NATO HQ

12 Apr. 1999

Audio file
(.MP3/4.19 MB)

Time is against President Milosevic. As his war machine becomes weaker from our air campaign, the NATO assets in the theatre become stronger. We now have doubled the strike aircraft taking part in the air campaign. In the past two and a half weeks 900 strike sorties have been flown and we have taken out half of his high performance aircraft, and the rest have not dared fly for a while. We know that in many parts of his civilian economy there is now tough rationing of petrol and diesel in order that they can eke out what they have for the military machine.

The second clear focus of today's meeting was on the role of NATO in meeting the humanitarian need for the victims of President Milosevic's brutal ethnic cleansing. Many of us, including myself, recorded our strong appreciation of the magnificent record of the NATO troops in building camps, in providing shelter, in supplying basic sanitation and in handling the logistics of the supply of food for the refugees who have made it over the border.

I do want to say though that I and a number of those who spoke in the debate did express particular concern about those refugees who have not made it over the border and are still trapped in Kosovo. In the middle of the day I took time out from the meeting to meet Mr Kraznici, who is one of the leading figures of the Kosovar Albanian community. He told me that the information that they are receiving from within Kosovo confirms the very serious circumstances of those refugees trapped on hillsides and woods, hiding from the Serbs but unable to obtain access to shelter or to food. Our communiqu clearly holds President Milosevic responsible for the welfare of those refugees still on his territory, and we also have tasked our military to examine how we can manage to get supplies and food through to them if President Milosevic continues to ignore and neglect them.

The third and final key point from our meeting is the strong sense of solidarity that was expressed in the meeting with the countries of the region. The other governments of the Balkans have been robust in their approach, supportive of our action and share our determination that President Milosevic must not be allowed to get away with ethnic cleansing. We are all very conscious that the contact and the solidarity that we have built with those countries is something we must build on for the future, and that the present economic development and the recent history of strife in the Balkans need not be the future of the Balkans, that is why we have committed ourselves to working through NATO to promote stability in the Balkans and working through the European Union to promote economic ties with the Balkans. It is up to the people of Serbia whether they wish to change the direction of their country and join that trend for increased contact between their neighbouring countries and the modern Europe, or whether they wish to continue with a future for Serbia which looks more like the fascism that we defeated 50 years ago.

Question (CNN): Was there any discussion among the Foreign Ministers of preparing the way, putting ground troops that are capable of fighting their way in, without taking a decision to put them in, but to prepare the way for that so that NATO military commanders have more options, Yugoslav military commanders have fewer options?

Foreign Secretary:If you mean by that did we decide to prepare for such a fighting force to invade Kosovo or Serbia, the answer is no, we have no intention of carrying out such an invasion, we have no plans to do such an invasion, there has been no change in our policy on this question. Indeed I have repeatedly myself stressed that even if we were to contemplate it, it would be two or three months before we had assembled such a force. We cannot wait two or three months, that is why the most immediate direct way we can change the balance of forces in Kosovo is by intensifying our air campaign.

Question: The US Secretary of State talked to us about discussions on possible partition which are going on, can you tell us the nature of these discussions? And you have been making threats directly to Mr Milosevic today, what will happen if he attacks Albania, what will happen if he carries on with the repression of the refugees, given that you are not thinking of engaging ground troops, what will happen?

Foreign Secretary: We have not been threatening President Milosevic, what we have been doing is giving guarantees of security to Albania and to Macedonia, we want to see those countries defended and I do not think President Milosevic need be under any illusion that if he mounts a major military campaign against those two countries then he will encounter a very severe resistance from ourselves. But having said that, Charles, the key issue here, one has to note, is that President Milosevic is already in enough trouble as it is, he is not in a position to go out looking for more trouble. On the question of the long term future of Kosovo, we start from the basis of the Rambouillet accords, the Rambouillet accords provided for a democratic self-governing Kosovo as an entire and not partitioned on ethnic lines.

Question (National Public Radio): It seems that there has been a fair amount of discussion about what kind of ground force would eventually accompany or protect refugees, presuming it doesn't have to go in in another way, but what used to be described as a NATO-led force is now being described as an international security force with a NATO corps. What I wanted to know is whether you discussed options in terms of command structure, would this be a single key, to use the jargon, NATO command structure or is that an open Question?

Foreign Secretary: We didn't discuss it and no it was not an open Question, I don't know of any member state who participated in UNPROFOR, who is present in Bosnia, who would be willing to go back to the concept of a dual key. If we are committing our troops, we are committing our troops with a clear, trusted and tried command structure and that for us is a NATO command structure. But that of course does not mean that we are not open to other members of the international community joining us in that force. I would welcome it if Russia wanted to play a part in such a force, Russia after all works alongside us in the current force in Bosnia and I am sure we can create a formula by which that is possible in Kosovo.

Question (NBC): Could you tell me how long NATO is prepared, if Mr Milosevic refused to back down, to persist with air strikes alone before you would make a decision that you would have to resort to ground troops and was that something you discussed today?

Foreign Secretary: We will continue until we have completed our objective and our objective is for the refugees to return with international protection. Until then, the campaign goes on.

Question: Secretary Albright talked about the belief that there are 700,000 people in Kosovo who may be deliberately deprived of food and shelter and the desire of NATO to help them, but without ground troops in there how do you deliver help of any kind, what is the mechanism?

Foreign Secretary: We have done it before and we can do it again and we have asked our military to examine those options and to report to us. But I would stress that obviously you touch on what is the best outcome and that outcome is that we get our international military presence in there to provide the security within which the relief agencies can operate. I think it would be false of any of us to promise that we can do a full job, or provide shelter, or provide decent medical care until we have that international military presence and that is the basis on which most humanitarian agencies would only consider going in. But there are emergency steps we can take and we have tasked the military to look at it.

Question: There has been a lot of discussion about the troops going in in a permissive environment, that is supposedly the objective. What is a permissive environment? Does that mean that Slobodan Milosevic says I permit you to come in, or does it mean that he is so battered he can't object to NATO troops going in?

Foreign Secretary: I am very happy to leave it to him to decide which constitutes permission on his part, but let us be clear on the bottom line, the bottom line is we are not fighting our way in against organised resistance and the sooner Milosevic recognises that it is going to happen and the less damage to his war machine the sooner he agrees to it, the better it will be for both sides.

Question: One of the main thrusts of the NATO air strike campaign has been against fuel supplies and POL facilities and yet there are now reports of oil tankers being unloaded regularly at river ports, so where does this leave the fuel attack strategy? Is something going to be done about tightening up the sanctions or are we going to have a kind of a war in which the plug is out but the tap is still running?

Foreign Secretary: First of all, we have had very considerable success in our targeting of the petrol, oil and lubricants for the Yugoslav Army. We know that we have very substantially reduced the fuel depots and the stocks within Yugoslavia, we have also eliminated his two refineries which means that his stocks of crude oil are now useless to him because he cannot use them for the movement of vehicles, and we are also aware that he is having difficulty distributing such supplies as he has to the troops in the front line. You raised an issue which we have reflected upon and which we are considering, it is certainly one of the unsatisfactory features of our targeting of the fuel supplies that there is no official UN oil embargo on Yugoslavia and we will certainly be considering whether there are ways in which we can plug those holes through which some oil may be seeping into Yugoslavia, but don't under-rate the extent to which the campaign has had an effect.

Question: If you can't get a UN fuel embargo because of vetoes in the Security Council, is there a de facto embargo that NATO could itself impose?

Foreign Secretary: I would have to consider very closely and very carefully how we took any such step, Martin. One of the great advantages of our present position is that it is a position that has the support of the overwhelming majority of the Security Council and of course has achieved a very impressive statement of support from the Secretary General. We wish to work with the UN.

Question (Time Magazine): One of the conditions of the Rambouillet agreement is the disarming of the KLA, I wonder if we are sticking by that? And secondly, what is the effect, particularly on public opinion, of reports of attacks across the Albanian border of the KLA and was this something that you took up with Mr Kraznizki today?

Foreign Secretary: It was not a matter that I discussed with him today but Mr Kraznizki and the members of the KLA remain fully committed to the Rambouillet Accords which require them to be demilitarised and to hand in their weapons. That remains our objective. If we are going to deploy a large international military presence of an envisaged 30,000 troops, many of them, if not perhaps most of them, from our own member states, we are only going to put them in an environment in which there is a real ceasefire and for that ceasefire to be credible there has to be demilitarisation on both sides, both Serb and KLA.

Question: Can you give us some examples of how in the past in different situations you have dropped food into refugees, I guess during a time of conflict, and are you satisfied with how the attacks on Serbian use of ground forces have gone to date?

Foreign Secretary: Satisfied is a very large word but yes I am clear that we are making a real impact on the capacity of those forces to manoeuvre and to operate, indeed we know that they spend an increasing amount of their time in hiding now because they know they have lost all air cover and if they emerge from hiding they are going to be hit. On the Question of air drops, I suppose the most recent and also the nearest example is what we did in Bosnia, whether that is an exact parallel for what we can do here is something our military must consider.

Question: You mentioned emergency measures that could be taken but are there any other emergency measures that could be contemplated that you would be prepared to mention apart from air drops?

Foreign Secretary: Yes, but I don't wish to be drawn on them now, we have invited our military to consider the options and to come forward with the plan that would best meet our objectives with least risk to our military, now that is a task really for them to advise us on and at the present time I wouldn't wish to get drawn on the options.

Question (Bloomberg News): Both you and Secretary Albright warned President Milosevic that he should not think about invading neighbouring countries. Beside whether it would be wise or not for him to do so, do you think he still has the military capacity to launch an attack on a neighbouring region?

Foreign Secretary: I don't know that he has got the capacity left any more in order to successfully launch an invasion to manoeuvre against any resistance and to hold the territory, but having said that, I am not entirely confident that President Milosevic thinks that clearly.

Question (Wall Street Journal): What do you expect to happen tomorrow with Mrs Albright's meeting with the Russians, are you optimistic that they can be brought in, what have you been told of that?

Foreign Secretary: Well the standard advice to Foreign Ministers when asked this Question is to lower expectations, so I am not going to talk up what may happen then but I do want to stress that we have always kept the door open to Russia for dialogue and for diplomacy. I myself spoke at length to Igor Ivanov on Saturday and we had a positive discussion and I very much hope that we will be able to engage Russia in support for our objectives and in working with us to secure those objectives. If we can do that then that will be a positive outcome but how much we can achieve tomorrow is something that I really would not speculate on, nor be wise to do so.

One point I would make, and it is an appropriate point on which to end, and that is that Igor Ivanov and the Russians worked very closely with us through the Rambouillet and Paris peace process, they made a real contribution to developing that peace plan and to helping to broker the discussions. They also were quite clear that it was the Serb side that were responsible for the breakdown of those talks and I think that we should always bear very firmly in mind that Milosevic had every opportunity to avert this conflict by negotiation and dialogue, it was he who blocked off that path, if Russia is willing to help us to unblock that path then that is welcome.