Yugoslavia Accepts Western Demands to Pull Out of Kosovo

Hammered for 72 straight days by NATO warplanes, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s government finally capitulated Thursday to the U.S.-led alliance’s demands, agreeing to pull out all soldiers and police from Kosovo and permit heavily armed Western troops to help escort the province’s war-shocked populace home.

President Clinton welcomed the news as “encouraging” but added that, in light of what the West sees as Milosevic’s record of breaking his word, “we must also be cautious.” He vowed that NATO will press ahead with its air war until Yugoslav forces have begun a “verifiable withdrawal” from Kosovo.

“What is essential is that the military action continues,” British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the most hawkish of Western leaders, said on the first day of a European Union summit in Cologne, Germany. “There’s no question of a letup in that action.”

Blair’s foreign secretary, Robin Cook, said NATO will use spy satellites, overflights and other intelligence means to see what Yugoslav soldiers, police and paramilitary forces do in Kosovo during the coming days. “We will know whether he is serious about withdrawing his troops,” Cook said in Cologne.

What seemed to be the long-awaited breakthrough in the Balkan crisis came after Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari and Russian envoy Viktor S. Chernomyrdin handed Milosevic the first detailed peace plan supported both by Russia, an ally of Yugoslavia, and the U.S.-led Atlantic alliance.

In about 6 1/2 hours of talks with Milosevic on Wednesday and Thursday, Ahtisaari said he made it clear that the take-it-or-leave-it proposition from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was the “best offer” that the Yugoslav leader was going to get.

Previously, Milosevic had refused to countenance a full-scale military withdrawal from Kosovo, a province of the main Yugoslav republic, Serbia. He also had insisted that NATO play only a marginal role in a U.N. peacekeeping force.

But in a closed-door session that some participants described as rowdy and on one occasion coming close to fisticuffs, members of the Serbian parliament approved the blueprint, 136-74, on Thursday after Milosevic met with party leaders and urged them to accept it. In the afternoon, Ahtisaari said he was informed that the Yugoslav federal government also had signed on.

The settlement would require the return of an estimated 850,000 ethnic Albanian refugees expelled--mostly to neighboring Albania and Macedonia--since March in a bloody purge by Yugoslav troops and Serbian police that threatened to destabilize much of the Balkans and Europe.

The accord also calls for the “demilitarization” of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA.

“I think all [German] citizens, and citizens of other countries, feel as I do,” German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, host of the Cologne summit, told reporters Thursday night. “Peace is now within reach, and we will ensure that it does not slip from our grasp.”

However, as distributed here, the plan makes no mention of the fate of Milosevic himself, indicted along with four top lieutenants last week by an international tribunal on charges that they are accountable for murders, forced deportation and persecution of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Ahtisaari said the issue never came up in the talks, which he described as businesslike and devoid of angry outbursts.

State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said Thursday that the agreement does not affect the war crimes indictment. He said NATO never made Milosevic’s prosecution a condition for ending the bombing. On the other hand, he said, all U.N. member nations have an obligation to arrest Milosevic if they get a chance, and the latest agreement does not change this obligation.

“The only thing that can change the obligations of member states is another Security Council resolution,” he said. “We would not support any step by anybody to do that.”

In a statement about the peace accord released Thursday, the Milosevic regime said: “The three sides [Milosevic and the two envoys] unanimously agreed that commitment to peace was of vital importance, not only for Yugoslavia, but for the whole region and all of Europe.” The Tanjug news agency, a mouthpiece of the Yugoslav leadership, stressed that the peace plan keeps Kosovo a part of Yugoslavia--preserving the country’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity”--and provides a role for the United Nations in restoring peace to the region.

With Milosevic’s consent in hand, Ahtisaari flew to Cologne to brief the other European Union heads of state and government. He also met with Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, the Clinton administration’s point man on Kosovo, at the German city’s airport.

The Finnish president said plenty of fine print still needs to be agreed upon to flesh out the two-page agreement, including a precise schedule for withdrawal of the estimated 40,000 Yugoslav soldiers and police now in Kosovo.

But Yugoslav military officers were already in contact with generals from NATO as of Thursday night, Ahtisaari told a news conference in Cologne. A halt in NATO operations could come within days, he predicted.

“In theory, if there is an agreement tomorrow,” the Finn said, “I think we could expect it would be days, and very few days . . . that a suspension of the war activities, in other words, a pause in the bombing, would take place.”

On his return to Moscow on Thursday evening, Chernomyrdin spoke cautiously about the outcome of the negotiations in the face of mounting criticism at home.

“We have neared the end of the Balkan war,” Chernomyrdin told reporters. “The main thing is we have managed to bring the Balkan process into the U.N. legal plane.”

One leading Russian general who participated in the Belgrade talks suggested at a joint appearance with Chernomyrdin that Russia had given away too much in the negotiations and is now in the unfortunate position of relying on NATO’s good will.

“In our hearts, we soldiers are dissatisfied with many conditional points agreed upon in the negotiations,” said Gen. Leonid G. Ivashov, head of the Defense Ministry’s International Military Cooperation Department. “Much is unclear and depends on the conscientiousness of our negotiating partners, and, above all, on NATO.”

Amid the news of peace in the offing, NATO warplanes kept up pressure on the Milosevic government, attacking communication facilities and fuel depots in Kosovo and elsewhere in Yugoslavia. State media reported that two people were seriously wounded in an attack on a Naftagas fuel depot near Sombor, close to the border with Hungary.

NATO jets avoided Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, but air raid sirens sounded half an hour before the talks resumed Thursday. The “all clear” signal rang out across the city 40 minutes later.

Chernomyrdin’s hotel was blacked out Wednesday night by one of the power outages resulting from weeks of bombing of power stations and lines.

If the U.S.-led air campaign that began March 24 does indeed end, it will close out a unique chapter in the annals of warfare. In the more than 31,500 aerial sorties carried out so far under Operation Allied Force, the 19-nation alliance has yet to lose a single pilot in combat. The only allied casualties were two American pilots killed when their helicopter crashed on a training mission in Albania.

Among Yugoslav forces, the carnage has never been admitted publicly, but sources at NATO headquarters in Brussels estimated Thursday that the army and police have suffered about 5,000 fatalities from alliance strikes and about 10,000 wounded.

An unknown number of civilians, including Serbs and ethnic Albanians, also have been killed--some in NATO airstrikes that hit refugee convoys, bridges, the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade and other unintended targets.

In recent weeks, leaders of the Western alliance had faced the unsavory possibility that a ground invasion of Kosovo--an act long opposed by the Clinton White House as too risky in terms of alliance casualties--might be necessary if air power alone didn’t suffice to make Milosevic’s regime buckle.

The document approved by Serbian lawmakers and the Yugoslav leadership, a translated copy of which was obtained by reporters in Belgrade, calls for the “imminent and verifiable end of violence and repression of Kosovo” and the “verifiable withdrawal from Kosovo of all [Yugoslav] military, police and paramilitary forces according to a quick timetable.”

The document does not specify when the pullout will start but says it should last no longer than seven days.

A White House official who requested anonymity said it was Chernomyrdin and the Russians who demanded such specifics in the final document. “They did not want any ambiguities,” the official said.

The document said an “international security presence” will then be deployed in the Los Angeles County-sized province under U.N. aegis and Article 7 of the U.N. Charter, which covers peacekeeping operations. The force, with “essential NATO participation,” also “must be deployed under unified control and command,” the document says.

The foreign troops brought into Kosovo, the agreement says, also will be “effective”--signaling that the 47,900-strong peacekeeping force that NATO has already begun to mass near Kosovo will be authorized to pack a lot of firepower.

All this language faithfully reproduces the demands of the Clinton administration and its European allies. Ahtisaari said Thursday night that the planned U.N. resolution authorizing the operation could be finessed to allow participation of Russians without their force having to report directly to NATO. That is already the case with the 30,000-strong Stabilization Force securing peace in nearby Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Some Yugoslav security forces will be allowed to return to Kosovo at an unspecified date to guard such sites as shrines of the Serbian Orthodox Church and key border posts, the agreement says. But it stipulates that the total number of Yugoslav troops must be kept to “hundreds, and not thousands.”

NATO military spokesman Col. Konrad Freytag in Brussels said the Yugoslavs also will be responsible for clearing land mines they planted during their campaign to drive out the separatist guerrillas of the KLA.

The peace plan accepted by the Yugoslav leadership also provides for U.N.-authorized “establishment of a provisional administration for Kosovo . . . under which the people of Kosovo will enjoy substantial autonomy” within Yugoslavia.

For some in the Serbian parliament, relinquishing that much control of a land seen as the mythical, mystical cradle of their Slavic people was too bitter a pill to swallow. On March 23, the same chamber rejected Western demands to station an international force in Kosovo to police the stillborn peace accords proposed at talks in Rambouillet, France. NATO began airstrikes against Yugoslavia the following day.

Despite the personal pleas from Milosevic, Serbia’s ultranationalist Radical Party voted against the peace deal. Vojislav Seselj, a party member and deputy prime minister of Serbia, threatened to withdraw the party’s support of the Yugoslav leader.

“We shall not sit in the government and await the arrival of NATO troops into Kosovo,” Seselj declared.

The liberal Civic Alliance of Serbia hailed the government’s acceptance of the plan and noted its similarity to the Rambouillet proposals that Milosevic and his government had refused to sign last winter. Vuk Draskovic, leader of the opposition Serbian Renewal Movement, echoed the government line that an important difference with Rambouillet is that peacekeepers will be under U.N. auspices.

“U.N. forces are not foreign forces,” Draskovic said. “The U.N. flag is not a foreign flag. NATO forces would be in Kosovo under the flag of the U.N. and our state is one of the founders of the U.N.”

For member states of NATO, French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine said Thursday, “the priority now is to formulate the peace settlement in a Security Council resolution, to start to enact it and thus allow a halt to military operations.” Vedrine, who also was at the EU summit in Cologne, said political directors from the foreign ministries of the Group of 8--representing seven leading industrial democracies and Russia--were to begin attacking the problem Thursday night.

Ahtisaari, a former career diplomat who chaired a U.N. working group on Bosnia in the early 1990s and directed peace negotiations on Namibia as U.N. undersecretary-general, told the news conference in Cologne that he wasn’t “jumping here with enthusiasm” over the peace plan he had carried to Belgrade because too many blanks had yet to be filled in.

“The English have a very good saying that the proof of the pudding is in eating it,” the Finnish leader said. “The same thing goes for peace processes.”

Russia’s Interfax news agency quoted Valentin Sergeyev, Chernomyrdin’s spokesman, as saying that a NATO military mission would go to Belgrade “in the next few days” to discuss implementation of the peace plan and that the bombing would stop then.

Dahlburg reported from Cologne and Boudreaux from Belgrade. Times staff writers Richard C. Paddock in Moscow and Edwin Chen, Doyle McManus and Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

By the Numbers

The tallies as of Thursday for the NATO campaign that began March 24:

* Days: 72

* Number of sorties flown by NATO: 31,529

* Estimated Serbian casualties: 10,000 soldiers killed or injured

* Yugoslav aircraft hit: 100+

* Artillery pieces hit: 314

* Command posts destroyed: 14

* Petroleum reserves destroyed: 57%

Source: NATO

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Highlights of the Peace Plan

Many details must be worked out to make the Kosovo peace accord stick. Here are some of the highlights:

Airstrikes: NATO airstrikes will continue until Yugoslavia starts withdrawing all its police, paramilitary and military forces from Kosovo “in a very rapid timetable.” If all goes as planned, the bombing could end in a few days.

Yugoslav withdrawal: Verifiable withdrawal from Kosovo of all Yugoslav forces. After all these forces have left, some Yugoslav troops will be let back into Kosovo, but only to guard borders and Serbian historical and cultural sites. Details of suspending hostilities and verifying the withdrawal of the Yugoslav troops will be left to NATO and Yugoslav military authorities.

Buffer zone: Establishment of a buffer zone at the Kosovo border behind which Yugoslav forces must withdraw.

Peacekeepers: Deployment of 47,900-troop United Nations security force, with NATO participation, under unified control and command.

Refugees: Safe and free return of all refugees and those displaced within Kosovo, under U.N. supervision.

Government: Establishment of an interim administration for Kosovo, under which the province’s people will enjoy substantial autonomy within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

Next step: The United Nations Security Council must pass a resolution endorsing the peace deal, notably the dispatch of an international force to Kosovo to make a refugee return possible.

Indictment: The indictment against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic as a war criminal remains in effect.

--The European Union, the NATO alliance, the United Nations, the World Bank and other money lenders have to mount a massive reconstruction effort for Kosovo.

AP-WS-06-03-99 1739EDT

Sources: Associated Press, Times staff

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Voices

“Peace, in my opinion, is very close.” German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder

“There will be a pause, NATO will stop bombing. They are suppose to stop two to three days after (Yugoslav President Slobodan) Milosvic begins complying with the agreement. . .” Russia’s special Balkans envoy Viktor S. Chermomyrdin

“I think that we might be close to stopping (the bombing). But the policy has worked. It’s not the time to deviate from the policy.” Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien.

“I don’t believe that there was any kind of surrender because we are not ready and we will never be ready to surrender Kosovo as an integral pat and spiritual cradle of the Yugoslavian nation.” Vladislav Jovanovic, Yugoslavia’s ambassador to the United Nations.

“The first step in building peace has been made. . .(But) bear with me if I’m not jumping here with enthusiasm because there’s a lot of hard work to be done.” Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari.

“You can’t trust (Milosevic) at all. He’s never kept to his agreements. I do not think we should keep talking about him. He should go. . .” Former Yugoslave Prime Minister Milan Panic, now one of the leaders of the Serbian opposition movement Alliance for Change.