Shift in bombing a warning to Serbs
Air raids: Nato clears way for possible ground troops Links, reports and background: more on Kosovo
Richard Norton-Taylor and Martin Walker in Brussels
Nato has shifted the emphasis of its bombing campaign in the past 24 hours to target Yugoslav army positions and equipment along the main road from the Kosovo capital of Pristina to the Macedonian border, the most likely potential entry route for Nato ground forces.
Until yesterday, Nato strikes on Yugoslav army units had focused on the 125th and 211th brigades heavily engaged with Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas along the Albanian border. While these Serbian forces were again hit during the last 24 hours, the latest strikes were concentrated on the road to Macedonia.
Although there was no sign that the strikes were a prelude to an early ground invasion, Serbian forces have installed batteries of minefields along the Macedonian highway, and have dug in, camouflaging tanks and guns.
The evidence emerging of a shift in bombing strategy suggests that in a military war of nerves, Nato is seeking to establish a credible threat that a ground attack might someday be coming. However, the success rate of the Nato strikes continued to be low yesterday. In Kosovo itself, Nato hit just 20 artillery pieces, two tanks, an armoured personnel carrier, two mortar positions, seven anti-aircraft artillery pieces, and two multiple rocket launchers.
Nato has also extended its target list to include Serbia's civilian telephone service and computer networks, Nato officials said yesterday, as allied aircraft still appeared to be finding it difficult to flush out Serb tanks and artillery in Kosovo on the 66th day of the bombing campaign.
It is understood that Nato commanders were given political consent this week to attack Serbia's civilian infrastructure as well as the homes of its political hierarchy.
Rear Admiral Simon Moore, the assistant chief of the defence staff, said yesterday that Nato bombers had hit what he called "support infrastructure", including television and radio sites, electrical transmission towers and transformer yards around Belgrade.
Much of Belgrade was without power after attacks by more than 12 missiles, according to local media.
Asked about the decision to strike the country's civilian telephone network, Rear Admiral Moore said: "If true, the Yugoslavs are using civilian telephone systems for military command and control." John Spellar, the junior defence minister, added: "Telecommunications are very much a key part of [Yugoslavia's] military capability."
Nato wants to cut telephone links between Belgrade and Kosovo so that Serbian forces in Kosovo have to rely on mobile phones vulnerable to eavesdropping by satellite surveillance.
Attacks on targets directed at Serbia's civilian population - apparently to stimulate opposition to Slobodan Milosevic - were criticised last week by Mary Robinson, the UN human rights commissioner, who said the campaign had "lost its moral purpose".
Nato's bombing strategy was questioned yesterday by Paul Rogers, professor at Bradford university's school of peace studies, in a study on the economic geography of the Kosovo war.
"If it is thought that an air war against the Serbian economy will damage that economy to the extent that people will very quickly experience severe hardship, with its consequent effect on the regime, then that is almost certainly wrong," he said.
The strategy was flawed, he said, because it was based on a mistaken understanding of the degree of resilience of the Serbian economy. Mr Rogers pointed out that Serbia was self-sufficient in food supplies; more than a third of the entire adult working population was directly involved in agriculture; and, outside Belgrade, Serbia was essentially a rural country with only four towns of more than 100,000 people.
Serbian media reported yesterday that Nato had targeted Pristina and Nis, the third largest Yugoslav city, where a major highway, military airport and an industrial zone were hit. Also targeted were a bridge in Vladicin Han, southern Serbia, and a factory in Aleksinac, central Serbia, where an unspecified number of people were reportedly injured. At least 30 bombs fell on the Pristina area overnight, according to the Serb-run media centre.
The disparity between the number of bombing raids and their impact on the ground in Kosovo was clearly illustrated yesterday. Nato officials said allied aircraft flew 800 sorties - the most so far in a single day - of which 310 were bombing sorties.
At the beginning of the war, Nato estimated that there were 300 tanks in Kosovo. The ministry of defence yesterday could not say how many artillery pieces there were now.