WASHINGTON -- The United States began pushing its allies last night to approve a major expansion of military targets throughout Yugoslavia, hoping to inflict far more punishment on Yugoslavia even if it means more civilian casualties and more risk to NATO forces.
NATO leaders rejected an offer by President Slobodan Milosevic yesterday to pull some his troops out of Kosovo if the allies ended the bombing campaign.
President Clinton called the Serbian overture "unacceptable," reiterating his demands that Milosevic halt the slaughter, withdraw his forces and commit to a peace accord before the air campaign ends.
Instead, NATO leaders turned their attention toward ratcheting up the airstrikes one more time.
NATO's governing North Atlantic Counsel met last night to discuss moving to what diplomats and White House aides are calling "Phase 3" of the week-old bombing campaign.
If approved, possibly today, the bombing would hit such civilian targets as power stations and communication centers and significantly intensify airstrikes above the 44th parallel, an imaginary east-west line 60 miles south of the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade.
Gen. Wesley K. Clark, NATO's supreme commander, has formally asked the Pentagon for use of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier that is expected to reach the Mediterranean Sea this weeked, on its way to relieve the carrier USS Enterprise in the Persian Gulf.
Clark has made a compelling argument for the carrier, Pentagon sources said, to intensify the air campaign.
If the ship joins the air campaign, NATO's military might would be substantially bolstered by about 72 aircraft, including additional radar-striking EA-6B Prowlers, along with such strike aircraft as the F-14 Tomcat and the F/A-18 Hornet that could also target radar systems and do close-in bombing.
Meanwhile, NATO officials say, the atrocities inflicted by Serb forces against the Kosovar population continue to spiral out of control. NATO military officials learned yesterday that Serb forces were shelling displaced Kosovar Albanians as they trudged toward the borders of their province.
Nearly 120,000 Kosovars have fled to neighboring countries since the bombing began a week ago, said Jamie Shea, NATO's spokesman. He conceded that NATO war planners had not anticipated the dimensions of the humanitarian catastrophe that is unfolding.
At a two-hour briefing yesterday, Pentagon officials stunned senators by disclosing that they now expect that within days, up to 1 million refugees -- half the province's population -- will have fled Kosovo.
"We all know President Milosevic's record, but I think that even we have been shocked by the sheer proportions of what we see happening in Kosovo today," Shea said. "I don't think anybody could have anticipated that it would be quite as bad as it seems now to be becoming."
Clinton reasserted NATO's resolve to continue and to expand the air war over Yugoslavia, raising for the first time the prospects of independence for Kosovo, which is a province of Serbia.
Proclaiming that NATO allies are "united in our outrage," Clinton said, "If there was ever any doubt about what is at stake in Kosovo, Mr. Milosevic is certainly erasing it by his actions."
Clinton and NATO officials bristle at the suggestion that NATO airstrikes caused the Serbs to intensify their atrocities.
Sen. John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, came to the administration's defense.
"What if we had done nothing?" Warner asked. "What if NATO had stood by and done nothing, and the U.S.? We'd be watching the same pictures we're seeing today. We've done the best we can under very difficult conditions."
But after seven days, NATO diplomats have begun to concede that their initial battle plans are not thwarting Serbian efforts to "cleanse" Kosovo of its Albanian population, which, until the exodus began, had made up 90 percent of the province.
The NATO offensive "was not planned for this particular scenario," a NATO diplomat told reporters in Brussels, Belgium. "It was never conceived as a campaign to stop the total wipeout of a province. It was conceived as a means of leverage in peace negotiations."
Ambassador James W. Pardew Jr., the U.S. special representative for Kosovo implementation, said, "We are not surprised that there are refugees.
"What's shocking us is the size, scope, intensity and brutality of the military forces who are simply rampaging through large sections of Kosovo."
In the face of that brutality, prominent foreign policy voices have begun exhorting Clinton to put aside his fears of civilian casualties and begin targeting Serbia's civilian infrastructure, such as its roads, bridges and power grid.
Four prominent foreign policy activists, including Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, plan to announce their support today for deploying U.S. ground troops in Kosovo.
"They've got to go in and go in hard," said Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, noting derisively that rock concerts have been held in downtown Belgrade while NATO was supposedly at war. "It's time to take out the bridges and turn out the lights."
Meanwhile, military and State Department officials told senators in a closed-door meeting yesterday that they are surprised at the risk in which Milosevic is putting his military to press his ethnic-cleansing campaign against the Kosovar Albanians.
Vice Adm. Scott A. Fry, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the bombing that began last Wednesday and continues around the clock is "grinding away" at the Yugoslav air defense system, as well as ammunition dumps and aircraft repair factories.
Still, the weather has grown worse since the first strikes, and some bombing sorties have been canceled.
"The Serbians have two more allies: One of them is the geography, and the other is the weather," Fry said. "We knew from the start it was going to be difficult."
Despite the allied attacks, some 1,700 sorties, Fry said the air defense system, a web of radars, surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft artillery, is still too potent to allow slow, low-flying airplanes such as the A-10 Thunderbolt, a tank killer known as the "Warthog," to head into the region.
"Once you get below 15,000 feet, you are going to place our pilots at a tremendous amount of risk," he said.
Added Rear Adm. Thomas R. Wilson, director of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "It's not safe to go in there now."
Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov of Russia, which is a traditional ally of Serbia, emerged from a six-hour meeting with Milosevic in Belgrade, proclaiming that the Yugoslav leader was ready to pull some Serb forces out of Kosovo and allow the return of refugees if NATO halts the bombing.
Clinton immediately dismissed the offer. "President Milosevic began this brutal campaign," he said. "It is his responsibility to bring it to an immediate end and embrace a just peace."
Administration officials insist they stand by the accord that was hammered out this winter in Paris and Rambouillet, France. That agreement would grant Kosovo significant autonomy, but the province would remain under the sovereignty of Serbia.
But Clinton signaled to Milosevic that support for full independence for Kosovo is growing. If Milosevic refuses to end the killing and sign the Rambouillet accord, he could lose the province.
"For a sustained period, he will see his military seriously diminished, key military infrastructure destroyed, the prospect of international support for Serbia's claim to Kosovo increasingly jeopardized," Clinton warned.
Albanians in the United States are finally hearing about the fate of their families.
Ramadan Gashi, an Albanian living in Manhattan, was planning the wake for his father yesterday. The 77-year-old was killed Saturday, refusing to yield as Serbian soldiers rounded up his family and shot on the doorstep of his house in Pec.
Gashi's father, who as a captured Yugoslav soldier spent nearly four years in Matthausen and other concentration camps during World War II, warned that he would not go through that experience again.
"He told me what he's going to say," Gashi said. "He told me he will tell the soldiers, 'You can only take my life. That's all you can take. You are not going to take my dignity.' "
Gashi said so many people are dying in Kosovo that their relatives in New York -- the highest concentration of ethnic Albanians in the United States -- cannot keep up.
"With so many dead, we are running even out of spaces to have our wakes," said Gashi, a building manager who has lived in the United States since 1977.
Others are still waiting for word on their relatives.
Agim Rexhaj called his home in Pec a few days ago, and a Serb soldier answered the phone. Rexhaj said the soldier, speaking Serbo-Croatian, told him, "I'm sorry, but we kill everybody. Everybody Albanian is going to be destroyed."
Rexhaj did not know whether his family was alive in the house, but now he is trying to find out what he can from friends crossing into Albania.
Sun staff writers Ellen Gamerman and David L. Greene contributed to this article.
Pub Date: 3/31/99