NATO and Russia Inch Toward Deal for Kosovo Peace

After eight tough hours of talks, the foreign ministers of Russia and key NATO nations inched toward agreement Monday on the final, crucial details required to end the war in Kosovo.

Meeting at the lavish German government guest house known as the Petersberg across the Rhine from Bonn, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, her Russian counterpart, Igor S. Ivanov, and the foreign ministers of Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Canada struggled to find agreement on two separate, yet connected, issues that must be resolved before the war can be brought to a close:

* The details of a United Nations Security Council resolution that would formalize the peace.

* The timing and sequence of the final steps to end the hostilities.

Agreement on both matters is vital in order to rescue a peace accord that had seemed all but nailed down late last week after Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic accepted it, but then appeared to unravel when talks between Yugoslav military officers meeting with a top NATO commander broke down early Monday.

In the days since the provisional agreement, Milosevic has shown signs of reneging on his pledge to pull all forces out of Kosovo--a province of Yugoslavia’s dominant republic, Serbia--and Moscow has insisted on an immediate NATO bombing halt before implementation of the deal can begin.

Many Russians have been outraged by the Western allies’ air war on their fellow Slavs in Yugoslavia, which began March 24 as an attempt to halt Milosevic’s bloody campaign of “ethnic cleansing” directed at ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. At the same time, Russia has sought to build international goodwill and revive some of its prestige as a former superpower by helping to broker an end to the conflict.

Although the ministers meeting here failed to finalize a draft resolution Monday, as they had hoped, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer told reporters after the talks adjourned for the evening that while the day’s session had been long, it had also been productive.

“When we began, there was a great deal of dissent, but we were able to remove most of the [sticking points] and have made progress on the remainder,” he said. “We hope to settle the remaining points tomorrow.” The talks were scheduled to resume in nearby Cologne this morning.

U.S. officials said that if the foreign ministers complete agreement on the draft today, they will forward it immediately to the Security Council in New York for action. A U.N. resolution is essential because it would provide the legal basis for a NATO-led peace implementation force for Kosovo.

Fischer said the negotiations broke up when Ivanov was unable to get instructions from Moscow, apparently because of the late hour, to accept compromises proposed on two or three key points.

While Fischer declined to elaborate in detail on the outstanding differences, others familiar with the talks said the main sticking point was the relationship between the NATO-led peace force that will administer the province and the Security Council, which will bless its presence.

While U.N. involvement was vital to win both Russian backing for the peace agreement and Milosevic’s ultimate acceptance, the U.S. and NATO have insisted that the world body exercise no operational control over the force and that the alliance remain in sole charge of its deployment and operation. Moscow wants some U.N. role.

Officials familiar with the talks indicated that they had produced a possible compromise that would require NATO’s military commander to provide the U.N. occasional progress reports on the peacekeeping mission--a solution that would give Moscow and Milosevic political cover but not impinge on alliance control over the force.

About 7,000 Americans are expected to be part of the 45,000-to-50,000-strong peacekeeping force. Moscow also reportedly has objected to a mention in the draft resolution that member states should cooperate with the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague. The tribunal, officially known as the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, last month indicted Milosevic and four associates on war crimes charges. British and French officials hinted strongly that language suitable to both Moscow and NATO had been achieved.

Despite the failure to complete the draft U.N. resolution, senior U.S. and other Western officials exhibited a sense of relief that the talks had gone far better than feared.

“When the day started, it was unclear whether Russia was wanting to negotiate,” one U.S. official said. “There was a question what they were going to do. But [Ivanov] did negotiate. He sat down and worked through this with us.”

But not before leveling some public verbal blasts at the Atlantic alliance.

Ivanov accused NATO of trying to do an end run around the United Nations by negotiating directly with Yugoslav authorities over the international peacekeeping force.

In Washington, meanwhile, the Clinton administration said caution remained its watchword.

“Just as there was reason not to be wildly optimistic on Friday, there are reasons not to be wildly pessimistic today,” said Pentagon spokesman Kenneth H. Bacon. “This is a process. NATO has hung in here for 10 1/2 weeks. We’re prepared to hang in as long as necessary. . . . Time is on our side.”

White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart said Clinton spent 10 minutes on the telephone Monday with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and another 10 minutes speaking by phone with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin.

“The NATO air campaign will continue until we see the beginnings of a verifiable withdrawal, until the agreement . . . is implemented,” Lockhart said.

Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, who, along with Russian special envoy Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, convinced Milosevic last week to end the conflict, made an emergency trip to Bonn on Monday during the talks to help shore up the earlier commitments. He reportedly won new assurances that the Yugoslav leader will not back away from the accord.

Ahtisaari arrived in Beijing today to consult with Chinese authorities in preparation for a possible Security Council vote. China is the only nation with veto power not represented in Bonn. China’s position has been unclear since NATO destroyed its embassy in Belgrade on May 8 in one of the conflict’s most tragic errors.

“He spoke to Milosevic, and Milosevic intends to go forward with the agreement,” a senior U.S. official said. “He said he thought it was important to move quickly [to nail down details]. No one wants a security vacuum when the Serbs withdraw.”

Last week’s agreement committed Milosevic to the full withdrawal of the estimated 40,000 Serbian security forces believed to be in the war-torn province and called for a NATO-led peacekeeping force to administer Kosovo.

At talks with NATO commanders Sunday in Macedonia, Yugoslavia’s 15-member military delegation demanded that the agreement reached in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, last week be altered to allow 10,000 Yugoslav troops to remain in Kosovo and to double the one-week deadline for the withdrawal of the remainder.

The delegates were also seeking clarification of who will disarm the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army, which has been fighting for the independence of the province.

Yugoslavia was evidently hoping that Russia would try to introduce those changes in the peace agreement when it came up for debate in the Security Council.

Yugoslavia also asked the U.N. Security Council on Monday that the resolution call for an immediate bombing halt and for steps to keep the KLA from attacking Serbian civilians between the time of the Yugoslav army pullout and the arrival of NATO forces.

Although seemingly trivial at first glance, the question of the timing and sequence of the last steps leading to an end of the conflict has become a highly sensitive--and tangled--issue in what could be the final phase of negotiations.

Going into Monday’s talks, the demands of NATO, Russia and Belgrade threatened to lead the search for peace into a vicious circle. They had also effectively stalled meetings on the Kosovo-Macedonian frontier between Serbian and NATO military officials aimed at working out the mechanics of the Serbian withdrawal.

The United States, with little trust for Milosevic’s word, has insisted that NATO aircraft will continue to bomb targets in Yugoslavia until there is verifiable evidence of a troop withdrawal. Milosevic has said that a Security Council resolution is needed before NATO commanders have the authority to discuss key elements of the withdrawal, while Russia insists that nothing should happen until alliance airstrikes end.

As negotiations broke up late Monday, the ministers seemed headed in the direction of compromise offered by French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine that calls for a rapid, yet carefully choreographed, sequence of steps that could take place in a matter of hours or a few days at the most.

According to NATO officials, if all works well, a six-step process could unfold within a 48-hour period according to the following sequence: agreement in Germany on a draft Security Council resolution; successful completion of technical military talks between Yugoslav and NATO officers in Macedonia; the start of a Serbian withdrawal; suspension of NATO bombing; passage of the Security Council resolution; deployment of the NATO-led force into Kosovo.

Before returning to the talks today, Albright is scheduled to tackle another problem related to the settlement: restraining the Kosovo Albanian resistance from attacking retreating Serbian forces. She will meet briefly in Cologne with three Kosovo Albanian leaders--Ibrahim Rugova, Hashim Thaci and Rexhep Qosja.

In other developments Monday:

* In Bydgoszcz, Poland, Pope John Paul II expressed concern about the apparently deteriorating prospects for peace in Kosovo. “We are hearing news which is not good news. The pope is continuing to pray for a solution to be found to this conflict, because there is still suffering in Kosovo,” said Joaquin Navarro-Valls, the Vatican spokesman. “The pope hopes for a rapid solution to this impasse. He is concerned,” he told journalists covering the pontiff’s 13-day trip to his homeland.

* Zoran Djindjic, president of the Democratic Party, the largest opposition party in Serbia fully committed to democracy, warned that unless the peace agreement includes effective guarantees for Serbs living in Kosovo, it could trigger a new exodus of refugees from the province. “It’s clear to everybody that the part of the agreement about disarming the KLA cannot be fulfilled completely,” Djindjic said in a letter sent to Russian envoy Chernomyrdin, U.S. envoy Strobe Talbott and Finnish President Ahtisaari.

* NATO said in a statement that allied attacks on Yugoslavia were “accelerating toward their prior intensity.” The official Tanjug news agency reported that about 70 NATO missiles hit targets Monday evening around Kosovo. Reuters news agency reported airstrikes on Belgrade this morning.

*

Times staff writers Richard Boudreaux in Belgrade, John-Thor Dahlburg in Brussels, Norman Kempster and James Gerstenzang in Washington, Carol J. Williams in Bydgoszcz, Maura Reynolds in Moscow and David Holley in Podgorica, Yugoslavia, contributed to this report.