NATO Gives Milosevic More Time to Comply

As fighting continued in Kosovo, putting incoming civilian monitors at risk of getting caught in the cross-fire, NATO extended its deadline Friday for the withdrawal of Serbian forces from the restive province.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization had given Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic until midnight Friday to pull back his troops or face airstrikes. But as the deadline approached, a NATO spokesman said that alliance ambassadors had “defined a realistic time frame” for the pullout and announced that the grace period will now last until Oct. 27.

The decision came a day after NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana and the alliance’s supreme commander, Gen. Wesley Clark, visited Belgrade to press Milosevic to move his forces out faster.

Ethnic Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova charged Friday that instead of withdrawing, Milosevic is actually sending new units into Kosovo.

“The Serbian forces have not withdrawn from Kosovo. There has been only a repositioning of those forces, and they have been entrenching themselves in many strategic points around Kosovo,” Rugova said here in the province’s capital. “Moreover, there are new forces coming from Serbia.”

Without hard evidence from NATO reconnaissance flights, which may get underway with American U2 spy planes this weekend, and without civilian monitors in the field yet, NATO’s assessment was more vague Friday than Rugova’s.

“We are still at some distance from full compliance,” NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said at alliance headquarters in Brussels.

An advance team of the monitors is due to arrive today to try to work out some daunting logistics problems.

There were signs that a Yugoslav army brigade and a police brigade were pulling out, but that is only “the tip of the iceberg,” Shea added.

Every day since U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke reached a deal with Milosevic early Tuesday, ethnic Albanians and Serbian security forces have accused each other of launching fresh attacks.

The sporadic fighting was much less intense than the all-out assaults that turned much of Kosovo into a burnt-out dead zone, but it proved the limits of diplomacy and threats of NATO’s air power.

The guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army, which seized large parts of the majority ethnic Albanian province only to be forced back by heavy attacks by Serbian forces in recent months, on Friday accused NATO of aiding Milosevic’s effort to crush the rebellion.

“Our feelings are that the international community is not ready to punish the criminal [Milosevic],” KLA spokesman Jashar Salihu said in an interview from Switzerland. “And with such an act, they are participating in the crimes that are going on in Kosovo toward the Albanian nation.”

With the first snows of winter expected to fall on mountainside refugee camps by early November, ethnic Albanians doubt whether NATO was ever serious about protecting them, Salihu said.

“We didn’t believe it at the beginning, and we don’t believe it now,” he said. “All that remains for us is to fight our enemies until we achieve our aim. And our aim is the independence of Kosovo.”

State Department spokesman James P. Rubin denied Friday that the Western allies had backed down by giving Milosevic more time, saying: “That is not NATO blinking.”

Rubin said Washington wants to keep the pressure on Milosevic but hopes to avoid the use of force if possible.

He cited anecdotal evidence of some troop withdrawals, although he acknowledged that there is equally persuasive evidence to indicate that Milosevic is failing to keep his agreement.

“There has been substantial but not sufficient compliance,” Rubin told reporters in Maryland, where a Middle East peace summit is underway.

In a testy exchange with reporters, Rubin said those who say that Milosevic is ignoring the agreement “seem to want airstrikes.”

“Our objective is not to have airstrikes but to secure compliance,” he said.

By squeezing Milosevic, NATO hopes to bring peace by reducing the number of police and soldiers in Kosovo.

Milosevic has also agreed to let about 300,000 refugees return to their homes, many of which were blasted by shells and gutted by fire. He has also promised to negotiate more autonomy for Kosovo, which is 90% ethnic Albanian, and to hold elections within nine months.

But there is no peace deal between Belgrade and the guerrillas in Kosovo, no promise of foreign peacekeepers to separate the bitter enemies and no guarantee that a Serbian pullback will end the war.

That means the civilian monitoring teams at the core of this week’s deal with Milosevic have a dangerous assignment in Kosovo.

The monitoring mission run by the 54-nation Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has received promises of 800 volunteers so far and is trying to find a total of 2,000.

“This is only the first step” toward peace, Polish Foreign Minister Bronislaw Geremek, who chairs the OSCE, told reporters in Belgrade on Friday after signing an agreement on the monitoring mission.

“Its first task is to stop bloodshed and avoid humanitarian disaster,” Geremek said. “And the second [is] to create conditions for dialogue between the Kosovo Albanian community and the federal government.”

Small technical teams are due in Kosovo today to begin working out the logistics of housing and transporting 2,000 people in winter--and in one of the poorest and most rugged parts of Europe.

They also have to figure out how to protect unarmed monitors in what is still a war zone. The monitors may get help from the weather because the onset of winter will make combat difficult.

But it will also make life perilous for thousands of refugees who say they are still afraid to leave their plastic-tarp tents and go home, where they fear that Serbian police can easily take revenge.

Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Queenstown, Md., contributed to this report.