Housing Area Hit, NATO Admits

BRUSSELS —  NATO conceded Wednesday that its warplanes had fired at least one laser-guided bomb into a housing area in southeastern Yugoslavia, at least the fifth mistaken attack on civilians and the latest self-inflicted wound to the alliance’s image as its airstrikes on Yugoslavia entered their sixth week.

The wayward bomb that smashed into houses Tuesday in the town of Surdulica was intended to hit an army training center, during intensified attacks on Yugoslav forces conducted by NATO, which maintains it has those forces on the run.

But the recurring accidents that have killed about 150 civilians over the last few weeks appear to have put the alliance on the defensive.

“NATO has never and will never target civilians,” alliance spokesman Jamie Shea insisted after reporting that a 2,000-pound bomb “failed to guide accurately to its designated target and impacted some 200 to 300 meters beyond the barracks in a small residential area.”

North Atlantic Treaty Organization officials had no accurate information about casualties, Shea said. Yugoslav authorities said at least 16 people were killed and contended more than one bomb struck the housing area.

Deputy Foreign Minister Nebojsa Vujovic, the Yugoslav government’s most prominent spokesman, traveled to Surdulica on Wednesday to denounce what he called “the latest NATO aggressive bestiality against civilians.”

“There are no military facilities in the vicinity,” he asserted, though residents said at least two Yugoslav army barracks had in previous days come under attack in or near the town, about 18 miles from Kosovo province.

While NATO came under criticism for the bombing, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic sought political gain in embattled Kosovo, where his troops have driven hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians from their homes, by negotiating a deal with Kosovo Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova.

Rugova, whom Kosovo Albanians elected president in an unofficial 1997 vote that Milosevic refused to recognize, agreed Wednesday to work with Serbian leaders on setting up an interim government for Kosovo, which is a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s dominant republic.

NATO’s bombing should stop and Kosovars of all ethnic groups should start negotiating again to reach agreement on “broad self-administration” for Kosovo, Rugova said in a joint statement with Serbian President Milan Milutinovic, a close ally of Milosevic.

“Our main goal is to somehow get out of this situation,” Rugova said as he stood beside Milutinovic in Pristina, the Kosovo capital. “In Belgrade, and in the international community, there is high-level work on finishing some things.”

As the leader of a peaceful campaign for Kosovo’s independence, Rugova was once so influential that he was photographed with President Clinton in the White House. Western officials believe that Rugova--whom Kosovo Liberation Army rebels seeking independence for their province have threatened to kill--is under house arrest, raising questions about how freely he was acting.

In other developments Wednesday:

* Milosevic’s regime fired Deputy Prime Minister Vuk Draskovic, a former Yugoslav opposition leader who in recent days had called for a compromise with NATO. The state-run Tanjug news agency said he was dismissed because of “public statements which were contrary to the government stands.”

* Clinton defended the NATO military operations as being more successful than critics have portrayed them and promised that the bombings would be even more effective as the weather over Yugoslavia improves during the spring. He said signs that Yugoslavia has sent additional troops to Kosovo are “an indication of the trouble they’re having” as a result of the allied bombing. “If they had no problems, they wouldn’t need the troops.”

* Clinton conferred at the White House with a bipartisan group of Senate and House members to appeal for support for his Kosovo policy. Lawmakers leaving the meeting said Clinton called for quick approval of his request for $6 billion to finance the war and related humanitarian efforts. Congressional leaders have made it clear that they will vote even more money, perhaps as much as $13 billion, in part to provide military pay raises.

* The World Health Organization warned of deteriorating health conditions at refugee camps in nations bordering Kosovo, and said conditions could worsen with the advent of warm weather. Drugs to treat diabetes, asthma and hypertension are urgently needed.

* Officials at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank told a news conference that the crisis could cut growth rates in neighboring countries--Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina--by an average of 5 percentage points next year. They said the cost of caring for refugees could rise far above current estimates of $300 million.

* Montenegro, the junior republic to Serbia in Yugoslavia, was hit again Wednesday and today in what appeared to be the heaviest bombing since airstrikes began March 24. The sound of explosions and antiaircraft fire could be heard in Podgorica, the capital, Wednesday afternoon. Attacks resumed at about 12:30 a.m. today for more than half an hour, with the sound of explosions and flashes of light coming from the direction of the city’s airport.

Civilian Deaths Blamed on Milosevic

Following Tuesday’s bombing on Surdulica, NATO leaders expressed regret for the inadvertent “collateral damage”--a military term for civilian casualties. But as in the case of at least four previous admissions of major civilian casualties, alliance officials placed blame for the deaths on Milosevic for provoking the bombing campaign by committing atrocities against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

“I want to express regrets about any casualties which may have resulted,” British Defense Secretary George Robertson said, adding that only “a tiny fraction” of NATO’s 4,400-plus airstrikes have killed civilians.

And it is Milosevic who “has and will continue to bear the full responsibility for what has happened in his country,” NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana added later at a briefing at alliance headquarters in Brussels.

Clinton administration officials were generally reluctant to talk about the misdirected bomb. Defense Department spokesman Kenneth H. Bacon said he had “nothing to add” to what NATO said about the incident. However, he did confirm that a bomb was dropped by an Air Force F-15 fighter.

Since the air campaign began, about 150 people have been killed by bombs that NATO concedes went astray or accidentally struck civilian targets, based on reports by Yugoslav media and Western journalists allowed to see the aftermath, usually in the company of Yugoslav officials.

The bombing of Surdulica threatened to further undermine already tense relations between NATO countries and Russia, as well as with world religious leaders and a skeptical U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

At the end of a three-day visit to Berlin overtaken by a diplomatic flurry involving Russian peace efforts, Annan expressed strong reservations that the Western alliance will accomplish its aim of ending warfare in the Balkans by trying to bomb the Milosevic regime into submission.

“The civilian death toll is rising, as is the number of displaced [refugees]. There is increasing devastation to the country’s infrastructure, and huge damage to the nation’s economy,” Annan told journalists after meeting with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott.

But he also warned that “the search for a political solution is a long, complex, drawn-out process. We are at the early stages.”

Russia’s special envoy for the crisis in the Balkans, former Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, planned to visit Germany and Yugoslavia today to continue Moscow’s search for a solution that would stop the bombardment.

Chernomyrdin met last week with Milosevic and returned to Moscow saying he had won concessions that might move the peace process forward, only to have the Yugoslav government contradict him by saying that it had not agreed to a plan to have armed international peacekeepers deployed in Kosovo.

Talbott said in Berlin that he saw little sign of Milosevic bending to NATO demands that his regime stop the “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo. But he was more hopeful of working out a coordinated approach with Russia for a postwar peacekeeping mission.

“We have not had anything from Belgrade that suggests that Belgrade is yet prepared to move in that direction,” Talbott said, referring to conditions set by NATO for halting the airstrikes, including withdrawal of all forces from Kosovo and the return of ethnic Albanian refugees to the province under the protection of a NATO-led peacekeeping force.

“The alliance strongly believes that NATO has to be at the core of that international security presence,” Talbott said. “That still leaves room for participation of other countries very much, including the Russians.”

Possible Power Play in the Works

At briefings in Brussels and Washington, NATO and State Department officials spoke hopefully of cracks emerging in the facade of unity of the Yugoslav leadership.

The indications of opposition against Milosevic gained momentum later, when Yugoslav media reported that Draskovic had been fired from his post as deputy prime minister. Draskovic, while a longtime foe of Kosovo Albanians, has recently criticized Milosevic for misleading Serbs about their prospects for victory in the war against NATO. However, he is widely seen as a political opportunist who may be trying to position himself as a potential successor to Milosevic if the Yugoslav president is removed from power.

NATO was watching the stirrings of revolt with interest, NATO spokesman Shea said. “Beneath the permafrost, there are some green shoots of democratic recovery,” he said.

Meanwhile, NATO officials on Wednesday painted a picture of a Yugoslav regime increasingly desperate for fuel to keep its war machine running. The alliance has received numerous reports of Yugoslav troops and paramilitary units siphoning gasoline out of the tanks of cars abandoned along Kosovo’s borders by fleeing refugees, and most bus service in the country has been cut severely to divert fuel to the army, Shea said.

But NATO’s supreme commander, U.S. Gen. Wesley K. Clark, conceded a day earlier that as many as 10 tankers a day are offloading fuel to replenish the reserves destroyed by NATO. While Shea said a week earlier that 70% of Yugoslav fuel supplies had been wiped out, Clark conceded the resupply has brought the reserve level back to about two-thirds of its prewar level.

Williams reported from Brussels, Kempster from Washington and Watson from Pristina. Times staff writers Richard Boudreaux in Surdulica, David Holley in Podgorica, Art Pine in Washington and Janet Wilson at the United Nations contributed to this report.