims in mass graves, Shattuck added.

“We will follow very closely his promise on the [Red Cross] and the interest he showed in independent forensic experts getting access,” Shattuck said.

In Brussels, final approval was given Monday to a ban taking effect today that bars Yugoslavia’s state-owned airline, JAT, from flying into airports in the 15-nation European Union.

“Milosevic understands that he has a very serious problem on his hands in Kosovo,” Shattuck said. “He has a humanitarian problem, and I believe that we have pressed upon him that he has a human rights problem. . . . If this crisis is not resolved, Milosevic understands that this is going to reflect directly and immediately on him and his government.”