As Talks Restart, Kosovo Rebels OK Peace Pact

Last-chance talks on ending the conflict in Serbia’s Kosovo province began Monday with ethnic Albanians offering written support for a proposed peace deal, placing their foes with “their backs against the wall,” as French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine put it.

The ethnic Albanians’ assent, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook agreed, means “we have now taken away from the Serb delegation their first line of defense” for not signing the internationally mandated agreement. If the Serbs do not sign, they face NATO airstrikes.

French and British ministers are serving as co-chairmen of the negotiations between the Balkan adversaries, which resumed at the same conference center near the Arc de Triomphe where the United States and North Vietnam negotiated and signed a peace treaty in 1973.

The goal of the Clinton administration and five European powers is to bring to an end ethnic violence that for the past year has rocked Kosovo, a mostly ethnic Albanian region of Yugoslavia’s dominant republic, Serbia.

More than 2,000 people have lost their lives, and in excess of 300,000 residents have been driven from their homes.

As peace talks were getting underway, some of the heaviest fighting in days raged along two fronts in northern Kosovo. The worst clashes were about 10 miles northwest of the provincial capital, Pristina, near the town of Vucitrn, where Yugoslav army troops have been pressing a two-pronged assault for days.

An earlier round of negotiations, at a castle in the town of Rambouillet outside Paris, broke up after 17 grueling days Feb. 23 without agreement on the power-sharing plan drawn up by the Americans and Europeans. The ethnic Albanians asked for two weeks to canvass politicians, military leaders and ordinary people back home.

The proposed 82-page settlement would vastly increase the ethnic Albanians’ ability to govern themselves for the next three years but would keep their region, which is slightly smaller than Connecticut, as an integral part of Serbia during that period.

To make sure both sides respect their engagements, 28,000 NATO-led troops would be deployed in Kosovo.

In a letter addressed to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and released Monday as the talks began in Paris, Hashim Thaci, leader of the Kosovo Albanian delegation, said he and the rest of his delegation had decided to “say yes to the agreement.”

Vedrine, addressing a news conference with Cook, said that after receiving the letter, he specifically confirmed with Thaci that his pledge stood for the entire ethnic Albanian delegation, which includes representatives of the Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas.

KLA delegates, of whom Thaci is one, had opposed abandoning the goal of Kosovo’s independence, or allowing their fighters to be disarmed, as the peace plan would require. But Vedrine said the ethnic Albanians now agree to it as written.

“Yugoslav leaders now have their backs against the wall,” the French foreign minister said. “It is now up to them to choose. They have the possibility to get Yugoslavia out of its isolation.”

For the past five weeks, the assent of the ethnic Albanians had been assiduously sought by the United States and its European allies so that if the talks fail, sole blame can be placed on the government of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has at least 300 warplanes standing by to pound Serbian military and security forces if Yugoslav authorities reject the deal, a high-ranking official at the alliance’s Brussels headquarters said Monday.

In Washington, President Clinton pointedly urged Milosevic to follow the ethnic Albanians’ lead. If he doesn’t, Clinton implied, NATO airstrikes will almost certainly follow.

“If he [Milosevic] shows intransigence and aggression, I think from our point of view we would have little option,” Clinton said.

The Serbs, who consider Kosovo a historical part of their homeland, have stressed their willingness to reach a political compromise but flatly oppose allowing foreign forces onto Yugoslav territory to enforce it. Cook on Monday called that attitude, which has been expressed repeatedly by Milosevic himself, unacceptable.

“This is not a questionnaire,” Cook said of the peace plan. “You either say yes or no to it as a package. And that is what we are looking for.”

In Kosovo, the Yugoslav army accused ethnic Albanian guerrillas of staging attacks to draw foreign troops into the war. Serbian security forces said the rebels started the latest fighting by firing automatic rifles at the village police station in Luzane and its Yugoslav army guards late Sunday.

The village is just north of Pristina beside the strategic main road that links the province to the rest of Serbia. The guerrillas attacked again early Monday, and the army claimed its reinforcements were ambushed as they rolled in along the same road.

International monitors said a Yugoslav army officer was wounded in the arm by a bullet that pierced the rear window of a police vehicle and exited through the windshield.

Hours later, thick gray smoke still was rising from the burned-out shell of a two-story farmhouse about 200 yards from the police station.

Some of the KLA’s best-armed and best-trained guerrillas fight in the region under Commander Remi, one of the guerrilla group’s strongest opponents of the peace accord.

When foreign monitors arrived, a large convoy of Yugoslav army tanks and armored personnel carriers was moving in to clear out villages on the hills overlooking the road. Soldiers refused to let the monitors get close enough to see exactly what was happening, U.S. monitor Robert Lawson said.

Western diplomats don’t expect the negotiations in Paris to run longer than this week. No one wants a repeat of the drawn-out, inconclusive talks in Rambouillet.

If the talks fail, airstrikes could begin within 48 hours, the NATO official.

Times staff writer Paul Watson in Luzane contributed to this report.