U.S. Troops in Kosovo a Possibility, Cohen Says

The Clinton administration said Tuesday that U.S. ground forces may soon be called on to help keep the peace in Kosovo, and it warned Yugoslav leaders that they must take further steps to halt their aggression against ethnic Albanians in the separatist province or face imminent NATO airstrikes.

As diplomatic efforts intensified, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen said U.S. forces may be required to join European troops in a peacekeeping effort to separate Serbian troops and police from the more than 300,000 ethnic Albanians who have been driven from their homes in Kosovo since a Serbian crackdown began last spring.

Appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Cohen said he would strongly recommend that any such contingent be “largely, if not wholly, European,” noting that U.S. warplanes will dominate any NATO force that bombs Serbian targets if airstrikes are ordered. Yet he acknowledged that U.S. participation in a ground force is now “a possibility,” although it is not an option he favors.

Cohen’s comments mark a slight but clear shift for the Clinton administration, which until now has been unwilling to publicly discuss any U.S. role in a peacekeeping deployment to Kosovo.

A politically weakened President Clinton may now face the formidable task of selling another indefinite Balkan deployment to a public and Congress likely to remember earlier administration zigzags on the issue of ground troops in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Although the administration had first insisted that the possibility of a Bosnia deployment was remote, U.S. forces remain in that Balkan nation nearly three years after its war.

Clinton did not comment directly on the ground deployment issue. But he publicly warned Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic that the recent withdrawal of some Serbian forces from the southern province is not sufficient to ward off the threat of North Atlantic Treaty Organization airstrikes.

At a meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington, Clinton said the United States “is prepared to act,” and he described Kosovo as a “powder keg” that could soon explode and do great harm to the entire Balkan region.

Late in the day, after a divisive, nearly seven-hour meeting, the U.N. Security Council issued a statement declaring that both sides in the crisis “had yet to be in full compliance with all the requirements” of the council’s resolutions on Kosovo.

The statement called for negotiations and for intensified efforts to avoid a humanitarian disaster. It urged Secretary-General Kofi Annan to send U.N. personnel to gather firsthand information.

The council also said that it appeared military activity in Kosovo had decreased but that Yugoslavia’s armed presence “remained significant” and that the operations of the special police had continued.

Meanwhile, U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke met with ethnic Albanian leaders in the provincial capital, Pristina, on Tuesday and then traveled to Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital, and met with Milosevic late into the night.

Holbrooke publicly warned Milosevic of NATO’s determination to press for a solution to the Kosovo conflict, in which hundreds of people, mostly ethnic Albanian civilians, have died.

“If he thinks NATO is bluffing, if he wants to take that risk, all I can do is convey to him the views of our government, of the president and the secretary of State, of the seriousness of the situation,” Holbrooke told reporters.

In Kosovo, Holbrooke met with ethnic Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova and other prominent ethnic Albanian figures. Neither side released any details of the meeting with Rugova.

Holbrooke said observers in Kosovo had given him a “grim briefing” on the conditions of ethnic Albanians who have been driven out of their homes by Serbian attacks aimed at crushing the separatist guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

“There are still huge numbers of refugees up in the hills,” Holbrooke said. “People have come back to their houses, but the houses are wrecked, without walls or roofs. . . . There isn’t much here that we’ve seen today that is very encouraging.”

“It wasn’t a good meeting,” a U.S. diplomat, who spoke on condition he not be further identified, said of the talks with the Yugoslav leader. If Milosevic continues to fail to comply with the demands outlined by the U.N. Security Council last month, NATO bombing raids “are going to happen,” he said.

Administration aides, meanwhile, expressed disappointment that Milosevic indicated to Holbrooke that he does not plan to comply with all the terms of the U.N. resolution, which calls for the Serbs to withdraw their forces, permit refugees to be given aid and housing, and begin talks aimed at providing some degree of autonomy for the province.

White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart said that while Milosevic had spoken of the partial withdrawal of Serbian forces, “we have not seen full compliance. . . . They are nowhere near compliance with the U.N. resolution.”

Cohen’s appearance in the Senate illustrated the difficulties the administration is likely to face in selling any plan to deploy U.S. peacekeepers.

Several Republican senators suggested that a new deployment could turn out like the peacekeeping effort in Bosnia, which has cost nearly $10 billion and is apparently nowhere near its end. Arizona Republican John McCain reminded Cohen that in his January 1997 confirmation hearing, he pledged to try to end the Bosnia deployment by the spring of 1998.

McCain suggested that if the European NATO partners were unwilling to mount a peacekeeping force in Bosnia without U.S. participation, they would probably feel the same way in Kosovo. “What is different in Kosovo [from] Bosnia?” he demanded. “Since we are required to have U.S. troops in Bosnia on the premise that the Europeans can’t do it, why would we somehow assume that they can do it in Kosovo?”

Several senators also questioned whether airstrikes could compel cooperation from a hard-liner like Milosevic and wondered aloud whether the administration even has a workable plan for military action.

Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.) said that after he participated in a 2 1/2-hour briefing by the Pentagon last week, “I left more confused than I came in.”

In recent days, some administration officials have floated the possibility of a contingent of military observers made up entirely of Europeans.

But that scenario appears highly unlikely in the wake of the U.S. experience in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995. During that period, U.S. calls for airstrikes to halt Serbian aggression generated severe tension with European allies whose lightly armed troops were risking their lives as U.N. peacekeepers.

One European diplomat, who requested anonymity, said Tuesday that implementation of the U.N. resolution on Kosovo will require a sizable force deployment under the NATO banner--”and that means the United States too.”

This official said the Europeans are generally ready to act on their own with deployments to meet humanitarian crises, for search-and-rescue operations or modest peacekeeping operations requiring a single division, or up to 20,000 troops. But he noted that NATO planners are considering a deployment of 25,000 to 35,000 for Kosovo--under one contingency plan, even 60,000--to enforce any negotiated cease-fire.

Richter reported from Washington and Holley from Belgrade. Times staff writers Tyler Marshall in Washington and John J. Goldman at the United Nations contributed to this report.

* FORMIDABLE FIREPOWER: The navies of 10 NATO nations are holding war games within striking distance of Serbia. A7