Allies Walk a Tightrope on Bombing

With Kosovo peace talks snagged, NATO military officials face a dilemma: If they restore the bombing campaign to an intensity and pattern that could push the Serbs to a deal, it could also worsen hardships throughout Yugoslavia.

NATO officials say they want to demonstrate their resolve to secure an agreement, and they declare that they will step up the bombing. Yet some officials acknowledge privately that they are loath to inflict casualties, particularly among civilians, with a settlement apparently so close.

Some outside experts believe that while punishing strikes on military targets will cause little stir, a renewal of the bombing of “dual-use” facilities--those affecting the military and civilians--could cause deep unease among some members of the alliance. And, they say, such strikes could undermine the willingness of the Serbs, the Russians and others to work toward a deal.

On Friday, French President Jacques Chirac said NATO should concentrate on exclusively military targets. His comments disturbed some NATO military officials because of their implication that the alliance had targeted sites without military purpose.

One urgent question was whether NATO warplanes would resume hitting economic targets and utilities around Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital.

By this morning, NATO seemed to have delivered its answer. Reuters news agency said that allied warplanes pounded Serbian oil refineries around the capital and that explosions were heard in central Belgrade. According to Yugoslav media, fires were raging at a major refinery in the northern city of Novi Sad.

Some U.S. officials have asserted that earlier strikes on utilities, by bringing home the reality of the war to the country’s elite, were key in bringing Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to the peace table.

Apparently, no such targets were hit over the weekend, and alliance officials, while insisting that no sites are off the table, would not specify whether NATO warplanes would resume knocking out power in the capital, thus reducing water supplies and other necessities.

Pressed at a briefing Monday on whether the warplanes would again pound Belgrade, Pentagon spokesman Kenneth H. Bacon responded: “I would just say, ‘Stay tuned.’ ”

Bacon had said that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization planned to increase its bomb-carrying sorties in the next few days by “two to three times” the number flown over the weekend.

But a senior U.S. official who asked to remain unidentified said, “We are concentrating on armed forces--and will continue to concentrate on the armed forces.” The official added that while the alliance has always worked hard to avoid casualties, “obviously, civilian casualties would be a complicating factor right now.”

Other officials, however, said NATO would be foolhardy to set aside any kind of target.

Over the past few days, one military official said Monday, “we have exercised some restraint. But that has not produced an agreement. . . . What has been most effective was hitting a range of targets. We can’t depend on how much [Milosevic] cares about the army in Kosovo, because he’s shown that he doesn’t seem to care about it much at all.”

NATO officials have declared that their 11-week-old bombing campaign has been 99.96% accurate. Yet the roughly one dozen highly publicized incidents in which civilian targets were hit have caused repeated problems for the alliance, and support for the bombing has been sagging among some key NATO members, including Germany.

Officials acknowledge that one of the difficulties they face in making decisions about the air campaign is that they do not fully grasp the motives and mind-set of Milosevic. It is not entirely clear what kind of bombing he would respond to now, or whether some kinds of strikes might harden his opposition.

Charles A. Kupchan, a former National Security Council specialist on Europe in the Clinton administration, said the political objective of the bombing “should be to escalate sufficiently to make it clear that the Serbs need to comply with the fundamentals” of the peace agreement.

But renewed bombing of civilian-related targets around the capital could cause a backlash that might harden the resistance of the Serbian leadership and Russia, a longtime ally of the Serbs and a key player in the deal, he said.

The Russians have continued to call for an end to the bombing, and it is “crucial” to keep them on board, Kupchan said.

Simon Serfaty of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, said he views the interruption of the peace process as probably just a “hiccup.”

To that extent, bombing of sensitive targets “does carry a risk,” he said. “Serb resolve could harden, and some members of the alliance could be disturbed by the merciless nature” of a resumed air campaign.

NATO statistics released Monday show clearly how the air campaign slackened over the weekend. On Sunday, for example, the alliance launched 93 bomb-carrying sorties, less than one-third the number of such sorties at the peak of the action.

NATO visual displays on the air campaign, which usually have shown warplanes striking a number of targets across Serbia, on Monday showed only one such strike outside Kosovo over the weekend, on the Rudnik radio relay station in the center of the province. Kosovo is the southernmost province of Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic.

Over the weekend, the alliance sharply concentrated its attacks on Serbian tanks, personnel carriers and artillery in Kosovo. The strikes were focused around two areas in the southwest corner of the province, where Serbian forces continue to try to block the advance of more than 2,000 ethnic Albanian rebels.