NATO Says Village Was Legitimate Strike Target

BRUSSELS, Belgium -- NATO is defending its bombing last week of Korisa, saying the Kosovo village had been used as a Serbian military camp and that dozens of ethnic Albanian refugees reported killed there must have been put at risk by the Yugoslav authorities.


"This was an assigned mission. This was a target that we knew to be a military target - a command post with artillery pieces and other equipment," a NATO spokesman said Saturday in Brussels.


The bombing of Korisa took place just before midnight Thursday. The latest Yugoslav casualty figures, given by the Belgrade-based Beta news agency, put the civilian dead at 87.


"We can't cross legitimate targets off the list - and we won't," U.S. Defense Department spokesman Kenneth Bacon told reporters in Washington.


NATO commander General Wesley Clark, on a weekend visit to Albania, said the alliance would intensify its bombings in Kosovo despite the danger of killing civilians if they were used as human shields by Serbian forces.


After hitting industrial sites, bridges and fuel dumps elsewhere in Serbia during a night of rain and thunderstorms, NATO fired more than 90 missiles during daylight attacks Saturday in Kosovo, Serbian media reported.


NATO's statement on the Korisa attack said it deeply regretted "accidental civilian casualties that were caused by this attack" but accused Yugoslavia of falsifying the circumstances. The alliance said Serbian officials' allegation that Korisa was hit by cluster bombs was also false.


Reporters saw scenes of devastation and dismembered bodies in Korisa on Friday. Survivors said the village, northeast of Prizren, was packed with hundreds of ethnic Albanian refugees when NATO planes attacked.


NATO said it spotted the target area outside Korisa in late April as a command post with an armored personnel carrier, at least 10 pieces of artillery and dug-in positions.


"In the past weeks, looking at that target, we had no evidence that there were civilians present," NATO military spokesman General Walter Jertz said Saturday. "When the pilot attackedthe target he had to visually identify it through the attack systems which are in the aircraft, and you know it was by night so he did see silhouettes of vehicles on the ground." Flying at medium altitude, three American F-16s dropped a total of 10 bombs - four laser-guided and six conventional - over the course of 10 minutes, he added.


The Pentagon's Bacon said victims of the Korisa bombing might have been led out of the hills by Serb forces to act as human shields and create a "public relations event" for Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. "They came out of the hills and they happened to be put next to a building that the Serbs had to know was a target because it's exactly the type of building, the type of installation, we have been hitting with regularity throughout Kosovo," he said.


"We try very hard to avoid these casualties. But combat is inherently dangerous and accidents cannot be avoided."


Serbian opposition figure Zoran Djindjic was quoted Saturday as saying NATO was wrong to think it could bomb Milosevic into accepting its terms.


"Militarily, he can stick this out for ages," Djindjic, the ousted mayor of Belgrade, told Germany's Welt am Sonntag newspaper.