jankee swastikka -> ww 0+3
To Kill (Last updated 10:46 AM ET April 22)
BELGRADE (Reuters) - NATO blew up President Slobodan Milosevic's Belgrade home Thursday but denied trying to kill him, as the Western alliance edged closer to sending ground troops into Yugoslavia.
Milosevic and his family were not in the house in the exclusive Dedinje area at the time of the predawn attack.
"It was an assassination attempt on the president of Yugoslavia," Goran Matic, Yugoslav minister without portfolio, told a news conference.
He said three laser-guided bombs hit the house, one landing in the main bedroom in an "organized terrorist criminal act."
Yugoslav television showed the burned-out shell of the villa with gaping holes where missiles had smashed through the walls.
Political sources said Milosevic began sleeping in a bunker after a building close to his presidential palace, not far from the villa, was destroyed by NATO two weeks ago.
Wednesday, NATO planes blasted Milosevic's ruling party headquarters.
"We are not targeting President Milosevic or the Serb people. We are targeting the military and the military infrastructure that supports the instruments of oppression in Kosovo," a Pentagon spokesman told reporters.
A NATO official in Brussels said the residence had functioned as a "presidential command post."
Seemingly unmoved, Milosevic held talks in Belgrade with Russia's new Balkans envoy, Viktor Chernomyrdin, who is trying to mediate an end to NATO's clash with Yugoslavia over its persecution of the ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo.
"We came with specific proposals to put an end to the tragedy in Yugoslavia," Yugoslav state-run news agency Tanjug quoted Chernomyrdin as saying.
State television later showed pictures of the pair meeting in the Beli Dvor presidential palace in a Belgrade suburb.
In Washington, U.S. officials said NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana had authorized the alliance's military command to review plans for the possible use of ground troops in Kosovo.
But one added: "The president has no intention of introducing ground troops into a non-permissive environment. We have complete confidence in our air campaign. We will prosecute it until our demands are met."
British and French officials said no decision on whether to send troops into Kosovo would be taken at this weekend's NATO 50th anniversary summit in Washington.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a German radio interview he believed a U.N. mandate would be sought for any international troop presence in Kosovo. None was sought for the air war under way against Yugoslavia.
Defense Secretary William Cohen said a study last year concluded that as many as 75,000 ground troops would be needed in Kosovo alone and that fighting through to Belgrade and the rest of Serbia could require 200,000 soldiers or more.
In Brussels, EU officials said the European Union was rushing through a ban on the shipment of oil to Yugoslavia and the measure could take effect from the middle of next week. Montenegro, Serbia's Western-leaning partner within federal Yugoslavia, said it hoped to be excluded from any oil ban.
The conflict continued to send shock waves through Serbia's Balkan neighbors. Serb forces and Albanian guards exchanged fire on their border Thursday, international officials said.
In Montenegro the border with Croatia was operating normally after the Yugoslav army closed it for two days. Tensions in the capital, Podgorica, were high ahead of an anti-NATO rally.
In Sofia, hundreds of protesters denouncing the NATO strikes gathered outside Bulgaria's parliament as the government worked to win legal backing for NATO to use its air space.
In Romania, parliament voted overwhelmingly to grant a NATO request for unrestricted use of its airspace.
President Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair met at the White House and agreed the NATO summit would show the alliance's strong resolve to defeat "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo.
Three powerful explosions shook Belgrade early Thursday, 20 missiles rained down on the Batajnica military air field on the capital's outskirts and a factory in central Serbia was hit, the Serbian news agency Beta said.
Tanjug said warplanes bombed an ethnic Albanian area of the Kosovo capital Pristina later Thursday morning.
A Pentagon spokesman said air strikes had damaged all four major routes from the Serbian heartland to Kosovo, cutting supplies to Yugoslav forces there by half. But he said they were "still responding to political guidance and still conducting operations."
Air raids appear to have done little to stop Milosevic's forces from driving ethnic Albanians around and out of Kosovo.
A U.N. aid official in Macedonia said Thursday a child died in a snowbound mountain hamlet while Macedonian authorities kept relief workers waiting for days for access to some 6,000 Kosovo refugees stranded there without food.
Milosevic, in an interview broadcast by a Texas television station, denied having a policy of expelling ethnic Albanians. He blamed the refugee floods on NATO bombing.
"There was never a policy of this country -- and my policy -- to expel any citizen of Yugoslavia from any part of this country," he said from Belgrade.
"You know that before the 24th of March, when they started their damn bombing and they started their dirty aggression against this country, there was not one single refugee.
"I believe when aggression stop, when bombing stop, then it will be very easy to continue political process," Milosevic said in English.
International organizations say some 960,000 people have fled or been expelled from Kosovo in the last year, 590,000 of them since NATO began air attacks on Yugoslavia.
jankee swastikka -> ww 0+3