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According to Serbian TV, NATO warplanes struck an oil refinery early Monday RELATED VIDEO CNN's Jonathan Aiken talks to military analysts about the logistics of sending ground troops into Yugoslavia (April 11) Real 28K 80K Windows Media 28K 80K NATO's Jamie Shea says targets hit near Pristina (April 11) Real 28K 80K Windows Media 28K 80K CNN's Dr. Steve Salvatore tries the smart shirt on for size Real 28K 80K Windows Media 28K 80K To view the latest video streams on the strikes in Yugoslavia, use the arrow buttons below to scroll through the video gallery.        Windows Media Real        28 K 80 K IMAGE GALLERY: Burning flags and rock concerts: Protesting the NATO strikes Devastation of Kosovo capital The Serbs and Kosovo  ALSO Albright suggests some Serb forces could stay in Kosovo Missing relief worker 'confesses' to spying on Serb TV Refugee flow slowing as more said to be hiding in Kosovo  MESSAGE BOARD Crisis in Kosovo  MAPS NATO officials describe attacks from day one through day 17

April 12, 1999
Web posted at: 12:19 a.m. EDT (0419 GMT)

In this story: NATO: Evidence suggests mass graves U.N.: Serbs may have slowed exodus of refugees Yugoslavs reject 'occupation' White House: Contingency ground troop plan Ex-POW senator: Air-only campaign 'foolish' Russian aid stopped at Hungarian border Hundreds more NATO planes on the way RELATED STORIES, SITES

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (CNN) -- NATO warplanes struck an oil refinery about 20 miles northeast of Belgrade early Monday, Serbian TV reported, following an Orthodox Easter lull in the aerial offensive now in its 20th day.

The strike, the second at the Pancevo refinery, followed reports of a missile attack Sunday evening that unleashed a raging fireball in a residential section of Novi Sad.

Saying the shelling occurred around 8 p.m. (2 p.m. ET), Serbian TV showed pictures of a residential section of the city ablaze and said there was heavy damage but no injuries.

NATO offered no confirmation of the strike.

In Brussels on Sunday, NATO officials said they had spotted what could be a mass burial ground southwest of Pristina in Kosovo.

"Freshly turned earth could indicate position of mass graves -- however this could only be confirmed when the area has been inspected," military spokesman Col. Konrad Freytag told reporters.

The aerial reconnaissance focused on a site between the small villages of Orahovac and Urosevac.

"We are simply indicating something from the air that could be a mass grave ... based on our experience in Bosnia," NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said. "From the air the form looks something similar."

"It could be a mass grave, but obviously it will be up to the International Tribunal in The Hague, once it's able to go into Kosovo, to conduct a thorough investigation," Shea said.

Also in Brussels, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright arrived late Sunday to launch a diplomatic initiative with NATO leaders, who plan a Monday conference, and with Russia's foreign minister, who she will meet Tuesday in Oslo, Norway.

The office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees reported fewer than 7,000 ethnic Albanians left Kosovo in the past 24 hours -- 4,300 entering Albania and about 2,500 entering Montenegro.

NATO officials expressed growing concern that with Yugoslav forces preventing many from leaving the province, as many as 400,000 displaced ethnic Albanians remain in hiding there, with no food, water or housing.

Hundreds of thousands of refugees have managed to leave Kosovo, where a simmering, yearlong civil dispute escalated into widespread violence after NATO began airstrikes to force Yugoslavia to comply with an international peace accord.

NATO leaders say the bombing will stop only when the government of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic accepts a peace plan for Kosovo -- a province of Serbia, the Yugoslav federation's dominant republic.

Yugoslav officials are resisting a provision that calls for the deployment of a NATO-led peacekeeping force to oversee the agreement. A senior Yugoslav diplomat repeated that opposition Sunday.

Vladislav Jovanovic, Yugoslavia's charge d'affaires at the United Nations, described the provision as a "foreign occupation."

"We are a sovereign state, and we are to exercise our sovereignty on our territory. No state would accept to abdicate its sovereignty on its territory," Jovanovic said.

In the United States, the Clinton administration responded to growing demands that NATO at least prepare for the contingency of committing ground forces to the campaign.

White House Chief of Staff John Podesta said there is already such a contingency plan.

"With regard to planning for the use of ground troops, as you know, we have a substantial elaborate plan to insert a force in the event that there's a peaceful ... permissive environment for them to go into," Podesta said on NBC's "Meet The Press."

"And last fall, NATO did do an assessment of putting ground troops in a non-permissive environment, and those plans and assessments could be updated quickly if we decide to do that," he said.

A key Republican who has been leading the cry for the ground troop option, John McCain of the Senate Armed Services Committee, criticized the White House on Sunday for ruling that possibility out at the beginning of the nearly 3-week-old offensive.

"There's no doubt in my mind that no military commander, past or present, would think that it's appropriate, that it's anything but foolishness to say that you are not allowed to exercise any option, or at least threaten," said McCain, a Vietnam POW who delayed an announcement of his likely presidential candidacy because of the Kosovo conflict.

Yet NATO's Supreme Commander, Gen. Wesley Clark, remained convinced that bombs will destroy Milosevic's military.

"We're going to attack, degrade, disrupt, and ultimately, if he doesn't comply to the demands of the international community, he's going to lose those forces," Clark said on CNN's "Late Edition."

NATO's 19 member nations plan to send a military force into Albania to help with humanitarian relief for the more than 300,000 refugees from Kosovo.

But in Hungary, a new member of NATO, border officials stopped some refugee supplies sent from Russia. The Montenegro-bound convoy included eight fuel tankers and armored vehicles in addition to medicine and food. NATO would only allow humanitarian supplies to pass.

International Red Cross officials were in Belgrade on Sunday trying to locate and gain access to the hundreds of thousands of displaced ethnic Albanians still trapped in Kosovo, Shea said.

"The border with the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, although formally closed, doesn't mean to say that refugees aren't going there, too," he said.

Shea said NATO showed "relative restraint" in its overnight bombing because of bad weather and the observance of Orthodox Easter.

"The concentration was on targets in Kosovo itself, particularly an assembly area, petroleum, oil and lubricant facilities at Pristina, and there was some cruise missile attacks against two radio relay stations. I stress, as always, these were strictly military targets," he said.

Shea said there would be 192 flights into Tirana, Albania, over the next several days to bring in the entire complement of 24 Apache helicopters, which have the ability to fly closer to the ground and slower as it zeroes in on targets.

In addition, the Pentagon has approved the deployment of 82 more fighter planes, bringing the total number of planes that could take part in "Operation Allied Force" to nearly 700 -- all but 200 of them from the United States.

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