-Caveat Lector- >From Wash (DC) Post Wave of Refugees Stirs Fears Of a New Balkan Nightmare By William Drozdiak Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, March 29, 1999; Page A01 BERLIN, March 28�As NATO warplanes carried out a fifth consecutive day of assaults against Yugoslavia, the Western alliance faced a grave new challenge: how to prevent a flood of ethnic Albanian refugees from Kosovo from destabilizing the fragile governments of Albania and Macedonia -- and possibly the rest of southeastern Europe. NATO has long feared that instability in Macedonia, a former member of the old Yugoslav federation and now an independent country, would trigger a scramble by its neighbors to grab chunks of territory they have long claimed. More than 400,000 Albanians live in Macedonia's western borderlands, prompting concerns that they might move to join a "greater Albania" encompassing Kosovo and Albania proper. Greece has contested even the legitimacy of Macedonia's name because of lingering border disputes. Bulgaria, which abuts both countries, also contains an volatile ethnic mixture that could explode if present borders crumble. Most of all, NATO officials fear that any Balkan upheaval involving Greece would inevitably draw in its arch-rival, Turkey, pitting two NATO militaries against one another. So far, NATO's response to the growing upheaval in Kosovo has been to ratchet up the level of bombing and embark on a second phase of the offensive that will emphasize targets related to the military crackdown in the Serbian province. Allied commanders said the primary sites to be struck over the next few days will include command and control centers and supply and ammunition dumps, as well as Yugoslav tanks and troop concentrations in Kosovo. But there are signs of fresh tensions between NATO military and political leaders over how to conduct the bombing campaign in a way that would address the humanitarian crisis more directly. U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO's supreme commander who is orchestrating the air campaign, has said he needs many more than 400 aircraft to carry out an effective bombing campaign to thwart Yugoslav security forces in the field and not just decimate air defenses, according to NATO sources. Several allied governments, including the United States, have pledged to dispatch at least two dozen more aircraft that could provide the kind of close air support needed to hamper ground actions. "If you want to stop what looks like genocide with just air power, you are going to need a lot more firepower so that you can go in hard and fast," said a senior NATO commander. "But that also involves some risks that we must be prepared to take if we want to achieve our goals." When the United States and its European allies launched the campaign of airstrikes last week, leaders on both sides of the Atlantic justified the action as necessary to prevent the crisis in Kosovo from spilling across international borders. Today, NATO political and military leaders sought to refute arguments that the airstrikes -- far from deterring Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic from waging a scorched-earth campaign through Kosovo -- had only intensified the misery and accelerated the exodus of ethnic Albanians, contributing to the very catastrophe that their policy was supposed to prevent. "Whether we bombed or not, Milosevic would have done this," Clark said in a telephone interview. "There was clearly a long-term plan worked out many months ago. We saw preparations well underway even before last month's peace negotiations, and they swung into high gear within the past two weeks." In Serbia's sister republic of Montenegro, whose government has tried to break from Milosevic's grip, Deputy Prime Minister Dragisa Burzan complained that the airstrikes were hardening attitudes against the West and only making Milosevic more popular. Despite sympathy for Montenegro's plight, NATO has targeted Yugoslav army and air defense facilities there to clear an attack path toward security forces in Kosovo. "The result of the bombing has been to radicalize things," Burzan said. "The psychological effect here and, to a much greater extent in Serbia, was the opposite to what [NATO] desired." In neighboring Macedonia, where 12,000 NATO troops originally destined to serve as Kosovo peacekeepers are based, the government has demanded full protection from the Western military alliance against any Yugoslav attacks or attempts to disrupt a delicate demographic balance that includes Muslim Albanians and Orthodox Christian Serbs. Senior U.S. officials said they have concluded beyond any doubt that the violent demonstrations this week at the U.S. Embassy in Skopje, Macedonia's capital, were organized and conducted by an ethnic Serb party acting on orders from Belgrade. "This was vintage Milosevic," said an American official with extensive experience in the region. Some military strategists, however, believe that NATO needs to take more drastic action by considering the use of special operations forces that could be flown in by helicopter to attack Serbian paramilitary forces that are conducting the most egregious atrocities. But that step is a giant leap for politicians fearful of public outcry against sending ground troops into the Balkans. Moreover, Kosovo's treacherous terrain and landlocked position make the logistical difficulties of sending in ground forces too immense to be bear serious consideration, many military analysts say. "Our best bet is to pray for good weather, hope their air defenses have been knocked out to a significant degree and send in attack helicopters and low-flying aircraft that can blast the hell out of these war criminals," a NATO official said. 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