Yugoslavia Facing New Sanctions Over Kosovo

The Clinton administration and the European Union on Monday imposed new economic sanctions on Yugoslavia, accusing President Slobodan Milosevic’s government of increasingly brutal suppression of the ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo province.

The sanctions, banning new investment in Yugoslavia and freezing Yugoslav assets held in the United States and Europe, were to have been put in place last month but were suspended after Milosevic agreed to negotiate with Ibrahim Rugova, leader of Kosovo’s Albanians.

Those talks broke down Friday, spurring Monday’s action.

A senior administration official, meanwhile, said the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will accelerate its plan to deploy troops to Albania and Macedonia to prevent the Kosovo violence from spilling across the border into neighboring countries. Although the NATO plan is still unfinished, any troop contingent would almost certainly include U.S. forces.

The six-nation Contact Group--the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia--announced meetings for later this week to deal with the escalating Kosovo crisis. Second-tier officials of the group will meet Wednesday in Paris to prepare for a foreign ministers meeting Friday in London.

NATO foreign ministers last month ordered alliance military commanders to begin planning to send troops to help Albania and Macedonia protect their borders with Kosovo. At that time, NATO officials had said the plan was expected to be completed by the end of this month.

The senior official who said the process will be accelerated did not suggest a new completion date. So far, NATO is considering only a protective deployment to Albania and Macedonia.

Officials of the alliance said there are no plans to send forces into Kosovo to prevent the police crackdown on Albanians, who make up 90% of the population of the southern province of Serbia, the larger republic remaining in the rump Yugoslavia.

Earlier Monday, Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, Clinton’s national security advisor, said military action in the Kosovo crisis “is not something that is on the table.” But State Department spokesman James P. Rubin later said Berger was signaling only that the planning was being done by NATO, not by the United States.

Rubin announced the U.S. sanctions just hours after foreign ministers of the 15-member European Union, meeting in Luxembourg, voted to impose the economic penalties. A State Department official said the EU action apparently prodded Clinton and his advisors to end deliberations and impose sanctions.

Officials said the investment ban is expected to further cripple Yugoslavia’s beleaguered economy.

In Luxembourg, the EU foreign ministers said in a communique: “We are deeply concerned at the intense fighting in Kosovo. The reports of widespread house-burning and indiscriminate artillery attacks on whole villages indicate a new level of aggression on the part of the Serb security forces. We are disturbed by reports that these attacks are beginning to constitute a new wave of ethnic cleansing.”

On Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) said he believes use of U.S. troops should not be ruled out in Kosovo, which he said has “the potential to become another Bosnia.”

On Monday, Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota seconded Lott’s comments, saying: “I wouldn’t propose that we do it today. But I believe that the multinational force that exists today in Bosnia is a clear demonstration of the success we could also witness in Kosovo if done correctly.”