Another Airstrike on Civilians Kills 16 at Sanitarium Complex

NATO’s intensifying air assault on Yugoslavia killed at least 16 more civilians Monday when missiles slammed into a sanitarium and nearby retirement home in this southern Serbian town after many of the occupants had gone to bed.

Four explosions crushed parts of both buildings shortly after midnight and left bloodied bedding and clothing hanging like macabre ornaments from pine branches in the surrounding 17-acre forest.

Rescue workers said they heard people screaming under the rubble and worked through the night to pull many out alive. By midafternoon, at least four people were still missing, officials said. Another 43 were listed as wounded, five of them in critical condition.

“I heard a plane pass and then return, and after that an explosion. The wall, the ceiling, everything fell on me,” said Mica Pjevac, a woman in her 60s who emerged after an hour under the wreckage with a fractured right hand. “I kept thinking: ‘It’s over. It’s over. That’s the end of my life.’ ”

Monday’s was the third strike on civilians in two days by NATO, which began bombing nearly 10 weeks ago to try to oust Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s army from Kosovo--a southern province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s dominant republic.

Daylight bombings Sunday killed nine pedestrians and motorists on a bridge in the Serbian town of Varvarin and the driver of a journalists’ convoy near Prizren in Kosovo. Serbian state media said 10 people were killed Monday by NATO missiles in the Serbian city of Novi Pazar, but this report could not be verified.

As President Clinton vowed to press NATO’s campaign to stop what he called “appalling abuses” by Milosevic’s troops against Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization voiced no remorse about the latest civilian victims of its own attacks.

NATO spokesman Jamie Shea insisted Monday that the bridge in Varvarin was a legitimate military target. He claimed that allied aircraft aimed at an ammunition depot and an army barracks in Surdulica but would not confirm that they hit civilian targets. And he said NATO had no evidence that its planes had fired on journalists.

“I don’t have any information at the moment of damage to any civilians or civilian facilities,” Shea said in Brussels, omitting his customary disclaimer that NATO regrets any loss of civilian life.

KLA Strengthened by Continued Bombing

NATO’s unapologetic tone coincided with a frank acknowledgment Monday that its bombing is helping the Kosovo Liberation Army, the separatist guerrilla group that has been battling Milosevic’s forces for the past 15 months. KLA fighters have recently captured three Kosovo villages after NATO airstrikes drove out Yugoslav forces, Shea said.

NATO has denied that it supports the guerrillas or their aim of an independent Kosovo. But Shea told reporters: “We have a clear objective here of striking at the Yugoslav forces wherever they are in Kosovo, and if the KLA are able to benefit from that, so be it.”

Yugoslav army and Serbian police forces have driven hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanian civilians as well as guerrillas from Kosovo this year. Milosevic and four top aides were indicted last week by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia on charges of murder and mass expulsions for their role in the bloody purge.

Since NATO began bombing on March 24, the KLA has regrouped and infiltrated units back into Kosovo from neighboring Albania. In the latest skirmishes, Yugoslav artillery pounded KLA positions along the Kosovo-Albania border Monday while U.S. armor-busting A-10 jets countered with strikes against the Yugoslavs’ hillside positions, drawing antiaircraft fire.

The 19-nation Western alliance has stepped up attacks across Serbia in recent days and now has about 1,000 aircraft flying in support of Operation Allied Force, which began with fewer than 400. As the number of daily strike missions has risen, so has the frequency of civilian casualties.

NATO’s attack Monday was its fourth against Surdulica, 175 miles southeast of Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital. The prosperous farming and industrial center of 15,000 people was still recovering from an errant missile that struck a civilian neighborhood April 27, killing 15 people.

Pro-American Teacher Left ‘Speechless’

“You add up the casualties and get the impression that this is a doomed place,” said Dusan Petrovic, 45, the town primary school’s English teacher, who added that he felt bitter toward Western countries involved in the attack.

“People like me, who were pro-American and pro-Western, we’re just speechless,” he said. “How can I ever teach my students that Hemingway was a great writer? Or play for them hits by the Beach Boys? They will immediately remember that the Americans were the same people who bombed us. I can no longer defend the indefensible.”

The locations of NATO’s intended targets in Surdulica were not clear. Residents insisted that the nearest barracks and ammunition storage facility are each more than two miles from the sanitarium’s wooded compound and that the storage facility is no longer in use.

Reporters escorted to the town by Serbian authorities were not able to move about freely to verify those claims; the sanitarium grounds and nearby streets were heavily policed.

Still, there was no doubt about the heavy civilian toll.

Bodies of four elderly women lay under white sheets outside the two-story retirement home, where 35 people had lived.

Eleven other bodies--one of them decapitated, others dismembered--lay outside the sanitarium, formally known as the Special Hospital for Tuberculosis and Other Pulmonary Diseases. The arm of a 16th body protruded from the ruins of the three-story building.

More than 60 Serbian refugees from ethnic fighting four years ago in neighboring Croatia had been lodged in the sanitarium, along with two ailing Yugoslav soldiers, the director said. A refugee and her three teenage children were among the dead, as were several lung disease patients.

“It seems that NATO has found a better cure,” Branislav Ristic, the town’s civil defense chief, said. “They get rid of TB by killing patients--an unbelievable advance in medical science.”

The government has publicized civilian casualties so heavily that many at the sanitarium were convinced that the building was on NATO’s hit list. Some had moved out and pitched tents in the pine forest after NATO bombed a nearby field Saturday, cutting a pipe that carried part of the town’s water supply.

Milosevic’s office denounced Monday’s bombing, asserting that “massacres and crimes intensified by the NATO aggressor each day . . . are undermining peace initiatives for the Kosovo crisis.”

His government issued a separate statement reaffirming its support for the broad principles of a peace plan put forward last month by the seven major industrial powers and Russia--the Group of 8--and calling again for a halt to the bombing.

Clinton Sees Kosovo as a Major Test

In a Memorial Day address, however, Clinton made it clear that the United States still insists on the more specific conditions set by NATO, which Milosevic has not fully accepted.

“In Kosovo, the world has said ‘No!’ ” the president told several thousand people gathered at Arlington National Cemetery to honor America’s war dead--including two helicopter pilots killed on a training mission near Kosovo’s border with Albania, the only U.S. military fatalities of the conflict so far.

“It is a very small province in a small country, but it is a big test of what we believe in,” Clinton said. “Our objectives in Kosovo are clear . . . that the Kosovars will go home, the Serb forces will withdraw, an international force with NATO at its core will deploy to protect all of the people, including the Serb minority.”

In an effort to press Milosevic on those peace terms, the European Union foreign ministers decided to send their official envoy, Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, to Belgrade on Wednesday with Russian mediator Viktor S. Chernomyrdin.

Ahtisaari’s mission would be the first official contact between Milosevic and the Western powers since the NATO bombing began.