NATO: Belgrade destroying ethnic Albanian records

NATO military spokesman Air Commodore David Wilby told the news briefing that a pattern of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo was continuing unabated.

Scope of targets extended, tempo stepped up

In light of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's continued crackdown in the Serb province, NATO said the airstrikes against Serb military targets in Yugoslavia would be stepped up.

Shea said NATO would now "extend the range and the tempo of operations in order to maximize the effectiveness of the (bombing) campaign." ( 265 K/24 sec. AIFF or WAV sound)

"No facility, no unit, which is currently being used to plan, conceive, direct or carry out the Yugoslav campaign against the Kosovars is going to be a sanctuary," said Shea.

NATO on Wednesday rejected Milosevic's latest preconditions for peace, which Russia's mediating Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov on Tuesday said included Belgrade's demand that NATO immediately halt its air campaign.

The alliance says it will only stop its raids if Milosevic accepts an international peace proposal, or NATO considers the Yugoslav military forces degraded to the point they cannot continue their crackdown in Kosovo.

Wilby said among the targets hit recently in Yugoslavia were a helicopter port in Novi Sad, an airfield in Nis and an army garrison in Pristina. Belgrade was also on the target list, according to NATO.

According to the Yugoslav news agency Tanjug, NATO missiles hit industrial suburbs of Belgrade and installations around Pristina.

Tanjug said NATO dropped cluster bombs on the outskirts of Kosovo's second largest city, Pec, on Wednesday, hitting one neighborhood inhabited by Serbs.

Belgrade policy of 'identity elimination'

NATO accused the Yugoslav authorities of deliberate "identity elimination" of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

"The Yugoslav forces, so we are learning, are destroying the archives of the Kosovar people: property deeds, marriage licenses, birth certificates, financial and other records," Shea told the news conference.

"This is a kind of Orwellian scenario of attempting to deprive a people of a sense of past and a sense of community on which it depends and to rewrite history," he said, comparing it to a vicious regime described in the novel "1984" by English author George Orwell.

Report: Russia to send navy vessel

Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev said Wednesday that Russia had officially notified Turkey that it planned to send one Naval reconnaissance vessel into the Mediterranean Sea, "into the region of conflict in Yugoslavia" in early April.

A senior U.S. government official also confirmed that Russia had filed a request for passage into the Mediterranean Sea.

In Moscow, Primakov vowed to press on with efforts to halt NATO's bombing and achieve a peaceful resolution.

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