Unease Shadows Efforts for Kosovo Peace

The Clinton administration’s efforts to crack down on Serbian aggression in the breakaway province of Kosovo are being complicated by the prospect that an allied peacekeeping mission would be far more complex and dangerous than U.S. officials have acknowledged.

Even before the United States and its NATO allies can come to terms on proposed airstrikes aimed at protecting Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians, the administration’s initial plans for dealing with the aftermath are coming under fire from Congress and key European governments.

The administration hopes that any peace settlement in Serbia’s impoverished southern province would win enough support from Serbian authorities and ethnic Albanian rebels that lightly armed police or civilian observers would be able to guarantee tranquillity.

At the same time, administration officials acknowledge the possibility that circumstances could require more. The risk of continued violence remains substantial. Among other things, the past seven months of Serbian attacks have radicalized much of Kosovo’s majority Albanian population, and some factions may spurn any agreement.

In Congress, some lawmakers are already drawing parallels to the unhappy U.S. intervention in Somalia, where clan fighters killed a group of U.S. troops in a 1993 ambush, then dragged their bodies through the streets of the capital.

Many members of Congress are angry that the United States continues to deploy peacekeeping troops in Bosnia-Herzegovina nearly three years after President Clinton dispatched forces with a pledge that the deployment “should, and will, take about one year.”

In recent days, a liberal Democrat, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, and a conservative Republican, Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, have offered separate amendments to bar U.S. troops from a role in any Kosovo peacekeeping mission.

In the House, 43 members, led by Rep. Tom Campbell (R-San Jose), wrote to Clinton asserting that no deployment could be made without congressional assent--a view the White House disputes.

In planning meetings at North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Brussels, meanwhile, some U.S. allies are pushing to ensure that any troops sent to Kosovo to keep the peace would have enough weaponry to at least protect themselves.

“Any international force on the ground has to be able to defend themselves,” a diplomat from one NATO country said. “What happens if they’re turned on? How do you get them out?”

The United States is also under pressure from Europeans who insist that in any peacekeeping mission, NATO partners would need to contribute troops on a roughly proportional basis.

For now, administration officials are tiptoeing around the explosive issue, which they fear could upset movement toward a peace settlement. Their game plan reflects a conviction that the situation in Kosovo is not as threatening as the one in 1995 in Bosnia.

“In Bosnia, we were stopping a war. . . . It was a tremendously complex situation,” one administration official said. “Here, we’re stopping an insurgency on one side and government-sponsored atrocities on the other.”

The administration believes that the threat of NATO airstrikes will compel Serbian compliance while the promise of greater freedom and security will have the same effect on the ethnic Albanians, who make up 90% of the provincial population.

Others argue that members of some ethnic Albanian factions will ignore a settlement and go on battling the Serbs--if not immediately, then after a few months’ pause.

They note the incessant infighting among the ethnic Albanians: The Kosovo Liberation Army, for example, has clashed bitterly with the “shadow” government of ethnic Albanians that has sought to lead the province under Ibrahim Rugova.

There are also differences among Serbs. The extreme nationalistic followers of Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Vojislav Seselj, for example, are unlikely to back an agreement signed by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

By the time the Dayton peace accords were completed, the three sides in Bosnia were exhausted by war.

In Kosovo, the government attacks that have killed hundreds since February have radicalized large segments of the ethnic Albanian population. Now, many want full independence rather than the increased autonomy that the West is pushing for.

Because of the atrocities, the Kosovo Liberation Army “is now all 1.9 million Albanians” in the province, said Ivo Daalder, a former National Security Council official now at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

In contrast to what happened in Bosnia, any political settlement is likely to be a transitional arrangement, subject to change after several years. That fact may create instability by inviting both sides to jockey for power, Daalder said.

Any peacekeeping mission “will be much more tricky” than NATO’s Bosnia deployments, he said.

Some analysts fear that NATO airstrikes and peacekeeping deployments, by suppressing the Serbian authorities, will tempt Kosovo Liberation Army fighters to start infiltrating the province again from Albania and Macedonia to reassert their authority in Albanian hamlets.

That, in turn, could cause Serbian authorities to try to close off the mountainous border and to resume the battle against the KLA.

Such circumstances would raise real questions about the peacekeepers’ role, one Senate aide said.

“Do they try to stop the Albanians from coming in? Do they fire at one or both sides? This could be a total mess,” the aide said.

Times staff writer Tyler Marshall contributed to this report.

* NATO PRESSURE BUILDS

U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke suggests airstrikes on Yugoslavia may be imminent. A8