Kosovo Talks End With Only Partial Plan to Halt Revolt

Intense U.S.-led diplomacy managed to salvage only piecemeal success from the Kosovo peace talks Tuesday, with Serbs and ethnic Albanians agreeing in principle to a home-rule plan for the separatist province but unflinching Serbian hostility to NATO-led enforcement blocking a final settlement.

“We have done a lot here, even if we have not done enough,” summed up British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, co-chairman of the grueling, deadline-busting negotiations.

After 17 days of sessions in a secluded chateau southwest of Paris, and four days of marathon intervention by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the Serbs and Kosovo Albanians agreed to resume negotiations March 15 at an unnamed location in France.

U.S. and European mediators said their task now will be to pressure Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to accept foreign peacekeepers in Kosovo, possibly by renewing a threat to launch NATO air attacks against Serbian targets. Kosovo is a mostly ethnic Albanian province of Serbia, the dominant republic of what remains of Yugoslavia.

In the interim, however, Albright announced that the bombs will be held in abeyance until results of the March conference are known--unless the Serbs commit gross violations of a cease-fire agreement they negotiated with U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke in October.

The incomplete settlement achieved here was markedly less than what Albright had said she would allow. As recently as Sunday, she had insisted that a home-rule plan without North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops both to enforce it and to protect the Kosovo Albanians from Milosevic’s brutal police and security forces was a worthless “piece of paper.”

In defense of Tuesday’s agreement, which is still unsigned and not yet fully embraced by the Serbs, Albright declared at a news conference here that “we have broken the stalemate that hung over Kosovo for so long.”

In Washington, President Clinton said the nonstop negotiations in this country town outside Paris “have produced more progress than we have seen in decades, since Kosovo’s autonomy was stripped away by the government in Belgrade [in 1989].”

But the three-week pause in the peace talks will be a dangerous time for Kosovo, where Serbian forces have ignored NATO’s repeated bombing threats and taken up new positions across the province.

“I think somebody is sending signals that the worst can happen,” Fernando del Mundo, spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said in Kosovo’s capital, Pristina.

Without an agreement to put NATO troops in Kosovo, which was supposed to be central to any deal at Rambouillet, there’s a danger that opponents of the agreement on either side might try to kill it by provoking more fighting.

Daily clashes between Serbian security forces and ethnic Albanian guerrillas have forced at least 9,000 people to flee 10 villages since Saturday, the refugee agency estimates. Villagers are so frightened in parts of Kosovo that the mere sight of Serbian troops is enough to make them abandon their homes in the dead of winter.

Rambouillet’s 81-page treaty, drafted by the United States and five major European powers, awards vastly greater powers of self-government to the province, where 2,000 people have died in the yearlong ethnic violence. But the pact also maintains the breakaway region as part of Serbia.

Throughout the talks, which opened Feb. 6, Albright said that if the Albanians approved all of the draft treaty and the Serbs rejected the military chapters, NATO would be free to bomb Serbian targets under a plan to punish the side responsible for the failure of the negotiations.

But the Albanians turned out to be more intractable than originally thought, and the Serbs were not the only obstacle to an agreement at Rambouillet. Until the last minute, U.S. officials said, the ethnic Albanian envoys had held out for a binding referendum on independence at the end of a three-year period.

The U.S. and European mediators refused to promise international recognition for the referendum, which almost certainly would endorse a full break with Serbia. But they agreed in the text of the treaty that the international community would consider “the will of the people,” along with other factors, in determining Kosovo’s definitive status.

Starting last weekend, a sometimes tired-looking Albright had to wage intense personal diplomacy to win acceptance from the Albanian delegation, which included hardened guerrilla fighters of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

“The Americans made two miscalculations,” contended Hans Stark, researcher at the French Institute of International Relations, a Paris think tank. “They underestimated the Albanians’ attachment to independence. And they overestimated the impact of the threat of NATO raids on the Serbs.”

It was only Tuesday, about an hour after a 3 p.m. deadline passed, that the Albanians who had been caucusing in the former royal estate here for more than seven hours voted by a show of raised hands to accept the peace package.

The approval came with this proviso: that the people of Kosovo also show their support during the upcoming three-week period of consultations. The delegates expressed confidence that public backing will be overwhelming.

At her news conference, Albright said the Albanians’ insistence on consultations with their people had prevented the talks from producing the sort of clear-cut outcome that could have led to rapid NATO military action against Serbia. But she said that if the Albanians sign the accord next month and the Serbs do not, the bombing threat will remain in effect.

At Rambouillet, the Serbs refused to even discuss the military and police annexes to the draft treaty that would allow a NATO-led force into Kosovo to implement the agreement.

In a letter, the Serbian delegation said Tuesday that once the mechanism for Kosovo’s autonomy is defined, they will be ready “to discuss the scope and character of an international presence in Kosovo.”

Even the autonomy package didn’t win their unqualified acceptance; one U.S. official said Serbian delegates approved only about 85% of the language of the political chapters. One Serbian objection is to the use of words such as “constitution,” “president” and “parliament”--language implying that Kosovo is an independent state.

In Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister Vuk Draskovic claimed that the completed draft of the plan had been changed to include a formula allowing an independence referendum. He accused the U.S. and European mediators of “playing games behind the scenes.”

Albright and the co-chairs of the Rambouillet conference, Cook and French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine, all agreed that the 81 pages are a package and that the political sections will not take effect without agreement on the military and police chapters.

The plan gives Kosovo virtually total self-rule, authorizing early elections and providing for local control of police, schools and other government services. It retains the present borders of Kosovo and specifies that the province remains legally a part of Serbia and the Yugoslav federation.

In addition to self-rule for the ethnic Albanians, the plan provides autonomy and protections for other ethnic groups, including the Serbs.

Under the military section of the agreement, a 28,000-strong NATO force, including about 4,000 Americans, would disarm and replace the Yugoslav army, Serbian special police and the KLA. Within six months of the arrival of the NATO forces, all Yugoslav troops would have to be withdrawn except for a small contingent to patrol the province’s border. Most special police would also be sent back to Serbia.

U.S. officials said that four months after the arrival of NATO troops, the Serbian police presence would be cut to about 2,500 personnel handling traditional police work.

Times staff writer Paul Watson in Pristina contributed to this report.