WASHINGTON -- President Slobodan Milosevic told a visiting Russian envoy yesterday that he could accept the deployment of a United Nations-led "international presence" in Kosovo. But the Yugoslav leader's restrictions on that force appeared to deflate what might have been a breakthrough in the month-long air war over Serbia.
Within hours, NATO forces struck again, knocking Serbian television's main network off the air with a hit on its downtown Belgrade headquarters.
Moscow's special envoy to the Balkans, Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, emerged from a daylong meeting with Milosevic in Belgrade to tell reporters, "We considered the possibility of an international presence led by the U.N. in which Russia would take part. Those are the basic principles we agreed upon."
Chernomyrdin also said the two had "considered conditions for the return of the refugees" and for allowing international aid agencies into Kosovo, where hundreds of thousands of displaced ethnic Albanians might be without food and shelter.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in a statement, said "the news out of Belgrade is encouraging," though he said he needed to review the details.
White House officials said there might be less to the offer than they first had hoped. President Clinton initially greeted it positively but gingerly, calling it "the first acknowledgment by Mr. Milosevic that there will have to be a security force there."
"If there is an offer for a genuine security force, that's the first time that Mr. Milosevic has ever done that, and that represents, I suppose, some step forward," Clinton said in the Rose Garden after a meeting with NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana.
But administration aides almost immediately turned skeptical. Reports from Belgrade last night indicated that the "international presence" envisioned by Milosevic would not be armed and would not include any NATO nations participating in the air strikes.
Withdrawal demanded
Milosevic also said the force could be deployed only if the NATO bombing is halted and allied troops withdraw from Yugoslavia's borders.
White House officials dismissed such conditions, and a NATO diplomat suggested that Clinton might have reacted too hastily.
But, the diplomat added, "The president reacted on the short hop on this and did a pretty good job."
A few hours after Clinton's initial reaction, White House officials adopted a harder line, saying the bombing would continue until Milosevic met all four alliance objectives -- the withdrawal of Serbian forces from Kosovo; the deployment of an armed international security force; the return of all refugees; and the granting of significant autonomy to the province.
Milosevic's offer "is one of four conditions, and we say we need all four before the bombing stops," a senior administration official said.
To underscore that, NATO warplanes followed up a dramatic attack on one of Milosevic's personal residences in the morning with strikes all day in what the Yugoslav Tanjug news agency called the fiercest daytime strikes yet. Last night, bombs struck three Serb television relays and a railway bridge over the Ibar River in central Serbia.
Serb media reported that NATO jets pounded an area around the southern town of Vranje with 40 missiles over two hours. NATO also struck the town of Uzice, 75 miles southeast of Belgrade.
TV headquarters hit
Then, in the middle of the night, a missile struck Serbian TV headquarters in Belgrade, knocking its three channels off the air.
NATO has warned that Serb TV was a legitimate target because it was broadcasting propaganda.
International news organizations relied on the Serb facilities for their transmissions.
Milosevic's offer yesterday came at a delicate time, as leaders gathered in Washington for NATO's 50th-anniversary summit. NATO officials had been expecting him to take some action to try to divide the alliance, and they said an offer of a toothless "international presence" might aim to do just that.
"That's what we all feared -- an initiative by Milosevic right before the summit to try to split the alliance," said a European diplomat.
Said the NATO diplomat: "I can predict that there will be something out of Belgrade every day between now and Monday," when the summit concludes.
Personal overtones
The bombing took on particularly personal overtones after the pre-dawn strike yesterday that gutted Milosevic's home in an affluent neighborhood of Belgrade. Goran Matic, a high-level Yugoslav official, denounced the attack as "an assassination attempt on the president" and an "organized terrorist criminal act."
Clinton denied that the bombing was an attempt on Milosevic's life, and his spokesman, Joe Lockhart, said NATO forces understood correctly that the Serb leader was not at the house when it was struck.
But, Clinton said, the house was considered "a command-and-control" facility and thus a legitimate military target.
Yugoslav television broadcast images of the blasted villa with gaping holes where laser-guided bombs had ripped through the walls. The strike followed missile attacks Wednesday on an office building that housed the headquarters of Milosevic's Socialist Party, as well as three media outlets, including Radio and TV Kosava, which is owned by Milosevic's daughter, Marija.
On the eve of the largest summit of world leaders in Washington's history, military intelligence officers gave an unusually detailed and optimistic assessment of the air campaign. Rear Adm. Tom Wilson, director of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that about 30 percent of Yugoslavia's SA-3 anti-aircraft missile batteries had been destroyed, and that 10 to 15 percent of the Serbs' mobile SA-6 force had been damaged.
But, Wilson cautioned, those figures "are not the relevant factor."
"We have air superiority over whatever part of the country we need to be operating to conduct our strike operations," he declared.
All four communications and supply lines into Kosovo have been damaged, Wilson said, and about half of Yugoslavia's airborne attack capability has been destroyed.
Pentagon and White House officials also cited intelligence reports of declining Yugoslav troop morale, rising desertion rates and increasing draft evasion, saying that the news media have underestimated the effects of 30 days of airstrikes.
"We will not be diverted from our objectives, and the objective is clear," Solana said yesterday. "Ethnic cleansing is a crime, and we have to reverse it."
Still, the Russian report could cause problems, especially with more reluctant members of the alliance against Milosevic, such as Greece. NATO leaders had already equivocating on the composition of an international peacekeeping force in Kosovo, shifting from an armed NATO-led force to an armed peacekeeping contingent with a "NATO core."
Clinton again said he would welcome the participation of troops from Russia, Ukraine and other Slavic and Orthodox Christian countries with ethnic ties to Serbia.
"I would not entertain going into Kosovo unless our mandate was to protect all people there, including the Serb minority," Clinton said.
A U.N. role
NATO leaders have pointedly refused to rule out a role for the United Nations, though White House officials reiterated their demand that the force at least be commanded by NATO.
The Russians have kept the details of the force vague, perhaps to dissuade NATO leaders from dismissing the offer immediately.
"What kind of international forces they will be or from which countries -- this is yet to be discussed," Moscow's Itar-Tass quoted Chernomyrdin as saying. "But the main thing is that Russia take part." Chernomyrdin has had close ties to the Clinton administration.
The Russians have said they will not send any high-level officials to the NATO summit this weekend. But Russian officials left open the possibility that Chernomyrdin would make a dramatic personal presentation of the proposal to NATO leaders in Europe, possibly during the summit.
Tass quoted Chernomyrdin as saying, "If need be, and if the president says so, I'm ready to immediately fly to Europe to meet with leaders of NATO countries."
Previously, he had indicated that he was ready to fly to Washington or any other capital to pursue an agreement.
Pub Date: 4/23/99