Clinton Calls Kosovo Crisis ‘Crucial Test’

WASHINGTON — Wary that the “ethnic cleansing” campaign waged against civilians by Yugoslav forces no longer seems shocking to the American public, President Clinton delivered an impassioned defense Thursday of NATO’s air war, as a military spokesman in Brussels suggested that the conflict could continue into next year.

Clinton’s explanation, the most comprehensive he has offered in recent weeks, reflects a perceived need to shore up support at a point when the public may be losing sight of the reasons the U.S.-led NATO coalition has been bombing Yugoslavia for seven weeks, a presidential aide said.

“Kosovo is a crucial test,” Clinton said in an address to military veterans. “Can we strengthen a global community grounded in cooperation and tolerance, rooted in common humanity? Or will repression and brutality, rooted in ethnic, racial and religious hatreds, dominate the agenda for the new century and the new millennium?”

As Clinton delved deeply into the diplomatic, military, economic and humanitarian concerns underlying Operation Allied Force, the bombing campaign reached its greatest volume yet, with still no clear sign of retreat by the military forces of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

In Brussels, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said the alliance believes it has destroyed more than a quarter of the tanks, artillery and other heavy military equipment Milosevic has deployed in Kosovo, a province of Yugoslavia’s main republic, Serbia.

“His forces are being pounded every night, he is admitting to heavy losses, every day he sees another percentage of his army being stripped away, and at the end of the day that is the basis of his power,” Shea said.

Refugees’ Welfare in Wintertime a Concern

Despite the confident talk, there were indications that NATO is preparing for a long slog.

Italian Navy Cmdr. Fabrizio Maltinti told reporters in Brussels that the alliance and the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees are worried about how Kosovo Albanian refugees will weather the next winter in Albanian camps located more than 3,000 feet above sea level.

“If these sites remain tented, they would be unsuitable during the winter,” Maltinti said. The implication was that the refugees may not be able to return home to Kosovo until some time next year.

In other developments:

* Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin issued a stern warning to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that Russia’s patience is running out and that his country may drop its efforts to mediate a peace agreement if the alliance remains intransigent. French President Jacques Chirac and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott said they had made progress in talks with Russian officials in Moscow. But the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Talbott was told: “Talks must not be held for the sake of talks.”

* Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin agreed Thursday to talk, as tensions with China over NATO’s bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade appeared to be easing. Jiang’s readiness to talk was conveyed by Chinese Ambassador Li Zhaoxing, who visited the White House. Meanwhile, Beijing promised that U.S. tourists would be safe in China despite protests unleashed by the embassy bombing. And senior U.S. administration officials said Clinton has decided to nominate retired U.S. Navy Adm. Joseph Prueher to replace James R. Sasser as ambassador to China.

* For the first time in a week, a few refugees crossed into Macedonia from Kosovo. It was unclear whether they signaled a renewed flow, which had been shut off since reaching 20,000 refugees a day 10 days ago. One farm family of eight from central Kosovo, including an 82-year-old grandmother and a pregnant woman in her 20s, said they had wandered for five weeks from one deserted town to another after Yugoslav paramilitary troops stormed their village.

* The U.N. refugee agency reported that more than 900,000 refugees, or about half of Kosovo’s prewar population, have fled the province since the start of the crisis more than 14 months ago. Of these, 748,400 have obtained refuge in Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia and the Yugoslav republic of Montenegro, while tens of thousands have been evacuated to other countries. Before the air war, an estimated 124,000 Kosovo Albanians had fled their homeland.

* The refugee agency said it has been unable to persuade many Kosovo refugees in northern Albania to move to newly established camps farther south, although their refuge, near the town of Kukes, is within shelling distance of Yugoslav artillery.

* In Merdare, Yugoslavia, foreign journalists were allowed to observe 250 Yugoslav troops heading north out of Kosovo in buses. It was unclear whether they were withdrawing, as asserted by Yugoslav officials, or whether fresh units would replace them. NATO and White House officials scoffed. “It could very well be a kind of regrouping. And we are talking numbers which are ridiculously low, if at all,” said Air Force Maj. Gen. Walter Jertz of Germany, a NATO spokesman in Brussels.

* U.S. military officials said the U.S. Army in Albania is putting Apache AH-64 support units near the border with Kosovo for a live-fire exercise, indicating that the attack helicopters are closer to being used in combat.

In his speech, Clinton showed no inclination to scale back the alliance’s goals or the conditions that would bring a halt to the operation. The alliance insists on a total withdrawal of Milosevic’s forces from Kosovo, the return of the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians who have fled or been terrorized into leaving the province, and deployment of an international peacekeeping force.

Rather, Clinton sought to answer questions that have been raised by the air war, while leaving little opportunity for critics to say--as have some Republican leaders in Congress--that he has not fully explained the rationale for the costly and dangerous deployment.

The president said he regretted having declared in the past that the United States had no business trying to untangle the Balkans’ ethnic animosities.

“We do no favors, to ourselves or to the rest of the world, when we justify looking away [or] . . . demonizing the whole Balkans by saying that these people are simply incapable of civilized behavior with one another,” he said.

To those who say the United States has been willing to overlook ethnic problems in other locales, he said, “There is a huge difference between people who can’t resolve their problems peacefully, and fight about it, and people who resort to systematic ethnic cleansing and slaughter of people because of their religious or ethnic background.”

Only the slaughter among Hutus and Tutsis earlier this decade in the African nation of Rwanda rivals what is occurring in Kosovo, he said, “and I regret very much that the world community was not organized and able to act quickly there as well.”

Clinton Denounces ‘Vicious Oppression’

The president distinguished the Yugoslav forces’ efforts to remove ethnic Albanians from Kosovo from the Nazis’ efforts to exterminate the Jews of Europe before and during World War II. But, he said, although the Yugoslav campaign may not rise to the level of the Holocaust, “the two are related: both vicious, premeditated, systematic oppression fueled by religious and ethnic hatred.”

Echoing a concern raised earlier in the week by British Prime Minister Tony Blair--that the West should avoid succumbing to “refugee fatigue”--Clinton said: “We must not forget the real victims of this tragedy.” He told one tragic tale after another about the horrors inflicted on the Kosovo Albanians.

“There is no picture reflecting the story that one refugee told, of 15 men being tied together and set on fire while they were alive,” he said.

In Brussels, NATO portrayed the first public reference by Milosevic to Yugoslav military deaths caused by the air campaign as evidence that his resistance is beginning to wilt.

“During this struggle, many members of the police and security forces died courageously,” Milosevic said Wednesday. “Their sacrifice is a shining example of bravery and devotion to one’s people and fatherland.”

Officials in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, reportedly said Thursday that more than 1,200 people have been killed and an additional 5,000 injured in the NATO airstrikes.

Meanwhile, NATO warplanes kept up their “extensive and effective” pounding of targets in Yugoslavia, although the weather worsened after nightfall, Shea said. On Wednesday night and Thursday morning, NATO attacked Yugoslav troops, armor and artillery in Kosovo west of Djakovica and south toward Prizren.

The Kosovo Civil Defense Center reported that five NATO missiles struck the Prizren railway station and a hotel.

Elsewhere in Serbia, Yugoslav state media said, Western planes bombed Milosevic’s hometown of Pozarevac, two Belgrade suburbs and the state television center in Novi Sad early Thursday. Explosions near the television center were so powerful that they blew out windows in buildings on the other side of the Danube River, the official Yugoslav Tanjug news agency said.

NATO said its warplanes also destroyed five Yugoslav aircraft--a MIG-21 at an airfield in Nis and four Super Galebs at a landing strip near Prizren.

But as military officials reported success in the aerial battle, and as Blair insisted there would be “no compromise, no fudge, no half-baked deals,” there was growing disquiet in some Western European countries.

At a raucous emergency meeting of Germany’s Greens party in Bielefeld, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer staunchly defended his backing of NATO’s air war. Pacifists met his address with heckles and boos, and protesters formed a chain around the building to prevent delegates from entering. One protester pelted Fischer in the side of the head with a red paint bomb, perforating his ear drum. He later received treatment at a hospital.

Fischer, the highest-ranking Green, warned that adopting the antiwar activists’ stand would probably break up Germany’s center-left coalition government, in power for six months, by forcing Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and his Social Democrats to seek another partner.

In the end, the Greens rejected calls for a permanent end to the bombing. They voted, 444-318, to support a temporary cease-fire and urged negotiations while acknowledging some military force was needed to bring Milosevic to the bargaining table.

In one of the toughest criticisms of France’s role in the NATO operation, Regis Debray, who was a prominent leftist during the 1960s, wrote to Chirac that during a recent two-week trip to the Balkans, including four days spent in Kosovo, he found no evidence of “genocide” or “ethnic cleansing.”

Gerstenzang reported from Washington and Dahlburg from Brussels. Times staff writers Maura Reynolds in Moscow; Alissa J. Rubin in Skopje, Macedonia; and Paul Watson in Merdare contributed to this report.