[1] U.S. Backs Europe On Serbia; EU Imposes Sanctions As NATO Eyes Options

The Washington Post June 09, 1998, A SECTION; Pg. A17 by William Drozdiak & John F. Harris

Facing the threat of a new Balkan war, the Clinton administration yesterday signaled its intent to join European nations in imposing fresh sanctions on Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia as NATO accelerated plans for possible military intervention to stem the conflict in the Serbian province of Kosovo.

Meeting in Luxembourg, foreign ministers of the 15 European Union countries announced a ban on new investments in Yugoslavia -- comprising Serbia and its satellite republic, Montenegro -- and froze its foreign assets to punish Belgrade for its military offensive against ethnic Albanian guerrillas seeking independence for Kosovo.

In Washington, Clinton administration officials said the United States will follow suit within days barring an immediate -- and, they acknowledge, unlikely -- move by Serbian or Yugoslav leaders to resume negotiations with Kosovo and forswear further violence there.

The Clinton administration had pushed last month for international sanctions to be lifted as an incentive to Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to participate in talks aimed at giving Kosovo greater autonomy. But the U.S. gambit quickly backfired when the talks broke down and Belgrade resumed its military operation with new intensity.

The U.S. position was further muddled yesterday by conflicting statements from the Clinton administration. Speaking with reporters aboard Air Force One while Clinton traveled to New York to address the United Nations, White House national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger said a U.S. military intervention "is not something that is on the table."

Alarmed by the impression Berger had conveyed, other administration officials rushed to assert that he was simply describing U.S. expectations in the near term, not ruling out the military option if economic pressure backfires. On the contrary, they said, the United States is moving within NATO to identify military options that are politically and logistically workable.

"We are working closely with allies and partners on measures intended to end the violence and promote a peaceful resolution," State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said. "This includes accelerated contingency planning in NATO. We and our partners have a variety of options available to us. No decisions have been made, but nothing has been ruled out."

Ethnic Albanians account for nine out of 10 residents of Kosovo, but Serbs control the government and security forces. At least 250 people have been killed there since February, when military forces and special police units launched a campaign to crush the Kosovo Liberation Army, an ethnic Albanian guerrilla group.

At least 10,000 refugees have fled to neighboring Albania to escape the violence, but the flow of arms across the border to the guerrilla force reportedly continues unabated.

EU foreign ministers, at their Luxembourg meeting, declared that Belgrade's campaign to suppress the Kosovo rebels went "far beyond what could legitimately be described as a targeted anti-terrorist operation." They said Milosevic bore "special responsibility" for what they called a new wave of Balkan "ethnic cleansing."

"Modern Europe will not tolerate the full might of an army being used against civilian centers," British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said.

Seeking to lay the foundation for future intervention, Britain has circulated a draft U.N. Security Council resolution that would endorse the use of "all necessary means" to stop the conflict from spreading. Similar language was employed to justify military deployments in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the Bosnia peacekeeping mission.

In Brussels, NATO officials said defense planners were preparing a series of military options that could be presented to alliance defense ministers this week, including the possible preventive deployment of thousands of troops along Kosovo's borders with Albania and Macedonia, which has a large ethnic Albanian minority.

U.S. officials said if military force does come to pass, they anticipate air power being used to prevent government security forces from carrying out attacks in Kosovo, but not the insertion of ground troops within Kosovo.

For all the tough talk and diplomatic maneuvering, it remained unclear how far the Western powers are willing to go in pressing Milosevic to meet their demands. These include the immediate withdrawal of security forces from Kosovo, a restoration of regional autonomy for Kosovo -- which Milosevic ended in 1989 -- and a willingness to engage in serious political negotiations with Ibrahim Rugova, leader of Kosovo's ethnic-Albanian separatist movement.

Russia and France have expressed reservations about a NATO military intervention in Yugoslavia. And some NATO military experts have questioned whether deploying troops in Albania and Macedonia would deter Belgrade -- capital of both Serbia and Yugoslavia -- from mounting further offensives in Kosovo.

"If you send in NATO troops to Albania and Macedonia and tell them to stop the flow of arms and guerrillas across the borders, it would probably be the biggest favor we could do for Milosevic," a NATO official said.

            Milosevic has been adroit at exploiting divisions in the international community. When he agreed to open talks with Rugova last month, the United States pressured its allies to revoke an investment ban that had been imposed at the end of April. But the talks collapsed after one round when government security forces launched a new assault in late May against villages that purportedly were serving as guerrilla sanctuaries.

A team of diplomats who visited Kosovo over the weekend said they were appalled by the destruction of civilian targets inflicted by security forces in their latest offensive. Their report condemned the razing of homes and entire villages, clearing the way for today's restoration of the investment ban and asset freeze.

 

[2] Kosovo Impasse Turns 'Ominous'; NATO Prepares for Strikes on Serbia

The Washington Post March 18, 1999, A SECTION; Pg. A01 by Charles Trueheart PARIS

Diplomatic efforts to bring peace to Kosovo were at an apparent dead end today, as the Yugoslav army continued to mass troops, tanks and artillery in and around the Serbian province in preparation for what U.S. officials called a "large-scale conflict."

"The signs are extremely ominous," a senior U.S. official said following a third day of talks in which the Yugoslav-Serbian delegation continued to demand major changes in the proposed peace accord that Western negotiators deemed unacceptable.

With the negotiations at an impasse, NATO turned to the possibility of launching punitive airstrikes against Yugoslavia, a prospect that gained urgency because of growing concern about the buildup of Yugoslav army forces.

Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO's supreme commander, said in congressional testimony in Washington that Serbian forces were "prepared to resume the conflict on a very large scale should these peace talks fail to result in an agreement or should they conclude that for some reason NATO wasn't serious in its expressed intent" to take military action against Yugoslavia.

A Pentagon official told lawmakers a NATO attack could come at any time. "There is broad consensus that, if necessary -- and it may be necessary quite soon -- that NATO is prepared to use military force," Undersecretary of Defense Walter Slocombe said.

Only the Kosovo side has agreed to the brokered deal granting broad autonomy to the majority ethnic Albanian province, and officials said the talks likely would conclude on Thursday or Friday with a formal signing of the peace accord by the Albanian delegation.

"We would not anticipate any further progress," said Christopher Hill, the U.S. ambassador to Macedonia and the chief U.S. negotiator at the talks.

The Pentagon says as many as 21,000 Yugoslav army troops have been positioned on the perimeter of Kosovo, a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia's dominant republic, about half of them in the past two weeks. In recent days, Yugoslavia has moved seven upgraded T-72 battle tanks into northern Kosovo, and ethnic Albanian rebels reported the Yugoslavs are stationing antiaircraft batteries in the mountains north of Pristina, Kosovo's capital.

Sporadic shelling by Serbian forces of ethnic Albanian strongholds was reported in Kosovo today, and international monitors in the province observed movements of Yugoslav tanks, armored personnel carriers and trucks. About 7,000 ethnic Albanians fled their homes in southern Kosovo after Serbian security forces shelled their village, a U.N. refugee agency spokesman said, according to the Reuters news agency.

             Western sources said NATO has decided on its targets for cruise missile and air attacks. The first action, officials said, would be "message strikes," targeting control and command centers. They would be limited and designed to get Belgrade to quickly back down. If that fails, the attacks will escalate steadily, the officials said.

Some Western officials fear that the Yugoslav army has plans to attack secessionist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) positions in the two- to three-day window between a final decision by NATO to proceed with military action and the first airstrikes on Serbian territory. One Western official said the Serbs have said they could "wipe the KLA out in three days."

Several Western officials, however, said this was far too optimistic, given that rebel forces have proved resilient to Serb assaults in recent battles.

In a sign of growing Western concern, international monitors today began preparing for a withdrawal from Kosovo, possibly as soon as this weekend, Western officials said.

Western mediators reported that the Yugoslav-Serbian delegation again today proposed substantial changes to the political part of the settlement and refused to negotiate about the "implementation" side of the deal.

The plan envisions a multinational, mostly European NATO-led force of 28,000 troops to guarantee the security of the province after the secessionist rebels are "demilitarized" and Yugoslav forces withdraw. A civilian successor to the current unarmed Kosovo Verification Mission also would help monitor the three-year interim peace accord.

"These are issues that were clearly part of coming to Paris in the first place," said Wolfgang Petritsch, the Austrian diplomat who represents the European Union at the talks.

The mediators said they would meet Thursday with conference co-chairmen Hubert Vedrine and Robin Cook, the foreign ministers of France and Britain, to decide whether to adjourn the talks immediately.

Russian envoy Boris Maiorsky, who along with Hill and Petritsch has been conducting the negotiations, took issue with Western assertions that the Serbs were responsible for the impasse. "One signature, unfortunately, does not make an agreement," he said. "It takes two to tango. This is the rule of any dance."

U.S. and European officials said today there were no plans for any special diplomatic missions to Belgrade to meet with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, although they were not ruled out.

State Department spokesman James P. Rubin, on a visit to Paris, said Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright had invited Hashim Thaqi, the young Albanian guerrilla who has emerged as leader of the ethnic Albanian delegation, to Washington, perhaps as early as this weekend. He would be accompanied by the other Kosovo delegates.

The visit, a senior U.S. official said, would be in the context of "developing a relationship with these people," including "the significant new power center of the KLA."

 

[3] NATO Hits Yugoslav Ground Forces; Attacks Largely Cut Kosovo From Rest Of Serbia, U.S. Says

The Washington Post April 09, 1999, A SECTION; Pg. A01 by Thomas W. Lippman & Dana Priest

            With no end in sight to the conflict in Kosovo and diplomacy apparently at a standstill, NATO warplanes zeroed in yesterday on Yugoslav soldiers and military convoys in the rebel province, inflicting the heaviest direct damage so far on troops and weapons used to kill and purge its ethnic Albanian population.

Pentagon officials said they believe NATO's airstrikes have almost completely cut off Kosovo from the rest of Serbia, the dominant republic of Yugoslavia, by destroying all rail lines into the province from the north and damaging most of the roads and bridges. Both tactics were intended to make it more difficult for military convoys to reinforce troops already there and make slow-moving traffic more vulnerable to NATO planes overhead, Pentagon officials said in the most detailed briefings since the air campaign started March 24.

Yugoslav authorities, meanwhile, sent conflicting signals about the possibility that three U.S. soldiers captured on the Macedonian border early in the air war might be released. The acting president of Cyprus, Spyros Kyprianou, arrived last night in Belgrade and scheduled a meeting today with President Slobodan Milosevic on a mission to win the three Americans' freedom.

The Yugoslav information minister, Milan Komnenic, told a French radio station that "good news" is coming but declined to specify what he meant. But Yugoslav Deputy Premier Vojislav Seselj said releasing the three is "out of the question" and they should be tried as terrorists. Earlier, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said they will be freed only when NATO stops its airstrikes.

            The intensifying bombardment reported by NATO did little to ease the alarm among NATO officials and relief agencies about the fate of tens of thousands of Kosovo civilians who were blocked from leaving Yugoslavia Wednesday and marched back into Kosovo to an unknown fate. "We don't know what has happened to these people, who seem to have been forced back inside Kosovo," NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said. "We are very concerned about their safety and well-being."

The plight of more than 400,000 Kosovo civilians who have fled the province or been driven out by Yugoslav security forces appeared to be alleviated somewhat. Relief agencies -- aided by NATO troops and aircraft -- established tent cities with food, water and sanitation in the neighboring countries of Macedonia and Albania, where the refugees flooded across the border seeking safety.

But the relief teams were hampered by bad roads, spotty electricity supplies, the sheer numbers of people needing help and the traumatized state of many of the refugees, aid officials said. Relief agencies geared up for what may be a long-term program because NATO has decided that the refugees must return to their homes in Kosovo and there is little prospect of such a development in the near future.

Despite signs Yugoslavia might be preparing an overture, there are no serious efforts underway to end the air war through diplomacy, State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said. The only method the NATO alliance is using to pursue its goal of getting the refugees home safely, free of intimidation by Yugoslav security forces, is continuation of the air war until Milosevic accepts the alliance's terms, he said.

Yugoslavia's state-run media said government security forces have ended their offensive in Kosovo, designed to put down a 13-month-old secessionist rebellion, and peace has been restored in the province. In a statement, the Milosevic government said it "once again calls on all citizens of Kosovo not to leave their country, to live in harmony and cooperation, and in that way resist the bombs that kill regardless of nationality."

But allied officials rejected the peace claim as spurious and said small-scale clashes continue with pockets of resistance from the rebels' Kosovo Liberation Army.

Taking advantage of a fourth day of clear weather, NATO threw hundreds of planes against army and special police units operating near Kosovo's Albanian border, where the Yugoslav forces are concentrated in an attempt to rout rebel remnants and hound their population base.

Some 50 targets were struck over the last two days during operations that continued nearly round the clock, Pentagon officials said. For the first time since the bombing began, NATO attacks killed "a significant number" of troops, said Rear Adm. Thomas R. Wilson, director of intelligence for the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. He did not elaborate.

Yugoslav Army forces at staging areas near Istok and Decani were struck, as was a special police convoy of vehicles in the Dakovica region and another military convoy near Poljanica. Army garrisons at Pristina and Urosevac also were damaged.

Although bombing over the last three days has been the heaviest to date, the overall damage to troops and equipment directly involved in the fighting has only begun, Pentagon officials acknowledged, and low-level attacks by helicopter gunships or A-10 airplanes specialized in attacking armor have yet to get started in any numbers.

As they have each day since the war began, Pentagon officials reiterated that the immediate goal of the air war is not to stop the killing and expulsion of the ethnic Albanian population -- 90 percent of Kosovo's 1.8 million inhabitants before the conflict -- but to whittle away at the ability of Yugoslav forces to conduct such raids in the future.

To fulfill that goal, NATO warplanes, flying above the clouds and at altitudes that minimize the risks to pilots, have made significant progress in destroying and damaging the roads, bridges and waterways that allow the military to travel around the country and in blowing up their supplies of ammunition and fuel, the U.S. military said.

Pentagon officials reported their bombing has blocked the Danube River at Novi Sad by collapsing two large bridges into the waterway. The main railways in and out of Montenegro have been destroyed, as have three of the four main roads and railroads leading into Kosovo from the north. The assessment on the fourth route in is still pending, they said.

NATO attacks also have closed the country's two largest oil refineries, at Pancevo and Novi Sad. The Pancevo facility produces two-thirds of the Serbia's refined petroleum products. The bombardment has also blown up at least 10 major fuel storage sites.

Wilson said the attacks have reduced the storage capacity of military and strategic fuels by 20 percent. The warplanes have also incapacitated some pumping facilities, and destruction of the two Novi Sad bridges made it impossible to transport crude from the Vojvodina oil fields to refineries farther south.

NATO has faced considerable criticism that its forces have not moved fast enough against the Yugoslav army and special police units responsible for the crackdown on Kosovo's rebel forces and civilian population. Yesterday, Pentagon officials gave an unusually detailed account of the large number of NATO fighter jets and bombers that were deployed Wednesday to destroy a convoy of about 10 armored combat vehicles and a staging area for Serb troops in the southwestern part of the country, between Pec and the Albanian border.

Over a matter of hours, Dutch F-16s fired at antiaircraft artillery batteries and tanks, while F-16s flying off the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt struck at the military convoy nearby in the northern part of the area. French Super Entendards flying from the French aircraft carrier Foch, stationed in the Adriatic, along with Dutch F-16s and British Harriers, threw munitions at military and staging areas and armored personnel carriers to the south.

U.S. and alliance officials stressed again that the bombing will not end until Milosevic accepts their conditions, which include return of the refugees to their homes, withdrawal of Yugoslav troops and security police from the province and acquiescence by Belgrade to deployment of a NAT0-led security force. The terms will be dictated, not negotiated, they said, because Milosevic's campaign against the population of Kosovo has stripped him of his right to expect compromise.

"There will be no compromise, no fudge and no partition of Kosovo," Clare Short, British international development minister, said at the daily British war briefing in London.

The only diplomacy in which the United States is engaged, Rubin said, is "to back up the use of force. I would say that Secretary [of State Madeleine] Albright's biggest task each day is to ensure that the NATO allies remain as united as they've been remaining."

Support for sending ground combat troops to secure Kosovo appeared to grow among an 11-member congressional delegation that accompanied Defense Secretary William S. Cohen to talks with NATO authorities in Brussels Wednesday.

Senators and House members in the group returned to Washington yesterday saying planning for the ground option should begin in earnest in the event airstrikes fail and to put added pressure on Milosevic now.

"The option should be on the table not only because we might need to use the troops to achieve our objective . . . but because Milosevic must know we will do whatever is necessary," said Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), a member of the Armed Services Committee.

But President Clinton, denying yet again that the alliance is revisiting its commitment not to send ground troops in the absence of a settlement, said, "I believe our present strategy will work if we can keep the allies with it."

NATO's foreign ministers, including Albright, are to meet in Brussels Monday to review the progress of the air campaign.

Rubin said it is "fine with us" if non-NATO countries such as Russia contact Belgrade in efforts to find a negotiated solution, so long as they understand that the bombing will continue until Milosevic answers these questions in the affirmative: Will he accept an international security presence in Kosovo? Will he withdraw his forces? Will he allow unconditional return of refugees? And will he allow for a new political arrangement restoring self-government to the province?

The air campaign has been accompanied in the past few days by an escalating verbal barrage aimed at Milosevic and his security troops, intended in part to back up charges that Yugoslav forces in Kosovo have committed war crimes and atrocities on a broad scale and that Milosevic is responsible.

U.S. and NATO officials, for instance, have accused Milosevic of skimming state funds to finance villas in the Greek Islands and ordering the security forces to destroy buildings in Kosovo in an effort to make it appear that NATO is targeting civilian installations.

On Wednesday, Rubin read off a list of nine Yugoslav military officers whose troops are "committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Kosovo." Britain published a similar list earlier. Under international law and under the United Nations resolution that created a war crimes tribunal for Yugoslavia, Rubin said, field officers can be indicted and imprisoned for war crimes and atrocities carried out by units under their command.

The State Department's list did not include Milosevic. Asked yesterday if he considers the Yugoslav leader a war criminal, Clinton said Milosevic is undoubtedly responsible for human suffering on a massive scale, but he declined to make a legal judgment about culpability.

"We have a tribunal set up for that," Clinton said at a news conference with visiting Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji. "We have people whose job it is to make that determination. They should examine it and make that determination. And I think that's all that it's appropriate for me to say, because I -- I don't -- that's not -- it's not my job, and I'm not a legal expert on that question."

In December 1992, however, then-Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger included Milosevic on a similar list of alleged sponsors and perpetrators of atrocities in Bosnia and Croatia.

CORRECTION:  The origin of U.S. F-16 aircraft involved in an attack on Yugoslav armored vehicles was incorrectly reported yesterday. The planes flew from land bases.

 

[4] NATO Bombs Serbia Into Darkness; Belgrade Blacked Out, Millions Lose Electricity After Strikes on Power Plants

The Washington Post May 03, 1999 A SECTION; Pg. A01 by Daniel Williams BELGRADE

            NATO airstrikes on major electrical power plants blacked out Belgrade and large areas of Serbia tonight, hours after the Serb-led Yugoslav government released three captured American soldiers in what it said was a goodwill gesture. The attacks dramatically brought the allied air campaign home to millions of Serbs.

At least one bomb hit the Obrenovac power plant in southwest Belgrade at about 9:45 p.m. (3:45 p.m. EDT), sending white and red sparks high into the air. Officials here said the plant supplies electricity to half the country.

Residents and local media reported that power was out from the city of Nis in the south to Sombor near the Hungarian border in the north, affecting millions of people. The blackout knocked state television and radio off the air, and the official Tanjug news service was unable to operate for about two hours. When Tanjug began functioning again, its first dispatch said that a major portion of Serbia, Yugoslavia's dominant republic, was without power.

"The electric power system of Serbia has collapsed," Goran Matic, a minister without portfolio in the government of President Slobodan Milosevic, told the news service. He said that electrical facilities in Nis and the northwestern town of Kostalac also were destroyed.

[Early on Monday power was gradually being restored, utility officials said, but they told Tanjug the supply was not stable and residents needed to conserve. About 30 percent of Belgrade including most of the capital's hospitals had electricity restored.]

The attack on the Obrenovac power plant came hours after three U.S. servicemen who had been held captive here for 32 days arrived at a U.S. air base in Germany after U.S. civil rights leader Jesse L. Jackson secured their release in weekend talks with Milosevic.

The three soldiers -- who were handed over to Jackson here this morning and driven by bus to Croatia before boarding a U.S. medical evacuation plane, waved and smiled as they arrived in Germany. After saluting their commanding officers in the 1^st Infantry Division, the soldiers were taken by helicopter to a U.S. medical facility in Landstuhl, Germany, for physical and psychological tests. Following an initial screening, the soldiers were pronounced in good health by Army physicians.

NATO, meanwhile, said that engine failure caused a U.S. F-16 fighter jet to crash west of Belgrade early today, challenging claims by Yugoslav authorities that the jet had been shot down by antiaircraft fire. The pilot bailed out and was whisked to safety by a NATO search-and-rescue team two hours after the predawn crash near the Bosnian border, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said in Brussels.

As the NATO bombing campaign moved through its 40th day, ethnic Albanian refugees continued to flow out of Kosovo, the Serbian province that is at the heart of the conflict. More than 5,000 refugees arrived in Macedonia today.

Officials of the Belgrade government characterized the release of the three soldiers as a goodwill gesture and reacted angrily to tonight's bombing. "We have made a gesture of goodwill, and now we get this," said a Foreign Ministry official. "It makes you think that the West is just trying to make a point of how strong they are."

Jackson said he went against the advice of the Clinton administration in embarking on his trip to Belgrade because he felt it was time "to build a bridge of trust, and someone had to break the deadlock."

President Clinton applauded the release of three soldiers -- Spec. Steven M. Gonzales, 22, of Huntsville, Tex.; Staff Sgt. Andrew A. Ramirez, 24, of Los Angeles; and Staff Sgt. Christopher J. Stone, 25, of Smiths Creek, Mich. -- but he rejected an appeal by Jackson to ease up on the NATO bombing campaign as a reciprocal goodwill gesture. Jackson also urged Clinton to open a dialogue with Belgrade by meeting directly with Milosevic to find a resolution to the crisis.

"As we welcome our soldiers home, our thoughts also turn to the over 1 million Kosovars who are unable to go home because of the policies of the regime in Belgrade," said Clinton, who plans to meet with the soldiers when he flies to Germany this week.

"Today, we reaffirm our resolve to persevere until they, too, can return -- with security and self-government."

Jackson carried a letter from Milosevic to Clinton that laid out the Yugoslav position on the conflict and requested direct talks. The letter contained four points, Yugoslav officials said: The bombing must end and talks begin; the ethnic Albanian refugees from Kosovo can return under the care of the International Committee of the Red Cross; talks between ethnic Albanian and Serbian leaders would get underway, with foreign representatives playing a role as observers, but not mediators as they had before the airstrikes began March 24; and unarmed U.N. troops could enter Kosovo to monitor the agreements.

Those conditions have already been rejected by the United States and its NATO allies as insufficient. NATO says the bombing campaign will continue until Milosevic pulls out his police and army units from Kosovo; allows the free and unfettered return of all refugees; and accepts an international military presence in Kosovo with NATO troops at its core. Belgrade has ruled out the presence of armed foreign soldiers as a violation of its sovereign territory.

The NATO allies have pledged to escalate the bombing campaign now that weather in the Balkans is improving and more than twice the number of aircraft originally assembled for the bombing campaign are available for action. NATO spokesman Shea said the large number of sorties and airstrikes carried out over the past three days would be increased as a way to intensify pressure on Milosevic to meet NATO's demands for a cease-fire.

The increased number of airstrikes has resulted in several accidents that killed civilians. In the latest, a passenger bus was destroyed Saturday as it was crossing a bridge targeted by a NATO warplane north of Pristina, the Kosovo capital. NATO military spokesman Col. Konrad Freytag said the pilot fired before the bus came into view and had no intention of harming civilians.

While apologizing for the casualties, Freytag said the bridge was a legitimate military target. "When they allow public traffic over these bridges, they risk a lot of lives of their public citizens," Freytag said at a briefing in Belgium. The Yugoslav Foreign Ministry said 47 people were killed and 17 seriously injured in the attack, figures that could not be independently confirmed. 

The sudden blackness in Belgrade following the strike on the power plant was followed by silence across the city; no more bombs had fallen as of midnight. Some illumination was provided by a full moon and the headlights of an occasional city bus following its normal route. Residents tried to phone friends to see if their lights were out too, but many telephones here need electricity to function and went dead.

Matic, the Yugoslav minister, said that although Belgrade city hospitals have emergency generators, some dialysis and oxygen respirator equipment might not function properly without full power. Water supplies to several western districts of Belgrade were cut, the Reuters news agency reported. Over the weekend, NATO forces bombed a power station in Kosovo, shutting down a plant that provides water to the area around Pristina, but tonight's attack was the most generally disruptive since the allied bombing campaign began.

[NATO missiles fell around the central Serbian town of Kraljevo early Monday and hit a bridge over the Lim River near the Montenegrin border, Tanjug reported. The agency also said that three people were wounded in a strike on the western Serbian town of Valjevo, where damage was reported at a hospital. It also reported explosions at a television transmitter near Novi Sad and said blasts were heard in Nis.]

Even before the blackout, Belgrade citizens reacted coolly to news that the American servicemen were to be freed, with many saying they were skeptical it would lead to a peace settlement. Even those who favored the release qualified their comments, saying that releasing the Americans was a way to help improve Belgrade's standing in world public opinion.

"Maybe it was wise to free them, if only to show them we are better than they are," said Anna Simonevic, a cosmetician lunching at a pizzeria just a block from where Yugoslav officials had turned the soldiers over to Jackson and his delegation of U.S. religious leaders.

Her husband, Dragan, an army officer, seemed resigned rather than enthusiastic. "What should I say?" he asked. "Perhaps our leadership knows what it's doing, and I believe they have selected the best moment." Their daughter Katerina, 16, focused on the humanitarian virtues of the move. "Maybe the soldiers have children," she said.

At a nearby park, businessman Radisa Vilofijevic accepted the government's contention that the Americans were victims of the war. "Our first concern is to stop the bombing," he said. "These soldiers were not involved, so it's a good move."

But three teenagers idling at a nearby cafe thought Milosevic had made a mistake. "The war is not over; they should have been kept until the end," said a youth named Aleksander, a college business major who is awaiting a military call-up.

Marina Dukic, who sells hair care products, thought the release was in bad taste, since it came on a day when reports reached Belgrade of the NATO airstrike on the bus crossing the bridge near Pristina.

"They bomb and we release," said Dukic. "It's wrong. I'm not sure the Americans understand goodwill gestures."

Dejan Perisic, a political science student, was harsher: "They should have been treated like the American in Somalia," he said, referring to the dead U.S. soldier whose body was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu following a battle between American peacekeepers and Somali militia forces in 1993.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Nebojsa Vujovic briefed reporters on the release of the Americans and on the destruction of the passenger bus near Pristina, as film of the bus attack scene rolled on a screen nearby. Smoking bodies, twisted metal, dismembered corpses made for a dramatic, grisly backdrop to his talk. The release of the soldiers, he said, was a gesture "to demonstrate our commitment to reaching a long-lasting political solution."

Vujovic said that in the end, Yugoslavia did not regard the soldiers primarily as combatants. "Their crime was to have crossed the boundary line," he said. Stone, Ramirez and Gonzales were taken prisoner along the southern Yugoslav border while on duty with NATO troops in Macedonia.

 

[5] For Now, NATO To Rule in Kosovo; Alliance Faces Daunting Task of Governing

The Washington Post June 10, 1999, A SECTION; Pg. A01 by Dana Priest & Bradley Graham

From the minute they arrive in Kosovo, NATO troops will become the police, town council and public works department until the messy problem of creating a local security force and a provisional government is worked out.

To run what will be essentially a military government, NATO peacekeepers will have unlimited powers to control and govern the battered Serbian province. Their commander will have the authority "to do all that he judges necessary and proper, including the use of military force," to protect his troops and to allow them to carry out their duties, according to an agreement signed yesterday by NATO and Yugoslav officers.

Simultaneously, the peacekeeping force will be responsible for monitoring the movement of 40,000 heavily armed Yugoslav troops from Kosovo northward to other parts of Serbia, while the first of some 850,000 refugees seek to return from Albania to the west and Macedonia to the south. Eventually, the troops will have to find and disarm miles of land mines and rebuild dozens of recently bombed bridges and roads.

Their reconstruction will make it possible for 50,000 troops, a NATO-led peacekeeping contingent called KFOR, to move in and stay for the foreseeable future. Of these, 7,000 will be Americans.

They will do all this while the well-armed but poorly managed Kosovo Liberation Army, the rebel force that continued to fight Yugoslav forces even yesterday, is expected to try to reassert control over local life in many villages as the Yugoslav army pulls back. In addition, thousands of Yugoslav soldiers and police will still blanket the province -- although they are slated to withdraw -- when the first peacekeeping elements move in.

"Military men are going to be challenged to perform tasks unlike any they have ever faced before," said Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Pentagon officials predicted that the first peacekeeping forces will enter Kosovo immediately after a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing their deployment, expected sometime today.

The Pentagon reported that 1,900 Marines, who had been waiting aboard three ships off Greece, landed on the beach of Litohoro early today and prepared to move to Macedonia, getting into position for a move into Kosovo. At the same time, an Army headquarters element from Germany will start arriving in Macedonia aboard C-17 transport planes and other Army units -- AH-64A Apache helicopters, tanks, artillery and 1,700 troops -- will be entering Macedonia overland from Albania.

The Kosovo Liberation Army, the main guerrilla force that fought the Serb forces until yesterday, was not party to the NATO-Yugoslav agreement and is not mentioned in the text. NATO and U.S. officials are hoping they can turn the young, brash leaders of the rebel force into a new 3,000-strong police force and that the loose-knit group will be able to impose discipline on factions that do not support NATO's goals because they do not include an independent Kosovo.

KLA leaders, who have at least several thousand guerrillas inside the province, say they will abide by the spirit of the agreement by limiting movements and have vowed not to pursue retreating Yugoslav forces. Both the KLA and NATO officials said they hope to complete within weeks an agreement on the particular types and quantities of weapons the secessionist rebels are to turn in.

NATO is seeking to disarm the KLA of heavy weapons but does not expect the rebels to turn in the abundant supply of rifles and machine guns they were able to buy from neighboring Albania and on the black market. Shinasi Rami, a spokesman for a coalition that includes the KLA, said that imposing a quick deadline for turning in weapons "would put Kosovo society in extreme strains." Rather, he said, "it would be a wise move to keep them integrated in the structure" of a new Kosovo.

Many U.S. officials worry that the rebel force will seek revenge against the Serb civilian population, will turn increasingly to criminal activity and will, once the Serb troops are gone, try to undermine the development of civilian political rule and seek instead to become a dominant political force.

"The KLA will keep its options open," said Ivo Daalder, a former National Security Council member and Balkans expert.  "That's going to be the number one problem."

Under the agreement, Yugoslav troops will withdraw in three phases from Kosovo. First, Yugoslav troops in northern Kosovo must leave by the end of today and must pass through one of four border crossings that NATO will monitor. Over the same period, all Serb aircraft must cease flying, and all air defenses -- including radars and surface-to-air missile batteries -- must cease operations.

By the third day, all air defense systems must be moved 15 miles north of the Kosovo border.

By the sixth day, all Serb troops in the southernmost zone along the Macedonia border will have to move north. Three days later, the central zone must also be vacated of troops, and 11 days after the agreement all Yugoslav forces must be out of the province.

The agreement also sets up a three-mile demilitarized zone along Kosovo's provincial borders with the rest of Serbia.  The Yugoslav government is required to turn over, within two days, detailed maps recording location of land mines and other            booby traps that NATO believes will endanger troops and returning refugees.

One of the major points left unresolved is how many Yugoslav forces will be allowed back into Kosovo. While NATO authorities have acceded to Belgrade's demands for some presence to patrol the border and maintain historical and cultural sites, the exact number is to be worked out in a separate accord later. The agreement reached last week with the Yugoslav leader, President Slobodan Milosevic, specified the final number would be "hundreds, not thousands."

In at least one respect, defense officials said the peacekeeping operation in Kosovo should be less risky than the one that began in Bosnia 3 1/2 years ago.

"In Bosnia, we were going into a situation where we actually had to separate the forces and set up and patrol zones of separation between the Muslim and Serb sides," said Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon. "Here, the Serbs are supposed to be out."

U.N. Balkans envoy Carl Bildt, however, said Europe and the United States will have to "take Kosovo from virtually nothing to practically everything in the next few years. This is to be . . . the most complex peace implementation operation ever undertaken by the international community in modern times."

Peacekeepers on the Move

The force will consist of 50,000 troops -- 17,500 of whom are now assembled in Macedonia, the staging area. 

Commander: Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson

* Six nations -- U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia -- have committed troops, and several others have pledged to contribute troops. They will be deployed in designated sectors.

U.S. contingent: Commander: Brig. Gen. John Craddock

* 1,700 U.S. Army soldiers yesterday began moving by road from Albania to Macedonia.

* 1,900 Marines, of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, now aboard ships off the coast of Greece are to move ashore in Thessaloniki and move by road to Macedonia.

* 7,000 U.S. Army soldiers to deploy from Germany. An advance party of 200 Army troops from Germany will be among the first U.S. forces into Kosovo.

The Kosovo peace deal provides for a NATO-led international peacekeeping force to be deployed once Yugoslav forces have begun to pull out and NATO has suspended airstrikes.

SOURCE: U.S. Defense Department

 

[6] Kosovo Successes Confirmed, NATO Chief Says

The Washington Post September 17, 1999, Friday, Final Edition A SECTION; Pg. A22 by William Drozdiak, BRUSSELS

NATO's chief military commander, Gen. Wesley K. Clark, sought to rebut critics of the air offensive against Yugoslavia today by releasing a long-awaited study that said allied bombs destroyed or damaged about a third of the Yugoslav army's weapons and vehicles in Kosovo.

Clark produced a mass of evidence drawn from declassified analyses, cockpit videos, pilot debriefings and reports from ground inspection teams to demonstrate that NATO did not exaggerate its claims of having inflicted a crippling blow to Yugoslav army and Serbian police forces.

"We destroyed, we struck enough, and we succeeded in ending the conflict on NATO's terms," Clark said. "The results of this study are not so far off what we believed them to be at the end of the war."

NATO sources said Clark, who during the war angered his superiors at the Pentagon for pressing to send troops to Kosovo, if necessary, was eager to lay out his version of events before a separate Pentagon study of the air campaign is published. In July, the Clinton administration asked Clark to step down as Supreme Allied Commander three months ahead of schedule next year.

            The 78-day NATO air campaign ended in June with an agreement by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw his government's forces from Kosovo, a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia's dominant republic, and to allow the deployment of tens of thousands of NATO peacekeepers there.

But Clark's conduct of the bombing campaign has been challenged by critics--including some within the Pentagon--who claim that NATO's failure to strike at military forces hard and early in the war allowed the Belgrade government to escalate its repression and expulsion of nearly 1 million of Kosovo's ethnic Albanians, more than half the population.

Clark successfully pressed NATO's 19 governments to consider the possibility that allied soldiers would have to launch an invasion if coercive bombing raids did not work. Today, he said that the conflict was brought to a close only when Milosevic realized that he faced an imminent ground invasion if he did not accept NATO's demands.

"I think he had ample evidence to conclude that, had he not conceded when he did, that the next step would have been the long-awaited and much-talked-about NATO ground effort," Clark told reporters.

The study produced by Clark showed that at least half of the 1,955 target hits reported by NATO pilots could be confirmed. Among the damaged or destroyed targets in Kosovo were 93 tanks, 153 armored personnel carriers, 339 military vehicles and 389 artillery pieces and mortars.

Clark chastised Western media outlets that accepted a claim of Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic, the commander of the Yugoslav Third Army in Kosovo, that NATO had struck only 13 tanks, six armored personnel carriers and 27 artillery pieces. He noted that Pavkovic also declared that 47 NATO aircraft had been shot down--when in fact only two planes were hit.

Clark has met many times with Milosevic and believes he has come to know the Yugoslav leader. He said Milosevic lost the war over Kosovo by falling victim to a series of miscalculations about Western resolve.

During a meeting in Belgrade last January at which NATO presented its list of demands for ending the Kosovo crisis, Clark recalled that Milosevic rejected NATO's terms and insisted that Kosovo "was more important than his head." Having lost four wars in 10 years and seen Serbia become increasingly isolated, Clark said Milosevic is now "struggling to save his head."

Known as a scholarly maverick, Clark has never won many friends among the Pentagon brass. His insistence on pressing the ground invasion option and his decision to deploy U.S. AH-64A Apache helicopters to Albania as a possible prelude to a land invasion angered Pentagon advisers who were opposed to the idea of committing U.S. troops to a ground war in Kosovo.

In defending the way he ran the Kosovo campaign, Clark said it was an unusual and "asymmetrical" military engagement that required innovation and political sensitivity. "Strictly speaking, this was not a war," he said, noting that bombing raids were just one dimension of a coercive effort.

Clark emphasized that he does not believe that "battle damage bean-counting" is an effective measure of the campaign and that the only criterion that matters is that Milosevic finally accepted all of NATO's key conditions. "The bottom line answer to the question of how much damage NATO had inflicted was: Just enough," he said.

Despite his success, Clark is said by NATO officials to feel embittered about the way he has been treated in the aftermath of the conflict. In contrast to Gens. Norman Schwartzkopf and Colin Powell, the two U.S. commanders who led the allied effort in the Persian Gulf War against Iraq, there have been no ticker-tape parades, no special awards ceremonies and no multimillion-dollar book offers for Clark.

In late July, Clark was told by Gen. Henry Shelton, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, that he would have to leave his post three months early to accommodate the need to move Shelton's deputy, Gen. Joseph Ralston, into the top NATO job.

            Clark refused to elaborate on his plans after he leaves NATO, saying only that he has no plans to write his memoirs.

 

[7] NATO Was Closer to Ground War in Kosovo Than Is Widely Realized
The New York Times November 7, 1999 Section 1; Page 6; Column 1; By STEVEN ERLANGER BELGRADE, Serbia

In early June, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, the most outspoken advocate of a ground invasion of Kosovo, had ordered the preparation of 30,000 letters calling up Britain's army reserves. Typed and addressed, they were about to go into the mail, making possible the commitment of up to 50,000 British troops -- half the standing army -- to go into Kosovo.

In Washington, President Clinton, with enormous reluctance, was about to give his own approval to preparations for a ground invasion of Kosovo, including up to 120,000 American troops -- despite his vow, in a televised speech on the first day of the war, March 24, that "I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war." Based on interviews with senior officials from seven governments -- the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, France, Finland and Yugoslavia -- the United States came much closer to a ground war in Europe than is commonly understood.

On June 2, the day before President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia agreed to accept NATO's terms for an end to the conflict, the national security adviser, Samuel R. Berger, convened a lengthy meeting of the Clinton administration's top national security officials that included a detailed discussion of how NATO could win the war.

At almost the same time, former Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin of Russia and President Martti Ahtisaari of Finland were in Belgrade, laying out NATO's terms to Mr. Milosevic, but few in Washington expected Mr. Milosevic to agree to them.

Mr. Chernomyrdin, unhappy with the terms, had nearly refused to go to Belgrade, but he listened as Mr. Ahtisaari told Mr. Milosevic that NATO would hit the city harder from the air, destroying its bridges and power plants, and was bound to invade Kosovo if necessary. Two weeks before, Mr. Clinton had said that "all options are on the table," and Mr. Chernomyrdin made it clear to Mr. Milosevic that Russia, which had supplied Belgrade radar information on incoming NATO aircraft, would be unable to help any further, even in the event of a ground invasion.

In Washington, White House officials were still looking hard for ground options short of the proposal put forth by Gen. Wesley K. Clark, the NATO commander, which called for an invasion by up to 175,000 allied troops. They discussed the creation of a limited "exit corridor" for displaced Albanians to get out of Kosovo, and of "safe areas" for them inside Kosovo, where they could be given food and shelter.

But the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who did not favor an invasion, made it clear that they preferred General Clark's proposals to anything that committed too few American troops to too limited a goal.

And the officials knew, they say, that Mr. Clinton had just a few days to authorize preparations for an invasion if it was to be sold to NATO, a reluctant Pentagon and a skeptical Congress and carried out before the winter, giving the refugees a chance to return home. The idea of the war's dragging through to the spring -- with Mr. Milosevic damaged but hanging on to Kosovo, 850,000 refugees still in camps, and the NATO alliance fraying or splitting -- "was too awful to think about," one senior official said.

The British thought they needed up to four months -- 120 days -- to prepare for an invasion, which is whyy the call-up letters were nearly in the mail. The Americans thought they needed less than 90 days -- but their schedule was rudely extended when they suddenly discovered that, without significant new roadwork, the large American M1 Abrams tanks could not negotiate the single route from Albania into Kosovo.

General Clark, whose troops were already rebuilding the road from Tirana to Kukes, in Albania, in preparation for a possible invasion, had wanted a decision by June 1, but thought June 10 was an absolute deadline to start an invasion in September. Mr. Clinton's ambassador to NATO, Alexander R. Vershbow, a former National Security Council official, believed for the first time that he could sell a ground war to the alliance, despite German, Italian and Greek unhappiness, but would need five or six days to do it.

The meeting of the officials broke up with an understanding that of the three American goals for the war -- NATO's victory, holding the alliance together and keeping Russia on board -- victory had become the only outcome that mattered, even if the alliance split and the Russians broke off cooperation with the West.

There was as yet no paper for Mr. Clinton to sign, but the only plan on the table was General Clark's idea of an invasion by 175,000 troops through Albania, with some helicopter assaults from Italy and possibly a feint from the north, from Hungary, to tie Yugoslav forces down.

"Clinton was going to have to decide in a couple of days," one senior official said, referring to a formal approval by the president of intensive preparations for a September ground war. "There was no way around that."

The White House announced that Mr. Clinton would meet with the Joint Chiefs on June 3.

Earlier on June 2, Mr. Berger had met a group of outside experts and analysts who had been critical of the administration and urged the authorization of a ground war. The group included a former ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, two former ambassadors to NATO, Robert Hunter and William Taft, a former NATO commander, George A. Joulwan, a former State Department official, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a RAND Corporation official, Stephen Larrabee, and two former National Security Council officials, Ivo H. Daalder and Jeremy Rosner, who had helped Mr. Clinton sell NATO expansion to the Senate.

Mr. Berger told them that he was still convinced the air war was working -- an opinion not universally shared -- but told them that "we will win" no matter what was required, to get "the Serbs out, NATO in and the Albanians back" to Kosovo.

There were "four irreducible facts," Mr. Berger said, according to notes taken by participants. "One, we will win. Period. Full stop. There is no alternative. Second, winning means what we said it means. Third, the air campaign is having a serious impact. Four, the president has said he has not ruled out any option. So go back to one. We will win."

In a subsequent discussion, Mr. Berger elaborated: "We have not yet concluded that the air campaign is not working. But we are preparing for the possibility that it isn't." And he said that victory would be won "in or outside NATO," adding: "A consensus in NATO is valuable. But it is not a sine qua non. We want to move with NATO, but it can't prevent us from moving."

He said, "There are a number of options and a number of time lines on how to use force, and we are looking at all of them." But in fact, officials say, there was only one option by then that the Joint Chiefs would support: General Clark's option, even though the Pentagon and Defense Secretary William S. Cohen never liked the idea of an invasion at all.

An authorization by Mr. Clinton to send tens of thousands more American and NATO troops to prepare for a Kosovo invasion would have a psychological impact on Mr. Milosevic. Ideally, the officials hoped, such a decision would bring Mr. Milosevic to capitulate without the need to send those forces into battle.

Mr. Clinton had already had severe criticism from NATO officials and even a former NATO general, Klaus Naumann, for what they called the strategic folly of ruling out a ground invasion from the beginning of the war.

At the start of the bombing campaign, American and NATO expectations were that Mr. Milosevic would give in after just a few days of essentially symbolic bombing. American estimates that he would not hold out for more than 12 days of an escalating air campaign were wildly inaccurate.

Three weeks into the war, the officials said, as Mr. Milosevic drove ethnic Albanians out of Kosovo by the tens of thousands, there was real panic in Western capitals and new strains between Mr. Berger and Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, who thought Mr. Milosevic would cave in early.

Mr. Blair was becoming convinced that a ground option was vital and made his own trip to NATO headquarters in mid-April -- just before NATO's queasy 50th anniversary summit meeting and again just afterward -- to discuss such an option.

While Mr. Clinton asked Mr. Blair in a telephone call to stop pressing publicly for a ground invasion before the summit meeting, the two men met with top officials during the meeting for a serious discussion of an invasion and approved joint planning for one, though it is not clear, some officials said, whether the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Henry Shelton, was informed.

General Clark was given quiet authorization by the NATO secretary general, Javier Solana, after conversations with Mr. Berger, to begin to discuss ground options. And Mr. Clinton was said to have decided that a ground war, if it had to happen, would not be "a half effort," one official said.

By mid-May, General Clark had come up with his plan, and it was treated skeptically by the Pentagon, which was still unwilling to authorize the use of Army Apache helicopters over Kosovo. Still, with Mr. Blair pressing Mr. Clinton and the apparent failure of the air war to drive Mr. Milosevic out of Kosovo, Mr. Solana was authorized to have General Clark work out a modified, detailed invasion plan. Mr. Clinton again had to ask Mr. Blair, in strong terms, to stop his government's public campaign for a ground option.

But in a photo opportunity on May 18, Mr. Clinton pointedly said that "all options are on the table," and within days, General Clark was in Washington going over his plan with the Joint Chiefs. Mr. Clinton approved positioning up to 45,000 NATO troops (including 7,500 Americans) in Macedonia, to serve as part of a NATO occupation force for Kosovo if Belgrade capitulated, but as the core of a potential invasion force if not.

Pressed again by the British, President Clinton sent Mr. Cohen to a secret meeting with his counterparts from Britain, Germany, France and Italy. At the meeting in Bonn, on May 27, the ministers decided their governments would have to decide whether to assemble a ground force for an invasion, and do so pretty quickly.

So the officials, including General Clark, reacted with enormous distrust and skepticism to clear signals coming from Belgrade as early as May that Mr. Milosevic was interested in discussing a deal. Despite all of NATO's public claims that Mr. Milosevic's army was being badly hurt, NATO generals understood that the army was well dug in and was not going to be bombed out of Kosovo. Increasingly, therefore, NATO strikes were aimed at putting political pressure on Mr. Milosevic and his regime by bombing civilian targets like bridges, roads, heating plants and electrical power stations.

"We knew he would have to capitulate sometime," one senior Western official said. "The only question was when. And no one expected him to cave in so soon."

Mr. Milosevic's acceptance of NATO's terms hit Washington with a shock early on June 3, and General Clark and others evinced great skepticism, convinced that Belgrade was just trying to buy time and short-circuit any invasion.

But senior Yugoslav officials have said that Russian support for NATO's terms, the prospect of more intensive air strikes against Belgrade's bridges and electrical and water systems, and perhaps most important, the understanding that a ground invasion was imminent were enough for Mr. Milosevic, who had won some important diplomatic shifts in NATO's stand.

Important for him, the United Nations would sanction the peace and control Kosovo, not NATO; Russian troops would be among the peacekeepers, and Kosovo was acknowledged to be a sovereign part of Yugoslavia. "It was the best moment for Milosevic to agree and save himself," one official said.

"In the end, the president concluded that he could not risk losing the war, and he was therefore prepared to send ground forces into Kosovo to assure a NATO victory," Mr. Daalder said. "But why did he and his advisers arrive at this conclusion so late into the war? Why did they not consider what might happen if Milosevic did not immediately cave when the bombing started? Indeed, why go to war if you're not prepared to go all the way?"

Some have contended that Kosovo has shown the possibility of winning a war with air power alone. But Mr. Daalder and numerous officials suggest that key to the psychology of Mr. Milosevic's decision was the prospect, real at last, of a ground war that he could not win and that would have decimated his army and police, two of the pillars on which his regime clearly rests. And one of the great security problems of the Balkans, as Mr. Milosevic holds on to power, these same officials say, remains his army and police, which he was able to withdraw nearly intact from Kosovo, precisely because NATO failed to destroy them from the air.

 

[8] Kosovo's Unquenched Violence Dividing U.S. and NATO Allies
The New York Times March 12, 2000 Section 1; Page 1; Column 1; Foreign Desk By JANE PERLEZ – WASHINGTON

Nine months after they declared victory in the war over Kosovo, Washington and its NATO allies are fighting among themselves over how to keep a deteriorating situation in the Serbian province from spinning out of their control.

Since June, tens of thousands of alliance troops and a United Nations' administration have failed to prevent de facto partitioning of Kosovo or continued ethnic bloodshed. The threat of more violence is intensifying as both Serbs and Albanians try to foment unrest across the border with Serbia proper. The problems are provoking mounting criticism from Congress -- even envisaging possible American withdrawal -- as well as reluctance from NATO allies to keep troops in Kosovo and pleas for more money from an underfunded United Nations mission struggling to keep the peace.

At the same time, administration officials acknowledge that an overriding priority is to avoid American casualties and keep Kosovo out of the news during an election year. One administration official, who served in Bosnia, said that the driving force behind the policy now is to keep it "off the front page."

The situation has frayed to the point where Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright met Friday with European allies at NATO headquarters to discuss how to avoid what she called a "hot spring" of new violence. The meeting yielded no statements about planned alliance action, although Dr. Albright's spokesman, James P. Rubin, said she was confident that more European troops were being found for Kosovo.

Mr. Rubin said he would be in Kosovo next week "to urge restrained behavior on the part of the Kosovo Albanians." But similar warnings from Dr. Albright herself, and from NATO commanders, have failed to quell unrest in an Albanian-dominated area of southern Serbia bordering eastern Kosovo.

Over all, administration officials acknowledge that they are finding Kosovo much harder than Bosnia, where a peace agreement with the force of international law was signed by the belligerents to end a war in which all sides were worn down after three and a half years of fighting.

In Kosovo, a vague United Nations resolution formally concluded hostilities, leaving the status of the Serbian province in limbo and a weak United Nations mission in control of Albanians and Serbs seeking revenge against one another.

Despite the presence of about 37,000 NATO-led troops in Kosovo, the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, has continued to meddle in northern Kosovo, and elements of the Albanians' secessionist Kosovo Liberation Army are stirring new trouble on the border of eastern Kosovo.

At the same time, the division of the city of Mitrovica -- with Serbs in the north, Albanians in the south and barbed wire between them -- leaves Kosovo effectively partitioned, something the Clinton administration has vowed it will not accept.

The administration's concern over avoiding American casualties was only heightened last month when G.I.'s sent into northern Mitrovica were forced to retreat before a stone-throwing crowd of Serbs.

Since then, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Henry H. Shelton, has placed restrictions on how the 5,000 American soldiers in Kosovo can be deployed, even though they are under NATO command. He followed up with a surprise visit on Tuesday to the American troops in eastern Kosovo to seek reassurances that the risk to the troops had been minimized.

In a further indication of distress in Washington about Kosovo, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John W. Warner, said he would seek to withhold half of the $2 billion appropriation for American troops in Kosovo unless European nations increased their financial contributions to the United Nations efforts there.

"What has the coalition achieved?" Mr. Warner asked in the Senate on Thursday, referring to the United States and NATO. The military had stopped the large-scale fighting, he said, but added: "Unacceptable, dangerous levels of criminal activity continue, and put our troops at constant risk. Precious little other progress has taken place in Kosovo."

Mr. Warner said that if President Clinton could not certify that the Europeans had met their commitments in Kosovo, he would call for the remaining $1 billion to be used for a "safe, orderly and phased withdrawal" of American soldiers.

The White House spokesman, Joe Lockhart, said the administration did not believe that any of the money for American troops should depend on whether the Europeans contributed more to Kosovo. "We share the overall objective that the Europeans should do their fair share," he said. "The Europeans have done more recently, and it is our hope that we can move forward with this money without any contingencies."

At NATO headquarters in Belgium, the commander, Gen. Wesley K. Clark, who is in a battle with the Pentagon over how to save the situation in Kosovo, has asked the 19 allies for more troops. Given Washington's reluctance to expose American soldiers to danger, however, other nations are also hanging back.

Only three NATO countries -- Britain, France and Denmark -- allow their troops in Kosovo to be deployed quickly, wherever they are needed in the province, without prior consultation with their capitals, NATO officials said.

General Clark has argued that troop levels in Kosovo have dropped too much as some nations have already withdrawn soldiers. He has told the North Atlantic Council, the decision-making body of NATO, that he needs more soldiers and more flexibility in how they are deployed. NATO forces are being reinforced in Mitrovica, where 16 French peacekeepers were injured this week.

So far, according to NATO officials, no nation has come forward with more troops. The French, who promised an extra battalion of soldiers two weeks ago, have now made that offer contingent on other nations' coming forward too, they said.

"Nations don't want to expose their people to particular dangers," the chief United Nations administrator, Bernard Kouchner, a Frenchman, said after the French troops were injured. "The reaction of governments is to withdraw their troops" in such a situation, he said.

The Pentagon spokesman, Kenneth Bacon, said that the administration expected the French to "live up to their commitment." He added, "It's important that everybody work together, police and military forces, to provide the troops we need, the people we need on the ground to maintain stability."

General Clark has asked NATO countries to contribute troops to a "multinational specialized unit" -- the euphemism for a riot control unit -- and to an intelligence-gathering unit, NATO officials said. The riot control unit has been considered too risky, and intelligence gathering is something that NATO nations have been reluctant to do under the alliance umbrella, though such a unit does operate in the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Bosnia.

To try to restore some authority in Mitrovica, Mr. Kouchner -- with the backing of the Clinton administtration -- has appointed a retired American general, William L. Nash, as the civilian administrator there. Officials said General Nash, who commanded American troops in Bosnia in 1995 and 1996, has been chosen for his military background and his ability to bring disparate groups together.

But Mr. Kouchner said that while naming a new administrator was important, the appointment of one individual was unlikely to bring fundamental change to Mitrovica.

Senior administration officials who run the Kosovo policy publicly defend the situation, noting especially that the 800,000 Kosovo Albanians who fled a wave of Serbian repression that claimed thousands of lives and destroyed tens of thousands of homes have returned to lives that are better now than before the war.

"They did not freeze during the winter; construction went on," a senior administration official said. The official also pointed to the $2.6 billion that Congress appeared prepared to approve for the military and civilian operations in Kosovo.

Asked about the overall situation, Mr. Rubin, the State Department spokesman, said that "we will be urging patience and time to meet the extremely difficult objectives."

One administration hope is that Mr. Kouchner's civilian authority will get all the money it needs from European countries that pledged billions of dollars last year.

Senator Warner said on Thursday that the Europeans should provide 2,000 more policemen for Kosovo to cope with violence that ranges from revenge killings to rampant smuggling.

But Mr. Kouchner said that while he desperately wanted more police, it was not clear that the police alone could quickly solve the problems stemming from deep bitterness between Albanians and Serbs.

For the moment, NATO officials said it was difficult to see how the effective partitioning of Mitrovica -- and hence of Kosovo -- could be reversed. It took 21 armored vehicles and large numbers of NATO-led troops just to return 40 Albanians to their homes on the northern side of Mitrovica, although more have since returned under lighter escort.

But if Kosovo is not kept in one piece, as the Albanians have insisted and as the administration had pledged, the relations between NATO and the Albanian community will worsen, the officials said. "The Albanians will feel we have betrayed them," a senior NATO official said, "and will turn against us."

Much as the Serbian authorities singled out educated Albanians before and during the NATO air campaign, now Albanians are singling out the dwindling number of educated Serbs in an effort to expel all Serbs from the province, Mr. Kouchner said.

As an example of the increasing difficulties faced by Serbs in Albanian-dominated towns, he told the story of a Serbian gynecologist who chose to stay in his town, Gnjilane, after the war ended. The doctor, Josef Vasic, was one of two remaining Serbian doctors in the city, the American troops' main Kosovo base, and was shot and killed one Sunday morning as he left his clinic. He had spent much of his professional life treating Albanian women, and was one of the moderate Serbs working with Mr. Kouchner to try to build a functioning multiethnic Kosovo. "He was my best ally," said Mr. Kouchner, who founded the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders. "His death was one of the most horrible defeats. We were not able to protect him."

[9] NATO Secretary General's Report Claims Successes in Kosovo
The New York Times March 22, 2000 Section A; Page 11; Column 1; Foreign Desk By SUZANNE DALEY  BRUSSELS

One year after NATO began its 78-day bombardment of Kosovo, the alliance's secretary general issued a report today highlighting what he said were the unsung accomplishments of the campaign.

In recent weeks, the United States and its NATO allies have been fighting among themselves over how to keep a deteriorating situation in the Serbian province of Kosovo from spinning out of control. And critics of the NATO campaign have said that the bombing had resolved little and exacerbated ethnic tensions while destroying large parts of Yugoslavia.

In his report, titled "Kosovo One Year On," the secretary general, Lord Robertson, appeared to be trying to pre-empt a harsh review of the NATO offensive when tensions between Serbs and Kosovo's majority Albanians are rising again.  He said the difficulties should not obscure the successes of the mission so far, including the resettling of 1.3 million refugees, the reopening of hundreds of schools and a drastic reduction in crime.

In June 1999, the report said, there were 50 killings a week in Kosovo. Today, there are about five a week.  "It is much too early to claim a complete success," Lord Robertson said at a news conference at NATO headquarters here. "But it is also far too early to have claimed that we failed. No one can be satisfied with the situation in Kosovo today but it's wrong to say that nothing is going right."

The 20-page report, issued three days before the anniversary of the day when the first bombs were dropped on Kosovo, says that the NATO force there has cleared mines or unexploded ordnance from more than 16,000 houses, 1,165 schools and almost 1,250 miles of roads. They have also distributed more than one million roofing tiles, 18,000 stoves and 4,000 truckloads of firewood to Kosovo homes and villages. More than 43,000 people have received medical treatment at NATO clinics in Kosovo.

NATO and Pentagon officials have grown increasingly worried about the potential for renewed fighting in Kosovo, particularly by Kosovo Albanian fighters using the relative security of NATO's peacekeeping zones to carry out strikes against Serbs in Serbia, just across the southeastern border of Kosovo.

In Prague today, the NATO commander, Gen. Wesley Clark of the United States, rejected the contention that little had been resolved in Kosovo.  "The level of violence has come down remarkably, and what remains is primarily organized crime and family violence," the general said.

He said the idea that there is a situation in Kosovo now "that resembles the situation before the air strikes is absolutely incorrect."  The general said that before the air strikes, the Serbs had conducted a systematic government-sponsored campaign of intimidation, repression and selective elimination of Kosovo Albanians.

General Clark said that there is still a high incidence of crime in the ethnically divided city of Mitrovica and other places in Kosovo, but that it is lower than the crime rate in Moscow, for example.  He said that the NATO peacekeepers had been successful in cutting some supply lines of Kosovo Albanian "extremists" who were trying to stir up fighting in southern Serbia.