'End the bombing calls after embassy fiasco'
Chinese protests erupt after four die in Nato's 'tragic mistake'
By Patrick Wintour, Ed Vulliamy in Washington, John Gittings in Hong Kong Sunday May 9, 1999
The credibility of the West's campaign against Slobodan Milosevic was close to collapse last night after Nato admitted it had dropped laser-guided missiles on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing four people and injuring more than 20 others.
The bombing on Friday night - described by Nato as a tragic mistake - provoked mass protests against Britain and the United States in several Chinese cities, and furious criticism from Russia.
And pressure on Nato to call off its bombing campaign against Yugoslavia received a boost last night when Pope John Paul issued a call for an immediate ceasefire.
'In the name of God, Father of all men, we urge all parties involved in the conflict to put down their weapons for good,' the Pope said in a joint statement with the Romanian Orthodox Patriarch Teoctist.
As Nato engaged in a desperate damage limitation exercise, it became clear that the bombing of the Chinese embassy building will severely hamper the West's ability to win Russian support for a Nato-led international security force in Kosovo, the alliance's primary war aim.
In the single most damaging error of the five-week bombing campaign, warplanes dropped three 'precision bombs' on the two-year-old embassy in the belief it was the Serbian Directorate for Supply.
The mistake, which dealt another blow to the heavily criticised air campaign, prompted a massive inquest inside Nato on how such a basic targeting error could have occurred. The site of the embassy is identified on any basic tourist map of Belgrade.
Serbian media said four people were killed and 20 wounded at the building in a residential part of the capital.
China's official Xinhua news agency said one of its correspondents, a woman, died in the attack. Chinese state TV said a second journalist and his wife were also killed. The injured included senior Chinese diplomats.
China denounced the bombing as a deliberate act and a war crime that must be punished.
'The Chinese government and people express their utmost indignation and severe condemnation of the barbarian act,' Beijing said in a statement. As one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, China can veto any UN resolution backing a Nato-led force to help the Kosovo refugees return to their homes.
The Russians, painstakingly lured last week into siding with the Western allies against Belgrade, described the attack as 'a barbaric bombardment'.
Russian special envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin said the attack 'would seriously complicate the international situation'. President Boris Yeltsin said: 'This is an open outrage and there cannot be any justification.'
In an instant index of Russian anger, the country's Foreign Minister Ivan Ivanov was ordered to postpone a visit to Britain to meet Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. In New York, the UN metin emergency session, and expressed its shock and concern over the damage and casualties. A sombre Nato Secretary-General, Javier Solana, admitted that the mistake, the eleventh serious bombing blunder of the war, was 'a tragic error'.
But following overnight consultations, Nato gritted its teeth in the face of the outcry, and refused to call off the bombing campaign.
Giving the Pentagon's first official reaction, spokesman Kenneth Bacon said: 'I do not anticipate a pause, indeed, I anticipate an intensification.'
Bacon added that the night of ferocious bombardments, of which the Chinese embassy mistake was a part, gave a 'pretty good idea' of what the Serbs could expect from now on. But the attacks would run in tandem with the drive towards a diplomatic solution.
While the bombing will weaken resolve in some Nato states, it also led to calls for an end to raids on symbolic targets in Belgrade.
The destruction of the embassy came on the night of Nato's biggest single bombardment of Belgrade, with more than 400 sorties flown. The city was plunged into darkness until the raids ended just before dawn. The targets included the Yugoslav army headquarters, the Defence Ministry, the Interior Ministry and a bunker beneath a residence of President Milovic being used as a wartime government headquarters.
The attacks came hours after Nato cluster bombs fell in a residential area of the southern city of Nis, reportedly killing 15 people.
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Allies' flawed tactics made embassy attack inevitable
Peter Beaumont and Paul Beaver report on the latest errors as the high-altitude Nato attacks still fail to find elusive Serb forces
Across the River Sava from Stari Grad - Belgrade's Old City - and south of the Danube is New Belgrade. There, close to the picnic grounds of Friendship Park, is the imposing structure of the Chinese Embassy, a modern edifice of concrete and glass, standing in its own compound next to the ambassador's residence.
A few minutes to midnight on Friday night, sleeping Chinese diplomats and journalists sheltering in the safety of a neutral embassy were blasted from their beds as the first of three missiles hit the building, killing four and injuring 20.
Yesterday, the building was twisted and wrecked, a whole side peeled off, the exposed concrete splattered with shrapnel and the scorch marks of two direct hits by Nato missiles.
The Nato pilots who hit the embassy did their job well. The only hitch was that the Nato intelligence officers, who identified it, and the military planners who ordered the bombing, got it completely wrong. In the heaviest night of bombing of the six-week-old war, Nato had planned to hit two nearby buildings - the Hotel Yugoslavia, 400 yards to the north of the embassy (a barracks and base for the indicted war criminal Arkan and his paramilitary Tigers), and the nearby Federal Palace which includes the offices of the organisation responsible for supply of ammunition and logistics to the Yugoslav army's forces in Kosovo.
They hit the Hotel Yugoslavia twice but missed the Federal Palace. Instead they turned the Chinese mission into a flaming torch. For once, this latest tragic error by Nato's bombers cannot be blamed on a 'rogue' bomb. This time - it appears - it was an intelligence mistake. The embassy - away from the Kneza Milosa - the 'embassy row' on the outskirts of Stari Grad, was simply mistaken for a Yugoslav headquarters by Nato planners examining aerial images.
But the bombing of the embassy, only hours after a rogue cluster bomb hammered into a hospital and open market in the Serbian city of Nis, killing 15 civilians and wounding 70, raises worrying questions over the prosecution of the whole war; a campaign that has failed to stop President Milosevic or his forces involved in the 'ethnic cleansing' of Kosovo.
It was brought into sharp focus yesterday as Foreign Secretary Robin Cook announced the assassination of moderate Albanian leader Fehmi Agani - a lieutenant of Ibrahim Rugova - apparently pulled off a train and murdered by Serb forces.
It also follows a series of other high-profile blunders in which civilians have been killed, including the bombing of a refugee column of ethnic Albanians, who were tring to flee Serb forces on the Pec-Prizren road in April in Kosovo, and last Saturday's strike on a civilian bus in Luzane, near Pristina.
The latest 'error' by Nato has raised new questions over the conduct of a 'low risk/no risk' air campaign designed to mollify US public opinion by preventing alliance casualties. But, as has become increasingly clear, the policy of flying at 15,000ft, at a height where targets are difficult to identify positively, has led to a series of incidents where the wrong targets have been hit.
The attacks on Belgrade, Novi Sad and Nis have raised serious questions over Nato's change of strategy to hit President Milosevic's political and economic infrastructure, faced with the relative failure to damage his ground forces in Kosovo.
For despite a high level of effort, the effect on the Serb forces in Kosovo, both regular army (VJ) and special police (MUP), as well as the paramilitary gangs, has been less than predicted. 'The Serbs have played a canny game,' said a senior officer last week, 'they have effectively disappeared from view. The net effect is that we are not degrading the VJ and MUP as we would like, and even flying lower may not be any better. We believe that bombing from a medium level (about 15,000ft) with the weapons available would not make a great difference.'
Last Thursday, Major-General Walter Jertz, the Nato military spokesman, admitted as much: 'Serb forces have proven particularly adept at using tunnels, natural camouflage and buildings in villages to make it difficult to locate and attack, sometimes even impossible, because they might be in houses where we do not know if persons are still living there.'
With a ground invasion rejected for the time being for political reasons, the only alternative - to fly low-level missions to seek Serb forces in the field - is also being frustrated by a similar lack of political will to take allied casualties in a war whose only Nato fatalities to date have been two US Apache helicopter crew killed in a training accident in Albania. Instead - as Kosovo still burns - Nato has changed tack, shifting the emphasis of the air campaign to economic and political targets aimed at weakening Serbian resolve on the 'home front'.
In recent days, that has seen Nato forces flying up to 600 sorties a day using graphite bombs to destroy Yugoslavia's electricity network, while chemical and petrochemical works have suffered repeated raids. The new intensity and wider scope of the bombing is designed not simply to 'degrade' Milosevic's ability to prosecute his war against the ethnic Albanians, but also to increase the political pressure on Milosevic by terrorising his population to the point where it rejects him.
In this respect, some of the missions against Belgrade have had only symbolic purpose - against buildings like the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Defence, both on the Kneza Milosa - which have been empty of their occupants for the best part of the air war.
It is here that Nato has been playing its most dangerous game, accelerating its bombing campaign in counterpoint to the increased diplomatic pressure for Milosevic to come to the negotiating table as splits have appeared in his brittle autocracy.