U.S. Presence in Kosovo Would Be Open-Ended

Tacitly acknowledging that the Clinton administration blundered by setting a deadline that it couldn’t keep for getting peacekeeping forces out of Bosnia, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said Tuesday that if U.S. troops are sent to Kosovo, another Balkan hot spot, the commitment will be open-ended.

“We really learned a lesson, I think, in Bosnia that setting an artificial deadline doesn’t work,” Albright said. Three years after a peace agreement was reached, U.S. troops remain in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

But the administration faces opposition on Capitol Hill to an open-ended commitment of troops. A spokesman for newly elected House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) said the House may vote soon on a nonbinding resolution on the wisdom of sending troops to Kosovo.

Albright insisted Tuesday that NATO peacekeepers must be part of any agreement to end the ethnic violence in Kosovo, a separatist province of Serbia that is predominantly ethnic Albanian. She warned that unless Serbia withdraws its opposition to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization deployment, it will face a bombing campaign by the United States and its allies.

Albright’s remarks escalated a war of nerves with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic by spelling out Washington’s bottom-line positions for the Kosovo peace talks now in their second week at a chateau near Paris. Earlier, NATO had threatened a bombing campaign if Serbia blocked an agreement.

“No NATO force is a deal-breaker from our perspective, and if there is no agreement, then the Serbs need to know that we have said earlier [that] whichever side cratered the talks would be held responsible, and in the Serb case, that means that it would be followed by NATO bombing,” Albright said in an interview on ABC-TV.

Milosevic was defiant Tuesday. Associated Press reported that in a statement issued after a meeting with U.S. envoy Christopher Hill in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, Milosevic said that “our negative stand about the presence of foreign troops is not only the attitude of the leadership but also of all citizens of our country.”

Albright had ordered Hill to go to Belgrade to deliver a warning in person to Milosevic that Washington will insist on a NATO-led force.

U.S. officials said there is no doubt that Milosevic is calling the shots for Serbian negotiators now engaged in the peace talks outside Paris even though he has not appeared at Rambouillet, the conference site. Serbian President Milan Milutinovic, a Milosevic lieutenant and the leader of the Serbian delegation, has said his government will never accept a foreign military force on its territory.

The United States has agreed to contribute about 4,000 troops to a 28,000-strong NATO force to police a Kosovo agreement. Albright said the administration will not make the same mistake in Kosovo that it made in 1995, when it set a one-year time limit on a peacekeeping force in Bosnia.

Clinton’s one-year deadline was extended for another year in 1996 and eliminated entirely in 1997. Today, there are about 6,700 U.S. troops in Bosnia, down from a high of 22,500.

Albright said that any withdrawal of the NATO force in Kosovo would depend on the achievement of certain “benchmarks,” including local elections and the establishment of a police force that would be acceptable to both sides.

Elaborating on Albright’s comments, State Department spokesman James B. Foley said, “The peace implementation force would be able to withdraw when the Kosovo institutions are up and running and considered to be self-sustainable and that stability has itself become self-sustaining.”

When a questioner suggested that it could take a very long time to meet that standard, Foley said, “Well, theoretically you’re right.” But he said the Contact Group, a six-nation consortium that coordinates Balkan peace efforts, will insist that the institutions be created in a relatively short time.

“Maybe the benchmarks themselves can contain timelines, but that’s different from there being a specific timeline attached to withdrawal,” he said.

NATO has said it will send peacekeepers to the embattled province only if the Serbian government and the ethnic Albanian rebels agree to a cease-fire and actually stop fighting. The purpose of the NATO force would be to disarm government and rebel troops and to keep order until an ethnically neutral police force could be trained and deployed.

The United States and its allies in the Contact Group have ordered the warring factions to complete their work at Rambouillet by Saturday. Although differences remain on both sides, the ethnic Albanians have accepted the broad outlines of the Contact Group’s proposal to give them a large measure of self-rule short of their objective of full independence. The ethnic Albanian side has also endorsed the NATO peacekeeping force.

“We take the deadline for agreement on Saturday very seriously,” State Department spokesman Foley said Tuesday.