Belgrade Targets Hit; U.S. to Send Attack Helicopters

Clearing skies over Belgrade allowed NATO to strike Yugoslavia’s 1st Army headquarters, an ammunition plant and other targets Sunday, as the Pentagon announced plans to deploy Apache attack helicopters and ground-based missiles for the first time in the Kosovo theater.

Allied aircraft delivered strikes around the capital of Yugoslavia on Easter morning, and after nightfall to Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. NATO and other European countries pressed forward with a plan to establish protective enclaves for hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanian refugees in Albania, Macedonia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

Separately, nations in the Atlantic alliance agreed to accept nearly 100,000 refugees from the embattled Serbian province. NATO said the United States would accept 20,000; Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said only that the U.S. would accept “several thousand.”

The dispatch of the 24 AH-64 Apaches, the Army’s main attack helicopter, could fuel the debate over the use of combat troops to bring the war directly to Yugoslav troops and Serbian police units on the ground in Kosovo. Using helicopters is riskier to U.S. forces than relying on cruise missiles and higher-flying warplanes.

The Pentagon presented the dispatch of the Apaches with their armor-killing capabilities as an expansion of the air war rather than a move toward the use of ground troops, although about 2,000 soldiers will be deployed to support the helicopter mission.

In other developments Sunday:

* An official of the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry, Milan Bovic, who is also Belgrade’s deputy mayor, said the three U.S. soldiers seized Wednesday who are being held captive in Yugoslavia will be released to the United States once the airstrikes end and that they wil not be put on trial. The International Red Cross said it has not been allowed to visit them. President Clinton called their families from Camp David on the Easter holiday to convey his support, the White House said.

* Pope John Paul II urged Yugoslavia to open a “humanitarian corridor” to allow aid to reach refugees still in Kosovo and denounced the “ravaging fire of bombs” as part of a “diabolic spirit of revenge.”

* Public opinion polls in Europe found widespread support for the NATO operation. But in Greece, where support has been weak, several thousand people demonstrated in Athens and on the island of Crete.

* The commander of Yugoslav army forces in Kosovo inspected troops and tanks hidden in foliage, in what state television described as preparations for a defense against an invasion.

Number of Refugees May Soon Double

The humanitarian crisis, meanwhile, grew unabated. A United Nations refugee official, Karen Koning AbuZayd, predicted that the number of Kosovo refugees could double to nearly 750,000 by Tuesday.

Refugees arriving Sunday in northern Albania from southern Kosovo said uniformed Serbian forces had been carrying out a house-to-house reign of terror.

One of the refugees, Illirana Zhubi, looked pleadingly into a stranger’s eyes and sobbed in anguish: “You don’t know what has happened here. You don’t know what has happened here with us.”

She said her husband, a jeweler, was among six men she saw lined up Thursday and shot in the back by uniformed Serbs. As she watched, they finished him off with a bullet to the head. She said they cut off his hands and set the house on fire.

Her 14-year-old niece, hiding in the basement, also was probably killed by the fire, she said.

There was no way to independently confirm such reports, but it matched other refugee stories of atrocities as Serbian forces empty Kosovo towns of their ethnic Albanian populations.

The outlines of a temporary approach to the refugee crisis began to emerge Sunday. Albright, in Washington, and the European Union’s commissioner for humanitarian affairs, Emma Bonino, in Brussels, said that, for political and operational reasons, the alliance wants to avoid a large-scale resettlement.

Despite the NATO countries’ refugee resettlement plans, most of the ethnic Albanians who flee will remain close to Kosovo in order to allow as speedy a return as possible, and in Bonino’s words, to avoid lending a hand to the “ethnic cleansing” campaign of Yugoslavia’s president, Slobodan Milosevic.

“The idea is not to have a new refugee population floating around Europe,” British Air Commodore David Wilby told reporters at NATO headquarters.

Under the initial plan to accommodate nearly 100,000 refugees, Germany would accept 40,000, the United States and Turkey 20,000 each, Norway 6,000, and Greece and Canada 5,000 each.

About 70,000 refugees were said by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to have fled Kosovo in the 24-hour period ending Saturday morning. The United Nations said 360,000 had fled the embattled province in recent weeks.

Amid the mud and cold, NATO forces began building reception camps for ethnic Albanians near Macedonia’s border with Kosovo to offer relief to tens of thousands of people who had waited days in a valley for the Macedonian government to allow them to enter.

Eleven elderly people among the stalled flow of refugees died in the past several days, said Julia Taft, the U.S. assistant secretary of State for refugee affairs. Several infants were reported to have died.

Every few minutes, refugees who collapsed after spending several days exposed to the harsh weather were carried to Red Cross tents. On Sunday, sunshine provided relief from the cold rain of recent days, but foul odors permeated the valley, home to 60,000 refugees.

“The people are very sick. Many of them are dying,” said Abdurauf Pruthi, president of a charity in Blace, Macedonia, that has greeted some refugees at the border with food, clothing, blankets and plastic sheets for shelter.

Among the greatest obstacles holding up the flow of refugees is insistence by Macedonian authorities that each be registered.

NATO troops began erecting tents for them.

“The relief effort is slowly getting together and gaining momentum. Unfortunately, so is the exodus,” said Kris Janowski, spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva.

The cold and the lack of food notwithstanding, the escape from the terror unleashed by the Serbs provided a warming ray for some.

“I was happy even to be sleeping in the mud and the cold because I was no longer afraid of being killed,” said 50-year-old Tahire Abdullahi.

An escape route leading to Kukes, Albania, has been clogged with refugees moving on foot and others in trucks and tractors, and some along the track have gone without food for 48 hours, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said.

NATO officials predicted that at the current rate, Kosovo’s 1.8 million ethnic Albanians could all have fled--or been driven from--the province within a few weeks.

U.S. officials were uncertain where the refugees under American care would land; they spoke about settling them temporarily at U.S. facilities outside the territorial U.S., including possibly the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo, Cuba, or at military bases in Guam or Europe.

The military focus shifted increasingly toward Albania, a tiny country on the Adriatic Sea, Europe’s poorest and for years tightly closed to outsiders and run by a Stalinist regime.

A Boeing 747 was dispatched to the small airport at Tirana, the capital, carrying food and other aid.

Pentagon officials said the Apache helicopters would most likely be taken to Tirana aboard cargo planes and reassembled near the overburdened airport ramp.

Officials have said the most advanced versions of the AH-64 being deployed to Albania can within 30 seconds detect 128 potential targets, select the 16 most dangerous and initiate an attack coordinated with other aircraft.

The mission will be to strike tanks, armored personnel carriers and other mobile units, operating at night and in clouds. Those are precisely the sorts of targets denied to high-flying fighters and bombers, and the kinds of conditions that have stymied the air war on most of the 12 nights it has been waged.

Denials of Any Move Toward Invasion Force

Posing the central question about the deployment--whether it represents a move toward sending an invasion force into Kosovo--Kenneth H. Bacon, the Pentagon spokesman, responded directly: “Absolutely not.”

“This is pure and simple an expansion of the air operation. It’s to give us the type of tank-killing capability that the bad weather has denied us,” he said. “It will give us the capability to get up close and personal to the Milosevic armor.”

“Obviously,” he added, “close-in engagement is by definition riskier than more distant engagement.”

The helicopters have been stationed at Illesheim, Germany. Deploying them to the Balkans will take about 10 days, Pentagon officials said.

Before they are flown in action over Kosovo, a final go-ahead must be granted by NATO political authorities, meeting today, and then by Clinton.

In addition, the Army will deploy 18 Multiple Launch Rocket systems, equipped with short- and medium-range missiles intended to destroy Yugoslav air defenses throughout Kosovo, and, for further protection, 14 Bradley Fighting Vehicles.

Details of the military action in the skies over Kosovo and the rest of Serbia remained sketchy.

In Pristina, a short break in the clouds allowed NATO bombers to strike several targets beginning around 11:15 p.m. Sunday night. In the heaviest airstrikes in several days there, bright flashes on the edge of the city set off powerful shock waves. A short burst of antiaircraft fire followed one strike, but most of the bombs appeared to fall unanswered.

Within half an hour, it was over and the only sound was a burglar alarm wailing in the rare moonlight. A second wave came about three hours later, when a short strike rocked the city center.

The raids that struck Belgrade late Saturday night and Sunday morning were reported to have hit an oil refinery and storage facilities. Yugoslav television reported that bombs destroyed a geothermal heating plant serving 100,000 people. Reports from Belgrade said the army headquarters was hit. NATO officials said only that military targets were hit but did not deny that the heating plant was struck.

Commodore Wilby, the NATO military spokesman, said the Yugoslav military units in Kosovo appeared to be shifting toward the province’s southwestern corner, where the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army was regrouping.

“This is the last area where the [rebels] will be able to mount a serious resistance,” Wilby said of the mountains near the Albanian border.

Even as administration officials insisted they had no plans to deploy ground forces, polls found ample support in Europe for such a move. In London, the Sunday Times published the results of a survey that found 66% supporting the use of British troops as part of a NATO ground force that would fight the Yugoslav army in Kosovo.

Heated Debate Over Troop Deployment

At home, the potential deployment of U.S. soldiers in an invading force drew heated debate among participants on Sunday’s television talk shows, as Albright pleaded for more time to prosecute the war.

“The president has decided . . . that ground forces and invading, an occupying force, is not the right way to go about this,” Albright said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Sen. James M. Inofe (R-Okla.) said on the same program that the administration should set a deadline for any U.S. involvement in the war--he suggested May 1--and turn it over to NATO allies. “We should not be in Kosovo,” he said.

But speaking on the same program, Republican Sen. Charles Hagel of Nebraska said that, given the opportunity, he would vote to send ground troops into Kosovo.

“We don’t have any choice but to deal with this,” he said.

And Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) warned that more aggressive measures are needed.

“We’re getting a higher and higher probability that we’re going to lose the war by pursuing low-risk tactics,” he said.

*

Gerstenzang reported from Washington and Kraul from Brussels. Times staff writers Paul Watson in Pristina, Elizabeth Shogren in Blace, Macedonia, John Daniszewski in Albania, and Ronald Brownstein and Robin Wright in Washington contributed to this report.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Apache Helicopter

On the Way to the Balkans

The United States announced Sunday that it is deploying 24 AH-64 Apache attack helicopters to the Balkans to participate in allied airstrikes against Serbian forces in Kosovo. The relatively small, sleek gunships carry a crew of two, and an arsenal of Hellfire missiles, rockets and machine guns. The Pentagon says the low-flying Apaches will be able to strike directly at Serbian tanks, artillery and troops on the ground in Kosovo. The helicopters will be ground-based multiple rocker launchers, as well as by hundreds of maintenance, communications and intelligence personnel.

The Apache’s Eyes

The night-vision system can detect and engage targets during battlefield conditions of smoke, sand and dust clouds, in all types of weather.

The image produced can be seen through a headset worn by the pilot or co-pilot or on a computer screen in the control panel.

Gun

30-millimeter chain gun automatic cannon (fires 625 rounds per minute)

Missiles

Hellfire anti-tank missiles (generally carries eight, could carry up to 16)

Rockets

70-millimeter folding fin aerial rockets (generally carries 38, could carry up to 76)

Flares

Flares are launched away from the aircraft to provide an alternate heat source to divert an incoming heat-seeking missile.

More on Crisis

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* SERB HAVEN--Sarajevo, not long ago wracked by its own war, is now a shelter for Belgrade refugees.A13

* TV CRITICISM--It took a war to dislodge Monica Lewinsky from television, Howard Rosenberg says.F1