Talks Near Collapse as Serbs Balk at Peace Deal

PARIS —  Talks on Yugoslavia’s disputed, violence-racked region of Kosovo teetered on the edge of breakdown Thursday as the ethnic Albanians formally signed a peace agreement but their battlefield enemies, the Serbs, stayed away.

With squadrons of NATO warplanes and batteries of cruise missiles on 48-hour alert, the Clinton administration warned that the Western alliance will start striking Serbian targets, perhaps as early as next week, if Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic does not change his mind and accept the deal. No firm deadline was set immediately.

“NATO stands ready to take whatever measures are necessary,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said in Washington before a closed-door briefing for Senate members.

“If the Serbs don’t reverse course, the Serbs alone will be responsible for the consequences,” she said.

In the troubled Balkan province, as many as 30,000 ethnic Albanians have fled their villages during the past week as fighting between Serbian security forces and Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas escalated, aid agencies say.

With Yugoslav army troops pushing farther into the heart of KLA territory, refugees are running out of homes not already destroyed in Kosovo’s year of bloodletting. On Thursday, the ranking Yugoslav commander in the province vowed to step up operations against armed separatists if the North Atlantic Treaty Organization does attack.

“Settling scores with the terrorists still in Kosovo doesn’t pose any problem, and that’s what we’ll do if our country is attacked from the air or the ground,” Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic was quoted as saying by the independent Beta news agency.

In the French capital, at a table draped with a crimson cloth, four leading members of the 15-strong ethnic Albanian delegation--Hashim Thaci, Ibrahim Rugova, Veton Surroi and Rexhep Qosja--put their signatures to bound copies of the 82-page agreement designed to end the violence in which more than 2,000 people have died and about 300,000 driven from their homes.

“Today a new chapter has been opened in the history of Kosova,” the delegates said in a printed statement, using the Albanian spelling for the province.

The U.S.-backed plan would establish broad self-government and police powers for Kosovo, a Serbian province where 90% of the people are ethnic Albanians.

However, despite the smiles, handshakes and embraces in Paris, the ceremony that lasted less than five minutes meant little because the other party, the Serbs, boycotted it. The Serbs announced that they had presented their own rival text for a political agreement.

Albright, in Washington, accused the Serbs of having “gone backwards.” In an initial 17-day series of negotiations on Kosovo, held in February at Rambouillet outside Paris, the Serbs had agreed to the bulk of the power-sharing plan, under which Kosovo would remain an integral part of Yugoslavia for at least the next three years.

But when the talks resumed Monday in Paris, the Serbs presented 20 pages of proposed changes.

“The situation is [now] as clear as it could be,” Albright said. “The Albanians have said yes to the accords, and the Serbs are saying no.”

The ethnic Albanians’ signatures, she stressed, clear the way for NATO airstrikes.

The U.S. on Thursday “strongly” urged Americans to leave Yugoslavia.

According to Western diplomats, the plan now is to adjourn the Paris meeting, perhaps until Tuesday or Wednesday. That would allow Yugoslav officials to ponder the damage that could be wrought by waves of Western warplanes and volleys of cruise missiles. Then the Serbs would be asked to return and give their final answer.

Today, the French and British foreign ministers, official co-chairmen of the Paris negotiations, were scheduled to meet a final time with the delegations and announce whether the talks should be suspended, said Anne Gazeau-Secret, French Foreign Ministry spokeswoman. Beforehand, Gazeau-Secret said, the other talks sponsors--the United States, Russia, Italy and Germany--will be consulted.

Though allied diplomats and an unarmed international observer mission in Yugoslavia would have to be evacuated first, the bombs could start falling on Serbia “relatively quickly,” Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said.

He said NATO members now have 350 to 400 aircraft, a little more than half of them American, on standby for air duty over Yugoslavia. Six warships equipped with cruise missiles are also off the coast.

U.S. military leaders said an air operation would be hazardous because Yugoslav air defenses are substantially more potent than the antiaircraft weapons that NATO pilots faced in neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995.

In January, NATO members agreed to authorize Secretary-General Javier Solana to order bombing if Milosevic’s government blocked peace accords.

“If an agreement is concluded, we are ready to deploy enough troops on the ground to guarantee its application,” Solana said Thursday during a visit to Turkey. “If there is no agreement, we are ready to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe arising from an attack by Serb forces in Kosovo.”

Although Albright said NATO action is virtually automatic if Milosevic fails to come around, some of the senators expressed strong doubts about U.S. military action.

“Significant reservations were expressed, but no conclusions were reached,” Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) said as he left the briefing by Albright, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and National Security Advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger.

Senate leaders asked to meet with President Clinton, perhaps as early as today. In the wake of the Senate briefing by administration officials, “the whole climate changed,” said Lott spokesman John Czwartacki. Before, the Senate had expected to vote on a resolution that would have expressed qualified support for military action. Now, that resolution has been pulled from the floor amid concerns about the information provided in the briefing.

Though willing to talk about a new divvying-up of governmental power in the province, Milosevic and his subordinates have flatly opposed the second clause of the proposed accord--allowing in 28,000 troops from NATO nations, including 4,000 Americans, to make sure that the deal is respected.

In Belgrade, the spokesman for Milosevic’s Socialist Party of Serbia on Thursday vowed that the Serbs “will not give in to blackmail and pressure.”

Vojislav Seselj, Serbia’s ultranationalist deputy premier, called on Yugoslavia to not cooperate with Western peacekeepers but instead prepare to defend itself.

In what could be a sign of the differences over Kosovo yet to come, the Russian mediator at the Paris talks, Boris G. Mayorsky, did not sign the treaty documents Thursday along with the ethnic Albanians. On Wednesday, the Russian had downplayed the merits of a deal supported by only one party.

On Thursday, Russian Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov called on the Serbs to approve the political text. But the Russians, at odds with the United States and other Western countries, have refused to countenance the use of NATO force.

Dahlburg reported from Paris and Kempster from Washington. Times staff writer Paul Watson in Dubrava, Yugoslavia, contributed to this report.