U.S. Rejects Yugoslavia Concession on Troops

The Yugoslav government indicated Friday that it no longer objects to a key NATO demand that alliance troops form the core of an international peacekeeping force in Kosovo.

But a senior Yugoslav official said the makeup, size and mandate of such a force for maintaining peace in the war-torn province was an issue that should be worked out between the Balkan nation and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

The latest retreat in Yugoslavia’s negotiating position came Wednesday when Russian peace envoy Viktor S. Chernomyrdin met here with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, but it was not fully articulated until Yugoslav Deputy Foreign Minister Nebojsa Vujovic briefed reporters Friday.

The Clinton administration immediately dismissed the overture as too little to warrant a pause in the air war.

State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said Washington will accept nothing less than an agreement to meet all of NATO’s conditions for ending the bombing: withdrawal of all Yugoslav forces from Kosovo, an end to ethnic violence in the province, broad autonomy for Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians, as well as a return of refugees to Kosovo under the protection of a peacekeeping force with North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops at its core.

“We’re not interested in negotiations, and we’re only interested in seeing whether, through this channel of Chernomyrdin . . . Milosevic can accept these points,” Rubin said. “There’s no middle ground here; either he accepts [all] the points or he doesn’t.”

Russia and the world’s top seven industrial nations--the Group of 8--are working to bridge their own differences and develop a detailed Kosovo peace plan to be submitted to the U.N. Security Council.

In Wednesday’s seven-hour meeting, Milosevic won Chernomyrdin’s endorsement for a Yugoslav voice in this process. The two men also repeated their insistence on a bombing halt before talks proceed.

“Yugoslavia should be seated at the negotiating table, and it is not there,” Chernomyrdin said after the meeting.

Chernomyrdin, who on Friday ended two days of talks in Moscow with U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, is scheduled to return here Monday for further meetings with Milosevic before rejoining Talbott in Moscow.

Ahtisaari, the European Union’s special envoy, said Friday that the negotiations “just keep getting better.” But Rubin said the Moscow talks had made only limited progress toward the U.S. goal of getting Russia to accept the U.S.-NATO approach for ending the Kosovo crisis.

“We have not achieved major movement forward,” Rubin said. “I think this is a very slow process.”

Having survived more than eight weeks of NATO bombing with his political power intact, Milosevic now believes that the alliance is losing public support for the air assaults and a possible land invasion, Vujovic and others close to the Yugoslav president say. Milosevic has hinted his willingness to make a deal by announcing a partial withdrawal of troops from Kosovo that NATO has dismissed as insufficient.

Politicians and analysts here in the Yugoslav capital say Milosevic is trying to show that he would accept almost any peace that keeps Kosovo within the Yugoslav federation and him in power.

With a place at the negotiating table, they said, Milosevic would be able to avoid the humiliation of an imposed settlement and portray any peace deal to his people and his army as the outcome of bargaining in which he fought to preserve national interests.

The United States and other Western nations insist that only a heavily armed peacekeeping force with NATO troops at its core can guarantee a safe return for hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanian refugees expelled from Kosovo by Serbian forces.

Yugoslavia has retreated on negotiating positions before. After the alliance air campaign began, Milosevic insisted that peacekeepers could not come from NATO countries and could not be armed. But he has since backtracked. Late last month, he said peacekeepers could carry light weapons for self-defense.

After the Group of 8 agreed two weeks ago that any peacekeeping force should first seek a U.N. mandate, Goran Matic, a minister without portfolio in Milosevic’s government, said Yugoslavia might accept soldiers from some of the nine NATO countries that are not taking part in the bombing campaign in such a force.

On Friday, Vujovic said Yugoslavia’s place at the bargaining table is more important than the makeup of whatever peacekeeping force emerges.

Asked twice at the briefing whether Milosevic would still reject a peacekeeping role by the countries he calls “aggressors”--those involved in the bombing campaign--Vujovic avoided giving a direct answer.

“Who would participate in a [peacekeeping] mission would depend on a direct dialogue between the U.N. secretary-general and Yugoslavia,” he said. “This dialogue would take Yugoslavia’s views into account. Our role would be reaffirmed, the role of the U.N. would be affirmed.

“So read my lips. It’s not about NATO. It’s about the U.N.”

Meanwhile, the NATO air campaign continued late Thursday and early Friday, though persistent low clouds hampered the alliance’s plans for renewed attacks on Yugoslav troops and police in Kosovo. NATO aircraft did manage to fly 57 strike sorties, alliance officials said.

Bombing runs on fuel depots lighted the Belgrade skyline and a town near the Hungarian border with the orange glare of burning petroleum. Yugoslavia’s state-run Tanjug news agency said one person was killed and several others injured when fuel storage tanks were hit in Sombor, a mostly ethnic Hungarian town 12 miles from the border.

Belgrade and nine other cities were dark early today, as NATO jets dropped carbon-filament bombs that short-circuited electrical transmission lines, Yugoslav media reported.

In Brussels, Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark, NATO’s supreme commander in Europe, met the ambassadors of NATO’s 19 members Friday at alliance headquarters at his own request to discuss the progress of the air war. The meeting came as some countries gave clear indications of frustration or dissatisfaction.

German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer called Friday for an urgent review of targeting procedures a day after NATO missiles damaged the Swiss ambassador’s residence here. Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema asked Thursday for a pause in NATO bombing operations once a draft peace plan approved by the Security Council is ready.

NATO spokesman Jamie Shea in Brussels maintained that alliance unity was still “rock solid.”

The U.S. ambassador to Switzerland, Madeleine Kunin, apologized to the Swiss government Friday for the damage to the ambassador’s residence. Switzerland has represented U.S. interests in Yugoslavia since Washington and Belgrade broke off relations in March.

Swedish Ambassador Mats Staffansson, whose own house sustained damage in an airstrike Wednesday, said he dived under a table to avoid flying glass, as did other guests, including the ambassadors from Slovakia and the Vatican.

“At quarter past eight, we had just come to dessert when a crash came,” Staffansson told a Stockholm newspaper. “Four cruise missiles came down on a fuel depot only 300 yards from the Swiss residence. An enormous pressure wave broke a very large window in the dining room.”

In other developments:

* In Bonn, diplomats from the Group of 8 on Friday continued their attempts to draft the U.N. resolution for ending the war, but sources at the U.S. Embassy said little progress was expected.

* In Montenegro, the smaller republic that together with Serbia makes up Yugoslavia, about 2,000 people staged an anti-army protest Friday in Cetinje, the traditional Montenegrin capital and a stronghold of anti-Milosevic sentiment. Demonstrators criticized the army for flooding Cetinje in recent days with more than 1,000 soldiers and for positioning artillery units around the ancient town. The demonstration came amid a sharp conflict between the pro-Western Montenegrin government, which has tried to keep the republic out of Milosevic’s fight with NATO, and the Yugoslav army, which has more than 20,000 soldiers stationed in Montenegro.

* About 2,700 refugees crossed from Kosovo into neighboring Macedonia on Thursday, the highest number in several weeks, the United Nations refugee agency said. The refugees reported that areas around Pristina, Kosovo’s provincial capital, had been “cleaned out” in recent days. Some said ethnic Albanian men had to pay Yugoslav troops and paramilitary forces to escape.

* German public support for NATO’s air campaign fell this month, and only a small majority still approve, according to a poll published Friday. The monthly ZDF Politbarometer survey found that 52% of 2,027 Germans polled support the NATO airstrikes, down from 60% in a similar poll in April.

* Greece, which has long-standing problems with fellow NATO member Turkey and is the alliance’s least enthusiastic member concerning the attacks on Yugoslavia, said Friday that it has denied permission for Turkish fighter jets bound for Germany and those being used in the NATO operation to pass through its airspace. “We will not allow our airspace to be used for such operations,” government spokesman Dimitris Reppas told reporters.

*

Times staff writers John-Thor Dahlburg in Brussels, Richard C. Paddock in Moscow, Norman Kempster in Washington and David Holley in Podgorica, Montenegro, contributed to this report.