Kosovo Hit by Terrorist Blasts on Eve of New Talks

A wave of three terrorist bombs struck two northern Kosovo towns Saturday, killing six people and wounding 58 others, as negotiators headed to France for a crucial round of peace talks.

Two bombs exploded in the town of Podujevo in the southern Serbian province, one behind a police station, killing two people and wounding 28. The third bomb went off in a crowded market in Kosovska Mitrovica, killing four people, including a 13-year-old girl, and injuring 30. It was unclear if the victims were Serbs or ethnic Albanians.

Police did not report arresting any suspects, but state television blamed ethnic Albanians, who make up the majority of Kosovo’s population. They in turn accused Serbs.

Meanwhile, there was no letup in clashes between government forces and ethnic Albanian rebels in the province.

International monitors said government forces set fire to more than 25 ethnic Albanian homes in villages near the northwestern town of Vucitrn on Saturday, apparently in retaliation for the killing of two Serbian civilians in the area a week earlier.

Ethnic Albanian and Serbian negotiators are scheduled to start a second round of peace talks in Paris on Monday, and Western diplomats are pressuring them to agree to a plan by Thursday.

Mediators believe that the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army is ready to sign, but diplomats have been disappointed by the KLA before. Saturday’s bomb attacks also raised new doubts.

Hashim Thaci, who leads the ethnic Albanian negotiators, confirmed Saturday that the KLA’s high command has made a decision on whether to accept the peace plan, but he refused to comment on reports that they will sign it.

“We are going to Paris to construct peace,” Thaci, who was waiting to fly to Paris, told reporters before news of the bomb blasts broke. “We have so far not signed an accord because that [peace] has not yet been a prospect.”

Other ethnic Albanian delegates said they will agree to the deal.

“Our intention is to go and sign the agreement and talk about the implementation,” said Veton Surroi, who has close ties to the rebels. Rexhep Qosja, another delegate, said there was a “consensus” among all groups in the delegation to accept the deal.

Yet ethnic Albanian delegate Hidajet Hyseni said his signature will be contingent upon deployment of NATO troops to enforce the agreement. “We are firm that the document is acceptable only as a whole.”

If the KLA guerrillas do approve the deal, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization can focus pressure on Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

He is standing firmer than ever on the eve of the Paris talks in his refusal to allow any foreign military presence to police a Kosovo peace accord.

Diplomats are still probing for chinks in Milosevic’s armor, such as the deepening problems within Yugoslavia’s economy or Milosevic’s own fear of international war crime investigators.

However, some of Milosevic’s political enemies complain that Western strategists have underestimated the strength of Serbian passions over Kosovo and the pressures on Milosevic to defend Serbian control of it.

One of Milosevic’s leading opponents, Dragoslav Avramovic, once head of Yugoslavia’s central bank, does not like the thought of NATO troops in Kosovo much more than he does the Yugoslav president.

Like many Serbs, the pro-Western economist believes that 28,000 NATO peacekeepers would guarantee Kosovo’s break from Serbia, the dominant of Yugoslavia’s two remaining republics.

Milosevic rose to power by stirring up nationalist passions in Kosovo, which Serbs see as the cradle of their culture, even though ethnic Albanians outnumber them 9 to 1 in the province.

“The opposition in Yugoslavia says, ‘We want to get rid of Mr. Milosevic,’ and you in the West are not getting rid of him,’ ” Avramovic said in an interview. “Instead, you are taking former Serbian territory and strengthening him as well. You are after the totally wrong target. You’re inflicting on 200,000 or 250,000 Serbs in Kosovo a sense of being expelled.”

More than 2,000 people, mostly ethnic Albanians, have been killed and an estimated 300,000 displaced since Milosevic launched a crackdown a year ago against ethnic Albanians seeking independence for the province.

Milosevic repeated Friday that his delegation will go to Paris ready to sign the political elements of an 82-page agreement negotiated last month at a chateau in Rambouillet, France.

The pact would grant ethnic Albanians limited self-rule in Kosovo for three years, after which their leaders hope they can hold a referendum to win outright independence.

Yugoslav President Fears Loss of Control

Milosevic’s rejection of the deployment of armed peacekeepers is based on the conviction that foreign troops would end Serbian control over Kosovo. The KLA and Washington insist that the troops are essential to a deal.

After meeting with Milosevic on Friday, Russian Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov was unambiguous in his description of the Yugoslav leader’s position.

“Belgrade ‘decisively and finally rejects’ the possibility of a foreign military or police presence in Kosovo,” Russia’s Itar-Tass news agency reported, quoting Ivanov.

NATO has threatened to bomb Serbian military targets if the KLA signs the accord and Serbian leaders refuse. However, NATO has drawn a line so many times only to watch Milosevic cross it that the alliance’s threats don’t move many here anymore.

By one popular theory, Milosevic might actually welcome a few days of bombing to shift his people’s anger from the worsening economy to foreign attackers.

After almost seven years of sanctions, compounded by corruption and inept management, Yugoslavia’s economic ruin is one of Milosevic’s biggest weaknesses.

The sanctions are remnants of penalties imposed on Belgrade in May 1992 in reaction to Serbian atrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The sanctions that are still in effect prevent Yugoslavia from getting loans from the International Monetary Fund and other agencies. They also make it almost impossible for Yugoslavia to export goods to the U.S. and European Union.

The Yugoslav government is now so short of money that pensioners, doctors and teachers have to wait months for their checks. Belgrade can’t even afford to pay its Russian allies about $14 million a month for natural gas imports, Avramovic said.

Yugoslav Traders Are Hoarding Staples

As the black market value of the Yugoslav currency, the dinar, continues to fall, traders have been hoarding basic goods such as sugar and cooking oil to drive up prices.

Yugoslavia’s huge public debt of about $15.5 billion is bigger than the country’s $12.5-billion gross domestic product, said Tomis Popovic, a leading Belgrade economist.

Yugoslav factories have been denied fresh capital for so long that industrial production is dropping every year.

“More than 85% of equipment is just useless, which means we have no potential for exports,” Popovic said in an interview.

U.S. diplomat Christopher Hill, who has spent months trying to mediate between Kosovo’s combatants, denies that Milosevic has been offered an end to sanctions if he accepts NATO-led peacekeepers.

Yet, soon after the Rambouillet round of talks ended inconclusively last month, the governor of Yugoslavia’s central bank, Dusan Vlatkovic, said there had been talk of sanctions relief in exchange for cooperation in Kosovo.

He also warned of even more serious trouble for Yugoslavia’s economy if something is not done to remove the remaining sanctions.

“From an appropriate place, we are being assured that if we make certain concessions in the Kosovo talks, sanctions on investment might be removed,” Vlatkovic told reporters in Belgrade. “To say it openly, if that money from foreign loans that we already negotiated for doesn’t come, we will have serious problems meeting our obligations for hard currency payments and to sustain production.”

Avramovic believes that Milosevic will not risk a compromise over Kosovo because the Yugoslav leader realizes he has already made too many decisions that will be held against him by Serbian history.

As the former Yugoslav federation began breaking up in 1991, Milosevic did deals with the West that caused an exodus of Serbs after Croatia took control of the Krajina and Eastern Slavonia regions.

At the Dayton, Ohio, peace talks that ended the war in Bosnia in 1995, Milosevic gave up Serbian claims to the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, expecting that, in return, Serbs would get the border town of Brcko.

Adding one more item to Milosevic’s loss column, an international arbitration panel decided last week that Brcko will be a separate district ruled equally by Bosnian Muslims, Croats and Serbs.

“This is the argument that he used in his discussions with [U.S. envoy Richard] Holbrooke: ‘Not only have you penalized the Serbian population outside Serbia, you are penalizing it now within Serbia,’ ” Avramovic said. “He wouldn’t be using this argument if he didn’t feel very strongly about it.”

Yet Milosevic has backed down so many times before that Western diplomats have come to assume that a Milosevic “no” actually means “maybe” until threats force a “yes” at the last minute.

Foreign diplomats trying to guess what Milosevic is really thinking listen for clues from his wife, Mirjana Markovic, who heads the neo-Communist Yugoslav United Left Party.

Some here heard a door opening to compromise, if only just a crack, when Markovic spoke to her party’s university committee March 10 while Holbrooke was meeting with her husband.

The rote anti-American rhetoric she indulged in was expected, but, midway through it, Markovic sounded more cautious as she advised Serbs to defend their interests without opening the way to their extermination.

To optimists, that sounded as if Markovic was preparing Serbs for another compromise if NATO’s bombing threat becomes an imminent danger.

“We are an old and small people,” she said. “Long historical developments enabled us to learn a lesson from our own life, and the lives of others. And a number taught us that small people have to be wise. Only the big can afford to be stupid.”