NATO to Deploy Major Force at Kosovo Borders

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization on Tuesday approved sending a heavily armed force of 45,000 to 50,000 troops to the borders of war-devastated Kosovo, but U.S. officials insisted that the peacekeepers will enter the province only with the consent of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

“The operations plan calls for this force to operate in a permissive environment. End of story,” a Western diplomat said.

The United States and its European allies want the contingent of NATO-led peacekeepers, which has been given the name Joint Guardian, deployed in the Balkans as soon as possible. Its kernel will be a British-led force of 13,000 troops already stationed in Macedonia, a former republic of Yugoslavia that borders Kosovo.

Joint Guardian “is what I personally call our ‘Teddy Roosevelt force.’ It’s a force that we are designing to speak softly but to carry a big stick,” NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said.

The United States is expected to contribute 14% of Joint Guardian, or about 6,600 troops, if Pentagon estimates of the force’s eventual size--47,000 troops--are correct.

Though the Clinton administration insists that it does not share Britain’s position that the heavily augmented force--which is expected to be fully deployed in six to eight weeks--be ready to fight its way into Kosovo if necessary, massing the equivalent of an army corps on Yugoslavia’s doorstep is meant as a warning to the Milosevic regime.

For more than two months, NATO warplanes have been bombing security forces and strategic targets throughout Yugoslavia, but Milosevic has not knuckled under to NATO’s demands, which include allowing soldiers from the alliance and other countries to escort about 1 million ethnic Albanian refugees home to Kosovo.

Alliance warplanes continued their attacks Tuesday, hitting Milosevic’s villa near Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, for the third time, along with military barracks, fuel depots and other targets in central Yugoslavia. Loud detonations shook Kosovo’s capital, Pristina. Kosovo is a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s dominant republic.

NATO’s decision to increase the number of ground troops at Yugoslavia’s borders “ratchets up the pressure and concentrates the mind in Belgrade,” said Edward Foster, head of the European security program at the Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies in London, in a telephone interview Tuesday. “Assuming we get to the point where the air campaign is deemed not to be sufficient on its own, we could now threaten to do something more, even if we’ve made a hash of sending clear signals till now.”

But NATO is now subject to pressures of its own. Although alliance leaders insist that the air campaign is working, Germany and the Netherlands, appalled by accidental bombings of a refugee convoy, a train, a prison, the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade and other unintended targets, have demanded an urgent review of targeting procedures. The spectacle of residents in Belgrade being deprived of electricity and water as a result of NATO’s most recent attacks also has shocked some Europeans.

On Tuesday, Spain’s conservative prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, visited NATO headquarters in Brussels and expressed support for the alliance’s current strategy--in fact, he even endorsed widening airstrikes. But he made no secret of his concern about the pressures that more than two months of undeclared war have placed on the alliance.

“We’d like to finish with the situation as soon as possible, get it over and done with,” Aznar told a news conference. “What does concern me is mainly the internal solidarity, the cohesion of the alliance, which today is producing reasonable results.”

In other developments:

* Macedonian officials estimated that more than 8,000 Kosovo refugees arrived in their country Tuesday, matching the number who crossed the border Monday. “The situation is reaching crisis proportions again,” said Ron Redmond, a spokesman with the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, referring to the overcrowding of refugee camps that occurred in late March.

* U.S. officials raised concerns that despite an appeal for a worldwide oil embargo, Yugoslavia’s main source of oil consists of shipments by barge up the Danube, principally Russian oil sent from Ukraine. Kenneth H. Bacon, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said NATO will continue bombing offloading sites near the river. Ukrainian officials, who oppose the alliance’s bombing campaign, have resisted U.S. efforts to halt the flow.

* In the central Serbian town of Cacak, antiwar activists said they would seek legal approval to hold a “massive protest of citizens” on Friday, Montenegrin state television reported. On Tuesday, six leading activists were fined between $140 and $420 apiece for organizing previous events without advance permission.

The Joint Guardian force will be considerably larger than the 28,000-member KFOR, or Kosovo Force, envisioned during negotiations in Rambouillet, France, last winter for peacekeeping duty in Kosovo. The U.S. military also had been expected to contribute 14% of the personnel--about 4,000 soldiers--to that earlier force.

A Pentagon official said the Joint Guardian force will include heavily armed combat troops, tanks, armored personnel carriers and self-propelled artillery.

As in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where 60,000 U.S.-led troops were deployed in 1995 to enforce peace accords in that Balkan nation, “you go in heavy, because you want to be a deterrent to anybody who might get ideas,” the official said.

Some U.S. officials say many of the troops will be drawn from the U.S. 1st Armored Division, based in Bad Kreuznach, Germany; other reports say the U.S. 1st Infantry Division, based in Wuerzburg, Germany, is a more likely source. Both have heavy equipment, though the armored division is slightly more heavily armed.

Nonetheless, U.S. officials said most of the additional U.S. personnel will not be combat troops but engineers, military police and civil affairs specialists. The noncombat personnel will advise the Kosovars on how to set up a new judicial and administrative system in the postwar province. Their job will be to replace the physical and civil infrastructure that’s been destroyed by weeks of Yugoslav military action and NATO bombing.

Alliance sources said planning calls for as many of the Joint Guardian forces as possible to be stationed in Macedonia, whose government, wary of provoking Yugoslavia, has fixed a ceiling of 16,000 for the number of NATO troops in the country.

A revised limit will have to be negotiated. Macedonian government officials said they had not been formally advised of the NATO plan. “We need to see the details and when a request is made formally, it will be discussed [by the government],” said Deputy Foreign Minister Boris Trajkovski.

The NATO sources said some units assigned to Joint Guardian could be based in Albania, west of Kosovo, or even in Bulgaria, which borders Yugoslavia but not Kosovo itself.

A 7,500-troop NATO contingent, code named A-FOR, is already in Albania but is too lightly armed to be integrated into Joint Guardian, NATO sources said. It is unclear now whether Task Force Hawk, a squadron of Apache attack helicopters and 5,000 support troops from the U.S. Army in Albania, will be included. The 2,220 Marines aboard the amphibious assault ship Kearsarge and other U.S. vessels in the Adriatic could be subsumed by the new force, Pentagon sources said.

The operational plan for Joint Guardian was approved under an accelerated procedure that made it automatic as of 5 p.m. Brussels time Tuesday unless one of the 19 NATO allies formally objected.

Now, Shea explained at a news briefing, NATO’s top brass at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, or SHAPE--located near Brussels--must draw up a laundry list of personnel and hardware they believe necessary for the mission’s success. As early as Friday, SHAPE could hold a “force generation conference,” where countries from inside and outside NATO will be asked to make nonbinding commitments to contribute troops and equipment, military officials said.

Defense experts estimate it will take at least six to eight weeks to move a corps-sized force into the Balkans, get it set up and train it as a unit. Good weather in the region is expected to last until mid-September, which means NATO must take the calendar into consideration.

Though NATO has expressed the hope that Russia will take part in Joint Guardian along with other nonalliance nations, some analysts said given Moscow’s hostility to the alliance’s bombing campaign, they didn’t see how Russian politicians could afford to agree.

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Times staff writers Paul Richter in Washington, Alissa J. Rubin in Skopje, Macedonia, and David Holley in Podgorica, Yugoslavia, contributed to this report.