Clinton Asks for $6 Billion for War on Yugoslavia

President Clinton formally asked Congress on Monday for more than $6 billion to pay for munitions, equipment, humanitarian aid and other costs of the air assault on Yugoslavia--now nearly a month old, with no end in sight.

Administration officials said the request is enough to finance the air war for the rest of the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, although they said they hope that the NATO campaign ends before then. The air war against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has already cost the U.S. about $1 billion, much of it for high-priced precision weapons such as cruise missiles.

Republicans in Congress are expected to support the budget request, but they complain that Clinton’s earlier Pentagon budgets left the U.S. unready for a war such as the one in Kosovo.

The special budget request is the latest measure of the growing scale of the military confrontation over Kosovo, a separatist province of Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic. The request is at least $100 million larger than administration estimates of only a week ago.

“The need for this funding is urgent, immediate, clearly in the national interest,” the president said. “There are literally lives hanging in the balance. And so I hope . . . the Congress will move the package right away.”

Pentagon officials said Monday that Yugoslavia has committed as many as 43,000 army troops and special police forces in and around Kosovo, up from about 40,000 at the start of the campaign.

NATO officials have said that the bombing has cut all railroad approaches and most roads into the province and that some Serbian units have been hampered by shortages of fuel. But the report by Pentagon spokesman Kenneth H. Bacon of increased troop strength suggested that at least some of Milosevic’s forces retain considerable mobility.

In other developments:

* At the United Nations, Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the Security Council that he will appoint at least one envoy to try to bring peace to Kosovo. The envoy, who will be named later this week, will probably be a European from a non-NATO country, diplomats said. Annan also announced that he will visit Moscow later this month to discuss the conflict with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin and other Russian leaders. Russia has vehemently opposed the airstrikes against Yugoslavia, a longtime ally.

* Rebel fighters of the Kosovo Liberation Army captured three soldiers from the Yugoslav army and planned to turn them over to NATO officials, KLA spokesman Luzim Bakalli said in Tirana, the Albanian capital. The soldiers were captured last week during fighting near Junik in Kosovo, he said. One Yugoslav officer seized by the KLA has already been turned over to U.S. military authorities.

* The State Department said that at least 100,000 and possibly as many as 500,000 Kosovo Albanian men are unaccounted for, raising fears that they may have been killed by Serbian forces.

* NATO air raids targeted an airport near the southern Kosovo town of Urosevac on Monday, witnesses said. NATO planes also bombed Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, and Serbia’s second-largest city, Novi Sad, in NATO’s 26th night of attacks on Yugoslavia.

* The Yugoslav news agency Tanjug said today that overnight NATO attacks on Serbia’s third-largest city, Nis, killed or injured 12 people and destroyed or damaged houses as well as factories.

* Several hundred paratroops from the 82nd Airborne Division based at Ft. Bragg, N.C., were dispatched to Albania to protect Apache attack helicopters, which are expected to arrive soon. That is the largest deployment of U.S. ground troops since the start of the NATO air war. Pentagon officials said the contingent does not violate a ban on ground troops because the paratroops will be stationed outside Kosovo.

The budget request made by Clinton on Monday contains funds to activate about 25,000 reservists, fewer than the maximum of 33,000 that the Pentagon said last week that it wanted to call up.

Also Monday, officials said the Pentagon is considering a plan to extend the service of as many as several thousand active-duty personnel who are about to retire or leave the armed forces for other reasons. If Clinton approves, the Pentagon will extend some terms indefinitely, mostly those of Air Force pilots and ground crews. That authority was also used during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

The budget request by the White House did not seek money for ground troops, either as peacekeepers or as an invasion force. If the U.S. and its allies decide--either at this week’s NATO summit in Washington or later--that the war cannot be won without infantry, the costs will go up.

Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre told a White House briefing that the cost will be lower in the future than the $1 billion spent in the first four weeks. Estimated costs for the next five months total a little more than $4 billion, he said, because Yugoslav air defenses and other targets requiring expensive cruise missiles and other “smart” weapons have already been knocked out.

The $6-billion-plus request includes $750 million to replace munitions already expended and $850 million to build weapon stockpiles for the coming five months. It also includes $3.6 billion for military operations other than munitions and $335 million for Defense Department humanitarian costs such as aid to refugees. The State Department requested $591 million for humanitarian aid and related programs.

Meanwhile, Clinton telephoned Yeltsin but failed to budge the Russian leader’s adamant opposition to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Yeltsin told Russian television that Moscow will not allow NATO to control Yugoslavia.

U.S. officials tried to soft-pedal the continuing dispute, arguing that Russia agrees with the United States that Yugoslavia should end its “ethnic cleansing” of Kosovo and allow refugees to return home. But the two countries differ sharply on how to bring that about.

AT NATO headquarters in Brussels, the alliance said that as many as 850,000 ethnic Albanians still inside Kosovo have been dislodged from their homes and are being herded toward the border.

Even as the Serbs were apparently forcing the ethnic Albanians to the border, however, they abruptly closed their frontiers Monday to Kosovars seeking refuge in neighboring countries. NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said the tide of refugees reached 40,000 Sunday but slowed to a mere trickle Monday.

No one outside Yugoslavia had a good explanation. “It all sounds fairly ominous,” said Kris Janowski, a spokesman in Geneva for the U.N. refugee agency, “and we don’t know to what end they’re doing it.”

Some Republicans in Congress suggested Monday that they will try to use the legislation to meet the special budget request to restore funds that they complained Clinton cut from Pentagon spending earlier in his administration.

“The Kosovo crisis has highlighted some important concerns that I’ve had regarding our military readiness and national security vulnerability,” House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) said. “This emergency funding measure cannot be shortsighted--it cannot simply replace bullets for bullets and bombs for bombs spent in Kosovo.”

House GOP Conference Chairman J. C. Watts Jr. (R-Okla.) said: “This request doesn’t go far enough if we are to fund the president’s Kosovo mission and remedy the crisis in our military capability.”

But Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) warned that any effort to depart significantly from the administration request into areas unrelated to Kosovo would slow down action on the bill.

“If you burden any vehicle, ultimately that vehicle will stop,” Daschle said.

Despite the Pentagon’s admission that Yugoslav troop strength in Kosovo has increased, administration officials continued to predict eventual victory in Yugoslavia for the U.S. and its allies.

“Broadly speaking, Milosevic’s war machine gets weaker and weaker every day, whether it’s ammunition, whether it’s fuel, whether it’s the actual vehicles on the ground, whether it’s command and control, whether it’s logistical support, telecommunications,” said State Department spokesman James P. Rubin. “And with every passing day, NATO’s determination and its military campaign is getting stronger and stronger. We are satisfied with that.”

Kempster reported from Washington and Havemann from Brussels. Times staff writers Richard C. Paddock in Moscow, Janet Wilson at the United Nations and Edwin Chen, Janet Hook, Paul Richter and Art Pine in Washington contributed to this report.