The Yugoslav leader's family members are believed to control lucrative businesses, such as liquor and cigarettes, and he has many loyalists in the state-owned oil industry. Since his rise in 1989, Milosevic has relied heavily on state-run television to whip up Serbian nationalist sentiment. Shea said the alliance, bolstered by extra aircraft, is hitting double the number of targets it struck during the first two weeks of the campaign, now entering its fifth week. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright vowed to press on. In congressional testimony yesterday, Albright again denied plans to supplement NATO's air campaign with ground troops even as the first of 24 U.S. Apache attack helicopters arrived in Albania.
Apaches fly low to attack enemy tanks and typically accompany ground troops.
It's not to say that the issue isn't in the back of people's minds, but we don't talk about it. But White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said yesterday that U.S. officials would support updating an assessment of the use of ground troops. Yugoslav forces fired artillery into Albania again in search of Kosovo Liberation Army attackers, and some 200 Serbian troops crossed the border briefly before confronting Albanian forces and withdrawing. The Serbs, mostly Orthodox Christians, maintain that Kosovo is the birthplace of their religious and national identity. NATO estimates that Kosovo's prewar population of about 1.8 million people is down to 1,052,000, with about 850,000 of them displaced from their homes.