Hours after two Yugoslav MiG-29 fighters were shot down when they tried to attack NATO peacekeeping troops in neighboring Bosnia, seven huge explosions rocked Belgrade on Friday as the alliance pressed its campaign to force Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to end assaults on ethnic Albanians in the southern province of Kosovo.
NATO launched its heaviest attacks yet Friday, the third day of the allied air assault, but there were no signs of Milosevic yielding. Besides the warplanes dispatched to neighboring Bosnia in an ominous escalation of the conflict, new reports emerged of roundups, killings and the torching of ethnic enclaves in Kosovo as Serb police and paramilitary gangs stepped up attacks on the Kosovar Albanians.
Yugoslav Foreign Minister Zivadin Jovanovic vowed the Serb campaign in Kosovo would not end, despite the escalating NATO air raids. Jovanovic said the ethnic Albanians had the same rights as all of Yugoslavia’s citizens, but that exceptions had to be made for “terrorists,” Belgrade’s term for Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas fighting Serbian rule.
“They should be eliminated, as terrorists are in any other country. Terrorists have to be neutralized. The government . . . certainly cannot tolerate terrorism that is endangering the lives of its citizens,” Jovanovic said.
Jovanovic rejected repeated U.S. and Western entreaties for Yugoslavia’s Serbian leadership to agree to NATO’s terms for peace. From Yugoslavia’s perspective, Jovanovic said, the Kosovo accord signed by the Albanians after recent negotiations in France was dead. While there were no reliable reports of casualties, Jovanovic said hundreds of people had been killed and wounded.
The air-to-air combat over Bosnia came as NATO opened its first round of daylight bombing attacks in Yugoslavia.
NATO officials had been concerned since the air attack opened three days ago that Milosevic might use rockets or planes to attack the more than 30,000 NATO peacekeepers stationed in neighboring Bosnia. The two MiG-29s were downed in northeast Bosnia by alliance fighters that have been patrolling a “no-fly” zone established under Bosnia peace accords. At first, NATO said the pilots had been captured, but later the alliance said it was still searching for them.
NATO chiefs had warned Milosevic at the outset of the campaign that he would be making a “grave error” if he attacked the NATO ground forces in retaliation for the air campaign. The apparent response was swift and carried the air attack much closer to the center of Belgrade. Most previous attacks have targeted military facilities in the suburbs or distant military installations.
Counting the two Yugoslav warplanes shot down over Bosnia, at least five MiG fighters had been destroyed, alliance officials said. All of NATO’s planes have returned safely to their bases, according to NATO spokesmen.
Pentagon and NATO officials issued their first damage estimates, saying that 50 targets had been hit in 400 sorties as the first few days of the campaign focused on Serbian air defense and support networks.
The NATO plan is aimed at degrading Milosevic’s army piece by piece until he agrees to stop the violence against the Kosovar Albanians and accept peace terms. Western military planners said that they would be shifting focus from buildings and equipment to Yugoslav soldiers and police units over the next few days because of the campaign of brutality against the Kosovar Albanians.
“There’s not going to be one knockout blow, but day after day, if he does not stop his genocidal attacks on the Kosovo people, we will take larger and larger lumps out of his military force,” said British Defense Secretary George Robertson in London.
In Washington, a Pentagon spokesman said the latest raids focused increasingly inside Kosovo. “We have been attacking MUP (special police) headquarters and VJ (Serb army) command posts in and around Kosovo,” said spokesman Ken Bacon.
In Brussels, NATO officials said their strategy rests largely on the hope that Serbian military commanders will pressure Milosevic to seek an end to the intense NATO bombing before it destroys their army and air defenses.
Asked what basis there was for such a hope, one senior NATO diplomat said, “There have been signs that the army was reluctant to get involved in Kosovo, and that it was forced by Milosevic to engage.”
Witnesses in the capital said the seven explosions triggered air raid sirens and set a cloud of flame across the city’s southwest horizon. By one count, there were 25 missile strikes in Belgrade’s suburbs. Panicky city dwellers abandoned their apartments and searched for cover underground.
Civil defense officials warned them to cover their faces with wet towels if they went outside, claiming toxic materials had been unleashed in the NATO attack on factories in two suburbs.
Reports from across the region indicated Milosevic’s initial reaction to the bombing campaign was to step up attacks on the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Refugees who moved into northern Albania told United Nations workers that Serbian forces had attacked the village of Goden on Thursday, setting almost all of it ablaze.
According to the UN officials, a group of 170 men, women and children were rounded up outside the local school in Goden.
“They said that the Serbian forces–we don’t know specifically what forces they were–went into the village and separated the men from the women and children,” said Kris Janowski, a spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva. “They alleged 20 of the men were executed and that they actually saw the bodies.” Some of the victims were intellectuals and school teachers, he said.
In Tirana, the capital of neighboring Albania, the local office of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said its monitors had seen the Kosovo villages of Rohovec and Babaj Boks ablaze. The European Union said it was growing increasingly concerned about the reports of atrocities across the region.
Ethnic Albanian sources in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, said there was gunfire in town all night long. They reported that a key political figure and a union leader were executed in the northern town of Kosovska Mitrovica.
In Washington, U.S. officials also expressed alarm at the atrocity reports. State Department spokesman James Rubin warned Yugoslav leaders that the U.S. was gathering evidence to prosecute Serbian leaders for war crimes.
As the widening conflict gripped the former Yugoslavia, tensions escalated in other nations of the Balkan region.
In Athens, Greece, some 15,000 protesters marched to the U.S. Embassy, chanting slogans including, “Clinton, Fascist, Murderer.”
Greece was the first NATO member to break ranks, calling Friday for the alliance to stop bombing and return to negotiations. In Italy, another alliance member ambivalent about the air campaign, Prime Minister Massimo d’Alema won support in Parliament to keep participating in NATO attacks but also to press for peace talks.
In Moscow, hundreds of protesters demonstrated for a second day outside the U.S. Embassy. The Russian government, which is not a member of NATO, said it would have no contact with the alliance until the airstrikes end.
In Bosnia, a U.S. Embassy spokesman said an employee of the U.S. diplomatic mission in the Bosnian Serb capital of Banja Luka was seriously injured Thursday when some 3,000 Bosnian Serb youths staged a violent demonstration.
Riot police were stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Skopje, capital of Macedonia, where demonstrators voiced their rage at America and NATO for a second straight day.
While there were no apparent diplomatic advances to report, Ukraine’s defense and foreign ministers were sent to Belgrade by President Leonid Kuchma to open negotiations aimed at ending the crisis. Defense Minister Olexander Kuzmuk and Foreign Minister Borys Tarasyuk were to meet with Milosevic on Saturday.
Kuzmuk, who frequently inspects Ukrainian peacekeepers deployed in Bosnia, strongly opposed the NATO action.
“This will be a long war, I tell you as a soldier,” he said Friday.
