NATO Targets Yugoslavia’s Tanks, Troops

Alarmed by evidence that atrocities in Kosovo are escalating into “genocide,” NATO opened a new and potentially far more dangerous phase of its five-day air campaign Sunday, targeting the Yugoslav tanks and ground forces suspected of killing or displacing as much as one-quarter of the province’s ethnic Albanian majority.

Coming less than 24 hours after the loss of the first U.S. warplane in the skies over Yugoslavia, the new strategy put American and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization jets at far greater risk because they must fly low to achieve the pinpoint accuracy necessary to hit tactical targets on the ground.

Talking to reporters at the White House, President Clinton said the airstrikes will not end soon. “The continued brutality and repression of the Serb forces further underscore the need for NATO to persevere,” he said.

Clinton gave his full backing to the widened target list announced by NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana.

“We have been until now basically trying to destroy the air defenses of the Serbian army so that our planes could enter into the airspace without great risk,” Solana said in an interview on ABC-TV. “Now what we want to do is to be able to attack from the airplanes the headquarters, the commanders which are on the ground, so that we can stop the tremendous ethnic cleansing which is taking place.”

NATO officials reported more than 80 sorties Sunday by warplanes including F-117A Stealth fighters of the type that was lost Saturday. The plane’s pilot was rescued and evacuated to Aviano Air Base in Italy, where U.S. officials said he was in good condition.

The Pentagon and Air Force officials at Aviano declined to say whether the plane was shot down or crashed because of mechanical failure.

If the craft was downed by a surface-to-air missile, that would be very bad news for the U.S. military. The plane was designed to present a very small target on radar and was thought to be virtually invulnerable to missile attack.

While carefully refusing to say the plane was shot down, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen sought to put the crash into perspective: “It has a sharply reduced radar cross-section, and it’s a very effective aircraft, but no one should ever be under the illusion that it is totally invincible or invulnerable to attack.”

In other developments Sunday:

* U.S. and allied leaders continued to insist that ground troops will not be sent to Kosovo even though some members of Congress and nongovernmental experts said it might be impossible to stop “ethnic cleansing” without NATO troops on the ground.

* Pentagon officials announced that four more B-52 bombers armed with cruise missiles had been sent to Britain to take part in the airstrikes. Although old and less technologically flashy than other weapons in the U.S. arsenal, the B-52 carries far heavier bomb loads than any other aircraft.

* Serbian media reported that Yugoslav forces had downed five NATO jets and a helicopter. The Western alliance said it had no information about the claims.

* Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic said after meetings with government and army leaders that his regime is fit to continue resisting the NATO airstrikes, Serbian media reported.

* Three leading liberal Russian politicians arrived in Belgrade for talks with Yugoslav leaders as part of efforts to bring the fighting to an end. They had earlier met with U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke, and Serb-controlled media denounced them as “scum and trash” controlled by the United States.

* In Moscow, a man fired a submachine gun at the U.S. Embassy, the site of three days of demonstrations against NATO airstrikes. Police chased the assailant away, and no one was hurt.

* Macedonia decided to ask NATO to admit it urgently as a member because of security concerns over the crisis in Kosovo on its northern border. The country fears Serbian reprisals because it is hosting about 10,000 NATO peacekeeping troops.

Serbs are the dominant ethnic group in Yugoslavia, although ethnic Albanians constitute 90% of Kosovo, a province in the Yugoslav republic of Serbia.

In Washington and at NATO headquarters in Brussels, officials accused Milosevic’s army and paramilitary police of a widening pattern of oppression. The officials angrily rejected suggestions that many of the atrocities were a reaction by the Yugoslav regime to the bombing campaign against it.

In a television interview, German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping said openly what many other allied leaders were hinting at: “Genocide is starting here.”

Government officials are reluctant to use the word “genocide” because, under an international treaty, all nations are required to take whatever action is required to stop it. The U.S. government carefully refused to use the term while ethnic slaughter was going on in Rwanda earlier this decade although Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright later said that the term should have been used.

NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said that half a million of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians--one-quarter of the province’s entire population--had fled their homes.

“And that number is increasing at a rapid pace,” Shea said. He accused Milosevic of conducting a “truly scorched-earth policy.”

“Just over the past few days, 50,000 people have been uprooted and are trying to seek shelter wherever they can,” he told a news briefing in Brussels.

Tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians were reportedly fleeing the northern and central areas of Kosovo, heading for Albania, Shea said. Most of them, he said, were women and children, leading him to ask ominously about the fate of the men between 16 and 60 years old.

“Whether we like it or not, we have to recognize that we are on the brink of a major humanitarian disaster in Kosovo, the likes of which has not been seen in Europe since the closing stage of World War II,” Shea said.

The Albanian government said early today that it had accepted more than 60,000 refugees in the past day and a half.

Critics of the NATO assault said it had provoked the Serbs into making their crackdown far bloodier. Albright called that reasoning “upside down.”

“What has happened here is that for the last 10 years, Milosevic has been trying to end the rights of the Kosovar people,” Albright said on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation” interview show. “He has systematically expanded this. He has killed people, he has [propagated] this ethnic cleansing. We have tried to have a peaceful approach to this. Before, he was doing it with impunity; we are now making sure that he pays a very heavy price.”

Cohen added in an interview with NBC-TV: “This blood bath has been carried on by Milosevic over a period of years at lower levels. . . . We saw the blood bath last fall when [Milosevic] chased some 300,000 people up in the hills who were in danger of freezing and starving to death.”

Nevertheless, allied officials left little doubt that NATO launched the second, more dangerous phase of the air campaign earlier than it had intended because of the escalating atrocities. Officials warned that there might be U.S. and allied losses during Phase II.

“The skies are very dangerous,” said Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who appeared with Cohen on NBC. “They have a very well integrated, multilevel, robust air-defense system. We are working on it, but it’s still a dangerous environment to fly in.”

The skies proved dangerous even to the high-flying warplanes that were responsible for the first phase of the assault. The F-117A Stealth warplane that crashed Saturday was from the 8th Fighter Squadron based at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.

On Sunday, hundreds of jubilant Serbs rummaged through the wreckage of the high-tech fighter jet, which landed about 28 miles northwest of Belgrade, and celebrated what they saw as a victory over NATO.

A reporter for the newspaper Stars and Stripes who works out of Aviano said the pilot returned to the base in northeastern Italy around 8 a.m. Sunday, nearly 10 hours after his plane went down and about three hours after his rescue. Fellow pilots greeted him with handshakes on the runway, the reporter said.

“The pilot is in good shape and in safe hands, and is actively engaged in working through the events of last night and otherwise continuing his military duties,” British Royal Air Force Commodore David Wilby, spokesman for NATO’s European command, said in Brussels.

Wilby implied that the rescue was not a U.S.-only effort, but he refused to give details.

“This complex, courageous and extremely professionally orchestrated rescue serves as a wonderful example of our united capabilities,” he said. “To effect such a swift rescue, deep in hostile territory, was something of which we all are justly proud.”

Officials at Aviano also provided very little information about the rescue. Sources at the base said several U.S. Air Force A-10 and F-15 jets flew air cover for the operation, but the sources would not go into detail.

The crashed F-117 was one of 12 at Aviano when NATO attacks started Wednesday. Reporters outside the base saw Stealth fighters taking off that night and on four subsequent nights.

Bad weather has hampered NATO operations so far, but Wilby said Milosevic was mistaken if he believed bad weather was his “friend.”

Shea said, “If it’s a complicating factor, it’s not an inhibiting factor. The operations will go on, good weather or bad weather.”

NATO officials said 66 allied aircraft flew 253 sorties against 17 major targets throughout Yugoslavia on Saturday night. Cruise missiles were launched as well.

Sunday night, NATO warplanes flew low over Pristina for the first time in several waves of attacks that hammered targets in and around the Kosovo capital. The independent Radio B92, based in Belgrade, reported that missiles hit police headquarters in Pristina early this morning, after which ethnic Albanian rebels launched attacks on police positions in the city.

And three bombs struck a military airport near the Montenegrin capital of Podgorica, local radio reported.

Officials said Yugoslav forces also appeared to be trying to create a “sterile buffer zone” 10 miles along the Albanian frontier by moving all ethnic Albanian families out, Wilby said. Super Galeb ground-attack aircraft of the Yugoslav air force were also active over areas where “ethnic cleansing” was reported, he said, and they were also attacking positions of the Kosovo guerrillas.

“It seems as if Milosevic is trying to create a new situation on the ground that is, in his view, irreversible,” Shea said.

Despite continuing calls from Capitol Hill and elsewhere for a firm “exit strategy,” U.S. and allied officials said the campaign is nowhere near complete. Sen. Joseph R. Biden (D-Del.), a key administration ally in Congress, said the bombing could last another month.

“It’s much too early to make that judgment. . . . There’s no measuring whether this has worked yet or not,” Biden said. “We’re talking about a probability of somewhere between 28 and 30 days before you have any sense of it.”

“I think it will last as long as necessary,” said Solana, the NATO secretary-general. “We are committed to continue to stop this ethnic cleansing, to stop these criminal acts from the Milosevic side, and we’re going to continue.”

Albright put it this way: “We will continue this campaign as long as it is necessary, until the job is finished. I’m not going to give any time frame.”

*

Kempster reported from Washington and Dahlburg from Brussels. Times staff writers Richard Boudreaux in Aviano, Italy; John Daniszewski in Skopje, Macedonia; Paul Watson in Pristina; and Alan C. Miller in Washington contributed to this report.

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Reports of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is embarking on a campaign of terror in Kosovo, so far forcing half a million ethnic Albanians--25% of the population--to flee their homes, according to Western reports. NATO released information showing what it says are the worst-affected areas (in red).

Source: NATO