How many Kosovars would survive Balkan's winter with agricultre destroyed? This is rhetorical, we are winning...The surgery was great success, however the patient died..
Clinton Signals Kosovo War May Last Into Winter; 2 Killed in Apache
Crash
By Richard Keil
Clinton Signals Kosovo War May Last Into Winter (Update1)
(Adds Apache pilots' names, refugees arrival in U.S.)
Ramstein Air Base, Germany, May 5 (Bloomberg) -- President
Bill Clinton signaled on the eve of a foreign ministers' meeting
aimed at ending the Yugoslav war that NATO is preparing for a
protracted air campaign.
Clinton told a group of U.S. military pilots over dinner
that ''we were going to be dealing with refugees through the
winter,'' said Major Steve Nielsen, a C-5 cargo pilot from Des
Moines, Iowa. ''He said that would be the case, whether they (the
refugees) were in Macedonia, Albania or Kosovo. He didn't
guarantee that they would be home by then.''
Clinton met earlier today with North Atlantic Treaty
Organization political and military leaders in Brussels, and said
NATO will step up its air war until Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic pulls his troops out of Kosovo, grants autonomy to the
ethnic Albanian majority and allows refugees to return.
''For those people to go home and have self-government,
there has to be an international security force, with NATO at its
core, that will protect everyone there,'' Clinton told NATO
troops at Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany.
Clinton's meetings with U.S. troops come as Russian envoy
Viktor Chernomyrdin seeks a cease-fire. Foreign ministers from
the Group of Eight - the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Italy,
Canada, Japan and Russia -- meet tomorrow in Bonn to discuss
efforts for a UN resolution to end the conflict.
Diplomatic Efforts
''We hope that together with our partners and Russia we can
make significant progress,'' German Foreign Minister Joschka
Fischer told the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament.
Fischer said not to expect an agreement tomorrow, however.
Milosevic made a gesture of his own, sending Kosovo moderate
Ibrahim Rugova to Rome. Italy's Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema
and Foreign Affairs Minister Lamberto Dini met and ''examined the
prospects for a diplomatic-political solution,'' D'Alema's office
said in a statement. Earlier, Western leaders had said Rugova
was being held in Belgrade against his will.
Clinton meets tomorrow with German Chancellor Gerhard
Schroeder, who faces internal political opposition to the bombing
campaign.
NATO Secretary General Javier Solana and Clinton agreed the
allies are seeking a diplomatic solution but ''will keep the
military campaign going in an intensive way,'' NATO spokesman
Jamie Shea said in Brussels.
''We want peace yes, but peace with justice,'' Shea said.
''Peace without justice is not peace for very long.''
Refugee Aid
About 700,000 ethnic Albanians have been driven from their
homes since NATO's air strikes began six weeks ago, according to
the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Plans are
already under way for outfitting refugee camps for winter, U.S.
Agency for International Development Director Brian Atwood said.
''We have to look past the summer and the fall in terms of
relieving the conditions the refugees are living under,'' NATO
Supreme Allied Commander for Europe General Wesley Clark said
after meeting with Clinton in Brussels.
Macedonian authorities shut the border crossing at Blace
today after 8,400 refugees arrived yesterday, Agence France-
Presse reported.
Refugees arriving in Macedonia said Serb troops had looted
and burned their shops, and some ''were badly beaten and showed
injuries on their backs, thighs and arms,'' UNHCR reported. A
refugee in Albania told the UN agency that 24 members of his
family had been slain and he had seen the corpses.
Arrival in U.S.
About 453 refugees arrived at McGuire Air Force Base, New
Jersey, en route for immigration processing at Fort Dix and
eventual settlement near U.S. sponsor families. First Lady
Hillary Clinton will welcome them tonight at Fort Dix, said U.S.
Defense Department spokesman Navy Capt. Michael Doubleday.
At least four more planes, each carrying about 453 refugees,
will arrive into next week, Doubleday said. Fort Dix can handle
as many as 3,000 of the 20,000 refugees expected in the U.S.
While NATO intensified its air attacks, a U.S. Army Apache
helicopter crashed during a training mission in Albania early
today. Both crew members, Chief Warrant Officers David Gibbs and
Kevin Reichert, died, the Defense Department said.
A spokesman for the U.S. European Command in Stuttgart,
Germany, said the cause of the crash is under investigation. CNN
said the helicopter may have hit a power line.
The deaths of the two U.S. Apache pilots were the first for
NATO in its Serb bombing campaign. It was the second time in two
weeks that a state-of-the-art AH-64 Apache has crashed on a
training flight and it's the fifth aircraft NATO has lost.
An F-16 fighter, built by Lockheed Martin Corp. crashed in
Serbia Sunday, a Harrier AV-8-B vertical takeoff aircraft crashed
into the Adriatic Saturday, and a stealth fighter went down in
Serbia in late March. NATO rescued the pilots of those aircraft.
POW Release Seen
In other developments:
-- Clinton met today with three prisoners of war Milosevic
released earlier this week in a gesture that put pressure on NATO
to reciprocate. U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen told
reporters NATO likely will release two Yugoslav prisoners of war
captured last month.
-- Clark said air strikes in the past week all but
neutralized Yugoslavia's air defenses. ''Milosevic is hurting and
increasingly hurting badly,'' Clark told reporters after briefing
Clinton on 24 hours of strikes against Serb air defenses and fuel
depots. ''Milosevic knows he cannot win, and more and more, his
forces know it too.''
-- NATO forces have flown more than 15,000 sorties so far,
Vice Admiral Sir Ian Garnett said at a U.K. defense ministry
briefing. About 5,000 of those missions dropped bombs or missiles
on Serb targets, he said. NATO has destroyed 80 of the 450 Serb
military aircraft, including one quarter of the ''critical'' Serb
MiG-21s and MiG-29s, Garnett said.
Nine out of 17 Serb military airfields were damaged, some
severely, 32 road and rail bridges were destroyed, and air
strikes had significantly damaged 12 of the 57 major Serb
ammunition storage sites, Garnett said.
Convoy Attacked
-- A humanitarian aid convoy came under attack today between
Pristina and the Macedonian border, Agence France-Presse and
Cable News Network reported. There were no reports of injuries
to the Doctors of the World convoy, CNN said. NATO said it wasn't
responsible for bombing any aid convoy, AFP reported.
-- NATO officials denied a report in the Wall Street Journal
that the alliance plans to send 60,000 troops into Kosovo by
midsummer, with one-third of them from the U.S., to take over the
Serbian province from retreating Yugoslav forces.
''I said there wasn't a bit of truth in it, but it's in
print anyway,'' Clark said. ''I didn't recognize any element of
truth in this.'' NATO leaders say they don't plan to invade
Kosovo, and troops would only be used to assist refugees as part
of a peacekeeping plan.
''We want to be ready, naturally, as soon as we are able to
get that security force in,'' Shea said. NATO wants to avoid a
vacuum of authority in the province between the withdrawal of
Serb forces and the arrival of allied troops, he said.
NATO forces are being increased in Macedonia on Serbia's
southern border to prepare for such a mission, Shea said.
-- NATO denied a report by the official Yugoslav Tanjug news
agency that a NATO plane was shot down about 1:30 a.m. local time
over Bajina Basta, 95 miles southwest of Belgrade, Agence France-
Presse reported. ''All of our aircraft returned last night,''
said Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Kaemmerer at NATO's military
command in Mons, referring to combat aircraft and not the Apache.
-- Serb paramilitary forces killed at least 150 civilians in
Drenica, a town of western Kosovo, Deutsche Presse-Agentur
reported, citing a broadcast today on Albanian state radio.
Drenica is a stronghold of the Kosovo Liberation Army, DPA said.
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