President Clinton on Monday vowed an “undiminished, unceasing and unrelenting” air campaign against Yugoslavia as NATO bombers, capitalizing on the best weather since airstrikes began nearly two weeks ago, unleashed a ferocious assault on Serbian targets, including the air-defense headquarters in Belgrade.
NATO military planners targeted Serbian ground forces, launching alliance warplanes and cruise missiles against fuel depots, bridges and military facilities throughout Yugoslavia, including the headquarters of the 3rd Army, a key military installation in southern Serbia used for launching operations in Kosovo. Also hit was a strategic bridge on a road connecting Kosovo with Montenegro, the other republic in Yugoslavia.
Speaking at the White House, Clinton declared the United States and its allies would not back down in Yugoslavia and pledged to reject any peace feelers from Yugoslavia without a return of ethnic Albanians to Kosovo.
“The ethnic cleansing of Kosovo cannot stand as a permanent event,” the president said. “We are prepared to sustain this effort for the long haul. Our plan is to persist until we prevail.”
The statement appeared to be part of an administration move to pre-empt any attempt by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to seek a settlement that would essentially leave him in control of a Kosovo purged of its majority ethnic Albanian population–a goal he may be close to accomplishing.
NATO officials estimate that more than 830,000 Kosovars, about half the population of ethnic Albanians, have been expelled from their homes in the past year by Serbian troops, with thousands more following each day.
Milosevic has made no public offer to end his assault on Kosovo, but Western officials saw signs he might be moving in that direction after Serbian state television aired a report purporting to show a top Milosevic aide discussing peace with moderate Kosovo Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova. Some Western experts suspected the videotape of Rugova was several years old.
NATO had earlier questioned a report that Rugova met last week with Milosevic, saying the Albanian leader was believed to be under house arrest. Underscoring the increasingly hard line in Washington, Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon warned that NATO would not let Milosevic achieve his goals in Kosovo and then agree to peace talks.
Bacon said NATO must prepare for the possibility that “after driving people out (of Kosovo), creating a crisis in the area . . . destabilizing surrounding countries and killing perhaps thousands of people, that (Milosevic) will say, `Now I’m ready to accept a peace.’ “
He said that although the air campaign was beginning to have some effect on Serbian operations in Kosovo, it has not slowed or blunted the drive by Serbian military and police units to force ethnic Albanians from the province.
In Belgrade, Milosevic brushed off the continued NATO barrage, defiantly promising to rebuild bomb-damaged structures and denouncing NATO “aggressors” and “criminals.”
As night fell, air raid sirens sounded in the Yugoslav capital, heralding the 13th straight night of NATO bombardment.
Two strong detonations were heard late Monday in the northern city of Novi Sad, the state news agency Tanjug said, and Serbian television showed pictures of a huge fireball. The private news agency Beta quoted Novi Sad’s mayor, Caslav Popovic, as saying the power station at the city oil refinery had been hit.
At the United Nations, Secretary General Kofi Annan accused Serbian forces of “shocking violations of human rights” in Kosovo.
Using some of his toughest language since the start of the crisis, Annan told Security Council members that “the brutal persecution the refugees and displaced persons are suffering, the loss of their family members, their homes and even documentation of their identities, underline the urgency of their plight.”
Clinton said the U.S. military would send 600,000 food-ration packs to help feed refugees in Macedonia in addition to 500,000 that already have begun to flow to refugees in Albania.
Western nations plan to help ease the refugee crisis by resettling 100,000 of the 831,000 ethnic Albanians that the UN now estimates are either on the move in Kosovo or living in mud and squalor in makeshift encampments in Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro. Clinton emphasized that the resettlement would be temporary, with the ultimate goal a return of Kosovars to their homeland.
The U.S. has promised to take in 20,000 of the refugees but has yet to decide where to send them. Mentioned as possibilities have been military bases in either Guam or Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, though an encampment once used to house Haitian and Cuban boat people at the Cuban facility has been dismantled and would have to be rebuilt.
Even so, there were mixed signals coming out of the Balkans over how welcome the emergency resettlement program would be. Macedonian officials, fearing the tide could lead to growing unrest, have closed their border to new refugees until at least some of the old ones are moved out.
In Albania, like Macedonia a land steeped in poverty, officials said Monday that they would not ask others to take in refugees who have arrived there, because dispersing them outside the region would only help further Milosevic’s aims.
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The first trickle of refugees was airlifted from Macedonia to Turkey on Monday, but the scene at Petrovec airport outside the Macedonian capital, Skopje, looked to some more like a forced deportation than a mercy mission.
Refugees said they were put on buses at Blace, which is near a no-man’s land at the border with Yugoslavia, driven to the airport and only then told where they were headed. The group was herded onto a Macedonian Boeing 737 aircraft under heavy police guard.
Stunned, many men and women burst into tears, and one man tried to flee, only to be forcibly put onto the plane by Macedonian police wearing hygienic masks and gloves.
“I’d love to come back home, but how can I do that from Turkey?” said one weeping young girl who had spent four days in the Blace field with other refugees who had been evicted at gunpoint from their homeland in Kosovo.
“No, no, no,” cried another girl.
That first plane later landed in Corlu in western Turkey, where the 150 refugees who disembarked, most reeking and unwashed after days of camping in the elements, were handed fresh fruit, sandwiches and chocolate.
One elderly woman had to be carried off the plane and taken to a waiting ambulance. Many of the refugees were elderly or women with young children. One was a 2-year-old boy whose parents had been lost; others were caring for him.
Zeki Sanal, a local provincial governor, said about 1,000 refugees were expected to arrive in Corlu over the first 24 hours of the airlift. He said more refugees were expected to arrive later as they came overland through Greece and Bulgaria.
As tens of thousands more refugees reach the borders of Kosovo and evidence grows of Serb atrocities against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, there is growing pressure for the United States and its allies to act to bring Milosevic to justice.
The NATO air campaign has been dogged by bad weather from the start, but attacks have intensified dramatically in recent days as skies over the Balkans have cleared.
At the Pentagon, Bacon said clearer skies have allowed U.S. and NATO warplanes to expand their targets and should permit damage assessment to be made within the next two days.
Bacon acknowledged that although the aerial campaign was beginning to have some effect on Serbian operations in Kosovo, the purge continues. He cited one aerial reconnaissance photograph that showed a group of Serbian armored personnel carriers and tanks herding large numbers of Kosovo refugees.
Bacon said the U.S. soon would move a major force of ground support aircraft–24 Apache anti-tank helicopters, backed up by support helicopters, M-1 main battle tanks and Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles–into Albania to deal with Serbian ground forces.
Because the airfield at Tirana, Albania’s capital, is being used for refugee relief, another base may have to be established for the Apaches in Albania, Bacon said. It may take two weeks, instead of a week to 10 days, before the helicopter gunships are operational there, he said.
On Monday, an advance crew of American soldiers worked late into the night next to Rinas airport outside the Albanian capital preparing a camp for some 6,000 U.S. troops who will coordinate a relief airlift for the Kosovar refugees streaming into the country.