Diplomatic Trip Signals Hope for Americans’ Release

NATO’s military campaign proceeded with heightened furor Wednesday in the air over Yugoslavia, while on the ground, an international negotiator said he was making progress toward obtaining the freedom of three U.S. soldiers captured by Serbian forces last week. U.S. officials warned that Washington would accept no conditions for the captives’ release.

Picking out some of the most minute Yugoslav military units waging war against Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians, NATO airstrikes targeted a column of seven to 12 vehicles in an overnight attack that continued into Wednesday, the military alliance announced in Brussels.

An air raid on an administrative complex in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, killed at least 10 civilians--five ethnic Turks, including three children, living in one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, and five Serbs, including three working at a post office and telephone exchange. Twenty other people were injured.

Looming over the military campaign is the prospect of a grinding war through the rugged terrain of Kosovo.

Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher (D-Pleasanton), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said NATO officials and U.S. legislators meeting in Brussels discussed the possibility of deploying ground troops in Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic.

U.S. officials have been adamant that they are making no plans to conduct the war in any way other than from the air. But Tauscher said: “This has not gone the way anyone had hoped. We need to be looking 17 steps ahead of where we are.”

She said the group, which accompanied Defense Secretary William S. Cohen to Brussels, was not “talking about [deploying] troops tomorrow.” But she said it was “not only prudent and appropriate but incumbent on us” to begin looking at what might become necessary in the future, including ground troops.

One day after Yugoslavia announced that it was calling a cease-fire for the Orthodox Easter, to be celebrated Sunday, the Clinton administration denounced the proposal as neither a serious gesture nor a signal that President Slobodan Milosevic is ready to move toward a settlement on anything other than his conditions.

“It is not enough now for Mr. Milosevic to say that his forces will cease fire in a Kosovo denied its freedom and devoid of its people,” President Clinton said in a hastily arranged speech to the U.S. Institute of Peace, a Washington think tank. “He must withdraw his forces, let the refugees return, permit the deployment of an international security force.”

In other developments:

* The fate of tens of thousands of Kosovo refugees grew more uncertain after a column of ethnic Albanians seeking to cross the border into Albania was turned back by Yugoslav authorities.

* In Moscow, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin appealed to the leaders of the seven major industrial democracies not to reject the Yugoslav cease-fire plan out of hand. Russian Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov said his nation had dispatched 74 trucks carrying 300 tons of food, medicine, tents and blankets to Yugoslavia and would send a mobile hospital unit to treat civilian victims of the NATO bombardment. But he said Russia had no plans to send military supplies.

* Greece asked its NATO partners to undertake negotiations with Milosevic and said the cease-fire should be exploited.

* The U.S. named nine Yugoslav commanders operating in Kosovo who it said were committing war crimes and warned that they could face international justice. In the Netherlands, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia said it was asking NATO to hand over evidence that could be used to try war-crime suspects.

A flurry of behind-the-scenes diplomatic activity raised hopes that progress was being made in obtaining the release of the three soldiers--Staff Sgts. Andrew Ramirez of East Los Angeles and Christopher J. Stone of Smith’s Creek, Mich., and Spc. Steven Gonzales of Huntsville, Texas.

The acting president of Cyprus, Spyros Kyprianou, flew to Belgrade on Wednesday at the urging of the Yugoslav ambassador to try to win the soldiers’ freedom. He later flew to Athens, where he said he was “waiting for the green light from Belgrade” before returning to Yugoslavia today, Associated Press reported.

“The indications are that this mission will succeed. I am confident about it,” he told reporters. Later, he said in an interview with MSNBC: “I think in principle there is an agreement for this.”

He said he had asked that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization halt its bombardment for 24 hours. He was turned down, but U.S. officials said Wednesday that they were taking note of his presence there and were aware of concerns for his safety.

Cyprus and Yugoslavia, both members of the Nonaligned Movement comprising more than 100 largely Third World nations, have had good relations for years.

Cyprus’ ethnic Greek majority shares an Orthodox Christian heritage with the Serbs; the Greek Orthodox Church on the island has collected more than $100,000 in donations to help Serbian victims of the NATO bombardment.

The Cypriot government’s call for NATO to halt its attack reflects popular pro-Serbian sentiment. But President Glafcos Clerides, who is trying to lead his country to European Union membership, has distanced himself from militant anti-NATO street demonstrations, some of which have been led by the more nationalist Kyprianou.

Kyprianou’s outspokenness against the West has made him more approachable to the Yugoslavs as a possible mediator. He was contacted by the Yugoslav ambassador in Nicosia, Cyprus’ capital, while Clerides was on vacation in Syria, and was informed that Milosevic was willing to turn over the three soldiers.

Among the Kosovo refugees, wretched conditions and wrenching scenes prevailed.

Under the cover of night, Macedonian authorities moved at least 20,000 refugees --from the border zone at Blace.

Many of the refugees were put on airplanes bound for Turkey, and still more were jammed into 350 buses that headed for Albania, Greece and possibly Hungary. At the Greek border, a convoy of buses was denied entry, a U.N. official said, and turned toward Albania.

At a second Macedonian checkpoint at Jazince, the U.N. refugee agency also reported “scenes of chaos.”

Within Kosovo, ethnic Albanians who had been waiting in line for several days to cross the border were dispersed. Their fate was unknown.

“People saw them being turned back,” said Rronn Qena, 20, a Kosovo refugee who had arrived at a camp at Stankovac, a suburb of Skopje, the Macedonian capital.

The departure of the refugees raised the prospect that Milosevic would seek to portray the crisis as de-escalating.

But White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart said, “I would not view as necessarily good the fact that he’s now closed the border and is forcing people back in.”

Clinton’s deputy national security advisor, James Steinberg, added: “It’s not enough for him to do some things that he wanted to accomplish and then try to blunt the campaign by saying, ‘Well, I’m going to stop the fighting now, on my terms.’ ”

Relief workers are “extremely concerned” about the fate of the thousands who were lined up on the Kosovo side of the border Tuesday night but were gone at dawn Wednesday, the U.N. official said.

U.N. officials said there were “disquieting reports from inside Kosovo” that authorities were now sending people back to their home areas and turning them away from the Macedonian border.

In Brussels, Cohen declared: “The appalling accounts of mass killing in Kosovo and the pictures of refugees fleeing Serb oppression for their lives make it clear that this is a fight for justice over genocide, humanity over inhumanity, democracy over despotism, freedom over fear and a future of hope instead of a past of hatred.”

Concentrating on ground forces in Kosovo, NATO jets flew 439 sorties in day and night bombing raids beginning Tuesday, the Pentagon said.

NATO said its aircraft hit a variety of targets, including a helicopter hangar and an airfield. British Harrier aircraft attacked individual tanks and a convoy of between 15 to 20 vehicles in Kosovo.

“Initial indications showed they were successful missions,” British Air Marshal John Day said.

“This is no time to pause. We will reject any settlement that freezes the result of Milosevic’s genocide and rewards him for his brutality,” Cohen said.

Presenting the cease-fire offer as a sign that Milosevic is faltering, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said in London: “As his fuel depots burn and his lines of communication are cut, it must have dawned on him that NATO can keep going longer than him. He knows he cannot win by military conflict. He also knows he cannot win by the cynical ploy he tried out last night.”

Pentagon officials said Tuesday night’s action brought the first attacks against Yugoslav forces by the tank-killing, low-flying A-10 “Warthog” aircraft, as well as the first attacks by F/A-18 and F-14 fighters from the just-arrived aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt.

The A-10’s involvement is another signal that, after days of delay, NATO forces are intensifying their attacks on the troops and heavy equipment that are carrying out the “ethnic cleansing” of Kosovo Albanians, who made up 90% of Kosovo’s prewar population.

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Gerstenzang reported from Washington and Kraul from Brussels. Times staff writers Paul Watson in Pristina; Elizabeth Shogren in Blace; John-Thor Dahlburg in Brussels; Richard Boudreaux in Rome; Maura Reynolds in Moscow; Janet Wilson at the United Nations; and Doyle McManus, Norman Kempster and Paul Richter in Washington contributed to this report.