OFFICERS SAY F-16 DOWNING SHOWS SERBIA'S REAL STRATEGY

by John Pomfret

(The Herald Tribune, 04/07/95)

ZAGREB, Croatia - Western officials and military officers are pointing to new details about the downing of an American pilot and a shake-up in the command structure among rebel Serbs in Croatia as indications that President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, despite his claims to the contrary, has actually strengthened his control over the war machines of his allies in Bosnia and Croatia.

The officials say the purpose of Mr. Milosevic's moves is not to prepare the way for peace in the Balkans, as Western diplomats had hoped, but to ensure that most of the land grabbed in Bosnia and Croatia by the Yugoslav Army in 1991 and 1992 remains under Serbian control.

As such, they say, the policy that Western powers have followed over the past year of courting Mr. Milosevic as the main potential peacemaker in the Balkans is flawed and destined to fail. If true, this analysis would leave diplomats stuck at the end of another dead end in their search for a way out of Europe's worst conflict since World War 11.

Western officials and military officers are also raising doubts about Mr. Milosevic's claim last August to have cut off the Bosnian Serbs from military aid.

Mr. Milosevic's alleged move prompted Western powers in October to loosen eco nomic sanctions on the rump Yugoslavia in 1992 because of his support of the Bosnian Serbs. That decision was part of a major shift by Western powers, who previously had tried to isolate the Serbian president.

A series of Western envoys went to Belgrade to try to convince Mr. Milosevic to follow up his purported blockade by recog-

nizing either Croatia or Bosnia, So far, all of those missions, including a recent one by an American special envoy, Robert Frasure, have failed.

Mr. Milosevic plucked one of the fruits of sanctions relief over the weekend, when the Yugoslav national team beat Lithuania to win the European basketball championship in Athens. He harvested another on June 28 when international monitors issued a report that gave his regime good marks for keeping his borders closed with Serb-held Bosnia. The report is one of the elements that the UN Security Council will consider when it decides, by Wednesday, whether to continue with limited, sanctions relief for the Serbian strongman.

Western officials and officers said the monitors were being, duped by the Serbian president, and a senior official called the operation "a sham."

They say Mr. Milosevic recently closed the borders of his country to draft-age men from both Serb-held Bosnia and Croatia as partof a policy to help the armies of those two breakaway regions.

For their part, Yugoslav police are rounding up thousands of Serbian refugees in rump Yugoslavia and sending them back to the battlefields in Croatia and Bosnia. Mr. Milosevic is also believed to be secretly supplying large amounts of fuel and ammunition to the Bosnian Serbs via his allies in Serb-held Croatia, officials said.

One senior NATO officer said that if Mr. Milosevic had really cut the supply lines, the Bosnian Serbian forces would soon have suffered "a drastic reduction of capabilities."

"Nobody wants the truth because to reimpose sanctions would completely terminate whatever shreds of hope they have for the Balkans peace process," a senior Western official said. "Still it's a laughable proposition that Milosevic has cut off either the Bosnian Serbs or the Croatian Serbs."

Western officials said the downing of Captain Scott F. O'Grady on June 2 provided an illustration of how closely the Yugoslav Army works with Serbian forces in Bosnia and Croatia. Captain O'Grady was shot down on June 2 while flying a F-16 over Bosnia.

What was unusual, Western officials and officers say, was that the SA-6 anti-aircraft missile site that knocked his jet out of the sky only "locked on" to his plane for several seconds, making it all but impossible for Captain O'Grady to defend himself by firing a missile at the radar site.

The reason for this, the officials said, is that the SA-6 site and all other anti-aircraft batteries in Serb-held territory throughout former Yugoslavia are part of an integrated air defense system headquartered in Belgrade and under the command of the chief of staff of the Yugoslav Army. That man, General Momcilo Perisic, reports to Mr. Milosevic.

The system uses powerful radar based in Yugoslavia to first locate the plane. Officers then relay that information to Bosnian Serb soldiers manning specific anti-aircraft batteries along the flight path of the intruding plane, officials and officers said. As such, the length of time the specific ant'-aircraft batteries have to be turned on is drastically shortened, thereby making them difficult targets.

"Without suggesting that the Yugoslav Army was directly responsible for the shootdown, it is certainly true that the plane could not have been shot down had there not been this system," a senior Western official said.

The system has been improved over the last six months, even after Mr. Milosevic allegedly stopped sending military equipment to his allies in Bosnia, officials said.

On May 18, General Mile Mrksic, who at the time was serving as General Perisic's deputy in Belgrade, replaced General Milan Celeketic as supreme commander of the armed forces of the Croatian Serbs.

He took the post on Mr. Mlosevic's orders, Western officials said, because he was viewed as a better fighter than General Celeketic, who presided over the worst Serbian defeat since Yugoslavia's wars of secession began in 1991 - the Croatian Army's capture of western Slavonia on Ma 1-2.

A final indication of Mr. Milosevic's control over the rebel Serbian armies comes in the form of pay records captured by Croatians showing that as many as 300 officers in Serbian units operating in Western Slavonia were being paid directly

by Belgrade