600 Sorties Mark Heaviest Night of NATO Air Assault

NATO pilots flew 600 sorties over Yugoslavia as they “hammered at the heart” of President Slobodan Milosevic’s military machine in the most intensive night of bombardment since the air campaign began, alliance officials said Friday.

The attacks left gaping holes in central Belgrade’s twin, fortress-like army headquarters buildings and the Interior Ministry command center--all abandoned since earlier in the air campaign--and killed a police officer and a motorist. One errant NATO missile aimed at the army headquarters hit a residential district about a mile away, destroying a house and leaving at least nine people injured.

The smoldering piles of rubble in Belgrade--clearly the worst damage to the capital since the air campaign began March 24--appeared to signal a more aggressive NATO operation to destroy Milosevic’s power center.

With weeks of cloud cover finally clearing to allow more accurate strikes, and with a more resolute mandate for the air campaign since alliance leaders met in Washington last weekend, North Atlantic Treaty Organization officials insisted that they had managed to inflict more damage on Yugoslavia’s arsenal in the last two days than they had during daily raids over previous weeks.

The latest airstrikes also damaged highway and railroad bridges, a ferro-nickel plant in Kosovo, a border post, an airfield, howitzers, tanks, surface-to-air missile sites, and an oil refinery in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia’s second-largest city.

“I think that is one of the largest, most diverse target lists thus far,” NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said in Brussels, noting that all alliance aircraft returned safely.

The mission also appears to be more determinedly focused on hitting key military targets despite the risk of occasional misfires that might endanger civilians. Alliance leaders have dealt with recent “collateral damage” with terse assurances that the hits were unintended.

The intensified airstrikes continued into Friday, as Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, Russia’s special envoy for the Yugoslav crisis, met here with Milosevic and later reported “some progress” in peace talks. But the former Russian prime minister offered few specifics to back up his optimistic statement and later flew home to Moscow.

In other developments Friday in the Balkan conflict:

* The Rev. Jesse Jackson met in Belgrade with three U.S. soldiers held since March 31 as prisoners of war but did not win their immediate release. Jackson held a prayer session with the men and said they showed a “great sense of dignity.” He is scheduled to meet with Milosevic today.

* The White House announced that President Clinton will visit NATO headquarters in Brussels on Tuesday, ahead of his tour of U.S. military bases in Germany the following day.

* Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said the 20,000 ethnic Albanian refugees from Kosovo to be sheltered in the United States will begin arriving next week. The first 3,000 or 4,000 refugees, State Department officials said, will be airlifted from the most seriously crowded camps in Macedonia to Ft. Dix, N.J. The White House said the government will provide $20 million to help relocate the newcomers.

* New York-based Human Rights Watch said Friday that Yugoslav army troops and Serbian police killed 100 to 300 men and boys in the Kosovo village of Meja this week. The group, which conducted separate interviews with 19 witnesses who reached Kukes, Albania, on Wednesday, said the killings were part of a daylong operation to remove all ethnic Albanians from 10 villages between Djakovica and Junik, near Kosovo’s border with Albania.

* The French relief organization Doctors Without Borders issued a damning report on the mechanics of the “ethnic cleansing” campaign that NATO officials say Yugoslav forces have waged against civilians in Kosovo, a province of the dominant Yugoslav republic, Serbia. The report, based on an extensive probe into the expulsion of 1,537 people from the village of Rozaje, calculated that 13% of the male residents 15 to 55 years old had disappeared during the displacement and that nearly half the refugees had been stripped of all identity papers.

* The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva reported that 10,000 more Kosovo Albanians had been driven from their homes in the previous 24 hours--mostly from the city of Prizren, where professionals have been systematically rounded up and expelled into the neighboring nation of Macedonia.

* U.N. officials also warned of increased public health problems at packed refugee camps in Macedonia, as temperatures climbed above 70 degrees and the stench of open-trench sewers became overpowering. Relief workers took heart, however, after Macedonian government officials indicated that they may allow construction of two more refugee camps.

* U.N. human rights chief Mary Robinson warned that both Yugoslav and NATO forces may face investigations into allegations of war crimes in the Kosovo conflict for actions that have killed numerous civilians. She called for fresh efforts to find a negotiated solution and said she planned to meet with Milosevic during a 12-day Balkan tour starting Sunday.

* Montenegrin television reported Friday that NATO bombs killed five people and injured seven, three of them seriously, in an attack on a bridge in Murino, a town near the border with Kosovo. Television showed buildings damaged at each end of the small bridge, which was still standing. Montenegro is the smaller of Yugoslavia’s two republics and has a pro-Western, anti-Milosevic government.

Russian Envoy Sees Room for Optimism

After meeting for more than five hours Friday with Milosevic, Russian envoy Chernomyrdin suggested that there was room for optimism in his efforts to find a common ground between NATO and Yugoslav proposals for ending the conflict.

“We have drafted several approaches to the peace settlement of the Kosovo crisis. There is some progress,” he said, according to Russia’s Itar-Tass news service. “I hope that leaders of the NATO member countries will take that progress seriously, but I cannot say a priori that they will make a positive decision.”

According to the news service, Chernomyrdin said Milosevic had softened his position concerning an international peacekeeping force for Kosovo, agreeing to accept troops from countries that could ensure the refugees’ safe return to their province. But it was unclear which countries would be acceptable. Asked if that formula would permit NATO troops, Chernomyrdin said, “Let’s talk about that later.”

U.S. and NATO officials, who have demanded that any postwar peace plan include the presence in Kosovo of an armed peacekeeping force with alliance troops at its core, immediately rejected the Belgrade proposal.

“I think we are not anywhere near a serious proposal,” Albright said in Washington.

NATO spokesman Shea also dismissed the overture, saying it “does not even come close” to alliance demands that Yugoslav forces withdraw from Kosovo and that a NATO-led peacekeeping force deploy to the province so refugees feel safe enough to return home.

While diplomacy seemed to be stalling, alliance officials were clearly buoyed by the successful overnight raids.

The 600 sorties late Thursday and early Friday compared with about 4,400 sorties during the previous five weeks of attacks. A sortie represents one flight by one jet, be it an attack or support plane.

“NATO aircraft attacked the national military headquarters that directs and controls the campaign of brutality and ethnic cleansing in Kosovo,” Shea said in Brussels, calling the targets “the brain that guides the operations in Kosovo.”

NATO also struck a 650-foot-tall TV relay tower atop Mt. Avala, south of Belgrade, again knocking Serbian state television off the air. The Yugoslav regime succeeded in restoring its propaganda voice, but Shea said NATO would persist in attacking government television because it is “used entirely to incite hatred” and serves a dual purpose of relaying military information.

After a spate of embarrassing accidents, including the firing Wednesday of a HARM air-to-ground missile into neighboring Bulgaria, NATO officials were visibly bolstered by the airstrikes.

“Yesterday was the most intense day thus far in our air operations over Yugoslavia,” Shea said. The campaign was “benefiting from more than double the number of aircraft that we had one month ago, benefiting also from . . . good weather.”

The Belgrade attacks began about 2:30 a.m. Friday and left city residents, who were enduring the 38th day of the bombing campaign, stunned and angry. The two-story home of the Filipovic family on Maxim Gorky Street was the first residence in the capital to suffer a direct hit.

“We were sleeping when we heard a strong blast,” said Bora Filipovic, who was in the living room with his wife and adult daughter. They climbed through shattered windows to safety, but his adult son, Dejan, broke a leg when he was thrown from a second-floor bedroom window.

The blast wrecked the Golden Ram restaurant, which has a separate entrance in the two-story building occupied by the family, and left Dejan Filipovic’s old white Yugo car crushed under massive chunks of concrete. Three other people in the neighborhood were injured.

The heat from the explosions was so great, residents said, that it burned the hair of those who ran out into the streets to see what had happened.

As if air raids weren’t enough for one night, an earthquake shook Belgrade just before dawn Friday, causing no damage but adding to the tension. The Serbian Seismological Institute said the epicenter of the 5.5-magnitude quake was 37 miles south of Belgrade.

A Question of Loyalties

NATO officials have sought in recent days to suggest that opposition to Milosevic--civilian and military--is mounting, but they acknowledge that the evidence is anecdotal.

“At the top levels, we know fully well that Milosevic has been changing generals consistently over the past few months, most recently eight at the head of his very important 2nd Army in Montenegro,” Shea said. He said nine generals are reportedly under house arrest.

Shea also contended that morale among the rank and file is deteriorating, as evidenced by decreasing combat readiness and deserters appearing across the border in Macedonia.

“The rot is setting in from below,” Shea insisted. “Soldiers generally are people who are paid and trained to defend their country against foreign threats or to defend their country’s interests in foreign lands. Soldiers are not normally trained and recruited to massacre their own people. And I think that this is distasteful for many.”

*

Williams reported from Brussels and Boudreaux from Belgrade. Times staff writers Maura Reynolds in Moscow; Art Pine and Nick Anderson in Washington; David Holley in Podgorica, Montenegro; T. Christian Miller in Skopje, Macedonia; and Associated Press contributed to this report.

* JACKSON MEETS WITH POWS: The Rev. Jesse Jackson prayed with three U.S. prisoners of war in Yugoslav capital. A17