NATO Rejects Milosevic Claims, Doubles Air Attacks

Rejecting as a cynical sham Yugoslavia’s claim that it has begun withdrawing tanks and troops from Kosovo, NATO officials said Tuesday that the alliance had virtually doubled its aerial bombardment of President Slobodan Milosevic’s forces after a two-day lull.

At the same time, the diplomatic quest for a way out of the Balkan crisis continued, but with no quick fixes. Russian envoy Viktor S. Chernomyrdin said his government and China, which is incensed by NATO’s bombing Saturday of its embassy in Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital, agree that the first step to any peace deal must be made by the alliance, not Milosevic.

“Our approaches are the same: In order to get a peace deal, the bombardment must stop,” Chernomyrdin said after talks with Chinese President Jiang Zemin.

The bombing of the Chinese mission in Belgrade, which left three people dead and 20 injured, chilled U.S.-Chinese relations to glacial coldness. Three days of furious, often violent anti-American demonstrations in China’s major cities subsided Tuesday, as news of an apology from President Clinton filtered through the country.

U.S. Ambassador James R. Sasser left his battered embassy compound this morning after being trapped since Saturday, as China mournfully received home the remains of the three people--all journalists--killed in the NATO bombing.

Since China’s veto power as one of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council makes its assent--or at least its neutrality--indispensable for any council action, Beijing’s anger could stymie progress on a peace plan outline approved by the Western democracies and Russia last week.

State Department spokesman James P. Rubin shrugged off China’s threat to block Security Council action until NATO ends its bombing campaign.

“We don’t believe that China will, at the end of the day, stand in the way of an agreement that could be struck by Russia based on NATO’s five conditions,” Rubin said.

Besides, he said, Security Council action will be required to ratify a peacekeeping force that will be deployed only when a peace accord is reached between Yugoslavia and NATO.

In the meantime, the pace of NATO’s bombing and missile raids against Yugoslavia quickened markedly. At alliance headquarters in Brussels, spokesman Jamie Shea said there was “no evidence” of the partial withdrawal of Yugoslav army troops and police from Kosovo, which the official Yugoslav news agency Tanjug reported had been ordered Sunday.

Milosevic “may be announcing a partial withdrawal, but he is doing total ethnic cleansing,” Shea said. “Ergo, we keep up the operations in the way we’re doing at the moment.”

NATO Resumes Full Air Campaign

Overnight, the Western alliance took advantage of clearing skies to step up the attacks after reducing attacks from Saturday afternoon until Monday morning. A total of 623 sorties were flown in the 24 hours ending Tuesday morning, almost twice the number of the previous day.

“We have now destroyed the equivalent of an entire brigade of weapons and equipment, and that was a significant achievement,” British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told British Broadcasting Corp., summarizing the results of the bombing campaign since it began March 24.

NATO said its jets overnight Monday and into Tuesday attacked seven radio relay sites and a television transmitter, seven highway bridges, a railroad bridge, three petroleum storage sites, an ammunition dump, an ordnance repair center, an explosives plant, three army barracks and a headquarters of the Serbian special police.

In Kosovo, which is part of Yugoslavia’s dominant republic, Serbia, U.S. and other NATO country air forces went after tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery and mortar positions, command posts, and elements of two Yugoslav army units, the 125th and the 211th Motorized Brigades, alliance officials said.

Belgrade residents saw intense tracer fire of antiaircraft guns as NATO missiles hit Pancevo, an industrial suburb.

Officials in Brussels dismissed speculation that the raids could be hampering retreat by some of the 40,000 Yugoslav soldiers and police that the alliance estimates are in Kosovo.

For NATO to stop its air raids, Shea said, Milosevic must accede to all of the alliance’s demands, including permission for an armed peacekeeping force with NATO troops at its core to enter Kosovo and safeguard the return of an estimated 750,000 ethnic Albanian refugees who have fled the province, and a total withdrawal of Serbian forces from Kosovo.

“If it’s a substantial withdrawal, it will be obvious--there will be plenty of dust on the tracks,” Shea said of Yugoslavia’s promised pullout. “Until such time as they all leave--and I repeat, all--we are going to keep up operations.”

The Yugoslav army’s supreme command said it had ordered the partial pullout from Kosovo after concluding that its troops had defeated the rebels of the Kosovo Liberation Army. At NATO headquarters here, officials called the claim of victory as surreal as the Serbian withdrawal it was supposed to have generated.

“In some areas, we have observed an increase in the ground combat activity . . . between the UCK [Kosovo Liberation Army] and the Serbian military or special police units,” German Air Force Maj. Gen. Walter Jertz told a news briefing Tuesday. “In particular, this morning we witnessed several skirmishes, including fighting in the western border areas [near the Albanian-Yugoslav border], which remain severely contested. All of this is directly contrary to Milosevic’s claim that his activities against the UCK have been concluded.”

However, there hasn’t been unanimity among NATO members about the Yugoslav announcement, hinting at the dangers of frayed unity as Operation Allied Force drags on with no decisive end in sight.

German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping dismissed the supposed Yugoslav withdrawal as a “propaganda maneuver.” But officials in Italy and Greece called it an encouraging “first step.”

“We are awaiting the next steps,” Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou said.

Albanian Foreign Minister Paskal Milo, attending a Balkan economic conference in the northern Greek city of Salonika, said he suspected the Yugoslav ruler of playing a wily game. “As always, Milosevic is trying to gain time by launching partial initiatives,” Milo said. “He is also trying to split the international community and especially NATO.”

The most prominent moderate Kosovo Albanian leader, Ibrahim Rugova, recalled that Milosevic had promised U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke in October that he would reduce security force levels in Kosovo to about 11,500.

“I demand, as a priority, the deployment of an international force, from NATO and Russia, to verify the retreat of the Serbian forces,” Rugova told the Paris daily Le Monde.

In related developments:

* The top United Nations official for refugees said Tuesday that her agency is running out of money to pay for shelter, food and other urgent necessities for Kosovo Albanian refugees, and called on European countries to do more. Sadako Ogata, U.N. high commissioner for refugees, had appealed for $143 million to meet the needs of the refugees through the end of June. Agency officials say they have received only about $71 million, and that all of that has been spent or allocated.

* More than 3,000 traumatized Kosovo refugees, including children with bullet wounds, crossed into Albania on Monday night and Tuesday morning, the U.N. relief agency said. Some had walked for days to reach the frontier. Refugees told relief workers that Yugoslav forces had separated out young ethnic Albanian men and taken them away.

* NATO military officials said the air campaign is being broadened to use airfields in Hungary and Turkey. The expansion is designed to spread more evenly the strain of equipping and maintaining the 770 warplanes now involved in Operation Allied Force, the officials explained.

* Germany and Italy on Tuesday rejected moves by the Yugoslav government to secure a verdict from the International Court of Justice calling for an end to the NATO bombing. The two European NATO members, appearing at a preliminary hearing, maintained that the tribunal based in The Hague is not competent to rule on the issue.

* Computer hackers, identifying themselves as Chinese, broke into several U.S. government home pages on the Web on Sunday, posting messages protesting the bombing of the Chinese Embassy. The frequently ungrammatical message left on the Department of Energy page said in part: “We won’t stop attacking until the war stops.” The Web sites hit by the hackers are operated by department public information offices and contain no classified material, officials said.

Meanwhile, U.S. Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark on Tuesday reported to a closed-door meeting of NATO ambassadors in Brussels on how the diplomatically disastrous attack on the Chinese Embassy had come about. U.S. officials in Washington have said outdated maps were used to select the target.

Shea, the alliance spokesman, expressed hope earlier that Beijing’s ire over what NATO has said was an accidental targeting of the embassy will subside “as China understands that there was nothing intentional whatever in the mistake.”

But the NATO spokesman said it would be an even bigger blunder to heed the Beijing government’s demands and suspend airstrikes--”handing President Milosevic ethnic cleansing on a plate.”

U.S. Warns Beijing Not to Exploit Incident

In Washington, there was a marked shift of tone of the Clinton administration. Defense Secretary William S. Cohen warned Beijing on Tuesday against exploiting the anger of the Chinese people, arguing that the Asian nation stands to lose if its relationship with the United States deteriorates.

“There is . . . a distinction between righteous indignation and calculated exploitation, and I think we have to be very concerned about that,” Cohen told members of the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee.

If the Chinese leadership was unwilling to accept Clinton’s explanation and take his phone calls, Cohen said, Americans might say, “If you’re going to react in that fashion, if you’re going to start burning American flags, if you’re going to destroy our embassy, then perhaps we should not be proceeding apace with our commercial transactions.”

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Times staff writers Richard Boudreaux in Belgrade, Maura Reynolds in Moscow, Maggie Farley in Shanghai, Norman Kempster and Paul Richter in Washington and John J. Goldman at the United Nations contributed to this report.