Airstrikes Kill Scores of Refugees
By Michael Dobbs and Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, April 15, 1999; Page A1
BELGRADE, April 14 – Scores of ethnic Albanian refugees were reported killed today when warplanes struck tractors and wagons at two sites in southwestern Kosovo.
Yugoslavia said NATO jets carried out the attacks, which it described as the most deadly assault on civilians in thethree-week conflict.
NATO confirmed its planes attacked vehicles on a road near Djakovica but said they hit only military trucks, and a Pentagon official said pilots broke off the attack when they saw civilian vehicles.
Pentagon officials denied responsibility for the other airstrike, which occurred further south near Prizren. They suggested Yugoslav planes carried out that attack, a claim denied by Belgrade.
In other air attacks, NATO planes hit military barracks, television transmitters and bridges. The strikes came as Germany briefly floated a diplomatic proposal – rejected by the United States – to suspend NATO bombing for 24 hours if Yugoslavia began withdrawing forces from Kosovo.
The two airstrikes that reportedly killed civilians occurred around 2 p.m.(8 a.m. EDT), according to refugees who arrived later at the Albanian border. They were part of a new surge in the exodus from Kosovo, amid fresh reports that Serb-dominated Yugoslav forces had intensified their brutal campaign against ethnic Albanian civilians in the province.
Refugees who witnessed the scene near Djakovica said the road was heavily traveled by both civilian and military vehicles, but they reported seeing only civilian casualties after two tractor-pulled wagons or flatbed trailers were hit. They described a gruesome scene, with the ground around the wagons littered with body parts.
“There were a lot” of people killed, said Sadete Sadiku, who provided a detailed account in Albania while half a dozen other witnesses listened and nodded in agreement. “I don’t know the number but . . . there are nearly 25 or 30 people on [each] tractor, so it was probably 50 or 60 dead.”
The attack near Prizren hit a single tractor and its trailer, leaving three dead and three wounded, according to refugees. “It was a plane and I saw it,” said Qazim Tata. “I don’t know whether the plane was Serb or NATO, but probably it was Serb because NATO would not attack us.”
Yugoslav Foreign Ministry spokesman Nebojsa Vujovic reported that 75 people were killed and 25 injured in the two incidents, and accused NATO of “a crime against humanity.”
Uncertainty over what happened was compounded by erroneous and confusing reports issued by Pentagon and NATO authorities during the day. Gen. Wesley K. Clark, NATO’s top commander, first suggested that the attacks on the refugees may have been perpetrated as a retaliatory action by Yugoslav forces, who were part of a convoy of refugees and whose trucks had been targeted by NATO warplanes.
But by early evening, Clark had retracted that theory. He said he could not yet account for the civilian casualties.
“There were aircraft working the area all day,” the general said in a telephone interview. “We’re talking to the pilots, looking at the video, listening to the cockpit recordings, going through every single weapon that was dropped in that area to determine what happened.”
Clark said the pilots reported hitting only military trucks and believed the trucks had come from Djakovica earlier in the day, where Yugoslav forces were seen burning houses and jumping into the vehicles. He said the trucks were traveling in a long convoy, spaced about 100 yards apart, and each one was targeted separately.
“As the pilots were attacking the military trucks, they saw civilian vehicles and suspended the attacks,” a senior Pentagon official said last night.
In the other incident, Pentagon officials said another convoy of about 600refugees was traveling on the road from Prizren to the Albanian town of Kukes. The Pentagon said the refugees, all women and children, told U.N. relief workers that they came under attack from Serbian planes.
Despite NATO’s intense air campaign, Pentagon officials said that Yugoslav forces have continued to operate low-flying Super Galeb jets and helicopters. However, the U.S. officials could not confirm that any Yugoslav aircraft were operating today in the area through which the convoy passed.
In Belgium, NATO issued a statement that its pilots had fired on military vehicles in “controlled attacks” and had been fired on from the ground with surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft artillery.
“The pilots state they attacked only military vehicles,” the allied military command said several hours after the attack. The allies said no civilian casualties could be confirmed but promised a full investigation.
Yugoslav spokesman Vujovic described the allegation that Yugoslav war planes had hit the refugee column as “monstrous lies” and said that Yugoslav planes had not been operating in southwestern Kosovo today.
He said that the Yugoslav authorities would support their version of events with evidence of bomb fragments manufactured in NATO countries.
It wasn’t clear how many planes were involved in the strikes, and the Yugoslav army said NATO bombed columns of refugees in four separate flyovers. “This [attack] was done deliberately . . . a massacre of Albanian refugees who were returning to their homes in the middle of the day,” Serbian President Milan Milutinovic said in a statement read on Yugoslav television.
The loss of civilian life as a result of NATO bombing has become an important weapon for Yugoslavia in the battle for public opinion, both at home and abroad. Yugoslav officials said that around 400 civilians have been killed in NATO bombing attacks over the last three weeks.
According to the Yugoslav Beta agency, the casualty toll from a train that was hit by NATO missiles Monday as it was crossing a bridge near the southern Serbian town of Leskovac has now risen to 27.
The Yugoslav authorities have generally refused to show off damage to military facilities but have been quick to take foreign reporters to places where civilians have been killed. The Yugoslav army press center in Belgrade said that it was attempting to arrange a visit to the scene in Kosovo for foreign journalists early Thursday.
NATO’s air campaign aims to force Belgrade to accept a peace agreement in Kosovo, a province of Serbia, which is the dominant republic in the federation of Yugoslavia. Serb-led Yugoslav forces are battling a separatist ethnic Albanian guerrilla movement in Kosovo and have driven hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians from the province.
Ethnic Serbs and Albanians speak different languages and practice different religions, and there have been tensions between them for centuries.
In other developments in the Kosovo crisis, Yugoslav forces shelled a deserted Albanian border village that they had briefly seized a day earlier, international observers said.
As Pentagon officials weigh a NATO request to add about 300 planes to the alliance force of more than 550 aircraft bombing Yugoslavia, the Defense Department indicated it was readying orders to call several thousand reservists to active duty. Until now, the many reservists who have been involved flying Air Force tankers and other planes in the three-week operation have volunteered for the assignments.
The Pentagon also revised upward today the amount it plans to seek from Congress to fund military operations in Yugoslavia through September, saying the total was likely to top $4 billion.
On Tuesday, Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said the request, though not yet fixed, would be between $3 billion and $4 billion.
On the diplomatic front, the United States rejected the German proposal for a 24-hour NATO bombing pause if Yugoslavia pulled back forces from Kosovo.
American officials said Yugoslavia would only take advantage of such a suspension. Germany had planned to introduce the idea at a European Union summit but withdrew it without explanation. The European leaders did offer to take over administration of Kosovo in the event of a peace settlement and endorsed United Nations involvement in seeking a deal.
In Belgrade, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic attempted to drum up international support for Yugoslavia’s resistance to NATO by playing host to Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko.
In his first public appearance since the start of the bombing campaign, Milosevic said that Belgrade might be prepared to accept an unarmed United Nations observer mission in Kosovo to supervise a peace settlement as long as it did not include any representatives of NATO countries.
The statement appeared to mark a hardening in the Yugoslav position since Belgrade had earlier permitted representatives of NATO countries to participate in the unarmed OSCE verification mission for Kosovo. The United States and other Western governments continue to seek a NATO-led peacekeeping force for Kosovo to provide secure conditions for returningrefugees.
Milosevic appeared relaxed and confident in his meeting with Lukashenko, the first foreign head of state to visit Belgrade since NATO airstrikes began.
The Belarus president was greeted with full ceremonial honors at an arrival ceremony in the White Palace in Belgrade, the official residence of Yugoslav heads of state. Milosevic greeted Lukashenko with an effusive hug in the old Communist Party tradition.
There was a loud bang shortly after the two leaders went into a meeting and air-raid warning sirens went off shortly afterward in a rare daytime alert in Belgrade. Yugoslav officials did not seem concerned by the explosion and speculated that it might have been the result of a sonic boom.
Lukashenko is welcome here for his hard-line anti-Western views and because of his role in forging a new Slavic union between Belarus and Russia.
Earlier this week, the Yugoslav parliament voted overwhelmingly to apply for membership in the union, but Russian officials have made clear that no early decision is expected.
Lukashenko has welcomed the Yugoslav request to join the union but has reacted coolly to Yugoslav appeals for military aid.
Dobbs reported from Belgrade, Vick from Kukes. Staff writer BradleyGraham contributed to this report from Washington.