U.S. Warns of Wide War in Balkans : Yugoslavia: Serbian repression of Muslims in Kosovo province could draw international forces, including U.S. support, Eagleburger says.

Acting Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger warned Saturday that Serbian repression of the Muslim majority in the province of Kosovo is likely to touch off a broad Balkans war that could draw international forces, with U.S. support, into the conflict.

Eagleburger said that Serbian efforts to carry out “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo of Albanian Muslims--who make up 90% of the province’s population--would be “qualitatively different” from the Serbian massacres in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

And in the most direct indication yet that Washington would support military action to curb the spread of the Serbian conflict, Eagleburger said that “any Administration would have to look at it differently” from the Bosnian debacle.

The West has been reluctant to act to stop the bloodshed in Bosnia because of the profound military, logistic and political problems inherent in the type of large-scale intervention. The difficult terrain and the proximity of the warring factions make any outside military solution dubious at best.

But Kosovo presents a separate case that would demand outside action, Eagleburger said on the CNN news program “Evans and Novak.”

Although Eagleburger did not directly say that the United States would be willing to commit forces, he drew a clear distinction between Kosovo and Bosnia.

He said that if the forces of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic attempt to kill or drive out the Muslims of Kosovo, “that sort of activity in the Kosovo would be qualitatively different than anything we have seen thus far, horrendous as what we have seen is.”

The acting secretary of state said that in contrast to ongoing brutality in Bosnia, which has largely been confined to that nation’s borders, an attack in Kosovo would “almost immediately” draw in Albania, Greece, Macedonia and Bulgaria, all of which have geographic, ethnic or political ties to one or another group in Kosovo.

The Administration has been criticized by Congress and President-elect Bill Clinton for reacting too timidly to the slaughter in what used to be Yugoslavia. Officials have repeatedly pointed out the pitfalls of military intervention in the nasty civil war there, but Eagleburger’s comments Saturday seemed to draw a line in the sand.

Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former senior State Department and National Security Council official, said Eagleburger was hinting at a growing consensus within the Administration that military action would be required to stop a Balkans-wide conflict like that of 1912-13, which sparked World War I.

“The Administration has been very much concerned about this danger in Kosovo,” Sonnenfeldt said Saturday. “Since the situation there is not as intermingled as it was in Bosnia, it is militarily less daunting to think of some form of intervention as distinct from Bosnia or Croatia, where there is intense intermingling of ethnic groups.”

The former official, now affiliated with the Brookings Institution, added that “grim as (the conflict in) Bosnia is, it is essentially contained, but this one (Kosovo) has potential for spilling over into an infinite variety of unpleasant and unsavory possibilities.”

For the United Nations, however, Kosovo presents a thorny legal and political problem, because it technically is a province of Serbia and not a separate or autonomous state. Thus, many Third World nations, as well as Russia and China, may object to outside intervention into what could legally be classified as an internal matter.

Eagleburger’s comments followed a report this week from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that warned that Kosovo represents “the flash point for an expanded Yugoslav war.”

The report said that a single incident, either manufactured by Milosevic’s forces or touched off by anti-Serb Muslim demonstrations, could set off a chain reaction.

“Whether accidental or premeditated, it is unlikely that a war in Kosovo could be contained,” the study continued.

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