Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 26, 1999; Page A1

American and allied warplanes threw fresh waves of bombs and missiles against Yugoslavia yesterday, concentrating again on air defenses to clear the skies for manned strikes yet to come against the military forces in the field.

For the second day, NATO massed a great deal of its fire on the regional and central command posts that bind Yugoslavia's 2,000 anti-aircraft weapons into a modern integrated system. Other targets included military airfields in the city of Nis, army barracks in Urosevac and Prizren and a radio and television transmitter at Mount Jastrebac south of Belgrade, the capital.

Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO's supreme commander, said the bombardment would "systematically and progressively attack, disrupt, degrade, devastate" and "ultimately . . . destroy" the army of President Slobodan Milosevic if he did not bow to an American-drafted peace plan for Kosovo, the rebellious province of Yugoslavia's dominant republic, Serbia.

The first visible returns on Operation Allied Force, however, directly contradicted NATO's declared objectives. Serbian army and special police stepped up their efforts to crush resistance in Kosovo, gouging a wider trail of blood and flame across the secessionist province that the United States and its allies sought to protect.

Fighting also slipped across Yugoslavia's international border, when Serbian forces opened fire with mortars and automatic weapons at the villages of Dobruna and Vicidol in neighboring Albania. Containing the Kosovo conflict – which "has no natural boundaries," President Clinton said Wednesday – is the central strategic interest at stake for NATO. Among the homes destroyed in Vicidol, according to Albanian independent radio stations, was one belonging to the family of former Albanian president Sali Berisha, a sponsor of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army.

Another alarming prospect of spillover appeared in Montenegro, the republic that is Serbia's last and unwilling partner in the former Yugoslavia. According to U.S. intelligence reports, Montenegro President Milo Djukanovic rejected Belgrade's declarations of martial law across Yugoslavia and ordered his security forces to offer armed resistance to any Serbian effort to enforce the edict. Washington calls Montenegro "a beacon of hope" in the Balkans, but the Clinton administration fears that further steps toward Montenegran independence could widen the war and threaten Bosnia as well.

Refugees continued to stream into Macedonia, Yugoslavia's southern neighbor and former fellow republic, and ethnic Serbian rioters there swarmed the American embassy in Skopje, breaking through its perimeter and burning several cars. Macedonian police intervened against the mobs, but they did not disperse until NATO dispatched helicopters from its Rapid Reaction Force to hover overhead.

NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana, meanwhile, provided confidential written assurances to the Macedonian government that the alliance would stand behind its territorial integrity. Some 7,300 British and German troops are there already to monitor the border and to prepare for a peacekeeping deployment in Kosovo, and military sources said British Lt. Gen. Sir Mike Jackson has prepared contingency plans to repel – and perhaps counterattack against – a ground assault by the neighboring Serbs.

As NATO warplanes and missile-launching ships pressed their attack, with 120 strike sorties flown on Wednesday and a like number anticipated yesterday, the first cracks appeared in allied unity. Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou called for a moratorium on bombing, and Italian Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema appeared to join in.

"The scenario is opening up for initiatives to return to the political track," D'Alema said, asserting that Serbian operations in Kosovo had halted. "I think therefore that the time to give politics and diplomacy their say is approaching. This is our commitment in the next few hours."

Solana tried to fend off those qualms, declaring NATO's continued support for the operation to be "total and absolute." And national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger firmly disputed the Italian report. "I noticed in Prime Minister D'Alema's statement that he suggested that the fighting in Kosovo has ended," Berger said. "That's not correct. We'll obviously point that out to him."

NATO operates on consensus, but in practice it is much harder for one or two members to shut down an operation than to prevent its launch. Clark said the punishment would go on "unless President Milosevic complies with the demands of the international community," adding: "In that respect, the operations will be just as long and difficult as President Milosevic requires them to be."

In part because the Serbs are holding back their surface-to-air missiles and keeping mobile launchers on the move, knowledgeable military officers said it could be days before NATO commanders are confident they have the "air supremacy" needed for close ground attack in Kosovo at acceptable risk. Even cut off from the computerized centers that work as their brains and nervous system, localized missile and artillery batteries offer lethal threats to allied aircraft flying over wooded and hilly terrain.

The simultaneous offensives unfolding yesterday – by NATO against the Serbian forces, and by the Serbian forces against Kosovo – amounted to a race of sorts between Belgrade's ethnic cleansing in its rebel province and NATO's attempt to stop it. The depth of Yugoslav air defenses set the stage for a test of nerves in which the alliance would have to take on far greater risks to mount effective attacks on a field army that is burning villages and leaving a trail of "massacred people with slit throats," as Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright put it.

Clinton, Berger, Albright and Defense Secretary William S. Cohen uniformly declared themselves "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with the first night's work, but again supplied no details of the targets struck or damage inflicted.

Officials with access to current intelligence said there was intense fighting in north-central Kosovo, where such resources as the province's lone coal-fired power plant, textile and metallurgy industries and lead and zinc deposits are concentrated. Serbian offensives continued also in the western sector, near Pec, where sites of historic nationalist and Christian Orthodox significance abound.

Milosevic came to power on a platform of Serbian nationalism, and he rescinded constitutional guarantees of autonomy for Kosovo's ethnic Albanians in 1989. That marked the 600th anniversary of Kosovo's fall to Turkish invaders in 1389, the central event in Serbian national lore.

"Kosovo means more for Serbs than [the] land of Vladimir for Russians, Toledo for Spanish people or Jerusalem for Jews," said Deputy Prime Minister Vuk Draskovic. "We must protect Kosovo, even for the price all Serbs must die."

Serbian leaders remained adamant that they would not permit the introduction of foreign peacekeeping troops, as called for in NATO's peace plan for Kosovo, but took every opportunity to broadcast their eagerness for peace.

"Stop bombing us and we will stop all operations against the people, the terrorists who provoked NATO strikes against Serbia," Draskovic offered in one of many televised interviews yesterday, this one to Britain's Sky News. To Channel Four he expressed willingness for an immediate "political settlement" granting the "highest maximum autonomy" to the Kosovars. That offer may have been undercut by his accompanying assertion, on CNN, that Serbia already provides "the most possible level of autonomy for Albanians, for all the others, based on the most possible democratic standards in the world."

In the south of Kosovo and elsewhere in Serbia, Yugoslav forces were shifting from offensive to defensive postures. Especially in the north, army troops were dispersing from garrisons, intelligence reports said.

Administration officials continued to fend off questions on what exactly they demanded of Milosevic apart from a halt in his Kosovo offensive, with Clinton and many of his advisers saying "he knows what he has to do." Albright said the peace pact signed last week by Kosovo Albanian rebel leaders need not be honored in every detail but in its basic "framework." She repeatedly said the agreement was "on the table," and replied as follows when asked whether this meant its provisions remained negotiable:

"No. I'm saying that they are on the table and that – that President Milosevic knows what he has to do. The Kosovar Albanians signed a document. But I – we had said before that there were tactical adjustments. But I'm not going to go into the details of that."

Clark delivered a veiled warning to Milosevic and other members of Yugoslavia's political and military hierarchy, declaring that "there is no sanctuary" in a hint that they might be personally at risk.

Solana said the participation by many allies in the NATO air campaign – 13 of 19 NATO members contributed aircraft, and eight of the 13 engaged in combat – demonstrated "solidarity, unity and resolve" behind the anguished decision to make war on a sovereign state for the first time in the history of the alliance.

France, which is not a NATO member and has a history of keeping the alliance at arm's length, flew 40 planes in the operation, including four Mirage 2000s and a handful of Super Etendard fighter bombers. Turkey contributed 11 F-16 strike fighters from the Ghedi air base.

Television made for another central battlefield in a war marked by intense competition for international sympathy. The Clinton administration, which spoke little of Kosovo in the weeks before the bombing started as it tried to decide a course of action, dispatched every senior foreign policy official to the airwaves. Following appearances late into Wednesday night on CNN's "Larry King Live," ABC's "Nightline" and PBS's "NewsHour," Cohen began yesterday with five network morning interviews and held briefings virtually back to back all day. Berger followed Albright so closely that CNN had to cut from one to the other, and it scarcely had time to squeeze in a phone interview with Draskovic before it cut away again to Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon. State Department spokesman James P. Rubin closed the day on "Crossfire."

Congressional Republicans expressed support for the fight but pressed to expand it.

In the Senate, Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) announced their intent to introduce a bill to provide up to $25 million "to arm and equip the Kosovars so that they can defend themselves," as McConnell put it on CNN.

The administration received a deeply skeptical hearing at a closed-door briefing for senators yesterday, according to Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.). Warner, who has said he agrees with the administration's rationale for acting, said he was struck by how sharp the questioning of his colleagues was – and by the difficulty that Undersecretary of State Thomas R. Pickering and Undersecretary of Defense Walter B. Slocombe had in providing compelling answers.

In Brussels, Clark confirmed that forty targets were struck in the first wave of NATO air strikes, including five airports, five army garrisons, communications and command centers and storage depots. He said air attacks would continue for several days at least against Yugoslavia's anti-aircraft systems as well as military facilities of the security and police forces waging a brutal crackdown against Kosovar Albanians.

Staff writers Dana Priest, John Harris, Charles Babington and Thomas W. Lippman in Washington; correspondents William Drozdiak in Brussels and John Goshko at the United Nations; staff researchers Nathan Abse and Robert Thomason; and special correspondents Michael Fleischer and Khiota Therrien contributed to this report.