Clinton Firm on Allies’ Demands for Ending Airstrikes

With U.S. officials fearing that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is about to unleash a diplomatic offensive intended to divide NATO, President Clinton launched a preemptive strike Friday, saying that the United States and its partners in the campaign against Yugoslavia “will not settle for half-measures.”

The president’s aides say they expect an effort by Milosevic to present the North Atlantic Treaty Organization with a pruned olive branch, now that the war and his troops have uprooted perhaps half a million ethnic Albanians from the separatist province of Kosovo in the last two weeks alone.

“If he starts down that road, that could cause problems,” a senior White House official said, expressing concern that Milosevic could try to peel away some members of the alliance with peace gestures.

In the Balkans, the foul weather that stymied pilots attacking targets in Yugoslavia in the initial phase of the offensive--now more than two weeks old--returned Friday, but not before overnight airstrikes on bridges, roads and rail lines isolated Serbian forces. U.S. and British officials predicted that fuel and ammunition shortages could soon cause problems for the Yugoslav army.

In a setback for the allies, however, the diplomatic effort to win the freedom of three U.S. soldiers held by the Serbs appeared to have hit a dead end. It was unclear whether veteran Cypriot politician Spyros Kyprianou, who had met with Milosevic in a bid to gain the men’s release, would even remain in Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital, for additional talks.

NATO’s intensified bombing campaign, Kyprianou said, “didn’t help” his efforts to negotiate the soldiers’ release.

Pentagon officials, meanwhile, said they had received credible but unconfirmed reports that ethnic Albanian women had been herded into Serbian military training camps in southwest Kosovo, where they were raped and killed. And British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said he had received reports that “four lorry [truck] loads of bodies have been buried in Kosovo and a fifth load burnt.”

In other developments:

* Pressure on Clinton to introduce ground troops into the campaign increased. Members of the House and Senate who visited NATO headquarters in Brussels earlier last week drafted a letter urging him to plan for “additional military missions, including the use of ground forces” if necessary.

* Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin said if the Balkans fighting escalates, Russia might reconsider its decision not to send weapons to Yugoslavia. He said he had told the United States, Germany and other NATO nations: “Don’t push us to military action, or else there will be at least a European war and maybe a world war.” Russia has vehemently opposed the campaign against Yugoslavia, its longtime ally.

* All of the thousands of refugees moved from a muddy valley encampment near Blace on Macedonia’s border with Kosovo have been accounted for, a spokeswoman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said. The refugees, whose location was unknown a day earlier, have been relocated in Albania and elsewhere in Macedonia, the spokeswoman said.

* Outlining what he called “indications of genocide,” the State Department’s chief war crimes investigator, David Scheffer, said civilian homes in at least 250 Kosovo towns and villages had been destroyed by burning or gunfire, and refugees had reported summary executions of military-age men in at least 50 towns.

In hastily prepared remarks delivered before he boarded a helicopter at the White House on his way to Philadelphia, Clinton said Friday: “If we settle for half-measures from Mr. Milosevic, we will get nothing more. And what we have from Mr. Milosevic today is not even partial compliance but the illusion of partial compliance. We and our allies have properly rejected it.”

Clinton Demands Serb Withdrawal

Clinton held to the allies’ demands: Serbian military, police and paramilitary forces must withdraw from Kosovo; an international security force must be deployed there, with Milosevic’s permission; all refugees must be permitted to return; and the province must move toward autonomy in secure conditions for all its people.

The president said that under the intensified attacks, Milosevic “has tried to rearrange the facts on the ground by declaring a cease-fire.”

But, Clinton said, “The fundamental reality is unchanged.” Innocent people have been attacked, refugees’ escape routes are blocked, and Milosevic “hopes that we will accept as permanent the results of his ethnic cleansing.”

“We will not--not when a quarter of Kosovo’s people are living in refugee camps beyond Kosovo’s borders; not when hundreds of thousands more are trapped inside, afraid to go home but unable to leave,” the president declared.

Administration officials took heart that U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan had generally endorsed the alliance’s primary goals. They said NATO unity was holding firm and that Clinton had recently spoken by telephone with Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema, who continues to support the operation. D’Alema and key Greek officials have been said to have had some reservations about the scope of the mission.

With little expectation Friday that he would make progress, Kyprianou pressed authorities in Belgrade to release the three Americans. The soldiers--Sgt. Andrew Ramirez of Los Angeles, Staff Sgt. Christopher J. Stone of Smiths Creek, Mich., and Spc. Steven Gonzales of Huntsville, Texas--were captured March 31 near the embattled country’s border with Macedonia.

Afterward, Kyprianou said he will continue his efforts.

It was unclear whether he would seek another meeting with Milosevic during the Orthodox Easter weekend or leave when a Greek airliner returns to the Yugoslav capital to take him back to Cyprus. Kyprianou is the speaker of Cyprus’ parliament and had been acting president earlier last week while the president was on vacation. He had been critical of the NATO air campaign even before his mission began.

Because NATO bombing raids have recently targeted Belgrade’s main airport, the aircraft that brought him to the city Wednesday and again Thursday flew back to Cyprus on Thursday night to await the envoy’s call that his mission was over.

Before his talks with Milosevic, the Cypriot official toured demolished houses in the impoverished mining town of Aleksinac, where a NATO missile went astray earlier last week and reportedly killed several civilians. He was accompanied by Yugoslav politicians, including the head of a stridently leftist party run by Milosevic’s wife.

Kyprianou said Yugoslav officials assured him the three captives were being well-treated.

Although clouds hampered air operations over Yugoslavia on Friday, military officers reviewing the progress of the bombings and missile attacks that began March 24 said half of the Serbs’ fuel-delivery network has been eliminated, three army headquarters were destroyed, and the communications system is taking a heavy pounding.

“Their lines of communications are being cut, their vehicle areas are being attacked, their supplies are running low, and they are taking casualties,” British Gen. Charles Guthrie said in London. “They are on a slippery slope.”

A senior White House official noted: “We finally cut off [Milosevic’s] supply lines. He’s not doing military operations. He’s hiding.”

Foreign journalists have had only limited access to targeted sites in Yugoslavia, and claims by both sides have been difficult to verify.

The U.S. Air Force flew its B-2 Stealth bombers Thursday, said Maj. Gen. Charles Wald, vice director for strategic plans and policy of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The planes dispatched satellite-guided 2,000-pound bombs toward reinforced targets.

Among the targets in Serbia, the dominant republic of the rump Yugoslavia, was a Yugo automobile factory that Wald said also made parts for tanks and other military vehicles; several armored vehicles; and a police headquarters.

“Troops are running low on the fuel they need. A tank with no fuel is a sitting target,” Cook said.

Wald displayed photographs of allied ordnance smashing what he said were bridges, ammunition bunkers, barracks, command centers and a Serbian antiaircraft battery.

He said that he had seen “no indication whatsoever” that Yugoslav forces were adhering to the cease-fire that Milosevic had announced to mark the Orthodox Easter celebration this weekend.

But only a day after NATO sought to shift blame to Yugoslavia for the death and destruction caused when a bomb went 200 yards off target and destroyed a row of houses rather than a telephone exchange building in Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, the alliance acknowledged that it was to blame.

At that site, approximately 30 volunteers spent the Orthodox Good Friday digging in the still-smoldering ruins of Pristina’s historic Zanatska Street, searching for the remains of Mesut Gash, his wife and their three daughters, ages 6, 7 and 9.

Gash’s 2-year-old toddler and the child’s grandmother were the only members of the family to survive the explosion and inferno when NATO bombed the heart of Pristina. The alliance said the communications building and a post office were military targets.

One of the mysteries of the conflict--the sudden disappearance Tuesday night of tens of thousands of refugees from the Macedonian fields on which they had camped for as much as a week--was cleared up Friday, at least to a degree.

Shortly after the refugees were moved by Macedonian officials, the UNHCR said its office could not account for several thousand. But the missing refugees have since been located in Albania and in other camps in Macedonia.

Approximately 45,000 refugees are living in tents in Macedonia, and 60,000 are being housed with families. Albania has accepted more than 300,000 refugees.

Many families were separated across international borders when Macedonian officials sent refugees to Turkey and Albania without their consent, and the United Nations office has been swamped with requests for help reuniting them.

The Macedonian defense minister, Nikola Kljusev, said in Brussels that few refugees were mistreated.

Paula Ghedini, spokeswoman for the refugee office, said that 1,200 ethnic Albanians trapped between Kosovo and Macedonia for several days were allowed to enter Macedonia on Friday.

After touring the region, the commissioner, Sadako Ogata, raised the plight of refugees still in Kosovo. “I am helpless there,” she said.

Refugees leaving Kosovo reported that as many as 20 women may have been raped and killed near the town of Dakovica, said Kenneth H. Bacon, the chief Pentagon spokesman.

He said officials were trying to confirm the reports.

“This is a very disturbing and eerie echo of documented instances of rape and killing of women in Bosnia during the Bosnian war,” he said.

A Russian news report that claimed that nuclear missiles there had been targeted at NATO nations set off a flurry of concern in Washington and other capitals.

But the Kremlin insisted that Gennady A. Seleznyov, speaker of the lower house of parliament, the source of the report, was mistaken. Later, Seleznyov’s spokesman said that the speaker’s conversations with Yeltsin, on which his report was based, touched only on the “possibility” of retargeting Russian missiles if the conflict escalates.

Russia and the United States agreed in 1997 to de-target their missiles--a gesture that signaled an end to political enmity even though it has nearly no significance militarily. Missile targets can be reset in a matter of minutes.

In Washington, a spokesman for the National Security Council, David C. Leavy, said, “We’ve been officially reassured by Russia at a high level that Russia will not allow itself to be drawn into the conflict in the Balkans.”

Times staff writers Elizabeth Shogren in Skopje, Macedonia; Paul Watson in Pristina, Yugoslavia; Carol J. Williams in Ramstein, Germany; Chris Kraul in Brussels; Maura Reynolds in Moscow; and Doyle McManus, Paul Richter, Art Pine, Melissa Healy and Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.