NATO Halts Air War, Readies Forces as Serb Troops Begin Leaving Kosovo

NATO declared an end to its air war against Yugoslavia on Thursday and ordered thousands of alliance troops to move into Kosovo to restore order after Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s forces began to withdraw from the ruined, depopulated province.

“NATO is ready for its new mission: a mission to bring people back to their homes and to build a lasting and just peace in Kosovo,” said Javier Solana, secretary-general of the 19-nation North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

International peacekeeping forces prepared to enter the province as early as today, though alliance officials said the deployment would more likely begin Saturday.

President Clinton, in an address broadcast Thursday evening, defended NATO’s first real war in its 50-year history and declared: “We did the right thing, we did it in the right way, and we will finish the job.”

As the alliance suspended an 11-week air campaign that was at times marred by errors, there was little sense of triumph--despite the glasses of French Champagne offered at NATO headquarters here.

With more than 1,000 warplanes in Balkan skies, the Western military organization finally managed to force a withdrawal of Milosevic’s troops but failed to prevent the mass deportation and persecution of nearly a million ethnic Albanians driven from the Serbian province.

“I feel no sense of triumph now, only the knowledge that our cause was just and rightly upheld,” British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the most hawkish alliance leader, said in London.

At the moment NATO suspended its airstrikes, Milosevic surprised his war-weary nation with a nine-minute televised address, calling for unity to rebuild the country and saying the international forces poised now to enter Kosovo would serve peace.

Milosevic, who did not make a single address to the nation during NATO’s bombing assault, proclaimed a moral victory for Yugoslavia and its ethnic Serbs.

“The people are the heroes,” he said. “We survived and defended the country.”

As a result of an agreement accepted June 3 by Milosevic, and implemented only after a week of arm-twisting, intense diplomacy and continued NATO bombardment, some Western units are now under four-hour notice to move into Kosovo, a province of Yugoslavia’s dominant republic, Serbia.

Helicopter-borne British paratroops are expected to push north toward Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, in a first wave. France’s Spahi light cavalry and Foreign Legion engineers also are among the first units scheduled for deployment.

Blair warned that the 48,000-member peacekeeping contingent--called KFOR, or Kosovo Force--could encounter mortal danger in the province. Hundreds of thousands of land mines were believed to have been laid by Yugoslav forces, he said, and the troops may face resistance from ethnic Serbs furious at NATO’s defense of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority.

“There are real dangers ahead. We cannot guarantee there will be no loss of life,” said Blair, whose country is providing KFOR with 13,000 troops, the largest contingent of peacekeepers among those provided by 30 nations.

After 2 1/2 months of air raids in which NATO warplanes dumped an estimated 20,000 bombs on Milosevic’s security forces in Kosovo and on targets elsewhere in Yugoslavia, Solana called a halt to the campaign shortly after 3 p.m. Thursday in Brussels.

Solana said he acted after receiving confirmation from U.S. Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark, NATO’s supreme commander in Europe, that “the full withdrawal of the Yugoslav security forces from Kosovo had begun.”

In the town of Kosovska Mitrovica, about 20 miles northwest of Pristina, about 15 Serbian police vehicles withdrew about 3 p.m. A couple of the trucks were pulling what appeared to be small antiaircraft guns.

In Kosovo, Maj. Gen. Vladimir Lazarevic, commander of the Yugoslav army’s Pristina Corps, said that “in the next 11 days the whole corps should be relocated . . . to their new posts on the border between Kosovo and Serbia.”

After ordering Clark to suspend the bombing campaign, Solana said, he faxed a letter with the news to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. The next cog in the process especially constructed to resolve the Kosovo conflict then began turning.

On the Eastside of Manhattan, the U.N. Security Council--by a vote of 14-0 and with China abstaining--adopted a peace plan designed to restore order to Kosovo and allow the ethnic Albanian refugees forced from the province and those displaced internally to return home.

China and Russia had vowed to veto the resolution unless there was a bombing pause first. The U.N. vote cleared the way for troops from the international peacekeeping force, which is dominated by NATO troops, to enter the province.

“We have now stopped Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing machine in its tracks,” said Jeremy Greenstock, Britain’s ambassador to the U.N.

Chinese deputy representative Shen Guofang announced that his nation--which as one of the five permanent Security Council members has veto power--would not block the resolution. China had passed that message to several governments privately Wednesday, ending suspense that Beijing’s lingering anger over NATO’s accidental May 8 bombing of its embassy in Belgrade could scuttle the Kosovo peace package.

Finally, in the last act of a carefully scripted stage play, NATO’s policymaking North Atlantic Council met briefly in Brussels and issued an “activation order” for the peacekeeping force.

Even before Yugoslav forces began moving north toward Serbia proper, NATO was cranking back the military pressure. The alliance said its planes flew only 60 sorties during the previous 24 hours, compared with more than 400 on June 1.

Yugoslavia’s state-run Tanjug news service reported that the final bombing runs occurred early Wednesday evening, when the city of Urosevac in southern Kosovo was hit.

“The enemy aircraft fell silent after that,” the news service reported.

NATO said its pilots would keep flying, however, to ensure that Yugoslav forces were keeping their commitment to complete their withdrawal within 11 days.

Solana, addressing the media in the very room where he announced the start of the air campaign in March, pointedly warned the Yugoslavs that bombing will resume if they don’t live up to the pullout timetable that was signed Wednesday night by generals from the Yugoslav army and Interior Ministry and NATO’s commander in Macedonia, British Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson.

“The violence must cease immediately,” Solana declared. “The Yugoslav security forces must withdraw, and all armed Kosovar groups must demilitarize. Violence or noncompliance by any party will not be tolerated.”

By armed groups, NATO’s top civilian official especially meant the Kosovo Liberation Army, a guerrilla force that now consists of, by some estimates, about 17,000 fighters who have been battling for the province’s independence from Yugoslavia.

The KLA said Thursday that it had accepted NATO’s accord with Milosevic and agreed to disarm once the Yugoslav forces have withdrawn and ceased combat.

“The KLA accepts the agreement and will abide by the agreement,” spokesman Masar Shala said in Kukes, Albania. “Once Kosovo is liberated [from Yugoslav forces] and NATO troops move in, the KLA has completed its mission. Then the KLA has no need to be a liberation army.”

Solana also made a special appeal to the estimated 100,000 to 200,000 Serbs living in Kosovo to stay. “The NATO forces will defend their rights, just as it will defend the rights of all other ethnic communities in Kosovo,” he said.

In Albania, many of the refugees who fled a savage 15-month campaign of “ethnic cleansing” waged by Yugoslav forces reacted to the latest developments with restrained optimism. They said that experience has taught them not to trust Milosevic, who made his political fortune by championing the cause of Kosovo’s Serbian minority. But belief--almost blind faith--in NATO allowed many to hope that they would be returning to Kosovo soon.

“Milosevic has signed several agreements, but now maybe it is something different,” said Fejzi Kalandri, a 27-year-old who had fled the Kosovo city of Prizren. “We are still afraid there is something behind this. But of course we want to go home.”

Refugee workers are hoping that the more than 1 million ethnic Albanians who fled to neighboring countries during the past 15 months will stay put until hundreds of thousands of their homeless brethren believed to be hiding in the mountains of their homeland are first located and resettled.

But the officials realize that sunburned, bug-bitten refugees by the hundreds of thousands are anxious to leave the dusty tent cities in neighboring nations where they have been living for weeks and, in some cases, months. The fear is that once these refugees sense their return is imminent, they may suddenly decide to move.

“We will try to minimize a mad rush to the border,” said Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Kukes. “We will inform them which areas are safe . . . and will reinforce again and again that there will be mines and unexploded shells.”

U.N. refugee commissioner Sadako Ogata told the French daily Le Figaro that she expects more than 400,000 ethnic Albanian refugees to return home by winter. Her agency estimates that when the Kosovo refugees return to their towns and villages they will find at least 50% of the housing damaged and most water sources wiped out.

In Macedonia, directly south of Kosovo, clouds of choking hot dust were whipped up Thursday as thousands of NATO troops and trucks laden with equipment ranging from tanks to pontoon bridges rolled into Skopje, the capital. Macedonia has become the brain center and jumping-off point for the pending NATO-led peacemaking operation.

The country’s airways were busy with Apache, Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters thundering into the U.S. base at Skopje, named Able Sentry. The 18,500 allied troops already in Macedonia are in the process of getting ready for KFOR’s deployment.

At Litochoron, Greece, a first contingent of 1,900 U.S. Marines destined for Kosovo began landing on the beach from ships anchored offshore and moving out in buses for Macedonia. Greek police dispersed 500 Communists demonstrating against the leathernecks and U.S. involvement in the airstrikes.

In Belgrade, Milosevic addressed his people by television from his official White Palace residence. He contended that his country had defeated NATO by blocking an alleged move to separate Kosovo from Serbia.

“Questions on possible independence for Kosovo raised before the aggression were closed with the Belgrade treaty” that he accepted June 3, Milosevic said. “Territorial integrity of our country cannot be questioned. . . . Future discussions regarding Kosovo could be only about autonomy” within Serbia.

Milosevic also said 462 Yugoslav soldiers and 114 police officers had been killed in the airstrikes, well below NATO’s estimates of 5,000 dead.

Serbs welcomed the military pact ending the unequal war with wild street celebrations Wednesday night that lasted into the morning. Belgrade residents flooded the main square, carrying Yugoslav flags and flares, honking car horns and popping champagne corks.

Yugoslav antiaircraft units deployed near the city fired celebratory salvos, lighting up the night sky with tracer bullets and orange bursts of exploding shells.

But the palpable feeling of relief was tinged with bitterness over seemingly pointless sacrifices by civilians and security forces and concern over how the country would recover from the massive destruction caused by NATO’s bombs.

“It is good that my children will no longer spend nights in shelters,” said Belgrade resident Srecko Mirceta. “But this is not a time for celebration. It’s a time for weeping.”

Russia, which plans to contribute up to 10,000 troops but does not want them to appear to be under NATO orders, was locked in tough talks with Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott on Thursday over the exact role its military would play. The talks were scheduled to continue today.

Under NATO’s plan for dividing responsibilities in Kosovo, the approximately 7,000 troops from the U.S. will be stationed in the province’s eastern areas, the French in the north, the Germans in the south, the Italians in the west and the British in the center.

“I think we have done something important, something important for our countries, something important for our societies,” Solana said.

Times staff writers Richard Boudreaux in Belgrade, John J. Goldman at the United Nations, Marjorie Miller in Kukes, Valerie Reitman in Skopje, Maura Reynolds in Moscow and Paul Watson in Pristina contributed to this report.

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