Brig Gen Dan Leaf's admission in a NATO briefing yesterday that F-16 pilots dropped nine 500 pound laser-guided bombs on what he called mixed refugee and military convoys in south-western Kosovo on April 14th only partially explained how the alliance killed dozens of the ethnic Albanian refugees it is trying to protect. Serb authorities say 74 civilians died in the bombings.
For five days, President Clinton, the Pentagon and NATO maintained that one F-16 pilot dropped only a single bomb at Meja, north-west of Djakovica, last Wednesday morning. There was no explanation yesterday about why their original report so minimised NATO's responsibility. Twenty-four hours after the attacks, The Irish Times visited three bombed sites - spread over several kilometres but considered one location in the NATO briefing - immediately to the southwest of Djakovica, and reported at least five bomb craters there.
Clearly, NATO did not deliberately bomb the Albanian refugees, whose charred and amputated bodies I saw last week, and they would not have been in those convoys if Serb forces had not driven them from their homes, but none of this explains how NATO war planes with highly sophisticated equipment could mistake tractor-pulled trailers for military vehicles.
In one of the more painful moments of Gen Leaf's briefing, I recognised the roadside factory at Tereziski Most and the graceful Ottoman bridge which gave the place its name. The tractor and trailer, where I had found blackened skeletons, limbs and torsos, moved into the video frame and exploded. "As we watch these videos in the comfort of this room," Gen Leaf admitted, "it appears possible the vehicles are tractors. . . As I reviewed the tapes with the pilots, they agreed. "However, they were emphatic that from the attack altitude, to the naked eye they appeared to be military vehicles."
The pilots may have been "psyched up" for attack and were flying at high altitude to avoid Serb anti-aircraft artillery. Most seriously, they were misinformed by the aerial reconnaissance aircraft which Gen Leaf referred to as "AB triple C". The general said ABCCC receives intelligence from various sources, but refused to elaborate what those sources are. It was ABCCC that misidentified the refugee convoy as Yugoslav army. Could the Kosovo Liberation Army, which is very active in the area, have been the source of this "intelligence"?
Gen Leaf also acknowledged that (as reported in this newspaper) Serb forces in Kosovo use civilian vehicles and do not move about in large convoys. Yet, inexplicably, two hours passed and nine bombs were dropped before pilots were told that "intelligence sources suggest VJ (Yugoslav Army) forces do not often travel in convoys this length."
The general also admitted that the codings which we found on bomb fragments in the craters "match the ordnance that we use". The Irish Times reported what looked like traces of A10 "tankbuster" cannon fire on the ground. Gen Leaf acknowledged that observation A10s with powerful binoculars were finally called in to determine whether the convoy was civilian, but he did not say whether those A10s fired any weapons.
Perhaps the greatest omission of the NATO briefing was an expression of sorrow at the death of the refugees. Asked, "What went wrong?" by a journalist, Gen Leaf answered: "I don't think my conclusion said that something clearly went wrong. "I said there is the possibility that civilian-type vehicles were struck and there may have been civilian personnel harmed."