After Milosevic Meeting, U.S. Envoy Sees ‘Dangerous Moment’

Wielding the threat of NATO airstrikes, U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke arrived here Monday to boost pressure on Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to end his crackdown on separatist ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

After an evening meeting with Milosevic, Holbrooke told reporters that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has “a military plan that is going forward on a serious, intense and sustained basis.”

“This is a dangerous moment in the region,” Holbrooke added. “We’ve been at dangerous moments before. This one is especially serious.”

Holbrooke declined to give details of his meeting with Milosevic, but the Yugoslav president appeared to remain defiant. His office issued a statement after the meeting calling NATO threats a “criminal act.” The statement, carried by state-run media, said fighting in the Serbian province stopped a week ago.

However, Yugoslavia agreed Monday to a Russian proposal to send an international mission to investigate the crisis.

Holbrooke flew to Belgrade from Brussels, where he met with senior NATO officials.

A NATO military officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the scale of fighting had dropped drastically in recent days but that Yugoslavia is still in noncompliance with a recent U.N. Security Council resolution calling for a cease-fire and negotiations.

A key point of that noncompliance, he said, is the failure by Milosevic to withdraw soldiers and paramilitary police from the field in Kosovo to the bases where they are normally garrisoned. For example, some soldiers who are usually based in other parts of Yugoslavia have been withdrawn from fighting in the Kosovo countryside--but only to bases elsewhere within the province in southern Serbia, and this, he said, is not acceptable.

A U.S. diplomat, speaking on condition he not be further identified, said the Holbrooke-Milosevic meeting was “perfectly civil” but “chillier in tone” than previous meetings between the two men.

“Nobody wants to bomb,” the diplomat added. “It’s a last resort. But finally you reach the point of last resort. We’re not quite there yet.”

Holbrooke is scheduled to visit Kosovo today, then return to Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, for another round of talks with Milosevic this evening.

The current U.S. mission to Belgrade comes with events at “a very serious juncture” but not quite yet at the “do-or-die” point, the diplomat said, adding that he did not expect any dramatic breakthrough today.

The diplomat also noted that to have a cease-fire in Kosovo, it is necessary for the guerrilla fighters of the separatist ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, to join the peace process.

“If Milosevic pulls back, I’m afraid the KLA will move into Malisevo [a former KLA stronghold] or something, and Milosevic will say, ‘Look at that!’ and go at them again,” the diplomat said.

Because of such fears, and because of the “bad, bad, bad relations between Albanians and Serbs” in Kosovo, any peace agreement for the province will have to be policed by “some significant international presence,” the diplomat said. This would not necessarily have to be a NATO force, he said.

In Washington, President Clinton spoke by telephone with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin and said Milosevic’s compliance with the U.N. resolution “must be verifiable, tangible and irreversible,” White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart told reporters.

Yeltsin launched his own diplomatic offensive aimed at heading off NATO military action.

Besides Clinton, Yeltsin spoke by telephone with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and with newly elected German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to stress Russia’s opposition to airstrikes.

“Bombs cannot resolve ethnic conflicts,” said Russian Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov, who together with the Russian defense minister dashed to Belgrade over the weekend on Yeltsin’s orders. The talks succeeded in persuading Milosevic to allow international observers to visit Kosovo, Ivanov said in a Russian TV interview.

“We believe there is no genocide in Kosovo, there are no ‘ethnic cleansings’ in Kosovo, but there are casualties there,” Ivanov said. “That is why it is necessary for the world community to have impartial observers there who could realistically assess the scale of such crimes, find those who are responsible and punish them.”

Annan said Monday that Yugoslav forces had increased attacks on Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians after the Sept. 23 Security Council resolution demanding a cease-fire.

Annan issued a report listing apparent violations of the resolution. He said the military activity seemed to lessen at the end of September, with evidence of heavily armed units returning to their barracks.

He did not give a clear assessment of how far Belgrade had now complied with the Security Council resolution. However, he said that the government’s armed presence remains “significant” and that special police units were continuing their operations.

He also said that the “great majority” of the atrocities in Kosovo were committed by Yugoslav security forces but that ethnic Albanian paramilitary units also were engaged in combat and may have committed atrocities.

“In the last few weeks, the international community has witnessed appalling atrocities in Kosovo, reminiscent of the recent past elsewhere in the Balkans,” he wrote. If the current state of affairs persists, “thousands could die in the winter,” Annan said. He cited estimates that more than 200,000 people remained displaced in Kosovo and that a quarter of them were lacking shelter and any kind of support network.

Despite the debate over military action, Annan urged the Security Council not to lose sight of the need for a political solution. “Otherwise, we shall be treating only the symptoms of the problem and not its causes,” he said.

Staff writers Maura Reynolds in Moscow and John J. Goldman at the United Nations contributed to this report.