May 29, 1999

How Yugoslav Military Planned and Mounted Kosovo’s Ravaging

By MICHAEL R. GORDON and THOM SHANKER

The purge of Kosovo this spring was led by Yugoslav army officers handpicked by President Slobodan Milosevic to replace the internal security forces who had tried and failed the previous summer to wipe out the Albanian rebels, NATO officials say.

Allied officials now acknowledge that they missed signs that the Yugoslav army was preparing a much more extensive operation in Kosovo than they had attempted in 1998, one that would move well beyond attacking Kosovo Liberation Army strongholds to cities and towns that had no direct ties to the rebels.

The Interior Ministry’s drive against the rebels last year was no half-measure. Special policemen and soldiers drove as many as 400,000 ethnic Albanians from their homes in and around rebel strongholds. Then they swept east to west across the province, sifting through the hordes of refugees in search of the elusive rebel fighters.

But NATO officials say the Serbs made a tactical error in that earlier purge. They did not seal off the borders with Albania or Montenegro, allowing the rebels to mingle with civilians and escape. The Kosovo Liberation Army was battered, but not defeated, and NATO officials say the Yugoslav army concluded that an even more brutal attack would be needed to quell the rebellion.

The fighting continued sporadically into the fall, when the United States brokered a cease-fire under which the Serbs agreed to pull back many of their troops.

That agreement did not last long. Plainclothes intelligence operatives from the Interior Ministry filtered back into the province as the Kosovo Liberation Army renewed its attacks. Western nations convened talks at a medieval castle in Rambouillet, France, in hopes of forcing a permanent settlement.

NATO officials say they failed to appreciate that the Serbs were girding for war while they talked of peace. In November, Milosevic fired the chief of staff of the Yugoslav army, Gen. Momcilo Perisic, who had made clear his distaste for ethnic cleansing.

He was replaced with Gen. Dragoljub Ojdanic, a career officer who NATO officials say had close ties to Milosevic and had served previously in Kosovo. A NATO intelligence official said this appointment was ominous for another reason: reports that Ojdanic’s daughter had been raped by an Albanian when he was a commander at the Yugoslav army base in Prizren in Kosovo.

Milosevic also replaced the overall commander of army forces in southern Serbia, turning to a general whose wife is said by Western officials to be related to the Serbian leader’s wife, Mirjana Markovic.

That officer, Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic, had previously commanded the main Serb army in Kosovo.

Even more sinister was the appearance in Kosovo during the winter of the notorious paramilitary groups that had played such a large part in the killing and purging of Bosnia.

There were Arkan’s Tigers, the private army of the indicted war criminal Zeljko Raznjatovic, a parliamentary deputy from Kosovo. Also spotted were the White Eagles of Vojislav Seselj, the pistol-waving law professor who is a Serbian deputy prime minister, and a band known as Frenki’s Boys, led by Franko "Frenki" Simatovic.

Such units had previously been the strong arm of Serbian ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Croatia. In Kosovo, according to U.S. officials, they were formally under Belgrade’s command, reporting to Serbia’s intelligence agency.

The United States threatened to bomb the Serbs if they did not sign a peace deal, which the Albanians had reluctantly accepted. In February and March, Western diplomats monitoring the shaky cease-fire saw the Serbs building up their forces. The question was why.

Pavkovic’s predecessor as Third Army commander offered a clue early that winter, warning that his soldiers could look forward to a "hot spring."

By this time, NATO officials say, Pavkovic and his colleagues had worked out a new plan for attacking the Kosovo Liberation Army that took account of the lessons from the failed attack last summer. The Yugoslav army was in charge, with the Interior Ministry taking orders from army officers.

This time, the army planned to seal Serbia’s border with Albania so rebel fighters could not escape. A torrent of refugees unleashed by the ethnic cleansing would be pushed across the border with Macedonia, tying down NATO troops there that were poised to enforce any peace settlement. It was, NATO officials now say, a "hammer and anvil" plan in which the army would drive the rebels against the closed border and crush them.

NATO officials said they had no proof that Milosevic reviewed the specifics of the operation. But one U.S. official monitoring the situation said the military campaign "was signed off and approved at the General Staff level, and then, obviously the final go-ahead would have been given by President Milosevic, as head of state."

This assessment is based on the fact that as head of the Yugoslav state, Milosevic was president of the Supreme Defense Council, with ultimate responsibility for military operations.

At NATO headquarters, alliance diplomats signed off on a military plan of their own to bomb the Serbs.

Both sides prepared to execute their plans in March. The Serbs moved first. On March 19, the Yugoslav army attacked key rebel strongholds and lines of communication on the periphery of Kosovo, saying it was defending itself against new rebel operations. The 1,300 Western observers pulled out of Kosovo the next day.

Pavkovic made no secret of his intentions, warning publicly that his troops were poised to take care of "internal enemy" if NATO went through with its threats to bomb.

On March 23, Serbian security forces began setting fire to villages that had never known rebel activity and—even more telling—began expelling ethnic Albanians from cities, which had never been used as bases by the rebels. NATO began bombing at nightfall. The war was on. Within days, tens of thousands of refugees would be streaming across three international borders.