NATO Rejects Offer of a Cease-Fire; Airstrikes Continue

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic declared a cease-fire Tuesday in ravaged Kosovo province, but the United States and its allies promptly rejected the truce offer and pressed on with their airstrikes against his regime.

In addition to the cease-fire, which Serbian TV said was in honor of this Sunday’s celebration of Easter on the Orthodox calendar, Milosevic offered to let expelled ethnic Albanians return to their homes. But allied officials said an offer to allow refugees to return under the guns of the Serbian army that drove them away in the first place was an empty gesture.

Only a settlement that provided international troops to ensure the safety of the refugees would be acceptable, the officials said.

“The president has made clear what we expect from Milosevic to end the bombing: withdrawal from Kosovo of his military police and paramilitary forces, a multiethnic and democratic Kosovo, accepting the deployment of an international security force and making it possible for refugees to return,” White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart said. “A mere cease-fire is clearly not sufficient to meet these conditions.”

An ethnic Albanian rebel spokesman in Albania, Visar Reka, also dismissed the cease-fire, saying a truce would be possible only if it was enforced by NATO troops.

Milosevic’s move came after his forces displaced more than half Kosovo’s prewar ethnic Albanian population, driving nearly half a million people from their homes in the past two weeks alone.

At the same time, NATO warplanes pounded Serbian targets Tuesday, taking advantage of a second straight day of favorable weather. Spokesmen at NATO headquarters in Brussels and at the Pentagon said the attacks were starting to take their toll on Milosevic’s army and paramilitary police.

“In the last couple of days, the weather’s improved, and today it looks very good, and we expect that to sustain over the next day or two, which is being translated into more operations and more ability for us to execute the mission,” said Maj. Gen. Charles F. Wald, vice director of strategic plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Over 30 different targets [were] struck over the last 24 hours.”

In other developments:

* NATO admitted that a misguided bomb struck a civilian apartment block in Aleksinac, a mining town in central Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic. Serbian TV said 15 civilians were killed. British Defense Secretary George Robertson said the incident was regrettable but that “despite all our efforts, such casualties will inevitably occur in a campaign of this size and complexity.”

* In Geneva, Sadako Ogata, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, said Yugoslavia was trying to destroy Kosovo’s “collective identity.” Ogata said: “Solutions for the overwhelming majority mean returning to their homes as soon as possible.”

* At the United Nations, Ted Turner, chairman of the United Nations Foundation, donated $1 million to support U.N. relief efforts in Kosovo, a southern province of Serbia. The grant will be used to provide shelter, blankets and other necessities for refugees.

* The Clinton administration announced that the first of 20,000 Kosovo refugees whom the U.S. has agreed to house could reach makeshift shelters at a U.S. naval base in Cuba as early as Friday.

* The Rev. Jesse Jackson met with Yugoslavia’s ambassador to the U.N. in New York seeking visas for himself and other religious leaders to travel to Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, to try to negotiate the release of three captured U.S. soldiers. “So long as these young soldiers are there, they are war bait,” Jackson said. “They are our new Pvt. Ryans.”

* In Moscow, Borislav Milosevic, Yugoslavia’s ambassador to Russia and brother of the Yugoslav president, said the NATO bombardment had so far killed “well over 300 people.” He said the latest information from the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry in Belgrade was that the number of wounded had topped 3,000. He said there had been a sharp increase in civilian casualties in recent days.

* Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, accompanied by a bipartisan congressional delegation, left Washington for meetings in Brussels with NATO civilian and military leaders. Officials said the trip will give Cohen, a former senator, an opportunity to solidify congressional support for the bombing campaign.

* The administration called on Serbia to “release” Kosovo political leader Ibrahim Rugova, implying openly for the first time that he is in captivity. “We call for the release of Dr. Rugova and all of his family and an ability for the international community to meet with him outside Yugoslavia under conditions free of possible intimidation,” State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said in a statement.

* Milo Djukanovic, the democratically elected president of Montenegro, Serbia’s smaller partner in Yugoslavia, accused Milosevic of pursuing a “catastrophic” policy to preserve his own rule. Djukanovic was interviewed on Britain’s Sky television.

In Brussels, North Atlantic Treaty Organization officials said Tuesday’s targets included petroleum and ammunition storage facilities, a railway bridge, air-defense systems and radar and police installations.

But the alliance conceded that the strikes against Yugoslav ground forces were frustrated by the “cunning” use of camouflage for troops and vehicles. Officials said it is never easy targeting ground troops from the air. Nevertheless, the Pentagon said that Serbian morale has been damaged by the continuing bombing.

Waves of NATO warplanes struck Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, Tuesday night. Several large explosions, followed by blasts of wind from the shock waves, made walls tremble in the city’s center.

Short bursts of tracer fire from antiaircraft guns arced over the blacked-out capital and then sparkled as the shells exploded.

The second wave hit as a half-moon rose on the horizon early today. More than a dozen bombs fell, with heavy blasts that made buildings sway as if an earthquake had struck.

Indications of a Long Campaign Grow

There were growing indications that the NATO campaign will be a long one. Despite the alliance’s claims that the air attacks have degraded Yugoslavia’s military capacity, officials acknowledged that it will take time to achieve their objectives by bombing alone.

“As hard as it is, we must be patient and persist,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said in a speech Tuesday. “We must be prepared for an extended conflict but, day by day, the damage inflicted by NATO power on the sources of Milosevic’s power will grow.”

Pentagon spokesman Kenneth H. Bacon said it will take 45 days to transport to the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba all of the 20,000 refugees the United States has agreed to shelter temporarily. The schedule clearly indicates the administration is preparing for a long struggle.

While Milosevic tried to use the refugees as a pawn in the conflict by offering to accept them back--and indeed, scores of cars carrying refugees were seen heading back into the province Tuesday from the Macedonian border--the circumstances continued to be very bleak for the hundreds of thousands of people forced out of Kosovo by Milosevic’s troops.

Concerns grew Tuesday about the spread of infection in Macedonia’s Blace border zone, where tens of thousands of refugees have been kept for as long as a week by the Macedonian government.

But international relief workers were heartened that an estimated 15,000 refugees were allowed to leave the fetid, muddy field where they had been camped out. That was a dramatic improvement over the snail’s pace of just a few thousand refugees a day that Macedonian officials had permitted until Tuesday.

The largest portion of refugees went to a camp several miles down the road, bringing the number of people there to about 15,000, said Paula Ghedini, a spokeswoman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which is running the transit camp and the international relief effort in overwhelmed Macedonia.

Tents Allow Refugees a Degree of Shelter

Long rows of light green and cream-colored canvas tents provided a degree of shelter for families who have endured the double trauma of being expelled from their homes by Serbs and then forced to spend several nights in a muddy pit without adequate food or water, exposed to the rain and cold. Although the temperature during the day Tuesday was warm and spring-like, nighttime temperatures were expected to drop to near freezing.

International relief workers, meanwhile, were concerned that the Macedonian authorities were sending busloads of refugees straight to the airport to be evacuated to Turkey. Some of the refugees were separated from their immediate family members, and none of them were asked whether they wanted to go to Turkey.

The airlift organized by the U.N. refugee agency to Germany and other West European countries and to the U.S. facility in Guantanamo Bay had not yet started.

An informal survey of refugees showed that many wanted to go to Germany, where many ethnic Albanians from Kosovo already live--and that no one wanted to go to Cuba.

“I don’t want to go to Cuba because it’s so very far away. I want to be as close as possible so I can return to Kosovo immediately, when it is safe,” said Hysnije Isufi, 63, a refugee from Pristina, who was temporarily staying with eight other family members in one tent.

*

Kempster reported from Washington and Shogren from Blace. Times staff writers Chris Kraul in Brussels, Maura Reynolds in Moscow, Paul Watson in Pristina, John J. Goldman and Janet Wilson at the United Nations, and James Gerstenzang and Tyler Marshall in Washington contributed to this report.

Many charities are accepting contributions to help refugees from Kosovo. The list may be found at https://www.latimes.com/kosovoaid.

On the Web

Extended coverage of the crisis in Yugoslavia is available at The Times’ Web site at https://www.latimes.com/yugo. Coverage includes hourly updates, all Times stories since NATO launched its attack, video clips, information on how to help the refugees, a primer on the conflict and access to our discussion group.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Mission: Scattering Serbian Forces

NATO forces are using B-1 bombers

equipped with special munitions designed to keep enemy forces from congregating. The CBU-87 is a U.S.-made bomb that sends out shrapnel and liquefied copper when dropped. It is being used to keep Serbs from gathering to refuel trucks and resupply.

How it works:

JSTARS plane flies over Kosovo, detects gas trucks meeting armored cars.

Plane sends message to B-1s to launch.

B-1s download target coordinates from the JSTARS into on-board bomb computer; use data to guide launch of bombs from as far as five miles up and 10 miles away.

Sources: American Federation of Scientists; John Pike, defense analyst