U.S., Europeans OK Modest Steps Against Serbia

Concluding a prolonged, often-heated debate, the United States and five European nations agreed Monday to take limited punitive measures against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic for his armed crackdown in the Serbian province of Kosovo and warned him to seek a political solution to the crisis immediately or face more sanctions.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and representatives from Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia agreed to impose an immediate ban on the sale to the regime in Belgrade of heavy police equipment, such as armored vehicles and riot protection gear, and to ask the U.N. Security Council to consider a comprehensive arms embargo against the Milosevic government.

They also urged the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague to investigate the Kosovo violence under its mandate to prosecute war criminals in countries that once were part of the Yugoslav federation. Yugoslavia is now made up only of the republics of Serbia and the much smaller Montenegro.

Russia refused to support two additional sanctions against Milosevic agreed to by the other five: a denial of visas to senior Serbian and other Yugoslav officials responsible for the repression in Kosovo, which erupted a week and a half ago, and a moratorium on government-financed export credits for trade and investment with Belgrade.

However, Moscow did join the others in warning Milosevic to take a series of specific steps “to stop the violence and engage in a commitment to find a political solution to the issue of Kosovo” within 10 days or face a freeze on all his country’s foreign assets.

The six nations, known simply as the Contact Group, have assumed responsibility for monitoring the uneasy peace that settled over the former Yugoslav federation more than two years ago with the signing of the Dayton peace accords.

Monday’s meeting came 10 days after Milosevic ordered a large-scale police crackdown that targeted ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo. Serbian authorities said the violence left more than 50 people dead, but unofficial reports have placed the death toll far higher.

Although Monday’s actions represent a reversal of what had been a gradual easing of Serbia’s international isolation in the wake of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, they are more a sign of international disapproval and future intent than of immediate new hardships for Milosevic. Only the suspension of export credits, which could hamper his efforts to sell off state-owned industries, would be expected to have any immediate substantive impact.

With Serbia’s economy in shambles, Milosevic has used these sales as a source of cash to ensure essentials such as salaries and other benefits for the police, who are helping to keep him in power. For example, Milosevic recently sold the country’s telephone system to Italian and Greek interests.

Albright, who reportedly spent much of Monday’s four-hour meeting persuading her French, Italian and Russian counterparts of the need to act, seemed more relieved than elated at a final package that contained at least some punitive steps all six nations could support.

“What we agreed to today was a satisfactory result, but we’re obviously going to keep our eye on the ball and see that this agreement sticks,” she told reporters at a news conference after the meeting. “If we don’t get the results we want, we need to exert the only kind of pressure that Milosevic understands, and that is the kind that imposes a real price on his unacceptable behavior.”

British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who hosted the meeting, declared the package “made it quite clear we cannot support the violent suppression of the nonviolent expression of political views”.

Cook said the Contact Group will convene again March 25 in Washington to review Belgrade’s response to its specific demands, which include the withdrawal of special police units from Kosovo and a public commitment to begin a dialogue with the province’s dominant Albanian community.

“If President Milosevic takes these steps, we will immediately reconsider the measures we have now adopted,” the six ministers declared. “If he fails . . . and repression continues in Kosovo, the Contact Group will move to further international measures, and specifically to pursue a freeze on the funds held abroad by the [Yugoslav and Serbian] governments.”

The six nations also agreed on a series of preventive actions to contain the tensions in Kosovo and prevent them from igniting a chain of ethnic violence across the southern Balkans.

These measures include backing a peace mission to the region by a European special envoy, former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez; calling on Milosevic to allow Belgrade-based foreign diplomats to view conditions in Kosovo firsthand; and recommending the extension of a small but effective U.N. peacekeeping force in neighboring Macedonia. The mandate for this group, which includes about 350 American soldiers, is due to expire at the end of August.

According to participants, uniting the six behind even this modest package proved extremely difficult, with Albright, Cook and German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel leading efforts for punitive measures and Italian Foreign Minister Lamberto Dini and French and Russian colleagues favoring softer measures.

At one point, Albright reportedly told the group that the United States was prepared to act on its own rather than settle for unity behind a weaker set of actions. She also reportedly called on her colleagues not to repeat the mistake of 1991, when the international community failed to act as Yugoslavia first disintegrated, then slid into war.

Moscow, which has declared the crisis in Kosovo an internal Serbian matter, decided to support some of the measures only after Albright, Cook and Kinkel spoke in turn by telephone with Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov in Moscow minutes after the formal meeting had ended.

In part to show Russian displeasure about the meeting, Primakov sent a deputy to London, apparently with instructions to accept nothing that would be seen as punishing Milosevic. Aside from its strong historical and cultural ties to Serbia, Russia has become wary of U.S. policies in other areas, including the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Washington’s hard line during the Iraq crisis.

More important, after struggling to contain a bloody insurrection in Chechnya, Russia is uncomfortable with any precedent of strong international reaction against a central government crackdown on provincial separatists.

As Monday’s meeting went on inside the ornate Lancaster House in central London, several hundred Albanian refugees demonstrated a few hundred yards away, carrying signs and burning the Serbian flag.

* BOSNIAN SERB PLEADS GUILTY: Hague court wins first conviction for rape as a war crime. A6