Mission to Free 3 U.S. Servicemen Stalls in Belgrade

On a day when hopes soured for the release of three American soldiers imprisoned in Yugoslavia, President Clinton held firmly Thursday to his plan not to send combat troops into a ground war in Kosovo.

In the Balkans, sad and confused accounts of the plight of tens of thousands of refugees--as well as recriminations among government officials--emerged from the rugged territory where Kosovo, the southernmost province of the Yugoslav republic of Serbia, borders Macedonia.

Only the detritus of hasty flight remained more than 24 hours after authorities in Macedonia cleared a border encampment in that country.

And in the fields and forests north of an Albanian border crossing, Serbian forces of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic planted mines. Only 24 hours earlier, thousands of ethnic Albanians seeking to escape vicious “ethnic cleansing” had languished at the border for days before Serbian troops suddenly forced them back into Kosovo.

In Belgrade, Yugoslavia urged the refugees to return, declaring that “peace has prevailed in Kosovo” and that the 14-month war against ethnic Albanian separatists had ended.

Hours later, NATO aircraft were reported by the state Tanjug news agency to have hit a fuel depot at Smederevo, 30 miles southeast of Belgrade early this morning. Attacks were reported in the town of Kragujevac, which houses the country’s only automobile manufacturer, and in two Belgrade suburbs.

In earlier military action, Pentagon officials said NATO planes struck 22 targets in overnight missions that continued into Thursday. They said sorties over Kosovo drew heavy antiaircraft fire.

Officials displayed videotape of A-10 “Warthog” tank-killing planes firing at Yugoslav army vehicles and taking heavy return fire. None were reported downed. French Super Etendard warplanes, Dutch F-16s, British Harrier jets and U.S. F-16s took part in the attacks.

GI Release ‘Out of the Question’

The mission by the parliament speaker of Cyprus, Spyros Kyprianou, to win the release of the three U.S. soldiers stalled in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital. Kyprianou arrived there Thursday afternoon after his flight from Athens was delayed a day. He held out hope for winning the release of the soldiers, captured last week near the Macedonia-Yugoslavia border, during the Orthodox celebration of Easter this weekend.

But a Serbian deputy prime minister, Vojislav Seselj, said their release was “out of the question.”

Kyprianou was to meet Milosevic today.

U.S. officials have said they will not negotiate for the soldiers’ freedom. But, speaking at a news conference with Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji, Clinton said, “I would be for anything . . . honorable that would secure their release, obviously.”

Yugoslavia has said the three soldiers, members of a patrol seeking to keep the violence from spilling into Macedonia, had crossed into Kosovo.

“They were in Macedonia,” the president insisted.

In other developments:

* The Pentagon said the F-117A Stealth fighter that went down over Yugoslavia on March 27, the only confirmed downing of a NATO jet, had been shot down by Serbian forces. The Pentagon had previously refused to say what caused the plane to crash. The pilot was rescued by U.S. troops.

* With more aid reaching the Kosovo refugees and few volunteering to go to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base on Cuba, U.S. officials acknowledged that it is uncertain whether any will actually be housed there, as previously planned. “Many of those refugees . . . would just as soon stay a little bit closer to Kosovo and their homes,” Maj. Gen. Charles F. Wald said.

* British officials said the international police organization Interpol and Western intelligence agencies were scrutinizing Milosevic’s access to international finance to see if the links could be severed.

* Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin pledged unequivocally not to send guns and other weapons to Yugoslavia. “It would mean dragging us into a big war,” Yeltsin told reporters.

* Seeking specific evidence, the head of the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia told NATO foreign ministers that the court could not investigate alleged war crimes committed in Kosovo by Serbs “without the active assistance” of the international community.

* Trying to break Milosevic’s link with the Serbian people, NATO warned that it may begin bombing Yugoslav television and radio stations, although U.S. officials said they are not on target lists unless they are also used for military purposes.

Serbian broadcasts have become “increasingly hostile,” a NATO source said. NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said many transmitters were integrated into the military command-and-communication network. Spokesmen said that the strikes could be averted if the allies were given six hours of daily, uncensored broadcast time to reach the Serbian people.

Since the start of the air campaign, NATO authorities have wrestled with the central question of whether bombing raids, no matter how punishing, can force Milosevic to withdraw his troops from Kosovo and allow the safe return of its ethnic Albanian population.

With NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana suggesting that discussions about ground troops were continuing, Clinton was asked Thursday whether the United States had shifted from its opposition to their deployment.

“No,” he replied, “I believe our present strategy will work if we can keep the allies with it.”

His closest ally in the fight, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, similarly ruled out the use of ground troops. Blair also acknowledged in an interview with the BBC that it was increasingly less likely that Kosovo would be granted autonomy within Serbia, a central element in the peace plan accepted in France last month by a Kosovo Albanian delegation but rejected by Milosevic.

In the news conference, Clinton said that he does not know whether Milosevic should be considered a war criminal but that the matter should be investigated.

“What we know is that by a deliberate policy, he has caused hundreds of thousands of people to be refugees,” he said. “We know that thousands of innocent people have been killed--defenseless, completely defenseless people. We know that people were herded up and pushed to the borders and pushed over the borders.”

And with the mining of the borders, the president added, “if they try to get across them to save their lives, they can be blown up.”

“The facts are clear: The humanitarian suffering and loss here is staggering,” Clinton said. “And it is his direct political strategy for first getting and then maintaining power.”

On Thursday, State Department spokesman James P. Rubin in Washington and NATO officials in Brussels said that in some instances, Serbs were moving into sites bombed by NATO, destroying civilian buildings and blaming NATO for striking nonmilitary targets.

But at least one case, in which allied bombs struck a post office and communications building early Wednesday in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, appeared to contradict a NATO claim that Serbs caused the civilian casualties in the center of the city.

A two-story house where three ethnic Turkish girls, ages 6, 7 and 9, were burned to death as they cried out for help was less than 20 yards from the back of the post office that exploded in flames during the NATO raids.

The bomb damage from direct hits on at least three government buildings in the same block was so extensive, and the blasts so powerful, that chunks of concrete and bomb shrapnel landed about two blocks away.

Foreign journalists found the post office building engulfed in flames shortly after the attack. So, too, were the houses in narrow Zanatska Street just behind it.

Pentagon officials said the large number of Kosovo Albanians still in the province was slowing NATO’s ability to fire on Serbian forces. About 900,000 ethnic Albanians have been displaced, they said, but about 500,000 remain inside Kosovo.

U.S. officials at the Pentagon and the Agency for International Development retreated from the plan to send as many as 20,000 refugees to the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

They said that a large segment of the refugees, many of them just beyond Yugoslavia’s border, have food, shelter and medical care, reducing the need to fly them far from their homeland.

Macedonia Maintains Refugees Can Be Traced

One day after its troops cleared a border camp of tens of thousands of refugees in a middle-of-the-night operation, the Macedonian government rejected as “disinformation” assertions by international relief organizations that thousands of Kosovo Albanians could not be traced.

Macedonian Deputy Foreign Minister Boris Trajkovski blamed the misunderstanding on the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugee’s “problem with numbers.”

At Jazince, the crossing between Macedonia and Yugoslavia that is closest to Albania, relief workers reported that thousands of refugees had returned to the border after trying to return to their homes in Kosovo.

“Milosevic learned that the international community was paying more attention to the Blace border, so now he’s playing games at Jazince,” said Xhafer Xhaferi of El Hilal, an Albanian-Macedonian charity. The Blace border, which had been closed, is less than a half-hour’s drive from Skopje, the Macedonian capital, where most journalists and international relief workers are based. The Jazince border is about 1 1/2 hours away.

*

Gerstenzang reported from Washington and Shogren from Skopje, Macedonia. Times staff writers Paul Watson in Pristina, Janet Wilson at the United Nations, Maura Reynolds in Moscow, John-Thor Dahlburg and Chris Kraul in Brussels, and Norman Kempster, Paul Richter and Melissa Healy 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.

More on the Crisis * CYPRUS--Bid to free captives puts tiny nation in limelight.A14

* ACTIVISM--Plight of refugees galvanizes U.S. Jews.A16

* DETOUR--After hajj, Kosovo Albanians sent to Turkey.A16