NATO Lines Up Bombers as Envoy Shoots for Peaceful Solution in Kosovo

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia —  As NATO geared up Sunday for threatened airstrikes on Yugoslavia, U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke sought to use the military preparations as leverage to reach a deal on the Kosovo crisis.

“We spent about 11 hours with [Yugoslav] President [Slobodan] Milosevic today, and the rest of the time in conversations with our colleagues in Washington,” a clearly exhausted Holbrooke told reporters shortly before dawn today after a marathon overnight work session.

“Today’s talks with President Milosevic and his colleagues were intense, indeed at times very heated,” he said.

“We remain committed to, we remain determined to find a--let me rephrase that, because it didn’t come out quite right--I can only say that we remain on an intense effort to find a peaceful and satisfactory outcome to what can only be called an emergency,” Holbrooke added, “while in another part of Europe, Brussels, NATO continues to move toward a very different form of outcome.

“We will see how things come out in the not-too-distant future.”

If NATO gives an “activation order”--equivalent to cocking the trigger of a gun--at a scheduled meeting in Brussels today, control of the alliance’s military power will go to U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark, the supreme allied commander in Europe. One more set of political approvals would be needed for the alliance to, in effect, pull the trigger.

Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, President Clinton’s national security advisor, said Sunday that NATO attacks could be launched as early as today.

According to U.S. officials, Milosevic still has not removed all the troops and paramilitary police sent to Kosovo to crush a separatist guerrilla movement in the southern Serbian province. That failure could be the key justification for airstrikes, if they come.

But talks Sunday appeared to be dealing not just with that question but also with longer-term issues seen as vital to any genuine solution.

These issues are the shape that an interim political settlement between ethnic Albanians in Kosovo and Milosevic would take, and the question of allowing an international military force to police any such agreement.

Holbrooke said his telephone conversations with officials in Washington early today included a nearly three-hour conference call chaired by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and joined by Berger. Their talks covered “the enormous range of issues and questions that lie before us in the next few hours and days.”

Talks with Milosevic would resume at 10 a.m. today, he added.

Early Sunday, after the conclusion of the previous day’s talks with Milosevic, Holbrooke stressed that compliance with U.N. demands must be “fully verifiable” and that there must be “a verifiable compliance regime.” While not publicly defined, these terms are generally seen as references to setting up an international military force in Kosovo.

Holbrooke appeared to be using the threat of action by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to obtain maximum progress on these two issues, whose settlement the United States considers vital to the effort to bring peace to Kosovo.

Holbrooke came here with a six-point ultimatum issued Thursday by the United States and its key allies.

Milosevic has claimed for several days that he already is in compliance with those demands, but that is an interpretation the United States rejects.

The ultimatum demands that Milosevic end offensive military operations in Kosovo; withdraw forces that were sent into the province in March to put down ethnic Albanian separatists; allow international humanitarian organizations to operate freely; cooperate with the international war crimes tribunal; facilitate the return of people displaced from their homes; and start negotiations with the ethnic Albanian community on autonomy for the province.

While face-to-face talks on autonomy have not yet begun, indirect negotiations are quite advanced.

U.S. Ambassador to Macedonia Christopher Hill, who has headed shuttle diplomacy for the negotiations on self-rule in Kosovo, presented a revised U.S. proposal this weekend to both Serbian President Milan Milutinovic and ethnic Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova.

Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Vojislav Seselj said Sunday that the key points of difficulty in the Holbrooke-Milosevic talks were questions of the deployment of NATO troops in Kosovo and demands that an interim political agreement exclude Kosovo from “the legal-political system of Serbia.”

But newspapers in Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital, carried upbeat articles Sunday indicating that an agreement might be in sight. “Sobering Up” was a headline in Politika Ekspres, while Dnevni Telegraf ran an article headlined “NATO Threat Removed?”

Despite such rays of optimism in some Serbian quarters, NATO officials are scheduled to meet today to further ratchet up the pressure by considering approval of an activation order.

“I believe that we will see in a day or two [NATO] consensus manifesting itself . . . with an action order giving authority . . . to prepare to launch those strikes,” U.S. Defense Secretary William S. Cohen told a Sunday news conference in Qatar.

Meanwhile, six U.S. B-52 bombers landed in Britain on Sunday. Cohen said they would be part of an overall NATO force of “420 to 430 aircraft” available for an attack.

A contingent of A-10 Thunderbolt fighter jets flew from Germany to Italy on Sunday, into better position for a possible attack.

If NATO did decide to strike, “there would be a very substantial air campaign that would be capable of inflicting severe damage,” Cohen said.

British Defense Secretary George Robertson said Sunday that NATO threats were intended to make Milosevic yield ground.

“If I were Milosevic and I was looking at the B-52 bombers prepositioning themselves along with all the other air forces, then I would be very worried and I would be talking unlimitedly with Mr. Holbrooke to get a solution to this,” Robertson said. “The pictures of the B-52 bombers will be a very visible piece of evidence to him that we mean business and we have determination.”

NATO officials at today’s meeting to consider authorizing strikes will need final official approval from Rome, Bonn and Lisbon. Other members of the 16-nation alliance have already agreed to approve this second-to-last stage in the ordering of airstrikes.

Outgoing German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his successor, Gerhard Schroeder, were to meet today to discuss giving Germany’s approval for NATO action.

In Moscow on Sunday, Russian Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov warned in a television interview that NATO action would be a “violation of the legal basis on which [world] peace rests.”

“It is very dangerous, as we can enter a period of international chaos,” Ivanov said. “States will solve border contradictions with force. . . . The consequences for everybody can be very difficult.”

Also Sunday, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz), a member of the Senate Armed Forces Committee, warned that the United States could lose some of its pilots and planes in a NATO strike.

“I think there’s every possibility we may lose some planes and some pilots,” said McCain, a former Navy pilot who was shot down during the Vietnam War. “There will be significant jeopardy there because the Serbians have a very good defense system. They’ve had the chance now to disperse it and tweak it.”

McCain said that while he backed U.S. efforts to resolve the Kosovo crisis, the Clinton administration risks being “suckered into another garrison-type, unending commitment.”

“I don’t think they have clearly articulated their objectives,” he said. “I think they have a short-term plan to mount a bombing campaign, first cruise missiles and then some manned airstrikes.”