U.S. Assails Kosovo ‘Genocide,’ Hints at NATO Protectorate

Amid a worsening refugee crisis and a failed Russian diplomatic mission to end the bloodshed in Kosovo, the Pentagon presented a grim picture Tuesday of its campaign to weaken Yugoslavia’s weapons of repression, acknowledging that NATO’s massive bombardment of the country had failed to halt even one act of brutality.

In a day of dashed hopes, however slim, Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov flew from Moscow to Belgrade to Bonn in a bid to negotiate an end to the NATO bombing. After meeting with Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade, Primakov said the Yugoslav president was prepared to pull back his forces from Kosovo and let refugees return once the airstrikes stop. But Milosevic’s stance appeared to reflect little change from the position stated earlier by his government, and President Clinton rejected his offer.

Instead, Clinton unleashed an angry burst at Milosevic, accusing him of seeking “absolute power” and threatening to destroy Yugoslavia’s military machine. He charged that Milosevic had singled out for assassination moderate leaders of the ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo.

Other U.S. officials increasingly referred to Milosevic’s campaign to rid Kosovo of its ethnic Albanians as “genocide.”

U.N. officials said that more than 100,000 ethnic Albanians had fled Kosovo, a southern province of Serbia, the dominant republic of Yugoslavia, in the past week and that half a million had been driven from their homes. “This already staggering number is growing by the hour,” a spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said.

In other developments Tuesday:

* In Brussels, NATO officials maintained that they can do enough damage to the Yugoslav military to staunch the outflow of terrified ethnic Albanians. Spokesman Jamie Shea declared: “The air operations are going to continue, and we’re going to make those operations count.”

* In Washington, Clinton administration officials said they are planning for a longer war than initially foreseen--ending in the imposition of a virtual NATO protectorate over the province.

* U.S. and NATO officials agreed to expand their list of targets in Yugoslavia, increasing the likelihood that allied bombs will strike the center of Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital. “We are going to continue to target Milosevic and his military capability so that he pays an increasingly high price for his determination to continue the offensive against Kosovar Albanians,” a Clinton administration official said.

* The Pentagon said it had not yet embarked on its threatened, second-phase attack, led by low-flying A-10 “Warthog” jets and Apache helicopters, meant to weaken the Yugoslav tanks and mobile units driving Kosovo Albanians from their villages.

* Newsday reported that Britain and France are preparing to launch commando assaults into Kosovo to break the pattern of Serbian massacres of ethnic Albanians and to smuggle out top rebel political figures.

NATO Official Equates Terror to That of Stalin

A NATO military spokesman said Milosevic’s campaign against ethnic Albanians had “reached new heights.” Another NATO official equated it to the terror that the Khmer Rouge spread across Cambodia a quarter-century ago and that of Stalin’s Great Terror in the Soviet Union of the 1930s.

The allies are trying to “move heaven and earth” to bring an end to the violence against ethnic Albanians, another NATO official said. But after a week of relentless aerial attacks by members of the Atlantic alliance, Pentagon spokesman Kenneth H. Bacon acknowledged, “Right now, it is difficult to say that we have prevented one act of brutality.”

In their most complete assessment of the air campaign so far, Pentagon officials said weather had been a far bigger hindrance than they had previously acknowledged. Officials said six days of bad weather forced a large number of flights, but fewer than half, to return to bases without dropping their bombs.

After 1,700 allied sorties over seven days, they said, Milosevic’s air-defense system remains a formidable obstacle to their operations.

They acknowledged that they had been able to hit only the tanks and armored vehicles parked near army centers, and not those conducting operations.

Chalking up the successful strikes, however, Rear Adm. Thomas Wilson, director of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the air raids have severely damaged the infrastructure supporting surface-to-air missiles deployed against allied aircraft. More than half of Yugoslavia’s 15 MIG-29 fighters have been destroyed in air-to-air combat or on the ground, he said.

In addition, Wilson said, “the capability to repair and fix both helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft has been significantly degraded, as has the ability to produce ammunition, as well as store ammunition.”

Successful raids struck six Yugoslav army bases in Kosovo, four secret-police bases, three ammunition dumps and one helicopter field.

Despite the outcome of the Belgrade talks, Primakov defended the Russian mediation efforts and insisted that the “signal” Milosevic had sent was reason enough to begin negotiations. Russia has strongly opposed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization campaign.

Clinton’s foreign policy spokesman, David Leavy, said that, from the start, the administration did not think the Russian prime minister was carrying “a serious proposal.”

At his final stop, in Bonn, Primakov insisted that his talks with Milosevic were “a good start” that had yielded results.

“I would assess the results . . . as reassuring,” Primakov said. “If NATO wants to receive a signal, it is receiving a positive signal.”

“Milosevic demonstrated that he is ready to make a very significant shift in his position,” Primakov said in a Russian television interview. “He said that he can begin the withdrawal of these troops provided the [airstrikes] are halted and the NATO troops concentrated on the border are pulled back.”

But German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder made clear that no new ground for negotiation had emerged. “What Primakov told me is not a basis for a political solution [of the Kosovo crisis]--at least not in the form he presented,” Schroeder told a news conference as soon as the Russian prime minister had left Bonn.

Primakov, Milosevic Meet in Belgrade

News reports in Yugoslavia and Russia suggested that Primakov and Milosevic met for up to six hours. But a senior Russian military officer said Primakov spent fewer than three hours with Milosevic and was “waiting for a response” for the rest of the time he spent in Belgrade.

Schroeder said at a news conference after Primakov departed in stony silence, “The cause of this genocide is the attitude of Milosevic, the effect is the military actions of NATO, which have only one aim: to prevent the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe.”

Clinton said in a written statement: “President Milosevic began this brutal campaign: It is his responsibility to bring it to an immediate end and embrace a just peace. There is a strong consensus in NATO that we must press forward with our military action.”

Earlier, the president, who has been largely out of the public eye for several days, accused Milosevic of plotting his campaign against the Kosovo Albanians even as they were agreeing to the peace accord negotiated in Rambouillet, France, last month.

With critics saying the attacks on the ethnic Albanians were sparked by the airstrikes, Clinton said of Milosevic: “He started carrying out that plan as the talks ended, increasing our sense of urgency that the airstrikes NATO had threatened for some time must begin.”

“Now, lamentably, we have credible reports that his troops are singling out for murder the moderate Kosovar leaders who supported a peaceful solution,” the president said. On Monday, NATO officials said they had received reports that one of the ethnic Albanian negotiators had been killed.

Clinton said Milosevic’s actions were “the culmination of more than a decade of using ethnic and religious hatred as a justification for uprooting and murdering completely innocent, peaceful civilians to pave Mr. Milosevic’s path to absolute power.”

But as a result, Clinton said, “for a sustained period, he will see that his military will be seriously diminished, key military infrastructure destroyed, the prospect of international support for Serbia’s claim to Kosovo increasingly jeopardized.”

“We must remain steady and determined with the will to see this through,” Clinton said at a State Department ceremony at which a portrait of former Secretary of State Warren Christopher was unveiled.

The reports emerging from Kosovo, carried by refugees struggling to find a haven in Macedonia, Albania and the Yugoslav republic of Montenegro, left NATO officials stunned.

“We all know President Milosevic’s record, but I think that even we have been shocked by the sheer proportions of what we see happening in Kosovo today,” said NATO spokesman Shea. “I don’t think anybody could have anticipated that it would be quite as bad as it seems now to be becoming.

“In whole towns and villages, tanks are first surrounding the site, then paramilitaries are going in, rounding up civilians at gunpoint, separating young men from women and children,” he said. “The women and children are then expelled from their homes, and then sent towards the border. Then after they have left, the villages, the towns, the homes, are looted and then systematically torched.”

According to the U.N. refugee agency, the number of refugees in Albania may soon reach 150,000. There are an estimated 22,500 in Macedonia and 42,500 in Montenegro.

City of 100,000 Is Said to Be Destroyed

“Pec was a city of 100,000 people. We now have reports that it has been almost totally destroyed,” Shea said. “We also have reports of people, thousands of people from Prizren, being forced to leave, on a forced march towards the Albanian border.”

The organization required by such steps, he said, demonstrates a “prearranged pattern.”

“This type of humanitarian disaster is not improvised; it represents a master plan that was conceived and was well on its way to being executed before the first NATO bomb was dropped against a military target,” Shea said.

*

Gerstenzang reported from Washington and Paddock from Moscow. Times staff writers John-Thor Dahlburg in Brussels; Paul Watson in Pristina; John J. Goldman at the United Nations; Carol J. Williams in Uglijevik, Bosnia-Herzegovina; Paul Richter and Norman Kempster in Washington; and researcher Christian Retzlaff in Berlin contributed to this report.

Updated stories, photos and video clips on the crisis in Yugoslavia are available on The Times’ Web site: https://www.latimes.com/yugo.

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NATO Targets and Torching of Towns

NATO continued pounding Yugoslav targets inside Kosovo and near Belgrade, the capital of Serbia and Yugoslavia. But the bombardment failed to alleviate the suffering of ethnic Albanians in the southern province, who continued to flee as Serbian forces torched their villages.

Source: NATO