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The cruelty is unimaginable
Macedonia cracks down on Kosovar refugees to force other nations to pitch in.
By Laura Rozen

Bloody blundering
If administration leaders really expected NATO airstrikes to accelerate the carnage in Kosovo, they should be indicted for war crimes.
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Broken contract
Republicans find populism is easier when you don't have any power.
By Jake Tapper
[ News 04/05/99]

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Belgrade under siege
[ 12:00 a.m. PST- 04/05/99 ]

NATO warplanes and missiles attacked an army headquarters, oil refineries and other targets in and around Belgrade on Sunday, while Yugoslav forces drove toward Kosovo's western mountains, where ethnic Albanian guerrillas were preparing a last stand.

Some refugees overwhelming neighboring regions were flown to European countries as relief agencies and Western nations struggled to help the more than 300,000 people forced out of Kosovo.

With mounting reports of mass killings and other atrocities in a campaign by Serbian forces to rid Kosovo of ethnic Albanians, NATO officials again blamed poor weather for limiting air attacks.

But clearing skies over Belgrade and other parts of northern Serbia -- the main republic in Yugoslavia -- allowed some strikes.

The Yugoslav First Army headquarters in the capital, along with petroleum tanks, an ammunition plant and highway bridges elsewhere, were hit, Air Commodore David Wilby said at NATO headquarters in Brussels.

Pentagon spokesman Kevin Bacon said Sunday the United States was sending Apache helicopter gunships to Albania, adding to NATO's ability to attack Serbian troops and tanks.

U.S. troops also will begin manning a newly deployed Multiple Launch Rocket System in Macedonia to fire short- and medium-range missiles into Yugoslavia, a senior U.S. official said. The system can operate in all types of weather.

An estimated 2,000 troops will be sent to operate and maintain the helicopters and missile launchers, Bacon said.

The Yugoslav military has been shifting forces in Kosovo to the southwest, where the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army was regrouping for what appeared to be a last stand, Wilby said.

"This is the last area where the [rebels] will be able to mount a serious resistance," Wilby said of the mountainous region near the Albanian border. The Tanjug state news agency said NATO attacks Sunday afternoon hit unspecified targets near Klina, 27 miles west of Pristina, Kosovo's capital, and Gnjilane, 22 miles to the southeast.

It also reported NATO missiles hit an oil refinery at Pancevo, northeast of Belgrade, killing two workers and injuring four, while a 73-year-old woman died and seven people were injured in an attack on Cacak, an industrial town 50 miles south of the capital.

Three people were injured when a fuel depot near the town of Kraljevo, some 75 miles south of Belgrade, was also hit, Yugoslav news reports said. In the capital's New Belgrade area, across the Sava River from the old city center, civil defense officials said a thermal heating plant was attacked, along with the police academy in the Banjica suburb. Flames lit the clear, moonlit night with a huge orange glow.

Those attacks came a few hours after NATO airstrikes Saturday night destroyed the Freedom Bridge across the Danube River at Novi Sad, Serbia's second largest city, where another bridge was wrecked last week. Both were major arteries between Belgrade and Yugoslavia's northern agricultural and industrial region. On Sunday, boats transported people across the Danube in Novi Sad, which now only has a railroad bridge left over the river.

The alliance launched air attacks on March 24 to try to force Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to accept a peace plan for the southern Serbian province that would include NATO peace-keeping troops on the ground.

Since then, the campaign by Yugoslav security forces to rid Kosovo of its majority ethnic Albanians has overwhelmed Albania, Macedonia and Yugoslavia's other republic, Montenegro, with refugees.

NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said allied nations were offering to take in some refugees temporarily and provided the following figures -- Germany (40,000 refugees), the United States (20,000), Turkey (20,000), Norway (6,000), Greece (5,000) and Canada (5,000).

Airlifts of some of the more than 100,000 refugees in Macedonia began Sunday. Shea said relief flights bringing aid to the capital, Skopje, were ferrying out refugees when the planes returned to their home nations. Macedonia said larger-scale flights were to begin soon.

But European Union Humanitarian Aid Commissioner Emma Bonino on Sunday questioned whether NATO might be exacerbating the problem by providing temporary shelter in countries as far away as the United States.

"We should not disperse people all over," she told reporters. "We should not cooperate in any way with ethnic cleansing."

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The Whole Story: War in Yugoslavia provides a complete list of Salon's coverage of the Kosovo crisis.

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