NATO Press Conference Shea & Jertz

TRANSCRIPT OF PRESS CONFERENCE
GIVEN BY MR JAMIE SHEA AND MAJOR GENERAL WALTER JERTZ
IN BRUSSELS
ON TUESDAY, 4 MAY 1999

JAMIE SHEA:
Ladies and Gentlemen. Good Afternoon to you all, welcome to today's
operational up-date. General Jertz from SHAPE, as you can see, joins me
once again at the podium.

I would like first of all just to give you a few details on the visit here
tomorrow morning by President Clinton and the senior foreign policy team of
the US Administration. President Clinton will be arriving at 7.00 am
tomorrow morning, so an early start for you who wish to cover the visit.
He will meet with the Secretary General, and thereafter with SACEUR and the
Chairman of the Military Committee at around 8.00 am. He will obviously be
having a full military up-date from the Chairman of the Military Committee
and from SACEUR and will discuss every aspect of the Kosovo crisis, both
political and military, with the Secretary General. He will also visit the
US delegation and other areas of NATO and will leave at around 9.30. So it
will be a short but extremely significant visit and we greatly look forward
to receiving President Clinton tomorrow morning.

There will be photo opportunities but my understanding of the present
situation, no press conference.

Today I had planned to bring you a comprehensive up-date on Serb forces in
the field. However, yesterday evening, and General Jertz will comment on
this in a moment, we had a very significant evening of strikes against Serb
fielded forces in Kosovo and tomorrow SACEUR will send his operational
assessment of the Allied force operation thus far to the NATO Council. So
therefore I suggest we do this briefing instead on Thursday because I want
the new data to be reflected in order that this report will be an accurate
up-to-date report.

Yesterday evening we had another very intensive night of air operations,
striking as I said a moment ago extensively, in fact in the most extensive
way since the operation began, at VJ, Serb Army, and special police MUP
forces in Kosovo. The weather at least for most of the night was very
favourable to us and we had several accurate strikes against tanks,
artillery and military equipment. But we also struck 40 fixed targets
elsewhere in Yugoslavia. No part of the Yugoslav Army was spared yesterday
night, and again we will have the full details in just a moment.

My message is to you today that our campaign against the Yugoslav forces is
working. Our strategy is clear - to pin those forces down, cut them off
from their command chain and resupply routes and to take them out
progressively and deliberately. You have already seen the impact of our
strategic campaign against the Yugoslav defences. You see also now that we
are able to turn off and on the light switch in Belgrade, and hopefully
also thereby to turn the lights on of course in the heads and minds of the
Belgrade leadership as they realise that they have no option but to meet
the essential demands of the international community.

And we have also shown our willingness and ability to strike at the command
centres that drive this military machine, whether they are the political
headquarters, whether they are in Belgrade or hidden in the woods, or
whether they are hidden in bunkers belonging to President Milosevic and his
family. We are also draining the fuel supplies and cutting off the supply
routes. And now our emphasis, and this is what will be in the briefing
later this week, will be on grinding the forces down in the field in Kosovo
until such time as they realise that they have no option but to depart.

That is what I would like to say by way of introduction, and now I hand you
over to General Jertz.

MAJOR GENERAL JERTZ:
Thank you very much, Jamie. Ladies and Gentlemen, good afternoon.

Just coming in I do have to make a very important announcement. In the
last few hours a NATO aircraft intercepted a Yugoslav military aircraft,
targeted it and shot it down, what the pilots call an air-to-air fight, and
more details will be available soon, maybe within this briefing, and as
soon as they are available I will make them available to you also.

No Klausawitz (phon) today. Let me start with some more military comments
on fielded forces, as was already stated by Jamie. The forces who pursue
Milosevic's brutal policy of ethnic cleansing, it is from these fielded
forces that the refugees have fled, and it is a justifiable fear of these
fielded forces that prevents the refugees from returning to their homes.
In the past we have achieved significant benefits from our air campaign
against fielded forces, first by relentlessly pursuing fielded forces, we
have all but entirely pinned them down. They can no longer move like they
want to, they can only move furtively and with great fear. This makes it
much more difficult for them to carry out their attacks against the Kosovar
people. When fielded forces are not moving, NATO forward air controllers
can identify them and NATO strike aircraft can attack them. As you can
imagine, we do our best to really pin them down and try to stop the
atrocities and to help the Kosovar people to go back to their homes. More
details, as was already announced, will be given to you this coming Thursday.

Let me now start with the operational up-date. NATO air operations over
the past 24 hours have gone extremely well. I am very pleased to report
that since yesterday we have experienced one of our most successful
military operations against fielded forces in Kosovo. We hit the 125th
Motorised Brigade in western Kosovo, and the 233rd in eastern Kosovo
especially hard. We engaged various fielded forces including many armoured
vehicles and artillery positions, military vehicles, command posts, two
radars and surface to air missile support vehicles.

The first imagery I would like to share with you today graphically shows
our success against such targets. As we have explained in the past, the
process of obtaining the imagery and clearing it for release of course
takes some time, so please keep in mind that this is not from yesterday but
this is from a couple of days ago.

Our strategic campaign against lines of communication, command centres in
Belgrade and the military radio relay network is isolating Milosevic's
forces in Kosovo. We have also had a serious impact on his fuel supplies
again.

This photograph shows the Vranje army garrison prior to our attack. The
next photograph shows the same slide following our strike. The focus of
our attacks outside of Kosovo included military and police command and
control infrastructure, including their communications systems. We also
struck again petroleum facilities, we know of the high value of that, and
several airfields which house remaining Serbian aircraft. Specifically
NATO attacked the Mount Avala national command bunker, along with other
military command bunkers and special police headquarters.

In our continuing effort to degrade the Serbian military command structure,
we once again attacked radio relay stations, satellite communications and
transmitter sites. In fact the next photographs I would like to show you
are of the radio relay facility at Bela Palenka. The first image is the
pre-strike photograph; the second image shows the facility following our
attack.

Additionally this weapon video shows one of our other attacks on the radio
relay site.

Last night we also targeted bridges and an ordnance repair facility at
Kacac. As I said, we are continuing our operations against Serbian
petroleum assets and this sequence of images is of the petroleum production
facility at Novi Sad. As you are well aware, we consider this a very
significant military target. The first photograph shows the facility prior
to attack. This video shows one of our attacks again from the north of the
weapon. And finally this image is one of our four post-strike assessments
of this facility.

You might recall previous reports which indicated that the Serb Air Force
has relocated many of its assets in an attempt to avoid detection and
destruction. Consequently during the night concentrated NATO attacks
struck several airfields. We hit Ponikve and Obrva very hard. At
Batanjica we destroyed at least one MiG 29 on the ground and two other
aircraft on the ground.

Serbian air defence surface to air missile activity in the last 24 hours
was less intense than normal, but anti-aircraft artillery was active. So
far, to our knowledge, no Serbian air defence fighters were launched, but
as I already indicated, at least one got airborne and got shot down.

Finally I am pleased to report that all Alliance aircraft returned to their
bases without incident after a very good day's work. And when I am saying
that I am finishing again with good work means we want to degrade
everything which Milosevic has to finally end this conflict.

Thank you very much.

CHARLES BREMNER, TIMES:
Jamie, I know you talked about this this morning, but have you got any more
information since this morning on the bus yesterday and how do you account
for the ordnance that the Serbians have apparently shown foreign reporters
which appear to have US markings on them around this bus?

JAMIE SHEA:
Charles, as I said this morning, we spent all of yesterday afternoon and
all of the night doing a check on this. We interviewed all of the pilots
who were flying over that area yesterday, we looked at all the cockpit
video tape available, we looked at all of the intelligence available, and
we have, and we still have, no indication linking NATO to that incident.
And you know, Charles, and everybody else knows here, and I know this
better than anybody, that when in recent days we have seen evidence that we
struck accidentally civilian vehicles, or what are a cause of civilian
deaths, we have admitted it as quickly as we could but we have admitted it
and we haven't sought to hide it. But this time it is different. Having
done exactly the same investigation we have no indications at all that any
of our aircraft were involved in that incident. We also know that that
particular area around the village of Savine Vode, which is west of Pec, is
a very hilly wooded area along the Albanian-Montenegrin border which has
seen some very intense fighting over the last few days between the Serbs
and the UCK, in fact that is one of the areas where the fighting has been
at its most fierce. It is classic ambush country and it is not the sort of
area where the information that I have received suggests that civilian
buses with civilians in them normally travel. It is not a major route.
The second element is that we know that the MUP special police in their
blue uniforms requisition and use civilian transport and have done so for a
long time. The independent Montenegrin radio, commenting on this incident,
gives a rather different version from Belgrade reporting that 6 vehicles
were apparently hit in the incident, including 2 police vehicles, although
of course they were not shown on the TV pictures. We also know that the
Serbs are going to some lengths to conceal their casualties. I don't know
if you have seen the reports out of Belgrade this morning that the
cemeteries were closed until midday in order for a number of discreet
military burials to take place. Of course this is something that is not
widely known to the public.

The other thing, looking at this whole incident, is that the bus would not
seem to have been hit by a missile or a bomb from an aircraft, would not
seem. Obviously without a thorough forensic examination on the ground it
is difficult to know exactly why that bus was in the state that it was in,
but small arms fire, mortars, a ground skirmish are also possibilities that
at least have to be looked at.

So in other words what I can say is that we have no indication whatever,
after a thorough search, that NATO was involved in that incident and just
looking at the things that we do know, other hypotheses seem worth
investigating at the present time.

QUESTION:
Would you have anything to add to President Clinton's comments this morning
that he might consider a pause in the bombing?

JAMIE SHEA:
I believe that President Clinton was very clear yesterday and his senior
advisers, who also spoke, have been clear too. The President said what
everybody in NATO has been saying for a long time, that when we know that
the Serb forces are withdrawing from Kosovo, as I said yesterday when we
can see the dust from the tracks of all of those vehicles turning around
and pulling out and we know that they are leaving for certain, we can
verify that and therefore we know that Milosevic is meeting our fundamental
conditions, not just one by the way, but five, then of course we are
prepared to stop this air operation. But this is not a pause, this is a
question of stopping when we know that Milosevic is now stopping his
violence and is pulling out his forces. That is what the President said,
that is perfectly clear, and he only stated what he has been saying for a
long time and what every other NATO leader has been saying.

ABC NEWS:
Serb Radio is reporting that a NATO plane has been shot down near Valjevo
in Serbia. Do you have any information about that?

JAMIE SHEA:
No, but so far I have counted over 70 NATO aircraft shot down by the
Yugoslav forces, and that makes 71.

NORWEGIAN NEWS AGENCY:
Just as you started your brief today there was a wired urgent from AFP in
Moscow from Russian sources saying that NATO should have accepted a peace
keeping mission in Kosovo under the UN flag. Could you comment on that?

JAMIE SHEA:
We have a NATO peace implementation mission in Bosnia which has now been
on-going for 4 years under a Chapter 7 UN Security Council mandate which
has been renewed consistently. Russia participates in that force and we
are very happy with it. Obviously the question of the mandate for an
international security force in Kosovo, which is our objective, is
something that has to be worked out. But as you know, allied leaders in
Russia are currently holding a series of discussions to try to define the
circumstances for that force and certainly if it is possible to have a UN
Security Council resolution, if that can be achieved, that would be an
acceptable basis for us. But we have to wait and see as these discussions
with Russia progress if we are going to be able to achieve that, but we are
making every effort and you can see that from the intense diplomatic
activity that is on-going to achieve that. But obviously we also want this
to be a mandate for a robust force with the proper rules of engagement, the
ability to do its work in a robust way with the clear lines of authority,
with the NATO core that we know is indispensable if this force is going to
be effective and different from previous manifestations of the
international presence in Kosovo, and if it is going to have the confidence
of the Kosovar Albanian population. They have said all along that they
want a robust force and they want NATO to be there if they are going to
return home, and as returning them home is one of our priorities I think we
have to heed what they are saying.

MAJOR GENERAL JERTZ:
May I draw your attention just back to military history again. You know
from 1992 - 1995 in Bosnia we had no robust forces and we had about 48
cease-fire agreements, the first one did not last longer than a minute, the
last one not longer than an hour, and when the robust forces came in in
1995, from then on Bosnia Herzegovina was safe and the shooting had ended
there.

QUESTION:
(Not interpreted)

JAMIE SHEA:
(Not interpreted)

JONATHAN:
Two questions please for the General. I appreciate you obviously want to
give much more detailed information on the attacks on fielded forces later
in the week, but since this is such a strong theme of today's briefing,
could you give us some indication of the scale of the losses, particularly
in tanks and armoured vehicles, that you think the Yugoslav forces have
suffered over recent weeks? Are we talking of dozens of tanks or more than
that, or less? And secondly, could you give us some indication as to the
reason behind the increasing success that you are claiming? Is it simply
better where there are more sorties being flown, or have there been some
fundamental changes in the pattern of the NATO attacks?

MAJOR GENERAL JERTZ:
As I will be the briefer on Thursday, and if I do give you the answer now I
would have nothing to brief any more on Thursday, so give me a chance to
just wait until Thursday.

PATRICIA:
General, you mentioned that now the forces in Kosovo are basically in
hiding, that you are able to hit them more effectively, and you mentioned
using forward controllers. Can you explain how forward controllers work?
Are these people on the ground that guide the planes in, can you explain
how that works? Secondly, Jamie you said that there could be a pause in
airstrikes if you got a clear indication that there was dust flying as
these troops leave Kosovo, but at what moment can you be sure that they are
leaving and they are just not on the move, and would you be hitting them
perhaps by accident if they were retreating?

MAJOR GENERAL JERTZ:
As you know, we never go into too much detail in operational tactics, but
what I can say, no they are not on the ground, so they must be in the air.
But you wouldn't know where they are because they are covered together with
the whole campaign. That is all I can say so far.

JAMIE SHEA:
Patricia, I am not talking about a pause, I am talking about we will stop
when Milosevic stops. We are an alliance of civilised nations, we don't
shoot people in the back, clearly. We want to see them though leave. I
think it is clear if they are leaving or not leaving and we need to be able
to verify that, we need to be able to ascertain that it is irreversible and
we need to know from Milosevic that he is not simply redeploying his forces
but he is accepting the five essential conditions, that is just as much a
part of this, and then we are prepared to stop. We are not seeking any
objective beyond those five key conditions.

CAROL:
I'd like to address the Major General. Is there any new information
available on the bomb or rocket or whatever was dropped on the electricity
system in Yugoslavia? At least I would like to give it a try.

MAJOR GENERAL JERTZ:
Yesterday, I promised that I would be very honest with you, today, I still
say that. That is a typical British understatement. I am not in a
position to give you more information on this subject because it's a very
national subject and therefore for operational, technical and other
intelligence reasons, I am not able at the moment to quote much than I said
yesterday. I hope that you will understand my position and I'll try to be
more helpful on other future topics of interest.

DOUG:
General, you said that the fielded forces in Kosovo were all but pinned
down completely but if that is the case who was it that put about 12,000
Albanians onto three trains yesterday and sent them down mostly from
Podujevo but also from Pristina to dump them on the Macedonian border?

Jamie, was it indeed a sign yesterday that massive ethnic cleansing may be
resuming? You apparently had a very serious influx yesterday.

MAJOR GENERAL JERTZ:
When I said we pinned them down, we did not completely pin them down as
they still have some fuel left and of course they can do what we would like
to deny them to do, drive innocent people out of Kosovo. But we do
continue to work hard so that they will stay where they are so that they
cannot attack any more innocent people.

JAMIE SHEA:
Yes Doug, I'd like to comment on this a little bit. Yesterday, 11,600
refugees crossed the border between Kosovo and the former Yugoslav Republic
of Macedonia. You will recall that three trains arrived, one in the middle
of the night, dumping - if I can use that term - several thousand poor
human beings into a foreign country particularly via the arrival place of
Blace. Most of these people come from Pudujevo, some 30 km north of
Pristina and this unprecedented flow of deportation trains does suggest
that this area around Pudujevo is being systematically cleared. It is too
geographically located not to be part of a systematic deportation campaign.
By the way, this is the highest figure of refugees since April 2nd, the
best part of a month ago, and the UNHCR is expecting thousands more to
arrive today and you saw with Prime Minister Blair's visit yesterday the
efforts that are under way particularly at Segrani (phon), the camp that
has been built to try to accommodate these people.

The area which we are looking at very closely is Prizren - I commented on
this yesterday - a town in the south that used to have a population of
180,000, nobody knows how many are left there but a fraction; about 50,000
people from that town have been forced to move in recent days and as I said
yesterday, the interesting thing here is that this time the men are being
kept back, it's a kind of reversal of the old pattern and many of them have
been conscripted into forced labour helping the Yugoslav Army to build
fortifications in Prizren. Our view is that the Yugoslav Army have
decided to built a kind of Maginot Line around Prizren perhaps in
anticipation that NATO would launch a ground operation and they are
conscripting the men both as human shields in that city and also for that
purpose. Again, we are very concerned about their condition.

If you want the tally which we now have for the time being over the last
twelve months, it's 800,000 Kosovar Albanians have fled Kosovo since March
1998, 650,000 are internally displaced, at least 100,000 men of military
age are missing, at least 4,000 victims of summary executions are reported
since the beginning of the year, nearly 1.5 million Kosovar Albanians - or
90 per cent of the population - have been expelled from their homes. We
have reports of mass executions in 65 towns and villages and mass graves in
at least seven locations so that is the macabre tally of this chamber of
horrors thus far.

ERIC (FOX NEWS):
What can Milosevic do right now, do you think he may be watching these
briefings? You've met him.

JAMIE SHEA:
I don't suppose he's watching the briefings because he doesn't see to be
getting the message (laughter)

STEPHEN CASTLE (THE INDEPENDENT):
Can you update us on the "visit and search" regime and particularly in that
it is now a good week since we were originally alerted to the imminence of
the deal on this, would it not be fair to conclude that there really isn't
a political consensus on a tough set of rules of engagement to enforce the
oil blockade?

JAMIE SHEA:
No, don't draw that conclusion Stephen because genuinely it would be wrong
and I don't want anybody to have to write a different story one week later.

I've made it clear all along that this is a complicated business and it's
not the essential business. The essential business is the oil embargo, if
oil is not leaving then oil is not arriving and the "visit and search"
regime, albeit important, becomes less important and we have had enormous
success in the wake of the Washington summit at making sure that the oil
doesn't leave in the first place. Hungary yesterday was the latest in a
line of countries to complete legislation to switch off pipelines and ban
any oil exports to Yugoslavia. There are well over thirty countries now
doing this and therefore it is going to be already very difficult even
without a "visit and search" regime for Belgrade to import oil; it is
going to vastly drive the price up on the black market, it's going to
further increase the dilemma for Milosevic in deciding whether he gives the
few drips that remain to his civilian economy or to his military machine.
That is the first point and that is what is really significant here, that
is the strategic objective which we are meeting.

The "visit and search" is complicated because we've got to first of all
identify the appropriate basis in international law, secondly we have got
ensure that it's militarily effective in terms of how it would take place,
the modalities, and thirdly, we have got to seek the support of the
broadest number of countries in the international community and therefore
the concept is being worked on still because when we actually get it up and
running we obviously want to get it right and it's worthwhile taking a few
days to get it right than to rush into something which is going to be
improvised and therefore less effective but I come back to the fundamental
point, what counts is cutting off the oil in the first place and that's
what is effectively being done.

YASSAK:
I would like to come back to the successful night because you didn't answer
the question why it was successful. At the same time, there were reports
that there is less activity in NATO attacks so how can you explain that on
the one hand there are these reports and is it a denial that your bombing
was less intense by saying that it was not more successful or just you want
to say that you are more effective now?

MAJOR GENERAL JERTZ:
I can comment on that. No, the intensity was exactly roundabout as far as
it was last night and in the last 24 hours so we haven't changed our goal.
In fact, there are new aircraft coming in, new military assets are coming
in, and when I said we were successful, we hit more than 80 per cent of the
target and we destroyed it and we achieved our goals and especially for the
first time we did go against airfields or against runways so here we did
something which we haven't done in the past so intensively but once again,
I am not going into more details on targeting. But no, the intensity is
as it was before and we are not planning to decrease the intensity.

JAMIE SHEA:
If I may add to that just briefly, I saw some press reports that we stopped
at midnight as if there were a curfew on NATO air strikes but I can assure
you we carried on after midnight, I checked this this morning and I
mentioned in amplification of what General Jertz said forty fixed targets
in addition to the fielded forces in Kosovo and as General Jertz mentioned,
there were petroleum production facilities in five different locations,
lines of communication in seven different locations, army facilities in
five different locations, command locations in two locations, command
control and communication sites in six locations, airfields in five
locations. That is the major targets of the evening so I think you can
see that it didn't represent any kind of loss of intensity vis-�-vis
previous evenings.

BILL:
Just to follow on that, is one reason for the greater accuracy due to the
possibility that the pilots are now going in at much lower altitudes rather
than sticking to the medium and high ranges that they were compelled to do
in the past?

MAJOR GENERAL JERTZ:
We haven't changed our tactics and I don't think the accuracy now is
greater than it was before, it was great from the beginning onwards and it
is still the same so no further comment on that, the accuracy is still very
high especially using the weapons which we are using and no, we did not
change our tactics.

ANTONIO:
General, is it possible to know exactly where we are in this war, phase 2
or maybe phase 3 and if we are not yet on phase 3, what prevents NATO from
going on to phase 3 because it looks to me much more efficient than phase 2?

Jamie, can you comment on the fact that President Milosevic is not
addressing the Secretary General of NATO with a message but President
Clinton and will this message be discussed when the President visits NATO
tomorrow?

MAJOR GENERAL JERTZ:
It goes progressively and systematically as you know from one phase to
another and now we are very much in the area where we are very close to
achieving our goal so I would not quote on phase 2 or phase 3 because these
things are very fluid and war is not a very static thing, a conflict like
this is a very dynamic thing so let me not quote on whether it is 2 or 3.
If I would quote then you would of course know what is in phase 2 or what
is in phase 3 and I hope you don't know that because that should be a
military secret.

JAMIE SHEA:
Antonio, as you know, NATO has no fixation with postal addresses and we
would be happy for President Milosevic to send a letter to any Alliance
leader or to the Secretary General or to SACEUR or, for example, to Kofi
Annan because the Secretary General of the United Nations has enunciated
essentially the same principles as we have so he has, if you like, an
extremely broad array of different addressees but an extremely limited
choice of what he puts in a letter: "The five conditions I accept.
Signed Slobodan Milosevic!"

NICK:
Jamie, day after day you have given us stories of crimes against humanity,
war crimes etc. and you talk about the five points but there is nothing in
the five points about arresting war criminals, people who have given these
orders to clear these people out, right to the very top yet you are
mentioning Slobodan Milosevic's name every day.

Are there any assurances that come the end of this when the dust actually
settles, that when the people are mourning their dead in three years' time
that the people giving the orders today are not walking around free? Is
there an assurance that people will be taken to The Hague regardless of
their rank or position?

JAMIE SHEA:
OK Nick. Yes, every NATO leader or the great majority have made it clear
that war criminals are going to be brought to justice, the United States
has released names of nine commanders not because they are yet indicted -
that is the business of the Tribunal - but just to point out that we know
about them and if they felt that they were acting in secret then they
should be disabused of that immediately.

The Tribunal has teeth. NATO already has helped to detain 14 indicted war
criminals in Bosnia, today we are in the happy situation where over half of
the indicted war criminals in Bosnia have been brought to justice in The
Hague, we have had the first convictions, we now have had over 10
convictions and this despite the complexity of some of these dossiers, is
going to go up. We have seen the big fish and not simply the people that
pull the trigger or the camp guards increasingly also being apprehended.
I think if anybody looks at the example of Bosnia the trend is abundantly
clear, that is to say that this Tribunal does work, it is effective and
those that commit the crimes in Kosovo are going to suffer exactly the same
fate as those that committed the crimes in Bosnia are suffering or will
suffer in the case where they have not yet been apprehended. There is no
statute of limitations in the Tribunal, if anybody feels that they can
simply go into hiding for 20 years and then hope that when they come out
like Rip Van Winkle the world will have changed and that all of these
things would have been cleansed, they are mistaken. It doesn't matter
whether they face justice at 70 or whether they face justice at 27 and I
think therefore that is something they should seriously consider. Four
countries of the Alliance in recent days have announced that they have
supplied the Tribunal with their latest intelligence, their latest data;
there will be more information. And also, these refugees, as they cross
the border, are being interviewed by the UN Human Rights Commission - Mary
Robinson made that clear this week - by the OSCE, by the UNHCR, vast
amounts of testimony are being taken down. All of this is being
corroborated so we are not going to be in the situation of witnesses coming
forward saying: "Oh, well these events related to twenty years ago, my
memory is not what it was!" No, we are gathering the evidence now and
therefore I think the Tribunal will be rapidly effective once it is able to
go in, which will happen of course once international security force has
been deployed in Kosovo, and start doing its investigations. I am bracing
myself, unfortunately, for a lot more rather gruesome facts coming out, I
think it is rather going to go that way than the opposite.

QUESTION (NBC NEWS):
Given the cut-off of electricity and the effects on the civilian
population, that represents a sort of crossed line in targeting a large
area of Yugoslavia. To what extent is NATO prepared to take the war to the
Yugoslavian population?

JAMIE SHEA:
OK. I am very pleased for this question. What I think people have to
realise - and I'd like to get this message across - is that the misery of
the Yugoslav people comes from Belgrade, not from NATO and the Yugoslav
people have been having a hard existence for years. Let me just give you
a few figures which point out this fact:

Serbian industrial production shrank by 50 per cent between 1990 and 1998.
National GDP in absolute terms in 1998 was estimated at �11.5/15 billion
dollars, tiny for a country of the size and industrial importance of
Yugoslavia. Per capita we calculate that the GDP income is $1400/1600 now.
Unemployment, the official figure is 27 per cent which is extremely high
and more realistically it is probably double that. We know that salaries
and pensions are paid late. In 1998, inflation was 45 per cent. 45 per
cent of the population lives below or on the poverty line. 72 per cent of
the 1999 budget is planned for defence-related spending. By the way,
these are World Bank and IMF figures, I haven't made them up.

What I want to say is that yes, it is true that after our attack of the
night before and the short-circuits of the electricity supplies, the Serb
people have suffered an inconvenience but I think that inconvenience, which
lasted a few hours and which had a severe effect on the military systems,
is nothing compared with the day-to-day misery of that kind of economic
melt-down which we have seen at the hands of Milosevic since he came to
power in 1989.

DIMITRI:
A follow-up to this question. May I ask the General to comment on the
effect on the military of the power stoppage because from my personal
conscript experience I know that the military always have some reserve
machines that produce electricity so how does it affect the military really?

MAJOR GENERAL JERTZ:
The main effect of course is that even though they do have back-up
electricity of course the military, like the civilians still without
electricity Milosevic will be unable to prosecute his ethnic-cleansing
campaign effectively because he cannot talk to the Serb forces in Kosovo
any more the way he did or not as good as he did.

What we think is that by NATO targeting these electric transformers we know
that we have reached a goal by degrading command and communication
facilities in Belgrade on the way over to Kosovo and now let us talk about
fuel. We know that these back-up electricity power plants run on fuel so
Milosevic has to decide what to do with his fuel, is he running his back-up
power, is he running his tanks, is he giving the fuel in a kind of act of
humanitarian aid to hospitals and things like that.

QUESTION (THE GUARDIAN):
General, you mentioned the Mount Avalon National Command bunker and Jamie,
you mentioned bunkers apparently available to Mr. Milosevic and his family.
Is NATO quite clear of the distinction between civilian and military
bunkers? I'm thinking of that incident in the Gulf War in Baghdad when
apparently a bunker was hit that killed an awful lot of women and children.

A second question which emerges out of one of your answers today:
If these trains are being used to ship so many refugees, why not do what
the Allies were criticised for not doing in World War II at Auschwitz, bomb
the railway lines and stop them doing that?

A final question to you General. Since you were talking of military
history yesterday, do you really think that you are going to make military
history by winning this war by air power alone?

MAJOR GENERAL JERTZ:
Let me comment on the first one, then I hand over to Jamie and then I take
it back again.

Command bunkers. Yes, we do make a distinction if they are civilian
bunkers or command bunkers. It is for the military just too difficult to
really find out if it is a military-used bunker or not so we do make sure
that when we target bunkers we do target those which are of technical or
strategic interest and so far I always have to say and I always have to
mention - and please everybody listen to this - we are not targeting
civilians so we are not targeting bunkers in which there are civilian
personnel.

JAMIE SHEA:
Martin, thanks for that question. What I remember about the holocaust,
having spent a great deal of my life studying it, is that still at the end
of the day far more people were killed through summary executions and it is
the case today I am afraid that even if we did strike the railway lines it
wouldn't stop the Serbs forcing people out for the simple reason that at
the end of the day most of them have left on foot or by car, not by train
and we want, to the extent that we can, to preserve the infrastructure of
Kosovo where there is no military purpose because of course the
international community is going to have rebuild Kosovo and we are going to
have to get those refugees back so you can say bomb the railway lines but
then of course how would we get the refugees home again afterwards which is
our objective? I think on balance,if there is no military rationale for
doing that, we won't do it.

Ladies and Gentlemen, before I stop today can I just remind you, which I
should have done at the beginning, that General Klaus Naumann, the outgoing
Chairman of the Military Committee, will be here at 4.30 for his farewell
press conference and so if you wish to stay for that, I'd be very pleased
because I think it will be an interesting occasion thank you.

SAME QUESTIONER:
I asked the General another question.

JAMIE SHEA:
General, I apologise, I thought you had answered everything else.

MAJOR GENERAL JERTZ:
His thoughts were somewhere else, with General Naumann of course.
Let me come back to your question, it is a very personal one. As an airman
I would say that I would be proud when we stop the war and I am convinced
that we will stop this conflict using air assets only. If it is
historical, the historians will talk about it maybe ten or twenty years
afterwards, not nowadays.

JAMIE SHEA:
We will be back at 3 o'clock tomorrow afternoon.