Fighting reaches new level

U.S. troops under fire near border

U.S. troops came under fire from Yugoslav forces along the border between Macedonia and Kosovo yesterday as NATO allies began the second week of bombing against military targets across Yugoslavia.

The shooting - the first ground encounter since bombing began March 24 - involved U.S. Army soldiers on a reconnaissance patrol as part of a leftover force organized by the United Nations seven years ago to prevent Balkan violence from spilling into Macedonia. The Pentagon said three of the U.S. soldiers were missing yesterday night, possibly abducted by Yugoslav soldiers or police who, U.S. defense officials said, opened fire from the Kosovo side of the border.

Despite suggestions from some member countries and an appeal from Pope John Paul II that the aerial assault be halted for Easter, the NATO alliance agreed late Tuesday to forge ahead with the bombing campaign and expanded the target list, settling in for what senior officials said will be a long and grim campaign that offers the only hope of an acceptable outcome for the rebellious province of Kosovo.

Under the commanders' new authority, NATO planes struck yesterday at the headquarters of Yugoslavia's Special Unit Corps, an elite group similar to the U.S. Special Forces. The facility is "the closest to downtown Belgrade that has been struck to date," Pentagon spokesperson Kenneth Bacon said.

The air campaign continued to be hampered by cloud cover over the Balkans, however, and there was no indication that Yugoslav security forces have relented in what allied officials described as a campaign of forced exile against the civilian population. Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the dominant republic of the remnant Yugoslavia, is about 90 percent populated by ethic Albanians, different in language and religion from the ruling Serbs.

Officials here and at NATO headquarters expressed particular alarm about reports that as many as 50,000 Kosovo civilians and rebel guerrillas confined in the Pagarusa Valley - in the Malisevo region 30 miles southwest of Pristina, the provincial capital - are being shelled by Yugoslav artillery and tank fire from the hills above.

Allied officials acknowledged that their information about conditions in Kosovo is fragmentary and second hand - a dearth of conformable facts underscored by reports yesterday that two Kosovo Albanian leaders reported by NATO last week to have been executed are alive. Nevertheless, State Department spokesperson James Rubin said, "I think that there should be no doubt in anybody's mind that there are terrible, terrible things going on in Kosovo, with men being executed, women being raped and hundreds of thousands of people being forcibly removed from their homes."

Photographs of families uprooted from their homes and loaded on trains for deportation evoked stark images of World War II and stoked fears among officials and rights groups that atrocities are being committed on a massive scale. Assistant Secretary of State Julia. Taft said yesterday the estimated 107,000 Kosovo civilians who have fled or been deported since the bombing started "are the lucky ones."

At the same time, news agencies reported from Albania that the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army, outnumbered and fighting for its life against superior Serbian firepower, has been stopping refugee convoys at the border and sending young men back to join its forces.

Almost from its inception, the bombing campaign has amounted to a race between Serb-run Yugoslav security forces trying to crush all challengers in the province and NATO aircraft trying to hinder them. After a week, alliance officials acknowledged that government efforts to crush the rebels and their supporters are outpacing the impact of the air strikes. But they expressed hope that NATO's decision to expand the campaign to include targets in Belgrade itself might break Serbia's grip on the province.

Still, the heavy cloud cover that has obstructed NATO warplanes on all the but the first day of the seven-day-old attack continued to plague the operation. Because of the bad weather, for instance, NATO was unable to launch strikes against the artillery and tanks that alliance authorities said were involved in the shelling of the Albanians at Malisevo.

All in all, one senior officer deeply involved in the NATO operation estimated that bad weather and other considerations had forced cancellation of up to half of the planned attacks by strike aircraft. British Harrier jets, which were expected to play an important role in hitting targets in the field, were compelled to turn back without dropping bombs on four of the first six evenings, according to NATO officials.

The cloud cover also has handicapped NATO intelligence-gathering efforts. "We have not been able to track some things as well as we would like," Bacon said.

Impeded by the weather from dropping many laser-guided bombs that require a line-of-sight to the target, NATO forces have had to rely more on satellite-guided cruise missiles. But defense officials said stocks of air-launched cruise missiles have dwindled to fewer than 100, a worrisome level, as a result of heavy use during the operation against Yugoslavia and during last December's airstrikes against Iraq. The Navy still has more than 1,100 ship-launched cruise missiles, but these carry only about half the explosive mass of the air-launched version.

White House spokesperson Joe Lockhart announced that President Clinton has authorized $50 million in cash assistance and surplus military supplies for the growing international effort to aid the refugees. Taft said governments and volunteer agencies, anticipating trouble in Kosovo, have developed a "pipeline of assistance" sufficient to care for 400,000 people for six months.

Russia, which has strongly opposed the bombing and sought to stop it, announced that it will dispatch a Black Sea Fleet reconnaissance ship to the Mediterranean on Friday, and that six other ships are being readied to set sail through the Bosporus. President Boris Yeltsin and other senior officials have said they have no intention of getting involved in the war, but fury over the bombardment of a traditional ally appears to be mounting across the political spectrum.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov emerged from a six-hour meeting with Milosevic bearing a vaguely-worded peace initiative that was promptly rejected as inadequate by the United States and other NATO members. Yesterday Primakov accused NATO of having made up its mind to reject his initiative no matter what its results, and vowed to continue the search for a negotiated settlement.

U.S. officials and diplomats from European countries, both NATO members and otherwise, said the fast-moving Yugoslav campaign of repression and forced exile has left the allies with no good choices in Kosovo.

"There is no short term solution to the fact that the Kosovar Albanians are outgunned by the Serbs," one senior U.S. official said. "So you pound the Serbs. What else are you going to do? If there's no bombing, the Serbs will destroy the Kosovars anyway."

04-01-99