June 1, 1999
BLUNDERS
Dozens of Civilians Are Killed as NATO Air Strikes Go Awry
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Issue in Depth: Conflict in Kosovo
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By STEVEN ERLANGER
ELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- As diplomacy inched forward toward a
possible settlement over Kosovo, NATO air attacks killed at least
another 16 civilians Monday and wounded 43 when four missiles hit a
hospital complex in the town of Surdulica.
Later today, NATO missiles aimed at a local television station
hit an apartment building in Novi Pazar, close to Kosovo, killing
at least 10 people and wounding more than 20, according to the
Yugoslav news agency Tanjug.
On Sunday, NATO aircraft hit a bridge in the middle of a market
day in Vavarin, a small Serbian town, killing at least nine people
and wounding 17.
Another person died and eight more people were wounded overnight
in Belgrade, the capital, and two more civilians were killed Monday
when NATO hit another bridge, between Leskovac and Lebane in
southern Serbia, the independent and normally reliable Radio
Pancevo reported.
On Sunday night, NATO attacks blew out the electricity in
Belgrade once again. The only lights in the city were from car
headlights and anti-aircraft tracers. A bomb on the outskirts of
the city lighted up the skyline.
The intensifying air campaign, with considerably more daylight
bombing even around Belgrade, is clearly tied to the diplomatic
effort to get President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia to agree
to NATO demands over Kosovo.
The Russian special envoy to the Balkans, Viktor Chernomyrdin,
is expected to return to Belgrade on Wednesday for more talks with
Milosevic, accompanied for the first time by the Finnish president,
Martti Ahtisaari, who is representing NATO.
The Russian prime minister, Sergei Stepashin, expressed new hope
Monday for a settlement.
And the Yugoslav government, after a Cabinet meeting, repeated
its acceptance of the principles for an agreement laid out by the
Group of Seven major industrialized nations, plus Russia, sometimes
called the Group of Eight.
"In accordance with our consistent policy of peace and defense
of freedoms, Yugoslavia has accepted the G-8 principles and thinks
a U.N. Security Council resolution, in accordance with the U.N.
charter, should enable the transfer of the resolution of the crisis
from the military to the political sphere," the statement said,
according to Tanjug, the official Yugoslav news agency.
It was nearly identical to a statement issued by Milosevic's
office on Friday night, after he met with Chernomyrdin.
But fleshing out the principles with a detailed U.N. Security
Council statement and a peace plan is another matter. Considerable
gaps remain between Yugoslavia and NATO over the size of a U.N.
security force to protect Kosovo Albanians, as well as its
leadership and its composition.
Though Yugoslavia has accepted the idea of NATO troops in the
force, it would prefer to have soldiers inside Kosovo from NATO
countries not associated with the bombing -- in other words, not the
United States or Britain.
Yugoslavia would also prefer a neutral commander. But NATO
insists that American and British troops be part of the force and
that NATO troops constitute its "core."
NATO is also demanding that Yugoslav forces start pulling out of
Kosovo before any bombing halt. Yugoslavia and Russia believe that
too rapid a withdrawal would leave a vacuum that would be filled
immediately by the separatist Albanian rebels of the Kosovo
Liberation Army.
Kosovo is the southern province of Serbia, which is the larger
of two republics remaining in Yugoslavia.
In another sign of Yugoslavia's willingness to deal, the
ultranationalist deputy prime minister of Serbia, Vojislav Seselj,
said on Sunday night that he would now accept foreign forces in
Kosovo.
"If that is the price we have to pay for the war to end, we can
let up a bit," Seselj said.
He still opposed NATO forces inside Serbia, he said, and
approved Chernomyrdin's proposal to leave at least some Yugoslav
security forces inside Kosovo to guard the borders and preserve the
symbols of sovereignty.
The intensifying NATO bombing is increasing pressure on the
government, but it is also killing more civilians.
The NATO spokesman, Jamie Shea, brushed off the increased number
of civilian deaths again Monday as the unfortunate "collateral
damage" of war, saying that NATO had aimed at a military barracks
in Surdulica and believed it had hit its target.
But Western journalists who went on Monday to Surdulica, 155
miles southeast of the capital, said that two missiles each made
direct hits on a retirement home and a sanitarium for tuberculosis
patients. The sanitarium also housed a number of healthy Serbian
refugees who were expelled from Croatia in an earlier period of
ethnic purging that, as Yugoslav officials often point out, brought
Croatia little criticism and no bombing from NATO.
On April 27, another NATO attack on Surdulica missed its target
and killed 20 people in a residential area, half of them children.
The injured were taken Monday to another hospital in Surdulica,
one that had no running water. A NATO bomb burst a water pipe in a
field 100 yards from the sanitarium on Saturday, depriving much of
the town of water.
After that bomb, some refugees, believing that the hospital
complex was a NATO target, began living in tents on the grass, said
journalists who went there Monday.
The two buildings are set in a wooded area on the edge of town,
and police officers lined the roadway into the complex, as if to
prevent journalists from straying. But residents said that the
nearest military target, a barracks, was several miles away.
The bodies of four elderly women lay on the ground outside the
retirement home, the journalists said, and 11 more bodies were
visible near the sanitarium, where the explosions had collapsed the
upper floors. One of the other bodies was still under the rubble,
crushed in a bed, one hand outstretched. Local officials and the
hospital director told journalists that 10 more bodies might still
be buried under the wreckage.
Mica Pjevac, a woman in her 60s who fled Croatia in 1991, said
she had been asleep on the second floor of the sanitarium. "I
heard a plane pass by and then return," Mrs. Pjevac told the
reporters. "After that, there was an explosion. From the wall and
the ceiling, everything fell on me."
Mrs. Pjevac was trapped for over an hour, she said. "I kept
thinking, it's over, it's over," she was quoted as saying. "I
thought that was the end of my life."
In Moscow, after speaking with President Clinton on the phone
and meeting with Chernomyrdin and the Russian foreign minister,
Igor Ivanov, Prime Minister Stepashin said, "There are signs that
even this situation, which originally seemed to be intractable, may
be settled after all," the Interfax news agency reported.
Chernomyrdin plans to go to Bonn, Germany, on Tuesday to meet
once again with the American deputy secretary of state, Strobe
Talbott, and with Ahtisaari and the German chancellor, Gerhard
Schroeder.
Chernomyrdin and Ahtisaari are then expected to fly together to
Belgrade.
