Refugees Must Be Allowed to Return, Clinton Tells Serbs

With Yugoslavia pressing ahead with its brutal “ethnic cleansing” campaign to empty Kosovo of ethnic Albanians, President Clinton vowed Monday to punish the Serbian military so mercilessly that it will have no choice but to allow refugees to return.

The number of ethnic Albanians displaced from Kosovo now exceeds 850,000 out of the Serbian province’s prewar population of 2 million, and Clinton conceded that the NATO bombing campaign will last much longer than originally hoped and will do little in the short run to protect the refugees.

Although the president continued to rule out the use of ground troops for combat in Kosovo, he ordered U.S. infantry units to neighboring Albania and Macedonia to deliver relief supplies to refugees and to protect humanitarian aid operations from cross-border Serbian attacks.

He vowed not to allow Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to negotiate a cease-fire locking in his gains after expelling most of the ethnic Albanians, who made up 90% of Kosovo’s population before the war.

“The ethnic cleansing of Kosovo cannot stand as a permanent event,” Clinton said. The only acceptable long-term solution, he said, is for the refugees to return to their villages, rebuild their demolished homes and restart their shattered lives.

British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, briefing reporters in London, said the tide of refugees represents a “mass deportation [like] we have not seen since the days of Stalin and Hitler.” With the addition of previous dislocations since 1991 in the former Yugoslav federation, about 3.5 million citizens have “lost their homes and heritage,” he said.

Troops from NATO countries were rapidly erecting tent cities Monday near Blace, Macedonia, to shelter tens of thousands of refugees, some of whom have been suffering in a muddy, cold border zone for days. Some soldiers, doctors and relief workers began wearing surgical masks at the camp because of the smell. Illness was rampant.

In other developments:

* Aided by clearing skies, NATO struck fuel depots, bridges and army barracks throughout Yugoslavia, and said it was taking particular aim at Serbian ground forces accused of terrorizing ethnic Albanians.

* NATO aircraft took a series of photographs of Yugoslav armor deployed as troops emptied the western Kosovo village of Glodjane over the weekend, herded villagers together and torched their homes, but alliance officials in Brussels said the allies were unable to stop the troops. It was unclear what happened to the villagers.

* Defense Secretary William S. Cohen conceded that a debate had occurred within the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the wisdom of using air power alone in Kosovo. But he said all of the uniformed chiefs ultimately endorsed the NATO bombing campaign as the best of a series of bad alternatives.

* Milosevic brushed off the onslaught, defiantly promising to rebuild bomb-damaged structures and denouncing the United States and its allies as “aggressors” and “criminals.”

* David Scheffer, the administration’s chief war-crimes investigator, found many of the signs of genocide during an investigation into the conduct of Serbian forces in Kosovo, the State Department said.

* A senior NATO diplomatic delegation, headed by Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, arrived in Sofia, Bulgaria, for talks about the Kosovo crisis. Talbott told reporters: “There is a serious threat to the security, stability and peace in this region. . . . The U.S. and Bulgaria see that threat fundamentally the same way, and we are working in our own ways to meet that threat.”

* U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan accused Serbian forces of “shocking violations of human rights” in uprooting hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians from their homes. It was Annan’s most outspoken denunciation of Yugoslavia since the conflict began.

With the influx of refugees swamping facilities in Albania and Macedonia, NATO countries have announced plans to temporarily resettle 100,000 refugees away from the border. The United States agreed to take about 20,000, probably housing them in a refugee camp at the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba that was previously used to house Haitians and Cubans fleeing their home countries. Germany agreed to accept 40,000, the largest total of any country.

But Clinton insisted that the relocations will not be permanent, as refugee resettlements from other parts of the world sometimes turn out to be.

“The refugees belong in their own homes on their own land,” Clinton said. “Our immediate goal is to provide relief. Our long-term goal is to give them their right to return.”

But clearly, their return is impossible as long as Milosevic’s army holds sway in the province. And unless Milosevic unexpectedly reverses course and agrees to a peaceful return of the displaced ethnic Albanians, Clinton said, NATO will pound the Yugoslav army until it is no longer able to resist.

“NATO will continue an air campaign,” Clinton said. “It will be undiminished, unceasing and unrelenting. It will inflict such damage that either [Milosevic] will change his calculation or we will seriously diminish his capacity to maintain his grip and impose his control on Kosovo. We are prepared to sustain this effort for the long haul. Our plan is to persist until we prevail.”

Responding to concerns expressed by other administration officials, Clinton said the U.S. and its allies will not permit Milosevic to lock in the depopulation of Kosovo by proposing a cease-fire once “ethnic cleansing” is complete.

“A Kosovo denied its freedom and devoid of its people is not acceptable,” the president said.

State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said that almost 30,000 refugees had reached neighboring countries within the previous 24 hours, bringing the totals to 244,000 in Albania, 136,000 in Macedonia and 60,000 in Montenegro, a small republic that is Serbia’s partner in what is left of Yugoslavia.

With the inclusion of displaced people still in Serbia, he said, the number of people driven from their homes has topped 850,000.

In a letter to the leaders of the Senate and House, Clinton admitted that the ferocity of Milosevic’s “ethnic cleansing” campaign took the administration and the world community by surprise.

“The international organizations engaged in refugee assistance do not currently have in the region the ability and resources to deal with a refugee crisis of this magnitude,” he said. “Unless adequate care can be provided for these refugees, a humanitarian disaster of immense proportions will result.”

In response, Clinton ordered an emergency airlift of supplies to Albania and Macedonia and directed U.S. troops to assist the burgeoning concentrations of refugees.

But the government of Macedonia stubbornly refused to allow the refugees to leave the increasingly rank border site at any rapid pace. Only about 5,000 refugees were sent to a NATO-built camp about 10 miles into Macedonia from the border, according to a spokeswoman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Paula Ghedini. Macedonian authorities were making it difficult for the U.N. refugee agency and others to keep track of the refugees.

The U.N. agency estimated that 60,000 people remained stranded at the Blace border area in Macedonia, prevented from leaving by armed troops and police.

“We have the capacity to move all of them out in two days. It’s just a matter of getting authorization from the Macedonian authorities,” Ghedini said.

An estimated 20,000 more were trying to exit through to Jazince, a border crossing near the Macedonian town of Tetovo.

Aid Workers Wearing Masks to Quell Stench

At Blace, relief workers and doctors helping the crowd began wearing surgical masks Monday because of the increasingly strong stench in the area. The refugees have been forced to use the confined area as an open toilet for several days because there are no latrines. Some of the soldiers guarding the crowd covered their faces with masks that resembled gas masks, while others wore white cloth masks and gloves.

A steady stream of people collapsed from the physical strain, with volunteers carrying people out on stretchers every few minutes. There were dozens of reported deaths, especially among old people and babies. And many refugees were falling ill.

Those allowed to leave the border zone for one of the temporary camps were exhausted and traumatized after being forced at gunpoint from their homes and then kept in deplorable conditions at the border for as many as four or five nights.

“In Blace, it’s worse than in prison,” said Zena Avdiu, 64, a refugee from Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, who was separated from his wife and daughter in the border zone and was desperate to find them. “It’s filthy. There’s no food. No medical care. We were treated like animals in the border zone.”

“It was awful,” said Lejla Prestreshi, 56, as she scrubbed the mud off her clothes in the camp near Tetovo. “The crowd was so big, and there was so much mud. I saw a mother deliver a baby, and it died. I saw a toddler slip from his parents’ arms and get crushed and killed.”

Like many others, Prestreshi complained about the refugees’ treatment by Macedonian soldiers.

“Soldiers were ordering us around, telling us to sit in the muddy water,” she said.

Meanwhile, in Brussels, NATO military commanders said the air campaign was intensifying because of improving weather conditions.

Targets around Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital, included an army garrison, petroleum production and storage facilities and an airfield, NATO officials said. In Kosovo, targets included Yugoslav ground forces and tanks, surface-to-air missile installations and an ammunition depot.

NATO aircraft destroyed a fourth bridge over the Danube late Monday, at Sombor, about 125 miles northwest of Belgrade, the Yugoslav news agency Tanjug reported.

Official Says Choppers to Make Big Difference

Gen. Charles Guthrie, chief of the British defense staff, said NATO’s military assets will be significantly bolstered by the pending deployment of U.S. Apache attack helicopters armed with Hellfire antitank missiles. They will be deployed in tandem with a land-based multiple launch rocket system that can strike targets from a distance of 100 miles. The helicopters and missile systems are to be based in Albania.

NATO members approved the deployment Monday and will now make a formal request to Albania to accept them. Although a touchy political issue for Albania, deployment there is likely since that country has said it would accept NATO military assistance during the conflict.

Pentagon spokesman Kenneth H. Bacon said the helicopters had not yet been sent to the region. He gave no indication of when they would be moved. Bacon also said that Air Force A-10 tank-killer aircraft had not yet flown ground-attack missions, although they have been used in a reconnaissance role.

Kempster reported from Washington and Shogren from Blace. Staff writers Chris Kraul in Brussels, James Gerstenzang in Washington and John J. Goldman at the United Nations contributed to this report.

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Witness to ‘Ethnic Cleansing’

WHAT NATO SAYS HAPPENED

Yugoslav armor is deployed at six sites in the village of Glodjane.

Troops herd what appear to be several hundred people into an open field next to about 60 vehicles.

Follow-up photos (unavailable late Monday) showed village homes set afire and the population gone.

Source: NATO photo via Reuters; labels added by The Times