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Diplomats Shuttle Between Kosovo Sides

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Cloistered on separate floors of a chateau near Paris, Serbian and ethnic Albanian delegations began negotiations via messenger Sunday in a bid to staunch the bloodletting and violence in the Balkan region of Kosovo.

“They have not met together,” U.S. spokesman Phil Reeker told a briefing called to sum up the first real day of talks, which formally opened Saturday evening.

Though there was no direct contact between the warring factions, Reeker reported that the parleys nonetheless started in a “constructive, businesslike and serious” atmosphere.

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There was another hopeful sign: Despite intense animosities honed by an 11-month-old ethnic conflict in which as many as 2,000 people have died, the Serbian and Kosovo Albanian delegates did manage to issue a joint statement condemning the bombing of a grocery store in Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, on Saturday that killed three people.

“The two participating delegations condemn in the strongest terms this act and demand the perpetrators be found and brought to justice as soon as possible,” the statement said.

“This, and similar cowardly acts, are directed against efforts now underway in Rambouillet, where the two participating delegations are working intensively toward a peaceful political solution to the problem in Kosovo,” it said.

The talks, held under pressure from NATO, the European Union and the six-nation Contact Group overseeing Balkan peace efforts, are meant to find a solution, albeit a temporary one, to a savage ethnic dispute that threatens to destabilize much of the Balkans. Kosovo is a province of Serbia, which is the dominant of the two remaining republics of Yugoslavia.

The delegations here, working under a press blackout, are being quartered in the turreted, 45-room castle where one of France’s greatest kings, Francis I, died in 1547. One of the talks’ two designated “co-presidents,” British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, has given the two parties less than two weeks to close a deal.

On Sunday, Reeker said, the Serbs and Kosovo Albanians were shown for the first time the complete text of the plan that the United States and five European powers, which together make up the Contact Group, want to see as the basis of the agreement.

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In a trade-off, the plan stipulates greater home-rule powers for Kosovo, whose autonomy was abolished by the Serbs in 1989, but insists that the region, overwhelmingly ethnic Albanian in population, remain part of Serbia.

The blueprint, based on a draft by U.S. Ambassador to Macedonia Christopher Hill, includes separate sections on a constitution, local elections and an ombudsman, Reeker said. To some outside observers, the plan seems to contain at least two flaws: It appears simply to postpone a final decision on whether Kosovo should become independent, as guerrillas from the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, and most people in Kosovo want, and it may be inapplicable if troops are not deployed in the disputed territory by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to enforce it.

Hill and two fellow diplomats, one from Russia, the other from the European Union, are in Rambouillet to serve as mediators in the negotiations--in essence, to shuttle from one side to the other and press for an accord.

The diplomats met separately with the Kosovo Albanians first, then with the Serbs on Sunday morning. According to Charles Hay, spokesman for the British Foreign Office, both delegations spent the day studying the proposals. Hay said they have been provided with computers and have plenty of working and living space.

The Serbs and Kosovo Albanians are being lodged on different floors of the chateau, officials accompanying the Russian diplomat, Boris G. Mayorsky, said. However, the KLA radio station in Kosovo said three members of the ethnic Albanian delegation would try to meet directly with the Serbs: Hashim Thaci, political director of the KLA; Ibrahim Rugova, pacifist leader of the Democratic League of Kosovo; and Rexhep Qosja of the United Democratic Movement.

Hill, a specialist on the Balkans who was named U.S. special envoy on Kosovo last April, predicted that the talks in Rambouillet will be arduous and stressful.

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“Our expectation is that they remain in the chateau until they reach an agreement,” he told BBC Radio. “It’s going to be a very intense period.

“There is not going to be any free time,” Hill said. “No one is planning to play volleyball or Ping-Pong with each other.”

In Kosovo, thousands marched Sunday in Rogovo behind a cortege of tractors carrying the bodies of nine men slain last month in a police raid in which more than 20 ethnic Albanians and one Serbian police officer died, Associated Press reported.

Villagers insist that the nine, including a father and his three sons, were all civilians killed by Serbian police in the Jan. 29 raid. The police claim the victims died in a fierce gun battle when officers raided a compound where KLA fighters had taken shelter.

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