Up to 33,000 Reservists May Be Activated

The Pentagon said Thursday that it plans to call up as many as 33,000 reservists--mostly Air Force pilots and ground crews--for NATO’s Yugoslav campaign, on the same day the department’s top officials acknowledged that the fighting could last for several more months.

The plan to activate reservists came shortly after President Clinton proposed a massive postwar program to rebuild Yugoslavia’s Kosovo province and bring all of the Balkans into the European mainstream.

A senior Pentagon official said about 22,000 of the reservists are Air Force personnel, needed to fly and maintain the 300 additional aircraft that Gen. Wesley K. Clark, NATO’s supreme commander, recently requested. The official said some of the reservists will be assigned to bases in the United States, freeing Air Force regulars for deployment to the Balkans.

The remainder of the reservists are army personnel, mostly military police and civil affairs specialists, trained to deal with local populations and to handle refugee relief programs.

The call-up is far fewer than the 245,000 reservists activated during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. But the number is huge in its impact on the Balkans. There are now only 29,040 U.S. military personnel in the theater, including the crews of ships in the Mediterranean and peacekeeping forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Officials said not all of the reservists will be called at once.

In a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in San Francisco, Clinton tried to give the people of Kosovo--reeling after at least one NATO rocket was misdirected, killing ethnic Albanian refugees--and the Balkans a glimmer of hope that a better day is ahead.

“We must follow the example of the World War II generation by standing up to aggression and hate, and then by following through with a post-conflict strategy for reconstruction and renewal,” Clinton said in a reference to the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe half a century ago.

But he also warned that civilian casualties--like the deaths of the refugees hit Wednesday by NATO fire--are unavoidable.

Clinton gave no estimate of the cost of his postwar plan. But he admitted that “realistically, it will require a democratic transition in Serbia”--in effect, the overthrow of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Kosovo is a separatist province of Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic.

Administration officials offered no strategy for reaching the goal of a democratic Serbia. In fact, Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged that NATO’s bombing campaign may not be capable of forcing political changes in Yugoslavia even when it achieves its goal of decimating the Yugoslav army.

Testifying before the Senate Armed Forces Committee, Shelton said he warned the White House before the bombing began that “the air campaign could carry out the military mission, but that that might not lead you to what was the desired outcome of the diplomacy, and that was a political settlement.” He said he has not changed his assessment as a result of three weeks of attacks.

Nevertheless, Shelton said he and the other uniformed chiefs supported the president’s decision to rely on air power because they did not believe that the political climate in the United States and the other NATO countries would support ground action.

Shelton and Defense Secretary William S. Cohen both said they expect that the military campaign will continue for many weeks, or even several months. And they warned that U.S. casualties are likely.

By activating reservists, the administration dramatized the seriousness of the conflict to the public, pulling individuals away from civilian jobs and families. By law, reservists can be called up for a maximum of 270 days, but the official said the Pentagon hopes that most of them will be there for a shorter duration than that.

The Pentagon’s estimate of a drawn-out conflict, coupled with the pace at which Yugoslav troops are driving ethnic Albanians from their homes, implies that few Albanians will be left in the province at the end of the fighting. But U.S. officials said NATO will continue the strikes until Milosevic agrees to allow hundreds of thousands of refugees who have fled to Albania, Macedonia and other neighboring countries to return under conditions of safety and broad self-government.

Nevertheless, the U.S. and its allies now admit that their aims of the early days of the conflict--a quick end to the fighting, with assurances for the safety for the province’s beleaguered ethnic Albanians--is no longer realistic.

In his speech, Clinton said the bombing of a column of ethnic Albanian refugees Wednesday was “regrettable” but unavoidable.

“The pilot thought it was a military convoy,” Clinton said. “It should be obvious to everybody in the world that we are bending over backwards to hit military targets, to hit security targets, even to hit a lot of targets late at night, where the losses in human life will be minimized.

“But I have to tell you, if anyone thinks that this is a reason for changing our mission, then the United States will never be able to bring military power to bear again because there is no such thing as flying airplanes this fast, dropping weapons this powerful, dealing with an enemy this pervasive, who is willing to use people as human shields, and never have this sort of tragic thing happen,” he said.

In other developments:

* Congress passed legislation permitting U.S. service members who have been sent to the Balkans to put off filing their federal income-tax returns until 180 days after they return from their deployments. The measure, passed by both the Senate and House and sent to the president, also eliminates any tax liability for these service members on hazardous-duty pay--a bonus paid to personnel assigned to a combat zone--and exempts them from the 3% federal excise tax on long-distance telephone calls.

* The FBI is investigating the origins of a letter urging Serbian Americans to attack U.S. military personnel, but it has found “no specific or credible threat” to substantiate any terrorist plans, officials said. The one-page letter was faxed last month to three Serbian Orthodox churches and a Serbian American social club, apparently in the Midwest and West. It urged Serbian nationalists in the United States to kill stateside U.S. military personnel “on streets, in parks, in shopping malls, in movie theaters, in their homes, wherever they may be.” But while the conflict has prompted upgraded alerts at U.S. military bases, officials said that “the FBI possesses no information indicating that any individuals have committed or are planning acts of violence in response to the ongoing NATO strikes.”

* The bipartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that if the air campaign continues into May--and is followed by a deployment of NATO-led peacekeeping troops, as the administration now hopes--the cost of the military and humanitarian aid effort could top $3 billion for 12 months. But the office said if the air campaign continues past the end of May, the additional cost would be about $1 billion a month. Separately, the White House told Congress it expects to seek $5.9 billion in emergency funding for the military operation and to help ethnic Albanian refugees.

* The U.N. Security Council rebuffed Yugoslavia’s request for an emergency council meeting to consider the bombing of the refugees. Instead, at the request of Russian ambassador Sergei V. Lavrov, the council was briefed by U.N. staff, and issued a joint statement “deploring the tragedy.”

* Congressional leaders announced that 20 lawmakers--10 from each house--will leave Washington today to visit U.S. and NATO military operations in the Balkans. The group will visit NATO headquarters in Brussels, Aviano Air Base in Italy, a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean and refugee camps in Macedonia and Albania. The lawmakers are scheduled to return to Washington on Sunday.

* Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told a House subcommittee that she plans to make daily broadcasts to the Serbian people in their own language to counteract the propaganda of the Serbian government media. The Czech-born secretary of State lived in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, as a child when her diplomat father was posted there.

Hundreds of demonstrators both for and against NATO policy converged outside the hotel where Clinton spoke to the ASNE. About 400 protesters, many wearing small bull’s-eyes pinned over their hearts--a symbol also adopted by Serbs in a bit of wartime gallows humor--called on Clinton to halt the bombing strikes.

But Clinton insisted that the United States and its allies will persist until Milosevic agrees to withdraw his forces and allow refugees to return under the protection of an international peacekeeping force.

Clinton said conditions in border refugee camps have begun to improve. But he expressed increasing concern over the fate of ethnic Albanians who have been driven from their homes but have been unable to reach the border. Officials say these “internally displaced persons” probably number more than 250,000 people, many of them in imminent danger of starvation.

“They are unable to leave, but afraid to go home,” Clinton said. “Mr. Milosevic apparently wants to use them as hostages and human shields. And he is preventing relief groups from getting to them.”

James Gerstenzang in San Francisco, Elizabeth Shogren in Macedonia, Art Pine and Eric Lichtblau in Washington and Janet Wilson at the United Nations contributed to this report.