Death, New Life in Hospital Hit by NATO

Alexandra Rancic, 27, was being stitched up after a caesarean section early Thursday when an errant NATO bomb welcomed her infant son into the world of wartime Belgrade.

“We were in the operating theater on the first floor when the explosion happened and all the shattered glass came down and the ceiling caved in,” a nurse said. “We managed to evacuate the babies--around 20 of them--and we took the women to the basement.”

Two mothers were cut by flying glass and several went into shock. But doctors said newborn Luka Rancic--weighing 7 pounds, 4 ounces--survived his traumatic birth, as did the other babies in the maternity ward of Belgrade’s Dragisa Misovic Medical Center.

Not so lucky were the four people who died in this latest fatal strike on a civilian target--one of at least nine accidental attacks that have embarrassed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization during its two months of bombing Yugoslavia.

The victims this time were three intensive-care patients and the night watchman at the hospital’s neurological wing, in a two-story building near the maternity ward. The bomb fell there about 1 a.m., crushing them under a mountain of rubble. Two of the dead were women, 82 and 75 years old.

Health authorities here react in anger each time NATO damages hospitals or causes blackouts that disrupt emergency services. Serbian Health Minister Leposava Milicevic rushed to claim Thursday’s bombing was proof that the alliance’s “prime targets at this point are civilians.”

“The more helpless the better,” she told reporters. “Intensive care patients, newborn babies, patients on anesthesia--perfect victims for NATO savages.”

In Brussels, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said the bombers were aiming at a nearby army barracks. He said they struck the barracks with seven laser-guided bombs, but an eighth bomb “failed to guide correctly” and landed at the base of a building 1,500 feet from the target.

He would not confirm the obvious: The building was part of a hospital complex located a few hundred yards from a barracks in Dedinje, an exclusive residential district dotted with foreign embassies and army facilities. The blasts spread damage over a wide area, shattering windows at a post office and the Swedish ambassador’s residence. News services also reported slight damage to the ambassadors’ residences of Spain and Norway and the Libyan Embassy.

Thursday night, NATO bombs shattered the windows at the Swiss ambassador’s residence, Yugoslavia’s Beta news agency reported.

Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema in Brussels warned Thursday that support for NATO’s air assault could falter if the alliance continues to hit civilian targets. NATO is trying to stop Yugoslavia’s crackdown against the ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo, a southern province of Yugoslavia’s dominant republic, Serbia.

The errant bomb at the hospital left a crater 15 feet wide. It tore off two walls of the neurological wing, buckled support columns and brought down ceilings, burying beds under brick, plaster, upended radiators and twisted water pipes.

Miodrag Lazic, the hospital’s deputy general manager, described a “really horrific” scene in which medical staff raced to evacuate dozens of patients from 24 wards, fearing that another bomb would fall.

The street where he spoke was covered with oil, mud from the crater and several dozen unfired bullets alongside small strips of jungle-camouflage cloth. The debris appeared to suggest that an army vehicle may have been damaged by the blast on its way to or from the barracks.

Downplaying any possible military target, the health minister suggested that the bullets, which appeared to be for an AK-47 assault rifle, may have belonged to the dead night watchman.

The bombing early Thursday broke nearly two weeks of relative calm in the Yugoslav capital. Since its munitions hit the Chinese Embassy on May 8, NATO has avoided targets in central Belgrade, though it continued to hit suburban targets.

Some Belgraders had taken the pause as a sign of hope--until Russian peace envoy Viktor S. Chernomyrdin arrived Wednesday for talks with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

“That was a bad omen,” said Goran Stojkovic, a 30-year-old parking lot attendant. “The last two times Chernomyrdin was here, they hit the television studios and the army headquarters. Whenever the Russians come to talk peace, we get bombed.”