Air War Continues Amid Plans for Peace

The Western alliance continued to make war against Yugoslavia on Friday but simultaneously accelerated preparations for peace, detailing a top NATO general to meet with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s commanders and coordinate how their military and police forces will vacate Kosovo.

“We’re going down there with a map, stick pins in it and say, ‘Take these routes, don’t get off them, move quickly, do not stop to collect $200,’ ” a diplomat at North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters here said.

The talks, scheduled to be held Saturday at a point on the Yugoslav-Macedonian border, will include British Lt. Gen. Michael Jackson, the designated commander of the future Kosovo peacekeeping force. The meeting is meant to fill in some of the gaps in a peace plan that Milosevic accepted Thursday.

The blueprint, intended to end 15 months of “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo and allow the return to their homes of more than 1 million ethnic Albanian refugees, requires all of Milosevic’s soldiers, police officers and paramilitary forces--more than 40,000 men under arms--to leave the region over a seven-day period. Kosovo is a province of Yugoslavia’s main republic, Serbia.

The meeting with representatives of the Yugoslav military command is supposed to fix a timetable and to specify routes the departing Yugoslavs should take.

“Anybody off the yellow brick road is subject to being bombed,” the NATO diplomat said. “So there is going to be a certain incentive” to stick to the accord.

Once the withdrawal clock begins ticking, the agreement with Milosevic allots the Yugoslav forces only 48 hours to dismantle and remove from Kosovo all antiaircraft missiles, guns, radar and other components of their air defense system. That provision, if followed, will allow low-flying NATO planes to safely monitor the pullout.

Though repeatedly cautioning that the accord with Milosevic does not mean peace has come to the Balkans, NATO has gone into overdrive to be able to occupy Kosovo as the Yugoslavs leave.

Jackson’s headquarters, in Skopje, Macedonia, just 10 miles south of Kosovo, has been ordered to be ready to move its forces on 24 hours’ notice, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea told a news briefing here.

The Atlantic alliance’s military headquarters in Belgium had been told to submit an updated operational plan for Jackson’s force to NATO’s top political body, the North Atlantic Council, within 48 hours, Shea said.

What NATO calls a “force balancing conference” also is planned to make sure the international peacekeeping corps for Kosovo, to which 30 countries have offered to contribute about 48,000 troops, has the right mix of engineers, liaison officers, medics, teams for clearing land mines, and other specialists.

Britain, which has pledged 18,000 soldiers, is providing the largest contingent.

Air Marshall John Day, deputy chief of the British Defense Staff, said the force will be able to move into position quickly once the details of the agreement are worked out.

“If you want to speculate 48 hours, I wouldn’t have a difficulty with that,” Day said.

Russia, NATO Discuss Force

NATO and Russia continued Friday to haggle over possible Russian participation in the peacekeeping force. A senior State Department official said the Russians object to the NATO command structure and to the alliance’s refusal to suspend its bombing until there is evidence of a Yugoslav withdrawal.

“The Russians have a choice to make” whether to participate, the official said. “NATO is going to be in overall command. There is one choice the Russians do not have--a separate command in a separate sector.”

In the meantime, the U.S.-led alliance kept up its pressure on the Yugoslav government Friday by carrying out a 73rd day of airstrikes.

“The promise of peace is not yet the reality of peace,” Shea said in Brussels. “We will not stop until we see the beginnings of a rapid, complete and verifiable withdrawal of those Serb forces.”

Reports of Yugoslav Antiaircraft Fire

Not only had NATO forces observed “no firm signs of preparation for withdrawal,” added alliance spokesman Maj. Gen. Walter Jertz, but Friday morning there were reports that the Yugoslav forces were firing antiaircraft weapons at NATO planes.

Yugoslav artillery pounded Albanian territory along a 12-mile stretch of the border with Kosovo on Friday evening, and four people were injured, said police and international monitors. The separatist Kosovo Liberation Army also reported that Yugoslav forces had launched a new offensive against rebels in the province.

In the 24-hour period ending early Friday, alliance warplanes in turn prowled the skies over Kosovo, attacking Yugoslav military targets. NATO aircraft hit 21 artillery pieces, 30 mortar positions, four tanks, 10 armored personnel carriers, eight antiaircraft artillery pieces and other military vehicles.

NATO jets also attacked an army airfield near Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, and targets across Serbia, signaling the alliance’s determination to stay on the offensive until Yugoslavia begins living up to the commitments of its leaders.

For another day, however, Belgrade and other major cities were spared.

Although Pentagon spokesman Kenneth H. Bacon insisted that “NATO has the right to hit any target it wants,” he indicated Friday that the alliance was starting to wind down the conflict. He said 36 F-15 warplanes that were supposed to have joined the allied force this weekend had been put on hold.

In Washington, President Clinton underlined the importance of the military-to-military talks scheduled for this weekend, saying they hold the key to an end to NATO bombing.

“Believe me, I’m anxious to end the bombing. But I want to know that our objectives have been achieved,” Clinton said.

“Our diplomatic and military efforts will continue until we see Serb forces begin to withdraw in a full-scale manner,” he said. “Our experience in the Balkans teaches us that true peace can only come when progress in discussions is followed by progress on the ground.”

Jackson, a blunt-talking former paratrooper who has commanded an armored division in Germany and an international peacekeeping force in Bosnia-Herzegovina, was set to be accompanied at the meeting along the Yugoslav-Macedonian border by a Russian observer, the military advisor to Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, and U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Robert Fogelsong, an aide to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, sources said.

Talbott, Ahtisaari and Russian envoy Viktor S. Chernomyrdin were all personally involved in seeking a negotiated end to the Kosovo crisis, with the Europeans making the trip to Belgrade on Wednesday to hand Milosevic the plan.

A NATO source said the first contacts with the Yugoslav military took place Thursday night, when Gen. Dragoljub Ojdanic, chief of the Yugoslav army’s general staff, sent a fax to NATO military headquarters at Mons, Brussels, and followed it up with a phone call.

Ojdanic was indicted along with Milosevic by an international tribunal last month on charges that the two men and three other Yugoslav leaders have been responsible for war crimes committed in Kosovo.

The schedule to be hammered out by Jackson and the Yugoslav generals is also meant to provide NATO with a scorecard for verifying that the Yugoslavs stick to their commitments. According to Shea, U.S. Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark, supreme commander of the allied air campaign against Yugoslavia, will be reporting directly to NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana on upcoming Yugoslav troop movements.

NATO Needs to Be ‘Reassured’ of Pullout

When Solana is “reassured” that a genuine withdrawal is underway, he can then recommend a pause in bombing to the North Atlantic Council, which has the final word in the matter, Shea said.

The council, composed of one ambassador from each of NATO’s 19 member states, also will decide when to issue the “activation order” for Jackson’s force.

“The idea is not to leave a vacuum,” Shea said when asked when Jackson and his soldiers would deploy. “The people of Kosovo have suffered enough, and therefore we will be hot on the heels--let me put it that way--of the departing Yugoslav forces.”

As NATO pressed ahead with plans for deploying a peacekeeping force, a flurry of activity was underway at the United Nations in New York in preparation for rebuilding postwar Kosovo.

The World Food Program has stockpiled more than 1 million daily food rations and has 30 trucks ready to travel into the province. It has set up mobile food warehouses and movable bakeries and identified five locations in Kosovo where it can set up offices. The WFP said it has enough rations to feed 800,000 refugees for two months.

On Thursday and Friday, a team of three inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency visited a nuclear research center near Belgrade to survey stored atomic material. The facility was last inspected in January, and, under IAEA guidelines, it is supposed to be surveyed monthly.

The precise role the U.N. will play in Kosovo still has not been refined in detail. Those plans are expected to be arrived at this week when the Security Council considers a Kosovo resolution being prepared by the foreign ministers of the Group of 8--the seven leading industrialized nations and Russia.

But U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has proposed that a single administrator with broad powers be put in charge of civilian aid and reconstruction activities in Kosovo.

“Everyone understands there will be a military and a civilian component. Their work will have to be coordinated,” said Fred Eckhard, the secretary-general’s spokesman.

In other developments Friday:

* Solana, the Socialist from Spain who has been NATO’s secretary-general since December 1995, announced that he will step down to become the European Union’s first high representative in charge of coordinating the 15 member countries’ foreign and defense policy. He was offered the post by EU leaders meeting in Cologne, Germany. Solana, 57, who has been widely credited with keeping NATO together during the Kosovo conflict, told reporters that he will stay in his present job until there is a “peaceful outcome to the crisis and a safe return of refugees to their homes.”

* State Department spokesman James P. Rubin stressed that Yugoslavia cannot expect to share in U.S. and European reconstruction aid so long as Milosevic remains in power. “Reconstruction for Serbia will require a democratic Serbia,” he said.

The fact that Yugoslavia is headed by a man indicted on war crimes charges only makes it more difficult to include the republic in postwar programs, he said.

* The Pentagon said about 2,200 Marines will arrive within a few days to join 15,500 NATO troops already in Macedonia as the advance guard of a peacekeeping force that eventually will include about 7,000 Americans.

Times staff writers Norman Kempster in Washington and John Goldman at the United Nations contributed to this report.