French Site of Peace Talks Takes It All In

Out the door of his wine shop, Claude Jardin can see some of the collateral paraphernalia of peacemaking: buses of French police, strolling TV crews in search of somebody to interview, the odd convoy of diplomats.

In a sense, he’s already paid a price for the efforts underway here to solve the ethnic conflict in Kosovo. When negotiations began in this country town 30 miles southwest of Paris, the arrival of Serbian and ethnic Albanian delegations and a clutch of VIPs so paralyzed traffic that Jardin’s sales were down 57% from normal.

Is he bothered by his disrupted routine?

The 50-year-old manager of the store on the Rue du General de Gaulle paused a few moments to think, then replied, “It’s worth living through this if it brings peace.”

Population 25,000 and right-of-center politically, Rambouillet, home to a magnificent chateau once used by French kings and their courts, is again in the international limelight.

Special police, carrying helmets and truncheons for possible riot duty, are here by the busload. On the Place de la Liberation by the town hall, a building that was a gift from Napoleon to the city in 1809, a fleet of TV vans has massed, satellite dishes trained skyward.

On Wednesday, after four days of talks, ethnic Albanian delegates and Serbian officials were still divided. The toughest part, the issue of a possible NATO deployment, was still to come. The Serbs want Kosovo, which is more than 90% ethnic Albanian, to remain in Serbia, the dominant republic of Yugoslavia. The ethnic Albanians demand a referendum on independence.

In Washington, senior Clinton administration officials worked Congress and public opinion for support for deployment of U.S. troops. A possible North Atlantic Treaty Organization force of 20,000 to 30,000 troops could include up to 5,000 Americans.

Undersecretary of State Thomas R. Pickering underscored that Americans would participate only if the force’s main mission was to police a deal accepted by both sides. He noted that U.S. participation would be pivotal because the ethnic Albanians may only agree to a package if it includes U.S. troops.

According to Gerard Larcher, Rambouillet’s mayor for the past 16 years, security precautions in place while international mediators try to bring the two sides together are so thorough that missile batteries have been deployed around the castle to protect it from aerial attack.

The rockets are invisible to the public, but other inconveniences are readily apparent. Until peace is made or the talks fail, people here can no longer park alongside the masonry walls or cast-iron gates that ring the castle grounds. Two open-air markets have been temporarily moved.

“They could have done this in Paris, couldn’t they?” asked Giles Baillon, 46, owner of a self-serve laundry. But the great majority of residents in Rambouillet, a tranquil place where one can see horseback riders on the roads on weekends, seems to relish the unusual hubbub. Mayor Larcher believes that it’s all worth it because of the publicity Rambouillet is getting from the 580 accredited journalists here.

“We will triple our tourism this year,” he predicted.

Local establishments such as the Cafe Gambetta or Cafe de la Place d’Armes already are benefiting. Since the chateau is off limits, media visitors have plenty of time on their hands, and they assemble to swap information or rumors in Flemish, Serbo-Croatian, Japanese and other languages.

Nestled amid forests of oak and birch, on the southwestern fringe of Paris’ urban sprawl, the chateau of Rambouillet possesses a past that mingles the pleasures of the mighty and the rituals of diplomacy.

With more than 40 rooms, the chateau, begun in the 14th century and vastly enlarged in the 18th, is big enough to keep the Serbs and ethnic Albanians well apart should they choose to deal with one another only through intermediaries.

Besotted with its forests rich in boar, stag and other wild game, King Louis XVI bought the chateau and its grounds in the 18th century. After the French Revolution, the estate was turned into a restaurant for Parisians who relished gondola rides on its canals and ponds.

In 1897, Rambouillet again became the property of the French state and was made into a summer residence for France’s presidents.

Since then, the chateau has hosted official guests and international meetings. It was under Rambouillet’s gray roofs and brick chimneys that French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing in November 1975 received President Ford and the leaders of five other industrial democracies in what became the first Group of 7 summit.

The opulent setting is obviously superior to the event the talks are modeled on: the closed-door negotiations at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base outside Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995 that produced a peace plan for Bosnia-Herzegovina.

“I was in Dayton for 21 days and nights,” U.S. Ambassador to Macedonia Christopher R. Hill deadpanned as the Rambouillet conference was about to start. “So far, I haven’t noticed any similarities.”