War Aims Under Attack, but NATO Counsels Patience

BRUSSELS — On Day 50 of its air war against Yugoslavia, NATO on Wednesday claimed its most successful overnight series of bombing and missile attacks, but unmistakable gloom has set in about its powerlessness to achieve victory any time soon.

“It’s like the mid-semester blues my children have,” said a Western diplomat at NATO headquarters here when asked to describe the prevailing mood. “You know you’re working as hard as you can, but you can’t see the end of it.”

“We could still be here at Christmas,” the diplomat added.

NATO officials said their strategy remains to keep bombing President Slobodan Milosevic’s army and police--which the alliance says have been carrying out a campaign of killings, rapes, robberies and evictions against the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo--until the Yugoslav leader accepts NATO’s demands.

“I think that we have a mission, that the mission is going to continue until we obtain the objectives,” NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana told Brussels reporters via video hookup during a visit Wednesday to the Macedonian capital, Skopje.

“Ethnic cleansing cannot prevail in Europe, and we are making all in our capability . . . not only to stop it, but to reverse it,” Solana said.

But even though NATO officials say their resolve is infinite, the time allotted to the alliance is looking much less so. The brutalities continue against the Kosovo Albanians, the supposed beneficiaries of the U.S.-led air campaign. About 750,000 of the 1.8 million ethnic Albanians who were living in Kosovo have fled to other countries, U.N relief officials said, and hundreds of thousands of others are believed to be displaced within the province.

Russian Support Now Seen as Uncertain

In some West European countries, domestic politics increasingly are roiled by disagreements about how to handle the conflict.

Efforts to find a diplomatic exit were broadsided early Saturday when NATO bombed the Belgrade embassy of China, a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization apologized, saying it had made a mistake. But German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, visiting Beijing on Wednesday, said China is still insisting that the alliance halt airstrikes against Yugoslavia as a precondition for a political settlement.

The United States and other Western nations had great hopes that Russia, a former superpower now dependent on infusions of their aid money, would assist in the search for a solution. But a wild card was thrown on the table Wednesday when Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin fired his prime minister, Yevgeny M. Primakov, and also threatened to walk out of negotiations on Kosovo.

“We’re not participants in this war. It’s not our country that started it,” Yeltsin said during a meeting of his powerful Security Council. “Some people obviously aren’t understanding our repeated proposals.”

Meanwhile, though governments of NATO members are adopting the same firm public stance as Solana, doubts seem to be growing in some quarters about the effectiveness and logic of alliance actions--and whether Western leaders, first and foremost President Clinton, have blundered badly in expecting Milosevic to see things their way.

“If there is one person who has emerged stronger from the whole campaign in his own fiefdom, it is Mr. Milosevic,” the Independent newspaper of London said in a scathing front-page analysis of the results of the first 50 days of NATO’s Operation Allied Force.

In remarks to reporters, Belgian Maj. Gen. Pierre Seger, chief of operations for his nation’s general staff, estimated this week that the NATO air raids have managed to destroy no more than 6% of the estimated 300 Yugoslav tanks stationed in Kosovo--markedly less than the 20% estimated by NATO.

NATO Details Latest Airstrikes

The alliance’s reply to much of the criticism is to ask for more time. “Usually incoming governments are given 100 days before they are judged, but if you wish to judge us after 50 days, I would simply say that the game is not over yet,” alliance spokesman Jamie Shea told reporters Wednesday.

During the preceding 24 hours, he announced, NATO warplanes had flown 327 strike missions--the highest number during a one-day period to date. That brought the total number of sorties since March 24, including such non-strike flights as missions by refueling planes, to just less than 20,000.

Five MIG-21s reportedly were destroyed on the ground, and Yugoslav troops, tanks and self-propelled artillery in Kosovo, as well as five airfields and eight bridges throughout Yugoslavia, were among the many targets struck, NATO officials said.

In a video conference call, U.S. Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark, supreme NATO commander in Europe, thanked his commanders for “the best day’s work of the air campaign so far,” a spokesman said. Officials at Clark’s headquarters in Mons, about 30 miles southwest of Brussels, said the surge in activity was primarily due to excellent weather over the Balkans, as well as the mounting number of aircraft under Clark’s command.

NATO officials promised more of the same in the days to come.

“It’s much easier to start having a significant impact against the Serb forces in Kosovo if you have already cut them off, deprived them of fuel, demoralized them, cut their lines of communication and reduced their mobility, which is what we’ve been doing,” Shea said. “But now that the correlation of forces, if I can use that term, is moving in our favor, it won’t stop moving in our favor; it will move increasingly in our favor, and we are going to use that to really strike hard against those forces until they withdraw.”

However, the alliance’s record in predicting Milosevic’s moves has been checkered. In Britain, members of the opposition Conservatives have begun expressing what one party official called “grave disquiet” about NATO’s conduct of the war. The country’s best-known military historian, John Keegan, even pronounced Clark a failure as “SACEUR”--NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe--and called for his replacement.

In Germany, the blow-back from the war in Yugoslavia could eventually scuttle the coalition government headed by Schroeder, a Social Democrat. Today the Greens party, the junior partner in his coalition, is holding a special conference on Kosovo, with most of its regional party organizations having adopted a motion demanding an “unconditional stop to the [NATO] bombing.”

In Italy, a poll published by the Corriere della Sera, a respected daily newspaper, found that 49.5% of Italians surveyed believed the air raids against Yugoslavia were unjustified, while only 35.4% approved. Two weeks earlier, the proportions were reversed.

“Things are not going well,” the Western diplomat at NATO acknowledged. “You can’t keep telling people your strategy is succeeding, when on television they can see the refugees streaming out of Kosovo, the few targets NATO has hit by mistake, like the [Chinese] embassy.”

Solana, the alliance’s secretary-general, said Wednesday that he hopes Russia “will continue the diplomatic efforts” for a solution despite the new uncertainties in Moscow. Meanwhile, NATO kept proclaiming its certainty that if it hits the Yugoslav military and related infrastructure hard and often enough, Milosevic will grant the alliance’s demands: an end to the fighting in Kosovo, a province of Yugoslavia’s dominant republic, Serbia; withdrawal of Yugoslav forces from the province; allowing Kosovo Albanian refugees to return, accompanied by an armed peacekeeping force; and a political arrangement restoring autonomy to the province.

“We said right from the beginning, when we started this campaign, that it would not be an overnight wonder,” Shea said. “This is not instant coffee. We knew that we were up against a very cynical person, a very strong military machine, well dug in in Kosovo, and with a great array of forces--paramilitaries, military, police and so on.”

Reminded that the 1991 U.S.-led military operations against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein led to victory in less time--43 days--the NATO spokesman said that was no proof that Operation Allied Force wasn’t succeeding.

“The fight against fascism in Europe in the 1940s took six years,” Shea said. “Does that mean to say that it was a failure or shouldn’t have been done? No. If the cause is just, then the timing is secondary--and this cause is just.”

In other developments Wednesday:

* NATO warplanes apparently have not ventured over downtown Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, since the errant bombing of the Chinese Embassy early Saturday set off worldwide diplomatic tremors. But Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles Wald, a senior planner for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, denied that NATO has now ruled the area off limits. “There’s not a moratorium on any target that I know of,” he said.

* Russia’s Balkan peace envoy, Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, said the dismissal of Prime Minister Primakov “will cause us special difficulties” in the Yugoslav peace negotiations he has been spearheading, but he did not elaborate. U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott met with Chernomyrdin, and the two repeated assertions that the talks are making progress. Talbott departed Moscow late in the day to confer in Helsinki with Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, who has been named special envoy on Kosovo for the European Union.

Times staff writers Paul Richter in Washington and Maura Reynolds in Moscow contributed to this report.