-Caveat Lector-
from:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/1999-03/30/015r-033099-idx.html
<A HREF="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/WPcap/1999-03/30/015r-033099-idx.html">NATO Builds Forces for 24-Hour
Airstrikes</A>
-----
NATO Builds Forces for 24-Hour Airstrikes
Russian Prime Minister Announces Mission to Coax Milosevic Back Into
Talks
By Thomas W. Lippman and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, March 30, 1999; Page A01
The United States and its NATO allies dispatched more airplanes to
reinforce the relentless bombardment of Yugoslavia yesterday as military
commanders concluded the strikes have so far failed to deter what
officials described as a systematic attempt by the Yugoslav military to
subdue or exile the populace of the rebellious province of Kosovo.
Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon announced that the United States is
sending more bombers and electronic warfare aircraft as part of an
alliance-wide buildup. He said five B-1B bombers, five EA-6B Prowlers
and 10 tankers will join the fleet that has been pounding Yugoslavia
since Wednesday. The airstrikes continued last night and will henceforth
be conducted around the clock, according to British officials and NATO
spokesmen.
As reports multiplied of atrocities against Kosovo's civilian population
and tens of thousands of refugees streamed into neighboring countries,
Pentagon officials said they are considering deployment of Apache attack
helicopters in an effort to impede the tanks and troops that are
carrying out the assaults.
Britain also announced reinforcements, saying eight additional Tornado
fighter-bombers are being readied for deployment.
The announcement that more U.S. planes would be sent to support the air
campaign followed a White House meeting between President Clinton and
his senior defense and foreign policy advisers. After that session,
Clinton took advantage of a balmy afternoon to head for the golf links,
where he telephoned two key alliance leaders, British Prime Minister
Tony Blair and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
The additional deployments dramatized an apparent mismatch between
NATO's objectives -- to stop the humanitarian tragedy unfolding in
Kosovo -- and the tactics employed so far to achieve them. In that
light, the NATO supreme commander, Gen. Wesley K. Clark, sought
authorization over the weekend to hit additional targets to intensify
the punishment against President Slobodan Milosevic's government,
including the Defense and Interior ministries in downtown Belgrade where
the army and security police get their instructions.
His request was turned down as premature by NATO's political leadership.
But a senior U.S. official said Clark's request had "100 percent
support" from the Clinton administration, while other members of the
19-nation NATO alliance declined to endorse it.
As the air campaign intensified, so did Russian efforts to halt it.
Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, who canceled a visit to Washington a
week ago to protest the imminent start of the airstrikes, announced he
will fly to Belgrade today with his foreign, defense and intelligence
chiefs. He is expected to explore the possibility of a cease-fire with
Milosevic, the leader of the Yugoslav federation and of its dominant
republic, Serbia.
Milosevic has shown no signs of yielding to allied demands that he cease
his campaign against Kosovo, the southernmost province in Serbia whose
population is about 90 percent ethnic Albanian, people speaking a
different language and practicing a different religion from the Serbs
who rule the province. On the contrary, Milosevic's military and police
appeared to be waging what a senior U.S. official called a "scorched
earth campaign" to crush the Kosovo separatist challenge once and for
all.
News of the Primakov trip to Belgrade caught the Clinton administration
by surprise and caused some alarm here and in other allied capitals,
senior U.S. officials and NATO diplomats said.
Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, who spoke by telephone with
Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright yesterday and Sunday, stoked
the anxiety by telling reporters, "We are going to Belgrade not to save
somebody's face but to stop the aggression, to return to the negotiating
table."
The allied position is that the air campaign will cease only when
Milosevic pulls his security forces back from Kosovo and accepts a peace
plan based on extensive autonomy for the province but under continuing
Serb sovereignty.
Part of the administration's apprehension was based on the fact that
France -- which in the past has aligned itself with Russia in opposition
to Washington on key issues, such as Iraq -- encouraged the Primakov
initiative. French officials, however, said there is no breach between
Paris and the rest of the alliance. They cited a television address
yesterday by President Jacques Chirac, in which he accused Milosevic of
being responsible for "more than 200,000 deaths and millions of
displaced persons" in a decade of conflict in Yugoslavia.
"Europe cannot accept having on its territory a man and a regime" with
Milosevic's record, Chirac said. "Enough is enough."
Publicly, the United States and other alliance members welcomed the
Primakov initiative, saying that if the Russian leader succeeds in
persuading Milosevic to stop the campaign in Kosovo it will be good news
and that if he fails he might emerge more sympathetic to the need for
bombing.
"What we hope is that the Russians will be able to convince President
Milosevic that the only solution is for him to stop the offensive, stop
the crackdown and commit to a settlement based on the Rambouillet
accords," said State Department spokesman James P. Rubin, referring to
the chateau in France where in January the six-nation "contact group" --
including Russia -- presented the peace plan that the Kosovars accepted
but Milosevic rejected.
Chirac's categorical comments seemed to have come from the same word
processor as Vice President Gore's remarks yesterday at a fund-raising
luncheon in Chicago.
"This man, Milosevic, has started three wars already," Gore said. "He
uses the classic totalitarian technique of holding onto power by
stirring up hatred among his own people of anyone who is different,
different ethnically, different religiously, and then focusing that
anger into a frenzy of violence that results in the killing and abuse of
all those families. The airstrikes are designed to take away, as much as
possible, his ability to make war."
But accounts from the region reinforced the persistent fear that the
campaign of repression by Serb-run Yugoslav army and Interior Ministry
troops, although it began before the airstrikes, has only accelerated
since the NATO planes began to bomb.
In the first days after the air offensive began, aid officials and
relief workers expressed alarm that too few refugees were coming out,
rather than too many, in a possible sign that civilians were being
detained and subjected to violence. Now the concern is the opposite:
that Kosovo's population is being driven out en masse, in an apparent
effort by Milosevic to ensure that his control of the province will not
be challenged again.
"He's working very, very fast, trying to present the world with a fait
accompli, to change the demographics of Kosovo," Clark said in a Reuters
TV interview. "He's doing this very quickly."
"They weren't coming out, and I was quite concerned about that,"
Assistant Secretary of State Julia V. Taft said at a briefing here.
"Since then they are coming out, and they are being told they have to
get out, and if they don't get out they will suffer the consequences."
Taft said the United States is concerned by signs that Serb forces are
driving women, children and the elderly out of Kosovo while targeting
ethnic Albanian men and boys for retribution.
She said about 60,000 people crossed into Albania over the weekend,
bringing to more than 130,000 the total number of refugees who have fled
Kosovo in the past year, in addition to some 260,000 who have been
driven from their homes but remained in the embattled province. About
22,000 have fled to Macedonia, and as many as 30,000 have sought safety
in the Yugoslav republic of Montenegro, she said. More than 18,000
others had crossed into Albania before the latest crisis began March on
24.
The flood of refugees has contributed to fears in Washington and allied
capitals that the conflict in Kosovo will destabilize neighboring
countries as well.
"There's no question this is ethnic cleansing," Taft said. "There's no
question that decisions have been made to do a scorched earth policy."
In an effort to halt the crackdown in Kosovo, Clark was authorized over
the weekend to expand air operations to include strikes at Yugoslav
troops as well as air defense and other strategic targets. But even so,
Clark said yesterday, "We never thought we could stop this. You can't
conduct police actions from the air in any country."
Such comments have augmented calls from some analysts -- and from the
Kosovo rebel leadership -- for NATO to send ground troops, but U.S. and
other NATO officials reiterated that they have no such intention.
One official with access to bomb damage reports said the air attacks
have destroyed a "significant share" of Yugoslavia's repair facilities
for aircraft and missiles. They also damaged the country's
communications network "sufficiently to make timely communications more
difficult," the official said.
According to Bacon, allied bombs and missiles have struck police and
army barracks in several towns.
But a senior Yugoslav officer said his country's army suffered only
seven fatalities in the first five days of bomb and missile strikes. Lt.
Gen. Spasoje Smiljanic, commander of the Yugoslav air force and air
defense system, said the airstrikes have severely damaged several major
installations but left air defenses largely untouched, Reuters news
agency reported from Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital.
He said NATO struck military targets exclusively until Saturday, but
since then has hit schools, hospitals, refugee centers and other
civilian targets.
Blair, however, said in an interview with the BBC Serbian language
service, "We have taken every single precaution we can to limit the
civilian damage" -- unlike the Yugoslav troops, who he said are "going
out of their way to murder civilian people."
Having watched horrifying footage of civilians arriving in neighboring
countries after being rounded up by Yugoslav troops, Pentagon planners
were asked to come up with ways to escalate the air war. Air Force
officials concluded there was little they could do without deploying
planes and helicopters that fly closer to the ground and have a better
shot at hitting the soldiers and special police forces involved.
The planes added to the force yesterday will not resolve that lingering
problem. The B-1B is a supersonic bomber, not a fighter designed to
attack troops. The Prowlers are designed to confuse enemy radar systems.
Sending them is an indication that Pentagon officials remain concerned
by the threat posed by Yugoslav antiaircraft weapons.
Defense officials said they have been puzzled by the relatively little
response that allied aircraft have encountered from the Yugoslav network
of fixed and mobile antiaircraft missile sites, which has been described
as extensive and sophisticated.
"One hypothesis is, we're causing so much havoc by our bombing and
electronic suppression measures that they can't respond," said one
senior Pentagon official. "The other hypothesis is that the Yugoslavs
are a lot smarter than we thought, are a disciplined military and are
husbanding their resources until they need them."
Officials said there is evidence that Yugoslav authorities have taken
lessons from Iraq's experience in dealing with U.S., British and French
aircraft patrolling its skies since the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The
Yugoslavs have longstanding ties with Iraq, having helped construct a
military bunker system there starting in the 1970s.
NATO sources reported that a Yugoslav military delegation traveled to
Iraq earlier in February apparently to discuss measures to combat an
allied air campaign.
British and French officials, like their U.S. counterparts, insisted
that the NATO bombardment will continue as long as necessary. So,
apparently, will protests and demonstrations against it, which flared up
across again Europe as well as in Israel and New York. Thousands turned
out for rallies in Britain, Portugal, Romania and Greece, as well as in
the Czech Republic, where one man was shot to death when a protest
turned violent.
Staff writers Bradley Graham and William Branigin and correspondents
Daniel Williams and William Drozdiak contributed to this report.
� Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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