U.S. OKs Updating of Plans for Ground War

The U.S. government gave the green light Wednesday to renewed NATO planning for ground troops in Kosovo as British Prime Minister Tony Blair, emerging as the alliance’s most outspoken hawk, pressed President Clinton to accept his plan for an eventual invasion against a weakened Yugoslav army.

With leaders of the 19 North Atlantic Treaty Organization nations converging on Washington for summit talks that begin Friday, a month into the allied bombing effort, the biggest question on the agenda will be whether NATO can prevail without putting infantry on the ground.

White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart said Washington will support updating the NATO plan, which was put aside in October, for a ground war in Yugoslavia.

Although Lockhart said the administration is not yet ready to go beyond planning, British officials assert that the alliance must prepare to send ground troops once the bombing has damaged the Yugoslav army enough that it can no longer fight back.

“We would have no objection to updating the assessment that was done in October,” Lockhart said. “It’s looking at whether the problems that were evident when they looked at this in October have somehow changed, how we would address them, whether the situation would be more difficult, less difficult.”

The October plan estimated that it would require 200,000 NATO ground troops to overrun Yugoslavia against fierce opposition. The scenario was so daunting that the plan was shelved. Clinton and leaders of other NATO countries said they would send troops only as peacekeepers and only into a “permissive environment,” military jargon for a cease-fire approved by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

But on Wednesday, Britain said there are two ways to produce a permissive environment--an agreed cease-fire or by mauling the Yugoslav forces from the air so that effective resistance would be impossible.

British Defense Secretary George Robertson told the daily military briefing in London that although the alliance remains unwilling to stage a full-scale invasion against an opposing force, NATO-led peacekeeping troops must be sent in eventually, even if Milosevic opposes their presence.

“We are determined that an international military force will deploy in Kosovo once airstrikes have done their job so that the Kosovo people can return to their homes,” Robertson said. “Milosevic will not have a veto.”

Blair and Clinton held a war council Wednesday over dinner at the White House. Blair was the first of the NATO leaders to arrive for the summit that marks the 50th anniversary of the alliance.

In other developments:

* Vice President Al Gore announced that up to 20,000 Kosovo Albanian refugees will be temporarily but indefinitely resettled in the United States. The decision reverses an earlier decision to confine refugees at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a destination most of the ethnic Albanians rejected. White House aides said details of the program are still being worked out, primarily by refugee specialists at the Department of Health and Human Services and the State Department.

Gore disclosed the plan in a speech at Ellis Island, N.Y., the 19th-century entry port for millions of European migrants, saying that the refugees would be paired with volunteer hosts and, when possible, relatives already in the United States.

* Warplanes pounded a Serbian refugee camp near Djakovica, Yugoslavia, where NATO aircraft mistakenly attacked columns of ethnic Albanian refugees last week. Four Serbs were killed in Wednesday’s attack, survivors said. The aircraft involved were not immediately identified, although refugees and Yugoslav authorities blamed NATO. A spokesman for the alliance in Belgium said NATO aircraft were not operating in the area.

* Both the president and Hillary Rodham Clinton urged Americans to donate money to nongovernmental relief organizations that they said were working around the clock to help refugees in the Balkans. In a meeting with relief organization representatives, the first lady singled out a number of companies, including Pepsico Inc. and Bell Atlantic, that are matching the donations given by employees.

* During the first congressional hearing on the administration’s request for $6 billion to finance the war, House Appropriations Committee Chairman C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.) told Defense Secretary William S. Cohen that the panel probably will approve the bill early next week, clearing it for passage in the House a few days after that. Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands), chairman of the defense appropriations subcommittee, and Rep. John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, its senior Democrat, both indicated they hoped to add money for a military pay raise to the legislation. Cohen urged the lawmakers to pass the money bill by Memorial Day. He said the Pentagon already is using money earmarked for end-of-year training exercises to finance operations in Yugoslavia.

* French President Jacques Chirac, sometimes a critic of U.S. leadership in NATO, agreed with Washington that Milosevic’s stubbornness over Kosovo meant NATO must intensify its attacks on Yugoslavia by bringing in more weaponry and hitting a broader range of targets. He said NATO airstrikes, which began March 24, had succeeded in reducing the mobility of Serbian forces and cutting off their supplies, but that Yugoslavia responded by digging in its heels, continuing to “murder, rape, plunder, burn villages and break up families.”

* European Union ambassadors, meeting in Brussels, agreed to ban sales and shipments of oil to Yugoslavia, EU officials said. The agreement was to be confirmed by EU foreign ministers Monday.

While allied leaders were wrestling Wednesday with the possibility of a military escalation, Russia launched a new diplomatic effort to find a peaceful solution to the conflict, dispatching former Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin to the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, today to seek a compromise with Milosevic.

Chernomyrdin preceded his Belgrade visit with a quick trip to three neighboring former Soviet republics to build support for Russia’s peace effort.

“This crisis is very serious and we cannot conceal the fact that it may grow to a larger scale,” Chernomyrdin said in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, after meeting with Ukrainian President Leonid D. Kuchma.

“Russia, above all, will conscientiously perform its mediation functions for settlement of the conflict, which is difficult to resolve without Russia,” Chernomyrdin added.

U.S. and NATO officials said that the only way Chernomyrdin can stop the bombing is to persuade Milosevic to withdraw his forces from Kosovo, a province of Yugoslavia’s larger republic, Serbia; stop the “ethnic cleansing” of Kosovo Albanians; and allow refugees to return home under the protection of an international force.

On those terms, administration officials said they hoped the Russian effort succeeds, but voiced little confidence that it would. They noted that previous Russian attempts to influence Milosevic had modest results, if any.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said there is a very narrow window for diplomacy, by Russia or anyone else.

“At some point negotiation and diplomacy become appeasement,” Albright told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday. “Diplomatic channels are open and Milosevic knows what he has to do. I think that none of us want to be involved in some kind of a half-baked deal that provides a temporary solution here but only leads to greater problems later on.”

The most significant Washington-Moscow disagreement is over NATO’s insistence on an international peacekeeping force to police any settlement. One Russian diplomat said Wednesday that Moscow might be able to accept a force with a “NATO core” and a NATO commander, as long as the commander was neither American nor British. An administration official said that if the diplomat accurately described the Russian position, the idea was encouraging.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin’s government also announced that it will not send a representative to Washington to participate in the NATO anniversary commemoration. The decision to boycott the ceremonies had been expected.

“NATO’S military action against a sovereign European country, Yugoslavia, is a flagrant violation of the U.N. Charter, the Helsinki Final Act and the Russian-NATO Founding Act,” said a statement issued by the Foreign Ministry.

In the air war, NATO forces conducted “an extremely accurate attack on a building in Belgrade housing both the Socialist Party headquarters and a communications and TV transmitting station, vital elements in the control apparatus of President Milosevic’s regime,” an alliance military spokesman, Italian air force Brig. Gen. Giuseppe Marani, told reporters at NATO headquarters in Brussels.

Marani also said Serbia widened the war by firing artillery shells across the border into Albania and sending 200 troops into Albania before retreating back into Yugoslavia.

At the same time, the Foreign Ministry of Montenegro--Serbia’s junior partner in the two-republic Yugoslav federation--criticized the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army for its incursion Monday night into a demilitarized zone on the disputed Prevlaka peninsula, which lies at the Croatian-Montenegrin border.

The army action “has explicitly and unilaterally broken assumed international obligations . . . which will undoubtedly lead to instability in the region and produce negative effects on the otherwise unenviable international credibility of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and will weaken the negotiating position in the dispute over Prevlaka,” the Montenegrin Foreign Ministry said.

The move also marks a fresh attempt by the army to take over powers that properly belong to Montenegrin authorities, the statement said.

The Montenegrin government is pro-West and critical of the Yugoslav federal government’s conflict with NATO.

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Kempster reported from Washington and Paddock from Moscow. Times staff writers Joel Havemann in Brussels, David Holley in Podgorica, Montenegro, Janet Wilson at the United Nations, and Edwin Chen, Art Pine and Paul Richter in Washington contributed to this report.