Peace Talks on Kosovo Extended for 3 Days

With the United States and Serbia locked in a bitter face-off over a proposal to send NATO-led peacekeeping troops to Kosovo, the U.S. and European sponsors of the Balkan peace conference agreed Saturday to extend until Tuesday their deadline for completing the negotiations.

The decision, made after the talks ran more than seven hours past a noon deadline that Washington had declared inviolate, was an embarrassment to the Clinton administration and to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

Albright had joined the negotiations Saturday morning, hoping to bring the warring sides together. Yet even as the talks continued, new fighting broke out in Kosovo.

At the negotiations, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, co-chairman of the conference, said the sponsors finally agreed to let the negotiations run until 3 p.m. local time Tuesday because the warring factions had “come very close [to agreement] on a long list of constitutional and political” provisions despite the continuing impasse over plans to send 28,000 NATO peacekeepers, including about 4,000 Americans, to enforce the deal.

Cook said the conference sponsors were not “predicting there will be an agreement by Tuesday, but what we have seen over the past 24 hours is substantial movement.”

He said the political agreements would provide a substantial measure of self-rule to the province’s ethnic Albanian majority for a three-year trial period before new negotiations on a final-status pact.

However, Albright said a political agreement without international peacekeeping troops to police it “is a nonstarter . . . just a piece of paper.”

“The Serbs’ refusal to even consider the peace implementation force is largely responsible for our failure to reach an agreement,” Albright said.

U.S. officials said later that Serbia had accepted the political autonomy plan without reservations, but that the ethnic Albanians had not yet agreed in full to the political side of the deal and were demanding an independence referendum in three years.

Albright said she hoped to use the three-day extension of the talks to answer the Albanians’ doubts and win their full approval.

The Albanian side has already endorsed the NATO peacekeepers.

Albright said she believed that it will be far more difficult to soften Serbian objections to the military aspects of the draft treaty.

But “it is worth trying, it is worth pushing again with [Yugoslav President Slobodan] Milosevic,” she said, adding: “It would be a grave mistake for Milosevic to miscalculate our intentions. . . . We’re not into endless extensions.”

If the talks fail, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is prepared to launch punitive airstrikes to halt the Balkan warfare, provoked largely by Milosevic.

However, as long as the Albanians raise doubts about parts of the pact, it is much more difficult to assess blame.

Although NATO agreed last month to authorize Secretary-General Javier Solana to initiate a bombing campaign against Serbia if the Belgrade administration blocked agreement at Rambouillet, a senior State Department official acknowledged Saturday that military action is unlikely unless the Albanians accept the peace plan in its entirety, leaving the Serbs as the only holdouts.

NATO has assembled a potent force of 450 warplanes in the region, ready to bomb Serbia if the talks fail.

Russia and, to a lesser extent, Italy oppose the use of force. However, U.S. officials said their objections will not be allowed to blunt NATO’s military plans.

In an interview with Associated Press Television News, Yugoslav Deputy Premier Vuk Draskovic said the fact that the talks were continuing “is a good signal which tells us there is hope for a political settlement.”

“The bombing of Yugoslavia would only strengthen anti-American and anti-European forces, and Americans cannot understand this,” Draskovic said.

He said the Serbian delegation will refuse to allow a foreign military presence in Kosovo, which is legally a province of Serbia, the dominant republic of what remains of Yugoslavia.

Draskovic said his government rejects a foreign military contingent “no matter what it’s called.”

Russian Opposition Firmly Reiterated

Russian Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov, who missed the Rambouillet talks because of a trip to Japan, said his government is firmly opposed to the use of force. He urged international mediators to keep hunting for a peaceful solution.

“Military actions will not resolve the Kosovo conflict,” Ivanov said, according to the Interfax news agency.

His deputy in Rambouillet, Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Avdeyev, talked even tougher.

“The threat of airstrikes is unacceptable. Even the idea of airstrikes or any other intervention without the [express authorization of] the U.N. Security Council is unacceptable,” he said. “This is what is taking place already in Iraq, and we’re sure it won’t happen again.”

U.S. officials were unconcerned, however, expressing confidence that Russia will ultimately acquiesce to NATO military action, even if continuing to criticize it.

On the ground in Kosovo, some of the worst fighting in weeks erupted.

About half an hour past the peace talks’ Saturday deadline, an intense battle broke out between ethnic Albanian rebels and Serbian security forces in the southern village of Studencane.

Each side blamed the other for the violence that forced as many as 400 villagers to flee their homes, leaving Studencane deserted by the time shooting stopped about 5 p.m., said Beatrice Lacoste, a spokeswoman for foreign peace monitors in Kosovo.

The village came under intense fire from mortars and heavy machine guns, Lacoste said from Kosovo’s capital, Pristina.

Serbian authorities accused the Kosovo Liberation Army of attacking a convoy of Serbian police and Yugoslav army vehicles as they drove through Studencane. The guerrillas say they were attacked first.

Fighting was also reported Saturday near Podujevo, about 25 miles north of Pristina.

“We are afraid the Serbs will make a massacre of civilians,” said one ethnic Albanian rebel commander near Podujevo, who gave his name only as Isak. “We are ready.”

The Serbian army also appeared to be sending troops back into Kosovo from a base in the Serbian city of Nis, violating an October cease-fire agreement, a NATO official told reporters at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels.

He called the troop movements “very worrying in terms of provoking the local population.”

In Pristina, Serbian police stopped vehicles and checked papers in the center of the city for the first time in months. They also set up new checkpoints on highways leading into the province.

International monitors withdrew from an area of western Kosovo after residents hurled rocks and firecrackers in a protest against their presence.

In other signs of rising tensions, large numbers of people took buses from Pristina back to their villages, saying the city was too dangerous.

In Belgrade, the capital of both Yugoslavia and Serbia, U.S. diplomatic personnel began evacuating, officials said. Non-emergency embassy personnel and their families departed Saturday, leaving behind only key staff. Members of an international verification team sent to Kosovo to monitor a previous peace deal remained in the province. They will be evacuated before any airstrikes, officials said.

Serbs were also frightened that NATO airstrikes might encourage the Kosovo Liberation Army to target members of their minority community in the province.

In the Serbian town of Mdalenovac, speakers told a gathering of the Serbian Radical Party that the United States was using the Rambouillet conference to extend its control to Serbia.

“The Americans’ only goal is to have NATO troops stationed in Kosovo,” said one speaker, Stevo Dragisic. “They do not care about the fate of Kosovo. . . . All they care about is fulfilling their own national goals.”

He said the Americans were “Nazis,” adding that U.S. policies toward Serbia were worse than Adolf Hitler’s.

In Washington, where President Clinton was kept up to date on the Kosovo talks by his national security advisors, the White House endorsed the three-day extension of the talks.

U.S. officials said that because both sides in the talks had asked for additional time, the administration felt that “we were in a position that we couldn’t say no.”

Clinton’s earlier tough stance had been widely viewed as an effort to intensify pressure on the Serbs.

U.S. Officials Deny Loss of Credibility

At the site of the talks, in a 14th century chateau near Paris, U.S. officials rejected suggestions that the United States and its allies lost credibility by relaxing a deadline that Clinton and other administration officials had called inflexible.

However, Albright’s last-minute unsuccessful intervention was a disappointment to her and her aides. Although officials said the Albanians moved closer to agreement on Saturday, the secretary of State missed her objective of closing that part of the deal.

“She is frustrated,” one official said.

The Saturday session also produced new signs of tension within NATO and the Contact Group, which supervises Balkan peace efforts and is made up of the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia.

Italian Foreign Minister Lamberto Dini told reporters that the United States was wrong in heaping most of the blame on the Serbs. Dini emphasized the Albanians’ continuing objections to parts of the plan.

Times staff writers Paul Watson in Belgrade, Maura Reynolds in Moscow and Art Pine in Washington contributed to this report.