POWS? : SERBS SHOW OFF MEN THEY SAY ARE U.S. SOLDIERS.

Byline: Daily News Wire Services

Serbian television showed pictures early today of men it said were three U.S. soldiers who disappeared near the Yugoslav-Macedonia border.

The three U.S. soldiers were captured Wednesday in Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav army Pristina corps claimed in an announcement carried by the state-run Tanjug news agency early today. All three belong to a U.S. reconnaissance unit permanently stationed in Germany, the army said in the announcement.

At a news conference in early today, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said, ``We are still completing a positive identification procedure.''

``I cannot give you further details until this positive identification procedure has been completed,'' he said at the alliance's headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.

While being apprehended, the three resisted arrest, the army said.

The television pictures showed the three men, wearing camouflage uniforms, with what appeared to be dirt or abrasions on their faces. They were speaking to someone off camera, and subtitles were shown with what the Serb TV said were their names.

The report apparently aired from Pristina, implying the allegedly captured soldiers were being held in the Kosovo province's capital.

``We've seen it on CNN,'' said Army Tech. Sgt. Beth Alber, a spokeswoman at the European Command in Stuttgart, Germany. ``We're not confirming those are the three missing soldiers until we get notice through official channels. The search is ongoing.''

Mountainous terrain had hampered the round-the-clock search for the soldiers, who were last heard from around 2:30 to 3 p.m. Wednesday local time while on a patrol described as routine.

``There's a concern they've been captured, but we can't say for sure,'' Maj. Mark Biron, a spokesman for the U.S. European Command in Stuttgart, Germany, had said earlier as the search continued by U.S. and NATO forces.

Asked if the soldiers' possible captors might have taken them over the border into the Serbian portion of Yugoslavia, Col. Richard Bridges, a Pentagon spokesman, earlier refused to speculate. But he said U.S. search teams were not expected to enter Yugoslavia, which is under NATO air attack.

The Army team had been on a daytime reconnaissance mission in the Kumanovo area, about 3 miles from the southern Yugoslavia border when they reported ``they received small arms fire and said they were surrounded,'' according to NATO.

``No more was heard from the patrol,'' a NATO statement said.

The soldiers were part of a 350-person U.S. contingent of the now-disbanded U.N. peacekeeper observers in Macedonia known as Operation Able Sentry. After the United Nations ended the observer mission, the 350 soldiers were assigned to help protect a NATO force of 10,000 soldiers who are on standby for peacekeeping in Kosovo.

The three are from the U.S. Army's 1st Infantry Division in Germany. Next of kin were being notified that the three were missing, the Pentagon said.

There have been no U.S. casualties in the first eight days of NATO's air war, which is aimed at stopping a Serb military offensive against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. On Saturday night, an air commando unit dramatically rescued an American pilot whose F-117A stealth fighter was downed about 30 miles northwest of Belgrade, the Yugoslavia capital.

Clinton strategy

Clinton said the NATO air campaign against Serb military targets in Yugoslavia had a ``reasonably good chance of succeeding - maybe even a better chance of succeeding as long as we have more and more steel and will and determination and unity from all our NATO allies.''

``And I want to pursue that strategy,'' Clinton told CBS television. ``The thing that bothers me about introducing ground troops into a hostile situation into Kosovo and into the Balkans is the prospect of never being able to get them out.''

He spoke as Serb troops ratcheted up their village-by-village campaign of sending ethnic Albanians out of Kosovo, which the Serbs see as the cradle of their civilization.

NATO's response was to widen the area of airstrikes. They hit several targets in Kosovo in daylight hours. Next, presumably, would be many government buildings in the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade.

But NATO's military commander, U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark, said even if he got the additional firepower he requested from NATO allies, it would not be enough to stop the attacks against civilians, which are reportedly spearheaded by irregular Serb militia units.

``We can't stop paramilitary actions from the air,'' Clark told reporters. ``We've slowed him (Milosevic) down and we've hurt him, but we never thought air power alone can stop this kind of paramilitary tragedy.''

Refugee account

Refugees reaching the Kosovo-Macedonia border said that Kosovo's provincial capital of Pristina was being systematically emptied of residents, and that tens of thousands of people had left their homes and were walking toward Macedonia. In Bonn, German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping cited growing evidence of ``concentration camps like there were in Bosnia.''

The State Department also reported that as many as 20,000 ethnic Albanians were being force-marched from the town of Cirez, summary executions had taken place in at least 20 towns and villages and at least 13 villages had been burned to the ground.

On top of that came a NATO report that echoed the Holocaust, that Serb troops were on a campaign bent on erasing evidence that ethnic Albanians had ever lived in Kosovo.

``The Yugoslav forces, so we are learning, are destroying the archives of the Kosovar people,'' NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said. ``Property deeds, marriage licenses, birth certificates, financial and other records, public records, are being systematically destroyed.

``This is a kind of Orwellian scenario of attempting to deprive a people and a culture of the sense of past and the sense of community on which it depends,'' he said.

When a Serb offensive started 13 months ago against a secessionist Kosovar guerrilla force, the ethnic Albanians accounted for 90 percent of the 2 million people there. Now, about 600,000 of those Albanians have fled their homes, and at least one-fifth have left Kosovo.

Serb headquarters

In NATO's air campaign, the U.S. Defense Department announced that forces attacked the headquarters of an elite Serbian special force near Belgrade on Tuesday night. The attack was the closest bombing yet to the city of Belgrade, the Pentagon said. And preliminary reports indicate that NATO forces hit tanks and other heavy military vehicles in Kosovo, but cloudy skies prevented aerial verification by photograph.

Defense Department spokesman Kenneth Bacon said the number of Serbian targets is expanding ``almost daily'' in an attempt to choke off Milosevic's ``continued brutality on ethnic Albanians.''

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3 Photos

Photo: (1--3) Serb TV images show the three captured American servicemen.