EmergencyNet NEWS Service-Wednesday, April 14, 1999-10:31CDT

CRISIS NEWS BRIEFS

ALBANIA (EmergencyNet News) - President Rexhep Meidani said on Wednesday the Albanian army was ready to respond to any further incursions by Yugoslav troops into Albania.

SERBIA (EmergncyNet News) - Despite bad weather NATO warplanes hit targets in Yugoslavia on Wednesday as European Union leaders prepared to discuss German peace proposals for the Balkan conflict. Belgrade said planes targeted a hydroelectric plant and hit a company building five times in overnight raids. A railway bridge linking Belgrade to the Adriatic port of Bar in Montengro was slightly damaged.

WASHINGTON (EmergencyNet News) - The Pentagon said on Tuesday it would ask Congress for up to $4 billion in emergency funding for the military operation in Yugoslavia, setting the stage for a fight among lawmakers over how to pay the bill. The size of the package, which Defense Department spokesman Ken Bacon estimated at between $3 billion and $4 billion, was bigger than many lawmakers had anticipated.

From the ERRI Watch Center

SERBIA (EmergencyNet News) - NATO again pounded Serb targets in Kosovo early Wednesday, launching more than 30 strikes on the southern province. On the Albanian border, Serb forces shelled a deserted Albanian village they had briefly seized a day earlier.

The latest action on the ground came amid a flurry of diplomatic consultations, including a German peace initiative that would provide for a 24-hour suspension of allied airstrikes if Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic began a withdrawal of his forces from Kosovo. NATO said bad weather had hampered operations overnight but an official described

Wednesday's conditions as "excellent." NATO has intensified air raids this week and asked for an extra 300 aircraft from the United States to bring its air armada up to some 1,100 planes.

A rare daytime air-raid alert sounded in Belgrade at mid-morning on Wednesday. Daytime alerts also sounded in the Montenegrin capital of Podgorica and cities including Novi Sad, Serbia's second-largest.

In other overnight airstrikes, NATO hit a hydroelectric power plant and a major food-processing factory early Wednesday.

Meanwhile,  in a sign the raids were starting to affect basic supplies, the first known report of food rationing surfaced since the start of the allied air campaign three weeks ago.

The fresh round of Serb shelling on Albania's northeastern border, near the hamlet of Padesh, began Wednesday morning. One shell hit Kamenica, the village briefly occupied by Serb forces who pushed across the frontier a day earlier and then withdrew after a short skirmish with Albanian troops. Tuesday's Serb incursion -- denied by Yugoslavia -- drew a warning from Washington to Milosevic not to widen the Kosovo conflict.

In the latest airstrikes, NATO hammered Kosovo, with Serb media reporting 30 strikes overnight, continuing into the daylight hours today. Pristina's bus station, wrecked in previous attacks, was again targeted, as was the local Slatina airport which was hit first with six missiles and pounded through the early-morning hours.

The nearby Serb village of Gracanica was again targeted, as was the all-Albanian Pristina suburb of Ajvalija. The targets were believed to be military barracks. NATO also struck in northwestern Kosovo, hitting near the town of Kosovska Mitrovica and targeting a transmitter on Mount Kutlovac.

In the southeastern Serb city of Pirot, authorities began distributing coupons for food staples on Tuesday. Fuel has been rationed nationwide since shortly after the strikes began, but this was the first known report of food rationing.

Telecommunications have been targeted in the airstrikes, and word came late Tuesday of a NATO hit on the biggest Yugoslav satellite station, in Prilike, 80 miles south of Belgrade. Officials said one of three large dishes was destroyed and the other two badly damaged. The state-of-the-art station, which carried most of Yugoslavia's telephone traffic with the rest of Europe, had been hit almost 24 hours previously.

NATO's Supreme Commander Wesley Clark said on Tuesday that Yugoslavia now has 23 battalion-size units in Kosovo. Describing the buildup of Milosevic's forces in the southern Serbian province of Kosovo, he said: "It is on a scale that would have been unbelievable if we had tried to forecast it in advance."

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