Milosevic, Top Albanian Separatist Meet on Kosovo Crisis

After months of daily bloodshed and deadlocked diplomacy, talks to avert full-scale war in the convulsive Serbian province of Kosovo began Friday and were praised as an important first step to a still-remote solution.

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and Ibrahim Rugova, the leader of ethnic Albanians demanding independence for Kosovo, met for 90 minutes in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital. They agreed to a schedule of weekly negotiations by their delegates on the future status of the province, ending an impasse in which the two sides had been refusing to talk to each other.

Friday’s encounter, the first meeting between Milosevic and Rugova, was arranged by U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke. In five days of diplomacy this week, Holbrooke, who brokered the Bosnian peace accords, scored what he termed a “procedural breakthrough” in the Kosovo crisis.

Washington and its European allies fear that fighting between armed Albanian separatists and Serbian security forces will continue to escalate and spread through the ethnically tense Balkans--inevitably demanding the attention and resources of U.S.-led peacekeeping organizations.

Serbian television showed an unsmiling Milosevic and Rugova greeting each other with a vigorous handshake.

Friday’s meeting “should mark the start of a peaceful solution for the Kosovo problem,” Milosevic said in a statement released through the official Tanjug news agency. Only “direct dialogue [can lead] to peaceful, humane, fair and lasting solutions to the problems.”

Rugova told reporters at a later news conference, “It seems there is readiness to move ahead toward a peaceful political solution to the Kosovo issue.”

Although the meeting was important because it opened negotiations, no one is predicting a quick end to daily attacks and skirmishes that have killed more than 150 people this year, including many civilians.

The two sides remain light-years apart. Rugova is demanding nothing short of independence for Kosovo, Serbia’s southernmost province, where an estimated 90% of the 2 million population is ethnic Albanian.

Milosevic has steadfastly refused to consider independence for Kosovo, which Serbs cherish as the birthplace of their cultural identity, although he has indicated that he is willing to restore a degree of the autonomy that he took away from the province in 1989.

There was no indication that the talks will stop the unrest; quite the contrary, Rugova’s decision to speak to Milosevic has driven a wedge into Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian community, with several key aides resigning and an opposition politician charging that Rugova had “capitulated.”

Holbrooke extracted concessions from both Milosevic and Rugova when he persuaded the two to meet. But it appears that Rugova, an aloof and detached intellectual, is left in the more tenuous position, while Milosevic, a veteran Balkan strongman who has engineered wars that invited international scorn but who has sustained his grip on power, stands to lose very little.

Milosevic immediately won a promise that the Contact Group of six nations that monitor the Balkans will review economic sanctions recently slapped on Belgrade because of the Kosovo standoff.

Rugova won a trip to Washington, which Holbrooke had promised as an incentive to begin a genuine peace process. Rugova, however, was forced to back away from his “bottom-line” demand that any negotiation be held under the auspices of a foreign mediator--something Milosevic had refused.

Milosevic was forced to afford a degree of recognition to Rugova and to elevate, at least for the moment, the Kosovo issue to the Yugoslavia-wide level. Until now, Milosevic had insisted that Kosovo was an internal Serbian matter that should be handled at that level.

Holbrooke is believed to have emphasized to Milosevic that the Kosovo guerrilla movement is growing at an alarming pace and will pose an ever-increasing threat to his country’s stability.

At the same time, Holbrooke had to remind Rugova that no Western country supports independence for Kosovo, leaving Milosevic with the upper hand.