Serbs Close In on Key Site in Kosovo as Talks Deadlock

With peace talks deadlocked, Yugoslav troops closed in on a strategic mountain ridge in Kosovo on Wednesday, leaving hopes fading for a solution to the war in the Serbian province.

Serbian negotiators in Paris are refusing to discuss deployment of 28,000 NATO soldiers to enforce any deal and demanded about 20 changes to a draft political accord giving ethnic Albanians in the province more autonomy, foreign mediators said.

Ethnic Albanians are set to sign the deal. But British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook and his French counterpart, Hubert Vedrine, are expected to decide as early as today whether to suspend the talks and issue another ultimatum to Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has threatened to bomb Yugoslav military targets if Milosevic blocks a peace deal for Kosovo, a southern province of Serbia where ethnic Albanians outnumber Serbs 9 to 1. Serbia is one of two republics that make up Yugoslavia.

Yugoslav troops appeared close to seizing the strategic Cicavica mountains, which would give them control of the high ground between two key rebel strongholds.

Reuters news agency quoted an international monitor as saying the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army lost a regional headquarters in the area, near an important highway running north from the provincial capital, Pristina, and an adjacent railroad.

NATO’s military commander, U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark, told a congressional committee in Washington on Wednesday that Serbian forces are prepared to resume fighting on a “very large scale” if there is no deal.

Although NATO’s 19 members are trying to present a united front, some European governments fear that Washington is too eager to use force and that Serbs could kill ethnic Albanians in revenge, making a negotiated settlement even more remote.

The pressure to get Milosevic to compromise is so intense that the European Union appeared to pull its punches in its summary of an investigation into the Jan. 15 killing of at least 45 ethnic Albanians in the village of Racak.

After calling the killings “a crime against humanity,” Finnish pathologist Helena Ranta quickly added that the remark was true of everything that has happened in the Kosovo war.

Ranta, who led a Finnish team that examined 40 of the bodies, concluded: “There were no indications of the people being other than unarmed civilians.”

A total of 22 male corpses discovered in a gully “were most likely shot where found,” Ranta’s team reported. But she refused to call the killings a massacre, as U.S. diplomat William Walker had done after seeing the corpses the day after the slayings. Walker heads a team of foreign cease-fire monitors in Kosovo.

The Finns’ more diplomatic approach can be criticized, Ranta acknowledged. But pressing too hard “probably would have ended up in tragedy,” she added, apparently referring to the possibility of retaliatory killings by Serbs.

“The only thing I hope is that the policy we have chosen would, at the very end, help people here to solve their problems in a peaceful way,” Ranta said.

In her hourlong news conference, Ranta deflected several questions to German and Finnish diplomats.

Wilfried Gruber, who represented Germany, which currently chairs the European Union presidency, denied that his government ordered Ranta not to reveal “inflammatory details” to avoid angering the Serbs.

Ranta refused to discuss whether any of the victims were shot at close range, as Walker had insisted they were, or how many corpses suffered only head wounds.

Ranta also refused to confirm a report that her team concluded some of the victims were killed while kneeling on the ground.

The summary still angered Serbian officials. Deputy Justice Minister Zoran Balinovac said the report was a political document and “a series of unclear guesses and untruths.”