2nd Wave of Allied Firepower Pounds Yugoslavia; Serbs Continue Assaults

By JOHN-THOR DAHLBURG and PAUL RICHTER

March 26, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

BRUSSELS —

NATO launched a second punishing bombardment of Yugoslavia on Thursday and, while offering little evidence, declared the first day of massive airstrikes a success. U.S. officials, however, said they are not likely to force Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to accept a peace accord in strife-torn Kosovo.

Officials gave few details on damage inflicted so far. They said half a dozen warships and about 150 aircraft from 13 countries struck 40 targets throughout Yugoslavia on the first day.

U.S. defense officials confirmed reports from inside Yugoslavia that the targets, in addition to air-defense sites, included at least one aircraft-parts factory and numerous Serbian security installations. Officials said they could not confirm Yugoslav reports of civilian casualties, including 11 deaths.

President Clinton warned that NATO attacks will continue until Milosevic bows to Western demands for peace in Kosovo, a separatist province of Serbia, but administration officials conceded that this appears “unlikely.”

A more likely outcome, one official said, would be to cripple Milosevic’s military so that the Serbs cannot win an all-out conflict with Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian rebels.

In extraordinarily tough remarks, U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark, supreme allied commander in Europe, said in Brussels that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is willing to destroy Yugoslavia’s military, the best-equipped in the Balkans. He also appeared to hint that Milosevic himself could become a target of NATO warplanes and missiles in the campaign, dubbed Operation Allied Force.

“We are going to systematically and progressively attack, disrupt, degrade, devastate and ultimately destroy these forces and their facilities and support unless President Milosevic complies with the demands of the international community,” Clark said.

Serbian forces in Kosovo appeared undeterred. Even as the bombs fell, armored Serbian police units roamed the streets of Pristina, the provincial capital. Serbs trashed and burned the office of a prominent pacifist resistance leader, and police began rounding up human rights leaders who had helped document Serbian atrocities.

In other developments Thursday:

* In Russia, officials backed away from President Boris N. Yeltsin’s threats issued the day before to respond to the NATO attacks with military action.

* At the United Nations, Russia introduced a resolution in the Security Council condemning the bombing and demanding an immediate end to the use of force by NATO. The U.S. and Britain immediately announced that they opposed the measure, ensuring its defeat.

* In Italy, the number of aircraft flying missions out of Aviano Air Base appeared roughly equal to those flown the day before, indicating there was no slackening of the NATO effort.

* In Yugoslavia, news correspondents from NATO countries were ordered to leave the country. Most complied.

* In Macedonia, the border was closed to halt the flow of refugees out of Kosovo. About 2,000 demonstrators threw stones and firebombs at the U.S. Embassy in the capital, Skopje, chanting, “NATO out of Yugoslavia.”

* In Albania, refugees streamed across the border, fleeing Serbian troops who shelled at least one village and set fire to another in Kosovo.

* In London, Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister Vuk Draskovic in several interviews broadcast Thursday said his government will halt all operations against ethnic Albanians as soon as NATO ceased bombing. He stopped short, however, of saying the Serbs would accept the peace proposal, meaning the government’s position is essentially unchanged. The Serbs object to the presence of NATO peacekeepers on their soil, as stipulated by the accord. The ethnic Albanians have already signed the pact.

“We do not have any positive response from President Milosevic,” NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana said in Brussels. “That is why, as Gen. Clark has said, the operation will continue today.”

* Elsewhere, Latin American and Greek leaders separately criticized the NATO attacks, saying they were unwarranted without U.N. authorization.

‘This Is Going to Be a Long Effort’

Defense officials in Washington said they are prepared for an extended campaign that will increasingly target Serbian military outposts in Kosovo.

“This is going to be a long effort,” Defense Secretary William S. Cohen said.

Kenneth H. Bacon, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said before the second round of strikes began that they would be “severe.”

Bacon did not say if that meant attacks will be intensified. Officials said warplanes from 13 countries had conducted 150 sorties against 40 targets Wednesday night, while ships in the Adriatic and B-52 bombers flying from Gloucestershire, England, had fired about three dozen cruise missiles.

Power went out in some parts of Yugoslavia, although it was not clear whether that was an unintended effect of strikes on nearby targets. NATO officials have insisted that they will avoid civilian targets.

U.S. officials, seeking to emphasize their eagerness to damage the forces that are assailing ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, said about 20% of their targets were facilities of the Yugoslav army and Serbian security police.

And they said strikes on those targets will become a larger share over time.

The strikes “will focus more and more on achieving our primary goal, which is to reduce the ability of the Yugoslav forces to target or repress the Kosovar Albanians,” Bacon said.

No Missiles Fired at NATO Warplanes

U.S. officials, citing security concerns, provided few details of battle damage.

However, they acknowledged that their effort to quickly knock out dangerous Serbian surface-to-air missile batteries had been slowed by the Serbs’ apparent decision to hold back on using their missiles for later. While some of the batteries’ radars were turned on, no missiles were fired at NATO planes, officials said.

Unless the batteries are active, U.S. planes can’t track and destroy them. Some military officials and outside experts believe that Milosevic may be husbanding his batteries for use in later stages of the fight, where his forces may have more of a military advantage.

U.S. officials have said they consider surface-to-air missiles a major threat and have predicted that they will lose a handful of planes, if not more, before the strikes are over.

Officials said there was substantial resistance from Serbian fighter planes, which engaged U.S. and Dutch warplanes Wednesday night in various locations in Yugoslavia.

U.S. planes shot down two MIG-29s, a Dutch pilot shot down one, and another, a MIG-21, may have crashed without being struck, officials said.

NATO planners have been watching to see if Milosevic would seek to move arms or troops near civilian centers, or ethnic Albanian towns in Kosovo, in an effort to discourage attacks by NATO warplanes. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein used such a “human shield” strategy during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

While the Serbs have shifted some equipment, such moves have so far not been made “to a huge extent,” Bacon said.

British officials were more candid in their after-battle assessments.

Gen. Sir Charles Guthrie, British chief of defense staff, acknowledged that six British Harrier jets had trouble carrying out strikes against an ammunition dump because of thick smoke. The first two fighter pilots were unable to “lock on” to their targets with laser-guided bombs and dropped them short of the target. Pilots of four other planes flying with them, worried about unintended damage in such conditions, decided to hold on to their bombs.

In Washington, Clinton met for about 40 minutes Thursday morning with his national security team.

“Our purpose here is to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe or a wider war,” he told reporters during a photo session at the start of the meeting. “Our objective is to make it clear that Serbia must either choose peace or we will limit its ability to make war.”

Asked whether Milosevic needed to send his negotiators back to peace talks to end the strikes, Clinton said: “I think he knows what needs to be done.

“The exit strategy is what it always is in a military operation: It’s when the mission is completed,” the president said.

Asked whether he was concerned that popular support in the United States was not greater, Clinton said: “Many Americans really have not thought a lot about this until the last two days.”

He added: “It is my responsibility to make this judgment based on what I think is in the long-term interests of the American people.”

Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, Clinton’s national security advisor, said the minimum outcome of the NATO attacks will be to prevent Milosevic’s planned “massive offensive against Kosovo.”

“That’s what he’s got the 40,000 troops there [for], that’s what he has hundreds of tanks there for. That will cause the kind of death and destruction, refugee flows, instability in the region which will have as its end state either chaos in the middle of Europe or wider war.”

The alternative, Berger said, is peace, or a “severely diminished military capacity for Kosovo, which we believe can be achieved.”

“Some have suggested that we go further than that and put an American or NATO ground military force into the region, to invade the region. That is something we do not intend to do,” Berger said.

And if Milosevic thinks that he can wait out an air war?

“He will sustain the most serious damage if he thinks he can ride out an air attack,” Berger said.

The White House believes that part of the reason Belgrade refused to enter into a peace treaty is the Serbian generals’ belief that they could win in Kosovo because of their military superiority--a belief the White House seriously doubted.

Part of the U.S. goal of the airstrikes is to do enough damage to the Serbian war machine that they can “disabuse them of that notion,” said a senior White House foreign policy advisor.

In other words, the goal is to inflict enough military destruction to force the Serbian generals to “make a reassessment of what they can accomplish.”

Once the strikes are finished, “they could carry on a low-level war, but it would be less damaging to the Albanian people,” the White House official said. “Repression is dramatically reduced.”

The hope is that “some kind of de facto cease-fire takes hold” because the Serbs realize that they can no longer achieve their objective through a military route.

This will give the sides an opportunity to rethink their strategies, the official said.

U.S. officials were also in touch with the Yugoslav navy and told it that any ship underway was subject to attack.

However, the Yugoslav ships apparently do not intend to leave port.

Dahlburg reported from Brussels and Richter from Washington. Times staff writers John J. Goldman at the United Nations, Paul Watson in Pristina, Elizabeth Shogren in Washington, Richard Boudreaux in Aviano, Italy, and Times wire services contributed to this report, which was written in Los Angeles by staff writer Terry McDermott.

Get updated stories and photos today on the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia on The Times’ Web site: https://www.latimes.com/yugo.