WASHINGTON -- With mounting accounts of atrocities in Kosovo, NATO aircraft and naval vessels yesterday focused more of their firepower on military sites in the beleaguered province, aiming at those Serbian forces responsible for the widespread killings of Kosovar Albanians.
"We have begun our operations against field forces in Kosovo," said British Air Commodore David Wilby, an allied spokesman in Brussels, Belgium, pointing to one attack on a Yugoslav motorized infantry brigade that operates near Pristina, the capital of Kosovo.
At the same time, thousands more Kosovar Albanians were forced to flee Kosovo, overwhelming border areas in Albania and Macedonia. Between 80,000 and 100,000 refugees have left Kosovo since the latest Serb offensive began last week.
Reuters reported early today that an Australian aid agency said that nine people were killed when NATO bombs dropped on Yugoslav military targets severely damaged two of its refugee centers housing women and children.
Amid reports of hundreds of executions of Kosovar Albanian civilians in Kosovo, the Clinton administration yesterday accused the Serbs of engaging in genocide and characterized President Slobodan Milosevic as a war criminal.
"Events in Kosovo obviously are being directed from Belgrade," said State Department spokesman James P. Rubin.
Beyond targeting Serbian troops in the field, the United States and its allies have not altered their strategy of launching daily air assaults against other Serbian targets.
The bombings have centered on barracks, ammunitions sites and supply centers, because air defenses have not been knocked out and the thousands of Serbian army troops and police units have proved an elusive target.
"There aren't huge concentrations of troops in the sense of massed armies that we encountered, say, in World War II," said Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon. "So that is a complicating factor."
Bacon contended that the attacks are reducing the Yugoslav ability to sustain operations. "And it may take some time to see that," he said. "But we are making progress in choking off the ability to operate."
Serb troops in Kosovo
Some 20,000 Serb troops are operating inside Kosovo, with 20,000 more poised outside the province, Bacon said.
They are equipped with tanks and armored personnel carriers. Thousands more special police are aiding in the ethnic cleansing, officials said.
"We've started first with the infrastructure and supply lines," Bacon said. "And we will move as quickly as we can to the actual forces."
The first phase of the airstrikes centered on Yugoslav's sophisticated and widespread air-defense system, and the second phase is focusing on the army troops and police units.
Officials said yesterday that NATO military planners have developed plans for a possible third phase, to be used if planners conclude that the humanitarian crisis in Kosovo has spun out of control.
In the third phase, the allies would pummel the province with more -- and less precise --bombs, a last-ditch effort that would pose a greater risk to civilians, to try to save them from Yugoslav troops.
"That's a more dire step," said one Pentagon official. "That's always a possibility."
Facing mounting pressure to consider sending ground troops to the province, White House aides have hinted that NATO has more firepower to unleash in its air war.
"There are further plans for additional sets of targets depending on what's happening on the ground," a high-ranking White House official confirmed.
No plans for NATO troops
Despite the increasingly bloody repression in Kosovo, Bacon reiterated the administration stance that there are no plans to send in NATO ground troops. British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook echoed those comments.
"It is not our intention to commit ground forces, and there has been no change in that intention," Cook said yesterday.
If there were a decision to dispatch allied troops, said Bacon, the Pentagon spokesman, it would take up to a month to amass the several hundred thousand troops that would be needed.
"There is no magic military bullet here," Bacon said. "There is not a quick solution."
Albanian spokesman killed
Reports continued to flow out of Kosovo about more killings, looting and burning of villages.
Fehmi Agani, a moderate ethnic Albanian voice in Kosovar politics who helped negotiate the peace accord in Rambouillet, France, was executed Sunday after attending the funeral of a prominent Kosovar human rights lawyer who also had been executed, officials said.
Wilby, the NATO military spokesman, said four other prominent Kosovar Albanians were executed Sunday. NATO officials spoke of refugees being herded into a makeshift "concentration camp" in a munitions plant, where they are apparently being used as human shields.
Reports from officials in Albania and Macedonia say thousands of refugees -- up to about 4,000 an hour -- are streaming into those countries. Nearly all the refugees have been women, children and the elderly, with young men having been separated and feared killed.
"This afternoon, we heard young girls are being picked out," said Panos Moumtzis, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. "The soldiers are saying they're looking for pretty young girls."
Primakov sent to Belgrade
Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin dispatched Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov to Belgrade to try to coax Milosevic back to the negotiating table.
Administration officials say there is little chance of that occurring.
But there are concerns that a diplomatic initiative that stops short of NATO goals could attract support from alliance members who are less stalwart about the bombing campaign, namely Greece and Italy.
The allies have said that Milosevic must stop the slaughter, pull back his forces from Kosovo and agree to a peace framework.
Reports from Kosovo Liberation Army soldiers, filtered through their relatives in the U.S., say the sixth consecutive day of NATO bombing has continued with ferocity. In Podujevo, a Kosovo town on the Serbian border, a KLA soldier said NATO bombed army troops Sunday night. But the soldier had no idea whether the campaign had been successful.
"He just said there was bombing and bombing and bombing, all night," said Naim Celaj, who spoke yesterday with his cousin on the front lines.
NATO also reportedly bombed Serbian police headquarters -- called local commands -- around Kosovo.
Albanians on the ground said the local command in Pristina, one of the larger outposts, was hit Sunday night.
One of the major attacks on Sunday night was centered on an army unit in the south, said British Commodore Wilby, the allied spokesman.
"We struck a deployed combat unit which participated in ethnic cleansing and other deplorable activities in south Kosovo," he said.
Isuf Hajrizi, editor of an Albanian-American newspaper in New York, has been receiving reports from inside Kosovo.
"The people on the ground don't know what's happening -- they have no way of knowing," Hajrizi said. "They hear explosions, they see fireballs, the ground shakes -- as far as they know, there's bombing going on, but they have no way of knowing if the NATO airstrikes are hitting the targets."
Jamie Shea, a NATO spokesman, said the phase-two campaign is a "methodical, systematic and progressive air campaign to strip the Serb leadership bare of their military capabilities."
The allies sent additional aircraft to the area to bolster their operations, particularly in Kosovo. Five B-1B Lancer bombers flew to Europe from Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota.
In addition, the United States is sending five more radar-attacking EA-6B Prowlers to the area.
Bacon also said officials are considering sending in Apache attack helicopters for possible future use in Kosovo.
The British are sending an additional four Harrier jets to take part in operations.
The Royal Air Force is also preparing to send eight Tornadoe aircraft.
Relief agencies
International Response Fund
P.O. Box 37243
Washington, D.C. 20013
Telephone: 1-800-HELP-NOW
Spanish: 1-800-257-7575
CARE
151 Ellis St. NE
Atlanta, GA 30303-2426
Telephone: 1-800-521-2273
P.O. Box 17090
Baltimore, MD 21203-7090
Telephone: 1-800-736-3467
Church World Service
28606 Phillips St.
P.O. Box 968
Elkhart, IN 46515
Phone: 1-800-297-1516, Ext. 222
Doctors Without Borders
6 East 39th St., 8th Floor
New York, NY 10016
Telephone: 1-888-392-0392
Lutheran World Relief
Church Street Station
P.O. Box 6186
New York, NY 10277-1738
Telephone: 1-800-597-5972
Oxfam America
Kosovo Relief Fund
26 West St.
Boston, MA 02111
Telephone: 1-800-77OXFAM
Save the Children
P.O. Box 975
54 Wilton Road
Westport, CT 06880
Telephone: 1-800-627-4556
243-5075
U.S. Committee for UNICEF
333 East 38th St.
New York, NY 10016
1-800-FOR-KIDS
Sun staff writer Ellen Gamerman contributed to this article.
Pub Date: 3/30/99