NATO planes hit Serb targets

Italian television said NATO warplanes deployed in northern Italy for a possible strike against Yugoslavia left their bases at Aviano and Istrano this evening. German tornados based at Piacenza also took off, a German armed forces spokesman said in Italy.

Among the planes that left Italy were US F-16 fighters, B-2 Stealth bombers and electronic warfare EA-6 prowlers.

NATO secretary-general Javier Solana, in a written statement in Brussels, gave no details about the number of aircraft or missiles involved in the initial phase of the attack, nor what the targets were.

“We must stop the violence and bring an endto the humanitarian catastrophe now taking place in Kosovo,” he said. We have a moral duty to do so.”

NATO planes were reported in the air in Kosovo’s capital, Pristina. Residents reached by telephone said at least four huge detonations were heard — one quite loud — and air raid sirens sounded.

In Washington, President Bill Clinton himself prepared the Americans for possible loss of lives. “I want to level with you,” he told a labour group in a speech on Tuesday. “This is like any other military action. There are risks in it.”

After the usual wrangling and fulmination, the US Senate too backed Clinton 58-41 while the Congress withdrew a move to cut off funding for the operation.

The brief Senate resolution stated that “the president of the United States is authorized to conduct military air operations in cooperation with our NATO allies against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro).”

But some lawmkers were still wracked by doubt. “It is all very unintelligible. Whereis it going to lead us?” asked Republican lawmaker Pete Domenici. Most American people too seemed uncertain about a war against a country whose geographic location they were unsure about for a cause they were unclear about.

Clinton acknowledged that most Americans would not even be able to point out Kosovo on a map. But he invoked the spectre of a pre-World War II Adolf Hitler to suggest that if they did not stand up to Serb aggression now, all of Europe could be in flames.

The US policy is said to be so uncharted that according to one account, when the visiting Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema last week asked President Clinton what Washington would do if Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic refused to back down in the face of NATO bombing and intensified his campaign against Kosovo Albanians, the President was nonplussed.

He turned to his National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, who said, “We will continue bombing.”

Most analysts fear that the campaign against Yugoslavia could turn into aquagmire for the US with such an uncertain endgame. They warn that a bombing campaign against Yugoslavia will not be the cakewalk it was in the deserts of Iraq given the Serbs’ better air defence and the more difficult topography. So imminent was the attack on Tuesday that Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, who was on his way to Washington for wide-ranging talks, had his plane turn around in midair and return to Moscow.