Department of Defense Report, Sunday, May 16, 1999

Defense Secretary William Cohen said there is a "very distinct possibility" that refugees were being used a human shields when American F-16 fighters -- bombing a compound in the village of Korisa -- may have accidentally killed ethnic Albanian refugees who had camped out next to a Yugoslav special police command post.

"We're not really sure how this came about," Cohen told interviewers on the CBS-TV program "Face the Nation" May 16. "We have reviewed the targets -- we're satisfied that we did in fact strike military targets."

He said "it is yet to be determined whether the Serbs moved in these refugees as human shields. "There's a very distinct possibility," Cohen said. There's no level to which Milosevic and his troops won't sink in terms of using refugees as human shields and for other purposes."

Cohen said that for the Serbs to publicly lament the deaths of the refugees killed in the bombing "is almost tantamount to Adolph Eichmann complaining about allied forces bombing the crematoriums. These are crocodile tears coming out of mass killers, and I think we ought to look at it in exactly that fashion."

Cohen said Yugoslav President Milosevic now has 40,000 Serbian special police and paramilitary troops engaged in a campaign to purge ethnic Albanians from their homes.

"As a matter of fact, he's put about one-and-a-half-million people out of their homes, and we're now seeing about 100,000 military-age men missing," he said. "They may have been murdered. We've had reports that as many as 4,600 have been executed. But I suspect it's far higher than that."

Questioned about Serb claims that they cannot withdraw their troops from Kosovo because they fear allied bombing, Cohen responded, "That is more Serb nonsense coming out."

He said Milosevic knows he has to comply with the NATO conditions before the bombing will stop -- including agreeing to pull all his forces out of Kosovo, allowing the refugees to return, providing the Kosovar Albanians with a degree of autonomy, and allowing for the presence of an international peace-keeping force.

Cohen said he has not yet seen any sign that Milosevic is ready to negotiate on the terms laid out by NATO. "And we intend to intensify this (bombing) campaign to the point that he will accept those conditions," he added. "So we're now intensifying this 24 hours a day ... so he is going to pay a very heavy price day-by-day."

General Henry Shelton, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, told "Face the Nation" that the allied bombing campaign has inflicted "a great deal of damage" both on strategic targets around Belgrade and the Yugoslav army in Kosovo.

"And it goes beyond just the fielded forces," he said. "As you know, (Milosevic) has lost all of his refining, he's lost a tremendous amount of his fuel, his ammo, his capability to sustain his forces."

Shelton added that 50 percent of the country's air defense has been damaged or destroyed, and that all Yugoslav front-line fighters, and a lot of the country's ground-attack aircraft and helicopters are now out of commission.