NATO Cites Mass Graves as It Weighs Oil Blockade

As NATO announced evidence Sunday of 43 new mass burial sites in the Serbian province of Kosovo, the United States and its allies moved toward ratcheting up their pressure on Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic by imposing an oil blockade.

“We are talking with our NATO allies about taking stricter action in order to limit the amount of oil that goes in,” said Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. The oil blockade, she said, would be part of a campaign “to tighten the screws on [Milosevic] economically.”

Earlier this decade, Yugoslavia’s economy was strangled by an oil blockade and other international sanctions imposed to punish Milosevic for his role in fomenting war in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said allied bombs had cost Yugoslavia 70% of its oil supplies and that the country no longer has the capacity to refine crude oil. What oil the country receives, Shea said, is in the form of refined products unloaded at its ports in Montenegro, which along with Serbia constitutes Yugoslavia.

“The question is, do we continue air operations like they’re going on now, or really hit Milosevic where it hurts?” a senior diplomatic official in Brussels said, referring to the prospect of an oil embargo. “We have to make sure that Mr. Milosevic wakes up every morning with something new to worry about.”

NATO officials in Brussels said their aerial attack, aimed at stopping the Yugoslav government’s campaign of “ethnic cleansing” of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians, had been particularly effective over the past 24 hours. Shea said that North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombs hit 13 armored vehicles and a variety of other targets and that Yugoslavia’s air-defense system has been reduced to a few uncoordinated antiaircraft batteries.

In other developments:

* Yugoslavia broke diplomatic relations with Albania, accusing it of siding with NATO in its fierce bombing campaign against Yugoslav targets, Albanian officials said. Also Sunday, President Clinton called the leaders of Hungary, a new NATO member, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania--the so-called front-line states bordering Yugoslavia--and thanked them for their cooperation, the White House said.

* Severe rainstorms delayed the arrival of the first of 24 U.S. Apache antitank helicopter gunships in Albania. The Apaches were not expected to arrive before Tuesday, NATO said.

* U.S. officials denied published reports that American intelligence personnel met with Kosovo Liberation Army insurgents to discuss supplying military equipment to the ethnic Albanians. “Our purpose here is not to militarize the situation further but to demilitarize it so these people can live in peace,” Assistant Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott said on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press.” “And also, there’s the U.N. Security Council arms embargo that we’re going to continue to follow.”

* A U.S. fighter pilot who described on audiotape how he hit a Serbian military vehicle may have had nothing to do with last week’s strike on a convoy of refugees in Kosovo, a Defense Department spokesman said. NATO said the comments were simply an example of how a pilot reacts during a ground attack over Kosovo. Whether the pilot on the tape was involved with any civilian deaths is the subject of an ongoing inquiry, NATO said.

* First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton may soon travel to Albania to get a firsthand look at humanitarian relief operations for Kosovo refugees. “Clearly, she’s very interested in what we can do to alleviate the refugee situation,” spokeswoman Marsha Berry said.

* Three aid workers--two American and one French--and their Albanian driver were killed when their car went off the road into a ravine on the road to Kukes, the Albanian Information Ministry said.

* Serbian state television reported that a NATO missile hit the provincial government building in Novi Sad today, causing “huge damage.”

NATO on Sunday reiterated that it has no current plans for a ground invasion to follow its aerial bombardment of Yugoslavia, which entered its 26th day Sunday.

But NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana said in Brussels that he did not rule out the eventual use of ground forces. And one NATO source said that while no planning for a ground attack is underway at alliance headquarters, officials in some capitals--notably Washington and London--are determined to “smash Milosevic.”

“Our task is to make sure that we . . . drive Milosevic’s forces out and we allow these people to return safely to their homes,” British Prime Minister Tony Blair said on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation.” “Of course, we keep every single option under review.”

Former NATO Supreme Commander Gen. George Joulwan warned that a ground force deployment would take up to four months. Even if a deployment were ordered now, troops would not be able to launch a counteroffensive against Yugoslav forces in Kosovo before the fall, when bad weather would give Milosevic a strategic edge.

Joulwan, speaking Sunday on “Meet the Press,” also said he thought ground forces would be necessary to achieve the objectives outlined by the NATO alliance.

The torrent of refugees from Kosovo to neighboring countries has provided vivid evidence that NATO’s air campaign has failed to stop Milosevic’s campaign of “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo.

Tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians continued to flee Kosovo over the weekend, but their journey was filled with peril--and uncertainty created by the erratic behavior of Serbian authorities.

At the Macedonian border, some refugees reported seeing Serbian security forces sending buses full of ethnic Albanians back into Kosovo, indicating that Serbian authorities had again closed the border. A day earlier, some Serbian border guards were granting passage only to those who had passports.

And some refugees have bypassed the protracted registration process at Macedonia’s entry points and sneaked into the country illegally, complicating the nation’s ongoing humanitarian crisis.

Heightening concern about the fate of those left behind, NATO’s Shea said the alliance has evidence that a notorious Serbian militia called the Tigers, under the leadership of war crimes suspect Zeljko Raznjatovic, was operating around the western Kosovo city of Pec.

Raznjatovic, usually known as “Arkan,” was indicted by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague for mass murders and rapes during the wars in neighboring Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Italian Air Force Brig. Gen. Giuseppe Marani, NATO’s military spokesman, said the alliance had reconnaissance photographs that showed 43 new mass burial sites in Kosovo.

“There have been numerous refugee reports of the Serb police assembling Kosovo Albanians into grave-digging chain gangs,” Marani said, calling this “the latest humiliation being inflicted” on the Muslim ethnic Albanians of Kosovo.

Most of the sites, he said, were made up of neat rows of individual graves pointing southeast in the direction of Mecca, the Muslim holy city. Despite the “gruesome task,” Marani said, “the Albanians are clearly trying to bury the victims of Milosevic with respect.”

The State Department’s chief war crimes investigator said on television Sunday that tens of thousands of young ethnic Albanian men--possibly as many as 100,000--may have been killed in the “ethnic cleansing” of Kosovo. David Scheffer, appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” said NATO’s most recent estimate of 3,200 dead was “very low.” He also called Milosevic “certainly a prime target for investigation” as a war criminal.

NATO’s latest strikes on a major refinery across the Danube River from Belgrade sent plumes of thick smoke over the Yugoslav and Serbian capital Sunday and drew protests from the Yugoslav government about the health effects on civilians. Marani replied: “Conflicts have never been healthy for anybody.”

The complaint about air pollution in Belgrade was part of a public relations offensive by Yugoslavia that also included an appearance by Yugoslav Foreign Minister Zivadin Jovanovic on “Meet the Press.” Jovanovic claimed that NATO--and not the Milosevic government--is responsible for the death and destruction in Kosovo.

“There is no killing, no raping, no depriving of . . . citizens’ rights,” Jovanovic said. “These accusations are mere NATO propaganda aimed at justifying a blunt aggression against Yugoslavia as a sovereign European state.”

He called the NATO aerial offensive a “crime against humanity” for which the alliance’s 19 member countries would eventually be held accountable.

Despite being confronted with aerial pictures of what NATO suspects are new mass graves, Jovanovic claimed that all citizens of Yugoslavia are “safe, free and equal.” He also denied that any paramilitary forces--believed by the allies to be responsible for much of Milosevic’s “ethnic cleansing”--are deployed in Kosovo.

U.S. frustration and anger are increasingly apparent as Yugoslav forces continue expelling Kosovo Albanians from the country despite the bombing campaign. The Clinton administration has begun to use the same kind of language in blaming Milosevic for the Kosovo crisis as it did in blaming Iraq’s Saddam Hussein for invading Kuwait--with the same implication that the leader must go.

In an article written for the Sunday Times of London, Clinton called Milosevic a “belligerent tyrant” and warned that the Balkans would not be peaceful as long as he is in power.

“Ultimately, Mr. Milosevic must either cut his mounting losses, or lose his ability to maintain his grip on Kosovo,” the president wrote.

Wright reported from Washington and Havemann from Brussels. Times staff writers John-Thor Dahlburg in Brussels and Elizabeth Shogren in Skopje, Macedonia, contributed to this report.