Yugoslavs Fail to Sign Pact, Want More Talks

NATO military officials said a Yugoslav delegation had agreed to all but a “few small points” of NATO’s dictates for a full withdrawal of troops from Kosovo and other actions after meeting for five hours Saturday with alliance officials in this remote border town.

Nevertheless, the six delegation members representing Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s government failed to sign a six-page document spelling out terms of a withdrawal and instead asked to resume discussions today.

The delay renewed skepticism that Yugoslavia is serious about the full-scale capitulation that its parliament agreed to Thursday. NATO is demanding that the Milosevic government commit itself to specific details of its planned withdrawal from Kosovo.

It also ended any hopes that NATO’s bombings of Yugoslavia would end as early as today. A NATO spokesman said the alliance will stop bombing within 24 hours after the document is signed if Yugoslavia displays a “verifiable withdrawal” of troops.

Further complicating matters, Serbian forces late Saturday reportedly shelled a northern Albanian border town crowded with refugees, killing one person and injuring several others.

Officials from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said eight shells exploded in Krume, about five miles from the border with Kosovo. The area is the main entry into the province for rebels of the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army.

It wasn’t clear what the sticking points were Saturday, and NATO representatives weren’t saying.

The meeting took place near where hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians crossed the Kosovo border into Macedonia seeking refuge from an “ethnic cleansing” campaign in their homeland. The site of the hastily arranged talks was an Albanian restaurant that had been rented by NATO forces a day or two before.

“It’s a NATO restaurant now,” said spokesman Lt. Col. Robin Clifford, surveying the Italian soldiers standing guard with their black AR-17 rifles and distinctive helmets adorned with feathers.

NATO officials are planning to move forces into Kosovo--a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s dominant republic--as the Yugoslav forces withdraw, paving the way for the refugees to ultimately return. There is much to do: Many of the villages have been burned, much of the infrastructure is gone and the area is said to be full of land mines.

Negotiating for NATO was British Lt. Gen. Sir Michael Jackson, who commanded NATO-led peacekeeping forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina and is to lead the NATO forces into Kosovo. Jackson sat at a rectangular table with the lead Serbian negotiators--Obrad Stevanovic, a police general and senior Serbian Interior Ministry official, and Col. Gen. Blagoje Kovacevic, deputy chief of staff in the Yugoslav army--going over the plan point by point.

Representatives of several other NATO member nations--including German, French, Italian and U.S. military officers--also were present in the unair-conditioned former dining room on a sweltering day.

NATO officials heralded the progress made in Saturday’s talks, terming the session a “constructive day.”

“We have a full understanding on both sides” about the contents of a peace agreement, said spokesman Clifford.

But it seemed as if NATO had actually been snubbed by the Serbian negotiators. At 5:15 p.m., the Yugoslav delegation members walked out of the negotiations and headed for their luxury cars. Clifford said that there were a “few points” that they wanted to clarify with their bosses in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, and that they would return to resume talks in an hour. But when, after two hours, the delegation hadn’t returned, Clifford told reporters that they had requested more time to return to Belgrade, about a five-hour drive away.

Negotiations would resume early today at a small Macedonian airport, he said.

Saturday’s hastily called meeting was set to begin at 9 a.m. at the border of Macedonia and Kosovo. NATO had expected 20 Yugoslav negotiators to arrive, but only six came and they were three hours late.

Disputes had occurred at the border that delayed the meetings; apparently the Yugoslavs were objecting to the location, preferring to negotiate in an area known as “no man’s land” between the border checkpoints in Kosovo and Macedonia, rather than to travel into NATO-occupied ground in Macedonia.

“It’s a shame they don’t seem to be taking this terribly seriously or as seriously as we thought,” Clifford said around midmorning. Soldiers could be seen loading a truck with tables and chairs to carry down to the border just in case they were needed. But by noon, the delegation had arrived.

In Washington, the Clinton administration waited nervously for word from the talks in Blace, but there was little doubt that, from the U.S. standpoint at least, the war was essentially over.

“We’re still in the stage where caution is the watchword,” Vice President Al Gore told CNN. “We hope that it’s real, but we’re just keeping the same realistic, hard-nosed approach that’s brought us to this point.”

Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, in an interview with The Times and two other papers, was asked if the apparent end to the conflict was less than satisfactory because NATO’s war effort failed to prevent Yugoslav forces from driving the vast majority of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians from their homes and left Milosevic in power.

Maybe it was not as glorious as “riding in with Douglas MacArthur and his corncob pipe,” Cohen said. “But it’s a different world.”

In Serbia, the government had yet to tell its people Saturday the full details of its capitulation to NATO.

State television gave only a brief report on the meeting in Macedonia and obscured its purpose.

The TV correspondent at the border said the talks “unfolded in a good atmosphere” and were expected to produce “a military-technical document” to implement the peace accord.

The network, the source of news for most Serbs, said the Yugoslav officers were meeting with a U.N. military delegation, not one from NATO. The government says one key concession it won from the alliance was that the NATO-led peacekeeping force is to be endorsed by a U.N. Security Council resolution, giving it a stamp of legitimacy Milosevic had sought.

Political leaders in Belgrade predicted that the Serbian minority in Kosovo, fearful of reprisals for the ethnic rampage that helped wreck the province, will flee on the heels of the withdrawing government forces.

“A number of desperate and badly informed people in Kosovo will follow in the tracks of the Yugoslav army and the police,” Serbian opposition leader Vuk Draskovic told reporters Saturday. The number of Serbs in the province has been estimated at 100,000 or more.

Meanwhile, Pentagon spokesman Kenneth H. Bacon said the NATO-led Kosovo Force, or KFOR, will be prepared to use military force if any Serbian troops try to stay in Kosovo.

“NATO will be coming in behind them to reinforce their leaving,” he said. “And we will, of course, reserve the right to take appropriate military action.”

Bacon also indicated that the alliance is winding down its military action, even though he said not a single Serbian soldier had left Kosovo. Over the previous 24 hours, he said, NATO warplanes had concentrated on military targets in the province, avoiding the attacks on the infrastructure of Serbia that were frequent before Milosevic signaled acceptance of NATO’s conditions for peace.

NATO jets hit military targets outside Urosevac, 12 miles from the site of the talks, Yugoslavia’s state news agency, Tanjug, reported. Cluster bombs fell near Pirane, scene of recent clashes between the Yugoslav army and KLA rebels.

Despite the Blace talks, several hundred demonstrators gathered near the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington early Saturday to protest the NATO air campaign. Many held placards with statements like “Stop the Bombing” and “Stop the War,” some comparing President Clinton to a war criminal. The crowd included a smattering of people who identified themselves as Serbs.

“We need to drop Clinton, not drop bombs,” declared Matthew Greene, 20, a student from Greensboro, N.C.

The demonstrators marched from the memorial to the Pentagon, where they heard former Atty. Gen. Ramsey Clark call for the abolition of NATO, which he termed “a threat to life on Earth.”

Also Saturday, a family spokesman said Staff Sgt. Andrew Ramirez, the East Los Angeles native held prisoner in Yugoslavia for more than a month, will board a plane Tuesday to rejoin his Army unit in Germany.

It remained uncertain what duties Ramirez will perform once he returns to Germany. An Army spokesman said it is unlikely he will be sent to the Balkans to be part of the peacekeeping force in Kosovo.

Times staff writers Norman Kempster, Paul Richter and Jonathan Peterson in Washington, Richard Boudreaux in Belgrade and Hugo Martin in Los Angeles contributed to this report.