Rebels to Sign Kosovo Deal Today, Dole Asserts

Ethnic Albanian guerrilla and political leaders have promised to sign an interim accord to stop the fighting and deploy NATO peacekeepers in Kosovo, special U.S. emissary Bob Dole announced here Saturday.

The former U.S. senator’s brief but promising foray into international diplomacy appeared to put back on track a high-stakes effort by the United States, Russia and four key European allies to settle the civil war in the violence-racked Kosovo region, where ethnic Albanians are fighting for independence from Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic.

Once the insurgents sign the accord, intense diplomatic pressure is expected to be put on Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to also sign or face airstrikes by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on Serbian military positions.

NATO warplanes, including scores of U.S. aircraft, have been poised to attack for several weeks.

Milosevic fiercely opposes the draft agreement’s plan to quickly deploy 28,000 NATO troops in Kosovo to enforce the accord and maintain peace. He also adamantly rejects the agreement’s provision to grant broad autonomy to the ethnic Albanians if they quit their year-old revolt.

The Clinton administration has committed to send 4,000 U.S. ground troops as part of the NATO contingent to Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians make up 90% of the population.

Serbian troops have brutally suppressed the rebels since the uprising began. More than 1,500 civilians have been reported killed, and hundreds of thousands have been made homeless.

Yugoslavia has deployed heavy weapons and additional troops to the province in recent weeks as fighting has intensified.

U.S. Ambassador to Macedonia Christopher Hill, the chief U.S. mediator on Kosovo, said Saturday that he will meet with rebel leaders in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, and obtain the necessary signatures.

German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer is scheduled to meet with Milosevic on Monday in Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital.

Other senior U.S. and European diplomats, including U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke, are also expected to head to Belgrade to seek Milosevic’s support before the next round of Kosovo talks begins in Paris on March 15.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright “is encouraged that things continue to move in the right direction,” State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said after she met with Dole and Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO’s commander in Europe, at her hotel here Saturday.

“We believe it’s extremely important to try to stop the conflict in Kosovo before it gets far, far worse,” Rubin added.

Albright unexpectedly flew to London overnight from the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, after wrapping up a weeklong visit to China, Thailand and Indonesia. She had been scheduled to fly home via Guam and Hawaii but changed course after Dole reported progress in his talks.

She also met separately outside London on Saturday with British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook.

Albright has invested considerable time, energy and prestige in trying to broker a peace agreement between the warring factions in Kosovo.

Aides say she miscalculated by assuming that the ethnic Albanians would willingly disarm and give up claims for immediate independence in exchange for NATO protection and three years of autonomy.

Instead, key members of the Albanian delegation balked for 18 days of tense negotiations last month in Rambouillet, France.

At the last minute, they backed down and agreed in principle to the accord. However, they also said they needed two weeks to take it home and explain it to the province’s 1.8 million ethnic Albanians.

That kept the nascent peace process from total collapse but has also kept negotiators on edge.

“This is the first time they’ve ever played in the big leagues,” Rubin said, explaining the rebels’ decision. “They’re trying to be democratic about it. It’s not as simple as just getting a thumbs up, thumbs down from a dictator.”

Dole, the 1996 Republican presidential nominee, said President Clinton asked him to help with the peace effort because of Dole’s influence with political leaders in Kosovo, which he visited in 1990. He said he was happy to volunteer.

“I’m not with the government, not employed by anybody,” he said. “I went there because I felt I had some credibility and they would listen to me. And I told them very frankly that many of their friends in the United States were disappointed that they didn’t sign the agreement in France.”

Dole originally planned to go to Pristina, but Milosevic refused to grant him a visa. Dole held his talks instead in the Alexandria Hotel in Skopje, the capital of neighboring Macedonia.

Dole said he had hoped that the Albanians would sign the 82-page peace accord Friday but that members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the rebel force that is a critical part of the Albanian delegation, were unable to cross the border from Kosovo.

He said he spoke to them by satellite phone during nearly seven hours of meetings with their compatriots.

At a news conference at the U.S. Embassy here, Dole said he was “90% positive” that the Albanian rebels and other members of the negotiating team would sign.

“They indicated to us many times that they will keep their word,” Dole said. “I think they will keep their word.”

Yet even if Kosovo’s guerrillas approve the draft peace accord today, they have made clear that they won’t drop their demand for complete independence.

“No half measures will be acceptable to the KLA, nor any solution whose goal is not independence,” the guerrillas’ overall commander, Sylejman Selimi, told supporters Saturday.

The U.S. and its five European partners in the Contact Group overseeing Balkan peace efforts have repeatedly said that Kosovo must remain part of Yugoslavia to prevent Albanian separatism from spreading to neighboring countries.

After a difficult internal debate, the KLA appears willing to gamble that 28,000 NATO peacekeepers won’t be able to block independence for Kosovo if the overwhelming majority of the province’s people still insist on it after the three-year interim agreement expires.

While foreign troops would give Milosevic the advantage of disarming the KLA for him, he doesn’t trust NATO’s guarantees that its soldiers would protect Serbian interests too.

New political turmoil in neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina, where NATO bombing forced Milosevic and his Serbian allies to make peace in 1995, makes it all the more difficult for Milosevic to compromise.

From across the political spectrum, Serbs expressed their outrage Saturday at an arbitration panel’s decision to end Serbian control of the northern Bosnian border town of Brcko.

Brcko, the most contentious problem left unresolved in the 1995 Bosnian peace accords brokered in Dayton, Ohio, is now supposed to be ruled by Bosnian Muslims, Croats and Serbs.

Zivko Radisic, the Western-backed Serb who chairs Bosnia’s three-member presidency, was the latest Serbian leader to protest the Brcko ruling Saturday as the political crisis grew worse.

“I’m putting a moratorium on all my duties until the [Bosnian Serb] national assembly does otherwise,” Radisic told reporters Saturday.

Milosevic has sent hundreds of Yugoslav soldiers into Kosovo to reinforce troops already there, and the military has been calling up reserves for several days.

Foreign peace monitors say the buildup is in reaction to NATO threats to bomb if the ethnic Albanians sign the peace deal and Milosevic doesn’t.

However, Milosevic is known for retreating at the last minute, so he could be playing a dangerous bluffing game with NATO powers.

Drogin reported from London and Watson from Vienna.