SERBS MET THEIR GOALS IN KOSOVO, EXPERTS SAY

By R. Jeffrey Smith and Dana Priest

Washington Post Service - The International Herald Tribune, May 12, 1999

WASHINGTON - Military forces of Yugoslavia, rather than retreating to escape punishment from NATO air attacks, can afford a limited withdrawal from Kosovo now because they have accomplished most of their aims and can trim operations without jeopardizing control of the province, according to intelligence and defense officials. During the last seven weeks, 40,000 security troops have nearly completed a yearlong project, reducing a separatist rebel army to scattered enclaves and forcing all but 10 percent of the province's 1997 population of 1.7 million ethnic Albanians from their homes, and more than 700,000 of them into exile. As a result, Yugoslav troops are devoting much of their effort to digging in for a long stay in Kosovo, often using forced ethnic Albanian labor to build bunkers, trenches and other defensive earthworks to prepare for a ground invasion, according to intelligence officials. ''There's no one left, it's time for peace,'' a high U.S. military officer said Monday with sarcasm. New, unrelease

d information obtained by Western sources has convinced NATO officials that President Slobodan Milosevic ordered a military offensive in Kosovo with the explicit goal of slashing the province's majority population of ethnic Albanians and thereby reinforcing Serbian control. The Yugoslav offensive operations still under way in Kosovo are aimed both at completing this assignment and at rousting the remaining units of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Security forces have launched attacks on enclaves of civilians under the separatist rebels' protection. The largest of these, holding about 130,000 people, was isolated east of Pec. Roughly 16,000 civilians from this area fled over the weekend into Albania and also into Montenegro, Serbia's junior partner in the Yugoslav federation. The pace of the expulsion has recently averaged more than 10,000 ethnic Albanians a day, meaning it may be only a few weeks before most of the remaining residents are out or on their way out. Ivo Daalder, a former Clinton aide and a National

Security Council specialist on the Balkans, said Yugoslav forces ''are basically done'' in Kosovo. In the contest with the world's most powerful military alliance, Yugoslavia's low-tech security forces have so far achieved far more of their goals than NATO, an alliance official said. After numerous setbacks, said a senior diplomat, NATO's aim is now the ''rollback, not the prevention'' of Yugoslavia's war aims. Although NATO has boasted officially of pinning down Serbian forces, officials say privately that Yugoslav forces have shown renewed energy in Kosovo. A NATO spokesman said Yugoslav forces had taken advantage of cloudy weather to step up their campaign of removing ethnic Albanians and to maneuver their tanks and other armored vehicles into new positions. Yugoslav gunships last weekend conducted their first attack since early April on the village of Kosari, a main supply route for the KLA. The 72d Special Operations unit was conducting operations in the Rogova Mountains, acting as forward spotters for

artillery battery units seeking to wipe out remaining pockets of rebel activity. On Saturday, Serbian forces in central Kosovo repositioned their forces to fight rebels in the Drenica region of central Kosovo. Both the Yugoslav Army and the special police forces moved ground forces and armored vehicles of the 252d Armored Brigade to the routes between Klina-Malisevo and Srbica. Despite the announced withdrawal, Yugoslav forces also have been fortifying their positions. General Nebojsa Pavkovic, commander of the Yugoslav 3d Army based in Pristina, the Kosovo capital, is now engaged full time at the army headquarters in Nis in planning a defense against any NATO invasion, Western intelligence officials say. An intelligenceofficial predicted that in the next month, ''both sides will be making gains.'' As NATO attacks from the air, government forces will expel more civilians on the ground. Several officials envisioned an eventual stalemate, with Yugoslav troops largely dispersed, inactive, and focused on strate

gic defense. ''Without an assembly point these guys will fly and fly and fly,'' a military official said. ''We can't bomb the woods.'' After seven weeks of bombing, Serbian forces are largely intact and able to move around in Kosovo. NATO has destroyed only 20 percent of all armored vehicles deployed in the province, according to NATO estimates. Even heavily attacked air defenses remain a sufficient threat to prevent NATO aircraft from flying routinely below 4,600 meters (15,000 feet) and never within range of shoulder-fired antiaircraft weapons. Serbian forces have been aggressively trying to shoot down attacking planes, firing 62 ''barrages'' of optically guided surface-to-air missiles last week. Despite the European Union ban on fuel exports and NATO emphasis on stopping the supply of fuel to the military, as of Monday ''large quantities'' of fuel were flowing into the country via the Danube River, and along highways from Montenegro, Croatia and Romania, intelligence reports showed. Two Western diplomats

at NATO headquarters said they did not expect President Slobodan Milosevic to give in soon to the alliance's demand for a pullout of his forces, despite a recent flurry of diplomatic maneuvers. One went so far as to describe the air strikes to date as a ''failure'' that left the alliance with no option but escalation. Mr. Milosevic ''has pretty much ruined Kosovo,'' said a NATO military officer. ''There's hardly been a village that's not trashed,'' he said, noting that more than 300 were damaged in the past month and 200 last year.