TRANSCRIPT OF PRESS CONFERENCE
GIVEN BY
JAMIE SHEA AND GENERAL WESLEY CLARK
IN BRUSSELS
ON TUESDAY, 13 APRIL 1999
JAMIE SHEA:
Ladies and Gentlemen, Good Afternoon, welcome to the briefing. Those of
you who were here yesterday to cover the meeting of NATO Foreign Ministers
will have heard the very clear message that that meeting sent to you and to
the world, which is that NATO is in this operation, if necessary, for the
long haul. The air campaign is working and the special briefer that we
have today, General Clark, SACEUR, will have more to say on that in just a
few moments. But the mood of the Foreign Ministers yesterday is that it
may be a long haul and we have to be ready for it, we have to be patient
and firm in our resolve.
We are becoming stronger and Milosevic is becoming weaker. The correlation
of forces, if I may use that expression, is in our favour and will become
increasingly in our favour. The air operations have been going on now for
three weeks and this was an operation that NATO was reluctant to start. We
would have preferred to have sorted out the Kosovo crisis through diplomacy
and through a political solution. But once this operation was imposed on
us we accepted it and we are determined to see it through to success.
And it is on the subject of the air operation that I have asked SACEUR to
come here today and brief you, three weeks in as I said, and to give you a
good assessment about what we have achieved thus far, how NATO has
performed, what the military objectives are and how we are going to pursue
them in the days ahead. I am very grateful to SACEUR for giving up his
time to come here today to brief you. I now hand over to him and I will be
happy to direct questions once he has finished.
GENERAL CLARK:
Thank you Jamie. I did want to come here, it has been three weeks and I
wanted to be able to put the operation in perspective, to provide some
details and to ensure that the results are understood and it is clear where
it is going.
To do this I would like to begin with the period in late October. In late
October, NATO supported the diplomacy of the United Nations, and OSCE and
UN Representative-designate, Richard Holbrooke, by taking measures to move
towards an Activation Order to authorise a phased air operation, should
President Milosevic not comply with the requirements of the UN Security
Council Resolution and the Contact Group.
Mr Holbrooke left Belgrade, he came back to the Council on a Monday night,
the Council listened to the results, it was an agreement to put an OSCE
Verification Mission in on the ground and to put an air verification
mission in. The Council members asked what about the pull back of excess
forces, there followed a discussion subsequent to which the Council voted
the Activation Order.
Subsequent to that, Secretary General Solana, General Claus Nauman and I
went to Belgrade. There were three trips all in all to Belgrade over a
week and a half and they produced an agreement from President Milosevic to
pull back his excess forces in compliance with the UN Security Council
Resolution: to take the heavy weapons away from their police; to revert
to normal peacetime policing activities; to respond with proportionate
force to provocations.
It took several days before this agreement was fully implemented, but it
was implemented under the threat of the phased air operation and on 11
November this is what the Yugoslav Army dispositions looked like on the
ground, and this was the estimated strength of the MUP inside Kosovo.
What was agreed was that Yugoslav forces could still protect the borders
but that interior there would only be three company sized units protecting
these lines of communications and this is what was worked out with General
Peresic, General Georgovic, endorsed and actually signed by President
Milosevic.
Now let me show you how these dispositions changed over time and why NATO
and the international community had increasing cause for concern. By 23
December it was clear that reinforcements had moved in, a battalion here up
near Podujevo, another battalion here on the line of communication from
Stimyei, and these operations were billed as a training exercise, they were
billed as routine, they were essentially not notified to OSCE in a timely
fashion, as had been committed by President Milosevic and his advisers, and
in our meetings in late December in Belgrade we reminded General Ordenic
and General Georgovic that they were in non-compliance with promises to
NATO, shown in red on this chart.
General Smarjic was retired as Commander of the Third Army as part of the
reshuffling of command, but in leaving he made this statement, reported in
the press. It didn't receive much notice at the time, but one of our alert
correspondents in Belgrade did pick it up. Notice that he said: "It would
be definitively solved, this problem, with a hot spring". We had been
warning for weeks that subsequent to the October agreement there were only
two to four months before a spring offensive would resume, seemingly this
would confirm a widespread understanding in the Yugoslav Armed Forces as to
what was being prepared.
23 January, more reinforcements, shown in red, non-compliance. 26 February
more forces had been brought in. You may remember the battle and fighting
around Busiturn and Kosovska, Mitrovica, and this is during the time of all
of the meetings and work at Rambouillet, steady reinforcement, steady
fighting, steadily preparing the battlefield for operations.
This is the situation at the time the air campaign began and we noted that
there had been consistent reports of brigade sized forces on the outside of
Kosovo waiting to reinforce, he has reinforced those forces, he has
continued to mobilise and try to bring reserves into the area. This is the
situation today, 13 April, and you can see some 23 battalion sized units
are deployed in Kosovo today. So this is a clear pre-planned pattern of
activity.
What was the result? Here are the destruction of Kosovar villages that we
have reliable evidence on and we have had a lot of cloud cover, we don't
have full coverage of this area and of course no-one is on the ground to
verify this for us, so this is what we are quite confident in, based on
reliable evidence.
Let me show you some examples of this. 260,000 people internally displaced
inside the country, driven out of villages. Here are the burned
structures, you can see the houses without any roofs all over town. This
is the symptom of the ethnic cleansing, going in, throwing a grenade,
starting a fire, turning on the gas before the grenade is thrown and it
blows the roof off, we have seen it all over Bosnia and here it is. More
burned structures, all of these are destroyed. A destroyed farm complex,
no roofs, here and here, all burnt out. Widescale destruction here, here,
here and here. It is a whole set of communities which have been
devastated. More burned structures here, here, up in here, over in here.
And what you see when you look at this is a widespread systematic pattern
of ethnic cleansing, it is the familiar pattern over the last 10 years.
More. Here is where not only has he burned out the village, he is now
moving in with military equipment in an effort to disguise himself and
hide, and our analysts have picked out tanks hidden right up next to and
inside these structures. Here is more armour concealed, right here, an SA9
air defence system and more destroyed villages. We have got the names of
these little villages down here on the bottom of the slide. Infantry
fighting vehicles. More tanks and reconnaissance vehicles.
So in addition to the destruction of the villages and all the homeless that
are left, inside is internally displaced some 290,000, 102,000 in Fyra and
290,000 in Albania, and these are what we are reckoning since 24 March when
this widespread campaign began. It is truly on a scale that would have
been unbelievable if we had tried to forecast this in advance.
We are running major humanitarian assistance efforts here in NATO. Now
humanitarian assistance is a responsibility of the United Nations and the
lead responsibilities rest with the United Nations High Commissioner on
Refugees, her organisation and the non-governmental organisations. But
since we had resources readily available, NATO was asked to help to the
extent it could to bridge the gap until sufficient humanitarian resources
were available from the appropriate agencies to take full responsibility
for all the activities, and this is what we are doing.
In Macedonia the Ace Rapid Reaction Corps, Lt General Mike Jackson is in
the lead, he is working towards a planned camp capacity of 83,000. We are
delivering between 30 and 50 flights every 24 hours and with medical
supplies, food and so forth. It is our impression, and again we defer to
the UNHCR on this, but it is our impression that the situation has become
increasingly stabilised in Macedonia.
Albania, we are deploying the Allied Command Europe Mobile Force Land, Lt
General John Reith, he is there on the ground now and he is assuming
responsibilities for coordinating some troops from NATO nations that were
already present and helping out - Italy and Greece - and many other nations
have now volunteered to put their forces in to try to work this very urgent
humanitarian problem. Camps are being built, food is being delivered,
refugees are moving out of the highlands where they are in danger of being
shelled and attacked into safer areas in central and southern Albania. So
a great deal is going on in these humanitarian operations and it is a major
point of effort for the NATO forces.
I could turn now to the air campaign, if I could. This is the intent of
the air campaign: attack, disrupt, degrade, deter further Serb actions and
keep it going and further degrade Serb military potential, and that is
precisely what we intend to do.
We are operating on what I would call two axes of attack, or two lines of
operations: we are going after the forces inside Kosovo and around Kosovo
to destroy these forces, to isolate them, to interdict them and to prevent
a continuation of their campaign or its intensification; and at the same
time we are going after an array of more strategic target sets that have to
do with forces that are possible to be used to reinforce bases of supply,
the integrated air defence system which protects the entire array of
targets around the country, and also higher level command and control,
petroleum and many other factors here that feed this military and security
juggernaut that was assembled. So that is the intent behind the air campaign.
We have worked very hard in this campaign. It is not a campaign against
the Serb people, as we have said from the outset, it is directed
specifically to cause President Milosevic to change his mind, to change his
pattern of behaviour, to achieve some well articulated political aims and
we don't want to hurt innocent people, innocent civilians in this campaign,
so we are working very, very hard to prevent collateral damage. One of the
things we are doing is we are using precision weaponry. This campaign has
the highest proportion of precision weaponry that has ever been used in any
air operation anywhere. We are going after militarily significant targets
and we are avoiding, taking all possible measures to avoid civilian damage.
I wanted to show you the tape of the cockpit view of the missile that hit
the railroad bridge and the train yesterday. It is hung up in a computer
problem in my computer at Shape, we are trying to get it up here and if I
can get it up here during the time we have the press briefing, if I can get
it up here we will show it to you. But I want to describe it because this
was a case where a pilot was assigned to strike a railroad bridge that is
part of the integrated communications supply network in Serbia. He
launched his missile from his aircraft that was many miles away, he was not
able to put his eyes on the bridge, it was a remotely directed attack. And
as he stared intently at the desired target point on the bridge, and I
talked to the team at Aviano who was directly engaged in this operation, as
the pilot stared intently at the desired aim point on the bridge and worked
it, and worked it, and worked it, and all of a sudden at the very last
instant with less than a second to go he caught a flash of movement that
came into the screen and it was the train coming in. Unfortunately he
couldn't dump the bomb at that point, it was locked, it was going into the
target and it was an unfortunate incident which he, and the crew, and all
of us very much regret. We certainly don't want to do collateral damage.
The mission was to take out the bridge. He realised when it had happened
that he had not hit the bridge, but what he had hit was the train. He had
another aim point on the bridge, it was a relatively long bridge and he
believed he still had to accomplish his mission, the pilot circled back
around. He put his aim point on the other end of the bridge from where the
train had come, by the time the bomb got close the bridge was covered with
smoke and clouds and at the last minute again in an uncanny accident, the
train had slid forward from the original impact and parts of the train had
moved across the bridge, and so that by striking the other end of the
bridge he actually caused additional damage to the train. I don't know
what the extent of the second strike was, but two bombs were put into that
bridge and in both cases there was an effort made to avoid collateral
damage. He couldn't, he saw what had happened, it is one of those
regrettable things that happen in a campaign like this and we are all very
sorry for it, but we are doing the absolute best we can do to avoid
collateral damage, I can assure you of that.
We have been working through the weather, the weather makes it more
difficult because the pilots can't see the targets, they are working
through heavy overcast and clouds. We are in the 21st day of the campaign,
we estimate we have had 7 days of favourable weather, we have had 10 days
where more than 50% of the strikes were cancelled and I tell you this
because I want you to appreciate the real power of this air campaign.
Despite the cancellations I am going to show you what the results have been.
Sorties. There has been discussion among some informed observers about the
numbers of sorties. At first we weren't releasing these because I wanted
to be sure we had flexibility in our operations, that I understood exactly
what was required to be protected in order to protect the air crews and
that we really understood how to manage the war fighting process first with
safety and operational effectiveness. We are releasing these numbers now
and as you have noticed for the last several days we have been reporting on
the number of sorties. This is a roll-up and what it shows is that we are
continuing to be effective in our strikes. By comparison with previous
campaigns there are a higher proportion of support sorties than there are
strike sorties. There is a reason for that. First of all we are using
protective combat air controls in 5 different, 6 different locations,
sometimes 7 different locations around the area. We are guarding the skies
all around Yugoslavia because we don't know what reaction he might have.
You may recall that a couple of weeks ago 2 MiGs did penetrate Bosnian air
space, they encountered one of these combat air patrols and they were
quickly shot down, but it is necessary to maintain these patrols regardless.
We have a lot of tanker support and of the numbers of sorties that we have
up there, about 2,000 of those are tanker support because we are operating
at great distances from our bases and we are keeping aircraft aloft for a
long time so there is a lot of support required. We are using a lot of
ancillary support, reconnaissance and airborne warning and control aircraft
and other things. In that respect this is the most heavily leveraged air
campaign yet seen.
We are also using almost all precision strike weapons when the targets are
point targets, and in some cases we are actually attacking individual tanks
on the ground with laser guided weaponry. The reason for this is it is a
very efficient means of attack, it reduces collateral damage and it reduces
the continuing exposure of aircraft going after the same target. So by
comparison with previous air campaigns you might recognise that this is a
high ratio of support to strike. The reason is that the strike is very,
very efficient and effective.
I would like to talk you through the battle damage assessments. This is
the roll-up from 24 March through 13 April and we are using colour codes
here. Green is destroyed, white is severely damaged and red is moderate
damage, and we are showing each of the target areas with triangles, and
what we are trying to portray here is the extent to which we have damaged
certain key sets of targets. In many cases these targets are quite large,
they are complex and they have many different what we would call aim
points, and so it is not a matter of only going over the target and
dropping a single bomb, the targets have to be revisited on several
occasions.
So this is the air defence target set. You can see that we have worked
heavily around the Belgrade area because this is the keynote for the air
defence assets. He also had a lot of air defence deployed in the Pristina
area and in central and south eastern Serbia.
In Montenegro there were some air defence assets that were deployed there
at the outset. These were struck and have been damaged, we are watching
Montenegro closely and we are firing in Montenegro in self-defence, as we
did the other night, but in general we are focused on the air defence
system and other targets in Serbia.
Here is a shot of an attack at Ponigla Airfield, this is a gun camera, you
are going to watch another aircraft's bomb fall on a MiG that just happened
to be on the runway at the wrong time. We were striking the airfield, we
were going after hangars, we are not bombing runways normally, they tend to
be relatively easily bypassed and repaired, but there was a, you can't
quite make it out, there it is, you can see the large fireball there as the
MiG was hit.
Here is a radar facility in Pristina, it is a radar and control facility.
This is the area before it has been struck, and now after it has been
struck.
These are the command and control targets we have done moderate, severe or
total destruction on. These are primarily air defence command and control
targets but there are some ground force targets here that had dual
purposes. So for example, here is the Pristina Radio relay facility and
this is one of the precision weapons we are using, you can see the tower
coming into view right here, the building, here is the aim point of the
weapon, it is getting closer, it is going in and it impacts. I think he
was off by a small margin from the centre of the base of the tower, but we
did get confirmation that that was a target destruction.
We have done a lot of attacks on PLL and support targets. I am not going
to go through those, you have seen them on the nightly news from Belgrade
for many nights. We have now achieved probably a 70% or so destruct rate
on his PLL storage. He is scrambling to bring more fuel in, he is quite
worried about this, he has taken fuel away from civilian consumption and
trying to hoard it for military use. We know there have been disruptions
in the supply chain where units have been told in Kosovo to cease
operations, to hold back, conserve your fuel, get out of the way and wait.
So we are having an impact on him with this.
Here is a storage facility at Rosovac in Kosovo. This is a
precision-guided weapon, you can see the target right over here. There
will be two struck actually in this sequence as I recall and then I think
there is one that comes in over here as well. Yes, that is the kind of
precision targeting, it is making a lot of noise for people in Yugoslavia
and that is what is being reported at night, but almost without exception
the targets are very precisely struck.
Here are the targets that we have gone against the Yugoslav Army, the VJ
and the Ministerial Police. You can see they are concentrated in Kosovo,
in the surrounding headquarters area at Nis and certain targets in Belgrade
and even further north that are sustaining headquarters for the effort down
here.
We are going after military supply routes, I think you have all seen
pictures of the bridges that have been taken down and that campaign has
taken down a number of other bridges that are shown here that have not made
the television news from Serbia yet, but they have been taken down. This
is part of the effort to isolate, interdict and cut off this force in Kosovo.
So if you were to make an assessment, and I am not making percentage
assessments today, the experience has been that in the absence of being
able to be on the ground and actually counting and working at what has been
struck and what is out of commission and so forth, estimates made are
generally pretty inaccurate. What we can say is the integrated air defence
system has been damaged, it is degraded, it is still operational and it
would recover rather quickly if we were to let go of our attack on it. But
this is a race of our attack against his reconstruction and repair. He is
losing this race right now and day by day his ability to control and
integrate his early warning radars with his missiles and his fighters and
have countrywide situational awareness of the air campaign, day by day that
is being degraded.
Command and control overall is damaged. We know that there are numerous
communications outages and difficulties that are being experienced by these
forces, we see it in their response on the ground, in their inability to
respond crisply and sharply as we saw in the early days of the campaign, so
we suspect this is having some impact.
We are attacking forces on the ground, you have seen tapes and other
briefings of the work that is being done on the ground in Kosovo where we
engage tanks and trucks and other items. To be candid, most pilots don't
consider that going after individual tanks on the ground from high
altitude, it is not the preferred target set, it is high risk, it is
difficult and it is slow, but it is effective and bit by bit we are taking
away this force.
The Security Force's headquarters are being targeted and their vehicles and
their movements also interdicted. Supply routes are being target and as I
said we are probably at the 70% level on petroleum, oil and lubricants in
terms of his storage capacity. As you may know, we struck again last night
at the Pencevo Refinery outside Belgrade and we believe it sustained
increasingly severe damage.
In summary, the air campaign is a methodical, systemic campaign, it is a
progressive campaign, it is going to be increasingly intense and difficult
for President Milosevic. We are limited by weather in collateral damage
avoidance. The weather will be improving as we move into the coming weeks,
we know that historically, we are going to do everything we can to continue
to avoid collateral damage.
Clearly there are high stakes caused by President Milosevic's action and he
has an apparent high degree of willingness to accept damage, but the damage
he is going to accept is going to be greater, and greater and greater.
Their supporting infrastructure and their security forces are vulnerable to
collapse.
I just wanted to say, in terms of reinforcing the air campaign and showing
you how it is becoming more intense, that more strike assets have arrived
and more are on the way.
Just to conclude on a personal note, I have been working on problems here
associated with Bosnia and the countries of former Yugoslavia now on an
almost continuous basis for about 5 years. We are going to do everything
we can to continue to work the air campaign in an effective and in a
systematic manner that avoids needless casualties, avoids collateral damage
and that achieves the objectives set out for this campaign. That is the
commitment that I feel personally and I know that commitment is shared by
all of the airmen, marines, sailors and soldiers in Allied Command Europe.
That is our responsibility and we are going to fulfil it. Thank you.
JAMIE SHEA:
SACEUR, thank you very much indeed for that comprehensive overview. We
will go now to questions.
JONATHAN MARCUS (BBC):
General, two points: One, you have shown us obviously evidence of the
Yugoslav forces hunkering down in Kosovo itself; could you say a little
bit more about the posture of those forces, do they appear to be digging in
for a long stay or are there any signs of them moving out? Secondly,
we're concentrating an awful lot on oil-storage depots and so on, I
understand that there are still tankers coming into ports and unloading;
are we sufficiently damaging the refinery capacity or do you think that
additional steps need to be taken to halt tankers actually unloading?
GENERAL CLARK:
First of all, we've seen no evidence of any pull-back of Serb military or
police forces, they are moving into defensive positions in some areas, in
other cases they are continuing with the pattern of ethnic cleansing and
village destruction and in a third set of instances, they are regrouping,
refitting, reconstituting and preparing for future operations but we've not
seen them leaving.
We have been working on POL as one of the target sets, we know that there
are other sources of supply, that he's scrambling very hard to try to
receive additional POL and I think that in coming days we will see
additional measures, diplomatic and otherwise, taken to further constrain
his POL resources.
QUESTION:
General, do you have any information on the two latest items of news, first
that Yugoslav army troops have invaded Albania and secondly, of the
suspected spy case in NATO which gave early warning to the Yugoslav side
about targets in Belgrade and somewhere else?
GENERAL CLARK:
I have no independent confirmation of the new reports about the activities
on the border between Yugoslavia and Albania, we'll be getting more
information on that later and at tomorrow's press briefing I'll ask the
SHAPE spokesman if he can provide a further up-date to you from our sources
but at this time I have nothing further.
With regard to the second question on the spy, I've seen that story break.
I don't really know what the origin of the story is but clearly NATO
remains very vigilant in terms of protecting the security of its operations
and we're taking what I believe are all necessary and appropriate measures
in that regard.
QUESTION:
General, do you have an estimate about the cost of the operation?
GENERAL CLARK:
I don't have any idea of the cost, I'm not working the cost of the
operation. I suspect it will be substantial but I would suspect it will be
far more substantial for Yugoslavia.
MARK LAITY (BBC):
General, the way you described it, you've said that all of the targets are
damaged, that most of them are moderately damaged rather than severe or
destroyed. Can you give some idea of whether we are talking several
weeks, months, to actually degrade them to the point that you could
actually declare that you have achieved your military objective and can you
actually say this military objective is achievable by air power alone?
GENERAL CLARK:
Remember, what we are trying to do by air power is degrade his forces, what
we're trying to do by achieving that military objective is to achieve a
political objective so it's the achievement of the political objective that
is the real aim of the campaign.
With respect to the destruction of the facilities and installations, I
think you can see where in some cases, for example the Pristina radio relay
that we showed being struck, that that is clearly out of business, it is
gone and an overhead image would show that there's really nothing there
after having been struck by that very large weapon right at the critical
point. But in general, he is scrambling to remove critical assets from
known locations, to hide, conceal, to repair and it's a day-by-day effort
by the intelligence analysts and others who are looking at the damage and
where the target sets have been repaired, what we have to re-attack,
where's there's a new target and this is very much the meat-and-potatoes
hard work of an air campaign.
As we have said from the outset, this is likely to be as long and difficult
as President Milosevic makes it and we're approaching it very
systematically, methodically and increasingly intense and so as we make it
more intense we are working very hard over those targets that may appear to
have been moderately damaged. I will tell you that "moderate" is a
relative term in this case, in some that are listed by the analyst as
"moderate" because they have only a small hole in the roof, inside the
damage may have been catastrophic but of course we are not on the ground to
see that.
QUESTION:
I have two questions. First, is it true that you asked the Pentagon for
300 additional planes and when do you think you will obtain them?
Secondly, do you have any information on the 100,000 people who disappeared
overnight last week at the frontier inside Kosovo?
GENERAL CLARK:
On the first question, I have asked for additional aircraft, approximately
300 is the number that's being reported in the press which I requested from
US sources but this is part of a NATO request and it is actually a larger
total than that because we'll be asking NATO to provide sources, this is
just the US share of this request.
It's our understanding that the people that were turned away from the
Macedonian border were moved back into the vicinity of Irosovac (phon) and
some moved up into the hills to the west of Irosovac, others are inhabiting
what is essentially a ghost town in which houses and homes have been
looted, burned and there is very little of value remaining in them.
RICK:
General, we understand that the Foreign Ministers asked the Military
Alliance to figure out a way to help those displaced people. What are
some of the options that you're looking at?
GENERAL CLARK:
We've looked at a number of options. Of course, the one that comes first
to mind is a humanitarian airlift. I would just tell you that inside
Kosovo first, it's a very difficult air-defence environment. Even though
we've experienced no real losses of aircraft there, we are engaged every
night and last night three or four SAM-6s were fired at us and lots of AAA
is fired but this fire is incapable thus far of doing any damage to our
aircraft. I am sure that's a source of great frustration to the Yugoslav
military but a slow-moving transport plane would be vulnerable to such fire
and I would have to assume in planning such an operation that the Yugoslav
military would choose to engage such an aircraft, there is no reason to
assume they wouldn't and it's not a matter of a single aircraft flying over
and dropping a load, we're talking of a quarter of a million people, it's
between 60 and 100 flights per day of substantial-sized cargo aircraft to
deliver the kinds of food that are needed to sustain them and so our view
on this is that, frankly, this is a question that is caused by President
Milosevic and his policies; he needs to address this problem, these people
are citizens of his country, that's what he has said all along, he needs to
demonstrate his leadership and concern for his own citizens who are being
held out there hostage, isolated and starved.
QUESTION (NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO):
General, you showed in the beginning a very interesting sequence on the
Yugoslav troop movements. Is it your impression that that was designed to
carry out a campaign of ethnic cleansing that was basically
randomly-scattered all the way across Kosovo territory or are you starting
to discern a specific pattern to what he was trying to accomplish?
GENERAL CLARK:
I'm sure that there are documents - and we've seen references to them in
the German press and others - as to what exactly what was intended in this
operation. When General Naumann (phon) and I were in Belgrade in October,
I recall being in a room with General Perisic, General Giorgovic (phon)
and some others. I asked General Giorgovic: "Where is this enemy that
you're fighting and how many are there?" and he brought in a map and he
showed me the individual locations where they believed that there were
still elements of the KLA and he said then to me: "You know, you stopped
us from totally destroying them, we only needed another two weeks and we
would have finished this problem with military force" and I said to him:
"Yes, and you've created about 400,000 homeless people in this process in a
campaign that's totally disproportionate to any reasonable definition of a
threat, it's a political problem and you've tried to solve it by force."
We had a long dialectical discussion on this point, as you might imagine,
at that time but that's when I realised that there was still this very
strong proclivity to believe that this problem was a problem which was
appropriate to be solved by military force and the target would be the
population since they couldn't get at the KLA directly and they would move
the population, sift it, screen it and do whatever was required to try to
eliminate the basis of support for this popular movement.
Whether it was planned that they force these people all out of Kosovo into
neighbouring countries or that they just make them internally-displaced and
shift them from side, wasn't clear. Last summer, it appeared that
President Milosevic had decided the right way to handle the problem was to
prevent being accused of creating a regional catastrophe by holding as many
of the refugees as possible inside Yugoslavia. For whatever reason, this
policy suddenly changed a week-and-a-half ago and now it's flip-flopped
back again. I couldn't explain it.
FREDDIE:
General, you gave a very clear indication of the military mission and the
political objective which it is intended to achieve but it doesn't in fact
make it clear how degrading the Serb forces can in fact get Milosevic to
change his mind. Since there is no intention of putting in ground forces
on the part of the Allies and since the statement that NATO doesn't intend
to be the air force of a reconstituted KLA, there is really nothing on the
ground to force Milosevic to change his mind unless further action is
intended. Is this action intended?
GENERAL CLARK:
I can tell you that right now what we intend to do is continue to
strengthen and intensify the air campaign. We are going to make it
increasingly difficult for these forces to survive on the ground in Kosovo,
we are going to make it increasingly difficult for them to be resupplied
and reinforced from outside Kosovo and we are going to make it increasingly
painful and difficult for President Milosevic to maintain his control and
the high-level command and control of the armed forces and police which are
essential to maintaining his authority but that is the nature of air
campaigns.
As we recognised at the beginning, you cannot stop paramilitary murder on
the ground with aeroplanes - we all knew that - but what we also said is
that he values very highly his ability to use these forces and to keep them
in readiness so that's what we're after.
CARLOS:
Thank you, Jamie. General Clark, you said that Mr. Milosevic has been
planning this operation for three four months. Don't you think that NATO
politicians have reacted too slowly to stop him? The second question, if
I may, is will you ask the Atlantic Council for ???????
GENERAL CLARK:
First, let me say that you're asking judgements about political leadership
which it's not appropriate for me to give but I will tell you that as in
every democracy, in this Alliance we look for force as the last resort. We
attempted to broker a peace agreement in faith. I had many conversations
with Chris Hill and with the other diplomats who were engaged in this
endeavour and there was every hope that President Milosevic was equally
negotiating in good faith. Apparently, there was more to it than that.
MRS.SAVIC, Novosti, Belgrade:
General, we are listening all over again from you and other officials that
you are not in quarrel with the Yugoslav people. How convinced you are
that your bombs are received with joy and happiness by Yugoslav people? Do
you receive any love letters from Novi Sad, Belgrade, Oranjovac (phon),
Chupria (phon), Pristina and elsewhere?
GENERAL CLARK:
We haven't yet received such correspondence but we are receiving increasing
indications that people in many of these cities are growing angry with the
leadership of President Milosevic and that's important, that they recognise
what his leadership is costing them.
LINDSAY HILL (CH4 NEWS):
You said that you've asked for 300 more planes from the US and other planes
from elsewhere. This suggests that this is a much bigger, longer and more
difficult job than you originally envisaged. Can you explain that to us
and explain to us why it was envisaged to be less difficult than it appears
to be?
GENERAL CLARK:
First of all, we always said that we did not seek a conflict with
Yugoslavia so the air campaign was not prepared in advance with some sort
of military objective that was final in mind, our hope was that President
Milosevic would recognise the seriousness of NATO's resolve and that he
would return in good faith to negotiate an agreement that would be in his
own and his country's best interests. We also said as we started this
campaign, that it would progressively intensify, we recognised that it
would and we said it at the time and so it's very much on-track as we
imagined it would be.
AUGUSTO:
General, there are reports that people in Kosovo are starving already, but
NATO officials say the responsibility for their lives lies with Milosevic.
Knowing how much he loves them, they will die. Is there any plan within
NATO that you can make any fast air-drop or something like that?
GENERAL CLARK:
As I described, we are looking at a number of options including the idea of
an air drop but the magnitude of the requirement is frankly staggering and
it doesn't appear to be an easy solution at this time. We are looking at
other options and at all other options.
JIM CLANCY (CNN):
General, you described the air defences in Kosovo as still being very
formidable. How will that affect the deployment of the Apache, the task
force Hawk, will you put them in as soon as they are ready or will you wait
until it has developed into a more robust force perhaps even a month from now?
GENERAL CLARK:
They'll go in when it's the appropriate time for them to go in based on
their mission, their capabilities, the threat, the targets and so forth.
It is a complex calculation but it not intended that that be saved up for
some later stage, it's going to be a matter of getting them there and then
making the call that they are ready to go and do the job.
MARGARET EVANS (CANADIAN BROADCASTING):
I wonder if you could just give us your assessment of how much more
difficult your job has been in fact and how much more difficult it has
become to actually wage a war given the fact that so much of NATO's time is
taken up with humanitarian aid, it has placed enormous pressure on the
campaign, has it not? And could you also clarify the numbers? The map
that you showed us said that there 260,000 people displaced within Kosovo,
yesterday Secretary of State Albright said 700,000 - who has got the right
number there?
GENERAL CLARK:
I don't know, I didn't see Secretary Albright's presentation. These were
the figures that we've been using. I am not sure we'll get an answer for
you, if we're wrong on our figure, we'll correct it at our press briefing
tomorrow but that's the figure that I briefed the Council on yesterday.
With respect to your first question, it hasn't been much of a burden. In
fact, the truth is that NATO forces were incredibly agile in picking up
this burden. In Macedonia when the real storm broke a week ago Friday, Lt.
General Mike Jackson was there, he was in meetings with the government and
the very next day the NATO forces that morning moved out to begin
assistance to the refugees, almost immediately aircraft began landing as
early as early Sunday morning with relief supplies and other materials and
on Saturday the combat stocks and other equipment of the NATO forces were
put to immediate use to alleviate the plight of the refugees. In the
meantime, the air campaign has continued.
GEORGE FORIS (HUNGARIAN TV):
General, would you mind elaborating a little bit? Strictly from the
military and strategic point of view, what makes it necessary to hit
Borovadina (phon) so heavily? For Hungary and Germany it is quite
difficult to send a story of the necessity at home and I know that there is
a growing hostility against it.
GENERAL CLARK:
We've hit military targets wherever they may be throughout Serbia. We said
at the outset that there was no sanctuary and as we've done our analysis,
there are military targets in the Borovadina province which are used to
support and sustain the effort in Kosovo.
I think we do have the video on the railroad bridge yesterday and I would
like to show this for you because it completes the statement I was making
about collateral damage:
(VIDEO)
The pilot in the aircraft is looking at about a 5-inch screen, he is seeing
about this much and in here you can see this is the railroad bridge which
is a much better view than he actually had, you can see the tracks running
this way.
Look very intently at the aim point, concentrate right there and you can
see how, if you were focused right on your job as a pilot, suddenly that
train appeared. It was really unfortunate.
Here, he came back around to try to strike a different point on the bridge
because he was trying to do a job to take the bridge down. Look at this
aim point - you can see smoke and other obscuration there - he couldn't
tell what this was exactly.
Focus intently right at the centre of the cross. He is bringing these two
crosses together and suddenly he recognises at the very last instant that
the train that was struck here has moved on across the bridge and so the
engine apparently was struck by the second bomb.
As I said, the crew feel very badly about this, it certainly wasn't what
they intended and we do take every possible measure to avoid collateral
damage.
Thank you very much for your attention, I just want to say again we're
going to do everything we can to conduct an effective professional campaign
and avoid collateral damage.
JAMIE SHEA:
And I'd like also to say a very big thanks to SACEUR for coming today,
thank you!
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