WASHINGTON -- Despite reports of mounting Serbian atrocities inflicted on the civilian population of Kosovo, U.S. and NATO officials said yesterday that they will not concentrate their firepower on the police and army units carrying out those attacks until they have virtually neutralized Yugoslavia's air-defense system.
With eyewitness accounts of Serbian army and police units sweeping through Kosovo, burning villages, abducting political and intellectual leaders and executing civilians, U.S. and NATO officials found themselves on the defensive about the focus of the air attacks, which continued yesterday for the third consecutive day.
State Department spokesman James P. Rubin raised the prospect of a war crimes tribunal, warning, "The United States is extremely alarmed by reports of an escalating pattern of Serbian attacks on Kosovar Albanian civilians."
The administration defended the airstrikes and strongly denied charges that there is too little emphasis on stopping the attacks on the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
"Right now the United States government and its NATO allies are engaged in military operations directed at those Serbian forces that are conducting these kind of operations," Rubin said.
But a senior NATO diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, conceded that NATO forces are searching for a difficult balance between cautious military actions designed to protect their own pilots and riskier efforts to halt the slaughter.
"The true picture is, we are attacking military targets -- barracks, radar relay stations, fuel dumps -- which have a connection with the overall campaign," the diplomat said.
"But clearly," he added, "honesty has to say we're not at the stage where we're going after individual units that can target individual people or tanks that can target individual houses or individual artillery that can target individual villages."
NATO will have to reassess
As the carnage mounts and political pressure increases, NATO defense planners will have to reassess their strategy, possibly as early as this evening, he acknowledged.
Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said yesterday's strikes were again centered on air-defense systems, although the allies would be "gradually increasing" the targets in Kosovo.
Such targets would include army troops, police units, armored vehicles and support facilities. Bacon emphasized that the allies were neither stepping up the bombing campaign nor changing their strategy to focus more on Kosovo.
"The idea, basically, is to try to make the skies as safe as possible for our pilots so then they can begin concentrating on the next goal," an air attack on the Yugoslav forces in Kosovo, he said.
Both the Pentagon and NATO officials have said that more than half the targets in Operation Allied Force have been Yugoslavia's sophisticated air-defense systems, with other targets including Yugoslav army and special police support facilities in and around Kosovo.
First daylight raids
Yesterday's attacks, the first daylight raids in the campaign that began Wednesday, involved a single cruise missile fired from a U.S. Navy ship and a force of allied aircraft that included American B-52s and F-117 stealth bombers. The targeted air-defense systems include radar and missile sites and command-and-control centers.
Pilots often cannot find anti-aircraft missile batteries because Yugoslav forces refuse to activate air defense radars. On the second night of bombing, NATO officials say only one Yugoslav surface-to-air missile was fired, and it missed. In addition, many mobile missile batteries have been moved.
'A pretty good strategy'
As NATO planes scour the Yugoslavian countryside for air defenses, Serbian forces are apparently slaughtering civilians in Kosovo. If NATO sends its slow, low-flying planes such as the A-10 Thunderbolt II against troops, tanks and artillery that are assaulting Kosovo civilians, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic can unleash his air defenses with far more deadly results.
"It's a pretty good strategy," said Ivo Daalder, a Balkans expert with the Brookings Institution and a former White House National Security Council member.
Humanitarian groups and supporters of ethnic Albanians are pressing for the allies to devote more attention to curbing the atrocities in Kosovo.
'Sitting on the sidelines'
Yesterday, four groups issued a statement calling upon NATO to make "protection of civilians" the "priority of the current operation." The statement also called for the allies to "accelerate" plans for NATO ground troops that would safeguard the Kosovo Albanians.
"We're going to be sitting on the sidelines while the killing takes place," said James Hooper, executive director of the Balkan Action Council, a nonprofit, bipartisan group which signed the statement along with the International Crisis Group, Physicians for Human Rights and the Coalition for International Justice.
Hooper, a former State Department official who served as deputy director of the Office of East Europe and Yugoslav Affairs from 1989 to 1991, said Clinton administration officials have little interest in sending troops into a hostile situation.
NATO has said it would send in some 28,000 troops, including 4,000 Americans, after a peace agreement. While the Kosovo Albanians have agreed to the agreement which would give them greater autonomy, Milosevic has refused.
Growing alarm on Hill
On Capitol Hill, there is growing alarm about the way the mission is unfolding, particularly Milosevic's intensified attacks on the Kosovars.
"The suffering of the Kosovar people has been a matter of concern for all of us for a long time," said Missouri Republican Sen. John Ashcroft. "One of the concerns is that whatever we do, we don't make it more difficult to end, or prolong or intensify the suffering."
At secret briefings Thursday with administration officials, lawmakers raised a series of questions about the mission's goals, timetable, exit strategy and what Milosevic must do for the bombing to stop. Several emerged with complaints that their questions were not answered. Rep. Steny H. Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat and strong supporter of the airstrikes, scoffed at criticism of the bombing campaign.
"This attempted surgical stuff is difficult to do," he said, referring to the effort to knock out the air defenses. It may be even more difficult, he said, to use air power to stop Milosevic's actions against the Kosovars as his forces go village to village.
Hoyer said it would make little sense for Congress to start pressuring for changes in tactics. "What we need is a consistent, thorough, patient strategy, whether it takes 48 hours, or 72 hours, or two weeks or whatever it takes to achieve.
"At some point, we are going to have inflicted so much collateral damage that Milosevic won't be able to continue fighting," he said.
Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat, believes the intensified assaults "underscore the need to arm the Kosovars to protect themselves," according to his spokesman, Dan Gerstein.
Arms for Kosovars
Lieberman, co-sponsor of a bill to provide the Kosovars with $25 million worth of weaponry, is urging the administration to begin providing those arms immediately and is expected to step up that campaign in talk show appearances over the weekend.
"The senator is obviously troubled" by the heightened aggression against the Kosovars, but he understands NATO's determination to minimize damage to pilots before trying to stop that aggression, Gerstein said.
Analysts close to the Clinton administration say there is simply no will to risk American lives to save the Kosovars.
"The real dilemma is that we have such a low tolerance for casualties," said Robert Hunter, who served as U.S. ambassador to NATO from 1993 to 1998. "Strategically, Kosovo is just not all that important."
In a telephone interview, a State Department official in neighboring Macedonia said of Kosovo: "The situation has been deteriorating rapidly in the last two days."
Hooper, the former State Department official, said reports by relatives of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo tell of Serbian army troops and police going door to door, smashing televisions, ripping out telephones and taking away males.
Serbs are specifically targeting intellectuals and political leaders, he said.
"The killing has begun of the political leaders and the educated class in Kosovo," said Hooper. "It is a classic case of genocide."
The situation threatens to get worse. British Air Commodore David Wilby said NATO has learned that some 300 "hard-line Serbian prisoners" were released from prison and added to the ranks of Serbian paramilitary forces.
According to Daalder of the Brookings Institution, the the leader of Serbian paramilitary units that were heavily involved in genocidal operations in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995 may be ready to join the fray. He is Zeljko Raznatovic, alias Arkan, who was seen swaggering around a Belgrade hotel Thursday. Some of his followers were spotted in Pristina, the provincial capital of Kosovo, on the same day, Daalder said.
"We have very good reason to start getting very, very worried," Daalder said.
Sun staff writer Karen Hosler contributed to this article.
Pub Date: 3/27/99