Milosevic OKs Peacekeepers, Russian Says

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic on Thursday agreed to accept an international peacekeeping force in Kosovo as part of a plan to end the conflict, a Russian official reported.

President Clinton said the offer might be “some step forward” if it assured the safe return of refugees. A British spokesman said later that Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed in a telephone conversation that the deal fell “well short” of NATO demands, according to Reuters news agency.

After an eight-hour meeting in Belgrade with Milosevic, Russian peace envoy Viktor S. Chernomyrdin said the Yugoslav president agreed to welcome a United Nations-authorized force including Russian troops to provide postwar security in the Serbian province. It was initially unclear whether the force would be armed.

Although the plan seems to fall far short of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s conditions for stopping its monthlong bombing campaign, it is sure to be a topic of debate when the leaders of the alliance’s 19 member nations open their summit in Washington today.

The White House said all it knows of the Chernomyrdin-Milosevic meeting is what it has read and heard in news accounts, although officials said they expect the former Russian prime minister to give Washington a fuller account through diplomatic channels.

“I hope we shall find understanding in settling this problem with NATO leadership as well,” Chernomyrdin told reporters at the airport in Belgrade, Yugoslavia’s capital, as he prepared to board a flight back to Moscow.

Asked about the development during a joint news conference with NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana, Clinton said, “If there is an offer for a genuine security force, that’s the first time that Mr. Milosevic has ever done that, and that represents, I suppose, some step forward.”

But Clinton and Solana said NATO continues to insist on a package deal that includes an end to the Serbian campaign of “ethnic cleansing,” withdrawal of all Yugoslav army and special police forces from Kosovo, broad self-government for residents of the rebellious province and a return of refugees under the protection of a well-armed and effective international military force.

In London, British officials were scornful of Milosevic’s talks with Chernomyrdin. “President Milosevic knows exactly what he has to do, and this comes nowhere near it,” said a government spokesman.

At the United Nations, however, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the reports of an agreement between Milosevic and Chernomyrdin for a peacekeeping force under the aegis of the U.N. were “encouraging.”

“Next week I will be in Moscow myself discussing this with officials at the highest level,” Annan said.

In other developments:

* The House International Relations Committee put off until Tuesday a vote on a proposal to force Clinton to withdraw U.S. warplanes from the NATO force bombing Yugoslavia. The committee decided that its previous intention to approve the measure Thursday but not schedule a floor vote on it until next week would signal weakness to Milosevic. The measure, proposed by Rep. Tom Campbell (R-San Jose) under the 1973 War Powers Act, is designed to force lawmakers to choose between withdrawal and a formal declaration of war--a decision that Campbell says the Constitution requires.

* NATO planes blasted one of Milosevic’s Belgrade residences. The Yugoslav president was not home at the time, but the attack produced a spate of questions about whether the alliance was specifically targeting Milosevic. Pentagon spokesman Kenneth H. Bacon said that Milosevic was not the target but that his home included military facilities like command, control and communications centers. “We have always said from the beginning that the price is going to be high in terms of degradation and damage to the military and security structure, and this is one example of that,” Bacon said.

* Bacon also said Thursday that NATO warplanes flew 324 sorties during the preceding 24 hours despite some of the worst flying weather in the conflict. “That brings the total number of sorties to 9,300 since Operation Allied Force began, and of those, 2,750 were strike sorties,” Bacon said. A strike sortie is a flight for the purpose of delivering a bomb or rocket, regardless of whether the ordnance is actually dropped. The rest of the sorties were support flights by refueling planes, radar suppression aircraft, reconnaissance planes and the like.

* Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou said a four-truck Greek convoy, in a rare delivery Thursday of relief supplies into Kosovo, entered the province with aid for the hundreds of thousands of refugees said to be wandering in the region. In an interview with The Times, he said a larger convoy of 10 trucks is scheduled to move into Kosovo on Saturday, with increasingly larger convoys following in the weeks ahead. He said Greece is the only country able to provide humanitarian aid to Kosovo’s Serbs and ethnic Albanians. Although a member of NATO, Greece has close ties with Yugoslavia’s dominant republic, Serbia, through the Christian Orthodox Church.

* Yugoslav authorities complained to the U.N. that sustained NATO bombings of chemical, oil and pharmaceutical factories are causing environmental damage to the air, two major European rivers and half a dozen national parks. Yugoslavia’s U.N. ambassador said bombing this week of chemical factories near four major cities released large quantities of ammonia, oil, plastic material and fertilizer compounds into the air.

* U.N. and refugee workers denied access by the Macedonian government for three days finally were able to get into the tiny village of Maline, where about 6,000 refugees were reported to be staying in a town of 400 people. When a U.N. convoy of food and blankets finally arrived Thursday afternoon, however, most of the refugees had vanished. Villagers told conflicting stories, according to U.N. workers. Some said the refugees left on their own accord for other villages, while others said the refugees were forced out by Macedonian police.

* After two days of relative inactivity at the Albanian border, 821 refugees--many of them on foot--streamed out of Kosovo through the checkpoint at Morine, authorities said. The new arrivals reported far larger groups of ethnic Albanians behind them, roaming the Kosovo countryside. But they said Serbs were both ordering the refugees out and putting up roadblocks that made a hasty retreat impossible.

Chernomyrdin provided few details of his talks with Milosevic, six hours of which were one-on-one.

“What kind of international forces they will be or from which countries--this is yet to be discussed, but the main thing is that Russia will take part in them,” Chernomyrdin said, according to Russian news reports.

Last week, Russian Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov said after talks with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that Moscow supports NATO’s political demands for Kosovo autonomy, refugee return and withdrawal of Yugoslav security forces from the province. But he said Russia would not endorse an international peacekeeping force unless Milosevic agreed to it.

Late Thursday there was no indication that Chernomyrdin had persuaded the Yugoslav leader to accept the broad conditions for a political settlement.

But Chernomyrdin’s assertion that Milosevic was ready to accept some sort of international force is sure to further roil the NATO summit’s discussion about conditions under which ground troops should be sent into Kosovo, an issue about which the United States and its closest ally, Britain, disagree.

Blair advocates sending NATO-led peacekeepers to the embattled province once the NATO air campaign has weakened the Yugoslav army enough to make effective resistance unlikely. U.S. officials say that scenario is dangerous because there might be more fight left in the Yugoslavs than expected. Washington wants to wait until Milosevic agrees to a cease-fire before sending ground troops.

At a joint news conference Thursday, Albright and British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook sought to minimize the differences. Despite the diplomatic language, however, neither side showed much willingness to change.

“We have always said that ground troops will be necessary in Kosovo to guarantee security and a cease-fire,” Cook said. “We are also absolutely clear that we are not sending in troops to fight their way in in a ground force invasion, and that has never been on.”

But he said his government believes that ground troops should be sent “in the endgame . . . when the time is right, when it’s appropriate, when it is safe.”

Kempster reported from Washington and Paddock from Moscow. Times staff writers T. Christian Miller in Skopje, Macedonia; Marc Lacey in Kukes, Albania; Janet Wilson at the United Nations; and Art Pine, Tyler Marshall, Paul Richter and James Gerstenzang in Washington contributed to this report.