Milosevic, Envoys Start Talks on Peace Plan

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia — In a potentially decisive moment in the battle over Kosovo, Russian and Western envoys on Wednesday handed Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic a modified peace plan that would halt NATO’s air assault on his nation and deploy alliance-led and Russian peacekeeping forces in the province once he begins pulling out his troops.

The two envoys, Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari and former Russian Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, flew here from Bonn after refining the proposal in two days of discussions with Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott.

After 2 1/2 hours of inconclusive talks with the two envoys at his presidential palace, Milosevic agreed to meet them again today while the Serbian parliament debates the peace offer.

Senior U.S. and NATO officials said the plan was nonnegotiable. They said Ahtisaari, the first official Western representative to meet with Milosevic since the bombing began March 24, was in Belgrade to clarify the proposal and persuade the Yugoslav leader to accept it.

Chernomyrdin said he was optimistic. “At the moment, there is a realistic chance that the war will end,” he earlier told reporters in Bonn.

Before the envoys arrived in Belgrade, aircraft of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization pounded Yugoslavia for the 71st straight day, flying 575 sorties that included 267 bombing runs. NATO planes struck military targets across Kosovo--a separatist province of Serbia, the dominant republic in Yugoslavia--and hit power lines, fuel depots and television relay stations in and around Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital.

Yugoslav media reported strikes on the central Serbian towns of Jagodina and Cuprija.

An allied jet broke the sound barrier with a thundering blast that rocked Belgrade as the envoys headed here, raising the tension level in a war-weary city growing short on power, water and fuel. But relatively little bombing was heard from the capital after they arrived.

“I hope Milosevic will sign,” said Dragana Popovic, a 26-year-old graduate student here. “Only 20 days ago, people were saying, ‘Kosovo is ours,’ and such slogans. Now they don’t care. They just want the bombing to stop.”

NATO is trying to halt a bloody crackdown by Yugoslav forces against the ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo. More than 850,000 ethnic Albanians have been driven from the province in a purge by Milosevic’s army and police, who have been fighting ethnic Albanian guerrillas for the past 15 months.

Diplomatic efforts building over the past month have been complicated by the existence of two somewhat different sets of demands on Milosevic--from NATO and from the Group of 8, comprising seven industrial nations and Russia.

NATO from the start has insisted on the withdrawal of all Yugoslav troops from Kosovo, deployment of a peacekeeping force with NATO troops at its core, the safe return of all refugees to their homes and the beginning of a political process that would restore self-government to Kosovo, which exercised a degree of autonomy until 1989.

Milosevic has accepted the principles of a Kosovo settlement laid down May 6 by the Group of 8. These points largely reaffirmed the NATO conditions but, at Russia’s insistence, did not include the alliance’s demand that it lead any Kosovo peacekeeping force and that all Yugoslav forces must withdraw at least temporarily from the province.

Ahtisaari said the talks in Bonn produced “a largely common position” between Russia and the West.

Explaining that consensus, a senior U.S. official said that NATO’s original demands remain on the table and that Chernomyrdin’s role in Belgrade is to tell Milosevic that “what [Ahtisaari] is laying out about NATO’s position is right. If you want them to stop bombing, he’s telling you what you’ve got to do.”

On four previous visits to Belgrade, Chernomyrdin had backed Yugoslavia’s insistence on an immediate bombing halt. Wednesday he said Yugoslavia and NATO should first work out a document “covering withdrawal of Serbian forces and the timing of the deployment of peacekeepers” in the province.

As a verified Yugoslav troop withdrawal begins, he added, “a cease-fire would be declared” and the U.N. Security Council would vote on a resolution to put the peacekeeping force under the U.N. flag, giving it the non-NATO authority and cloak of international legitimacy that Milosevic and the Russians want. U.S. officials said they would support such a resolution.

Yevgeny I. Mashkov, a Chernomyrdin aide, said Milosevic’s assent to the plan could lead to a halt in the bombing within a week.

Belgrade’s official media gave no reaction to the plan, but Chernomyrdin said the convening of Serbia’s parliament was “a good sign.”

Milisav Pajic, a Yugoslav Foreign Ministry official, said before the envoys’ arrival that the government would have difficulty agreeing to a complete pullout of its estimated 40,000-member army and police forces from Kosovo and accepting a large peacekeeping force with an open-ended mandate.

Military officials from NATO’s 19 nations and a dozen partner countries have committed 47,900 troops to be part of the force, which would escort Kosovo refugees home and protect the province’s autonomy.

President Clinton on Wednesday raised the U.S. commitment to the force from 4,000 to 7,000 soldiers, about half of them combat troops, and added 68 U.S. aircraft to NATO’s arsenal. Officials said the U.S. contingent will include three armored battalions, one artillery battalion and an “aviation task force” with dozens of attack and transport helicopters.

Defense Secretary William S. Cohen said Clinton and top military advisors will discuss today the possible use of ground troops in the event of a land invasion of Kosovo.

Pajic, the Yugoslav official, voiced concern about the size of the proposed peacekeeping force.

“A force this size has nothing to do with the return of refugees,” Pajic said in an interview. “The aim is to occupy part of Yugoslav territory and put it under some kind of NATO protectorate.”

Unless Yugoslavia is allowed to keep a peacetime level of about 12,000 soldiers and police in Kosovo, he added, separatist guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army will “fill the vacuum” and reclaim territory from which they have been driven. Yugoslavia does not trust NATO to disarm the guerrillas, he said.

Aiming to overcome that objection, Chernomyrdin arrived with a proposal to include 10,000 Russian troops in the peacekeeping force and to put them under an independent Russian command. Such is the arrangement that helped bring peace to Bosnia-Herzegovina, where Russian forces not answerable to NATO have been on duty alongside the Western alliance since late 1995.

But as soon as Chernomyrdin announced the proposal in Bonn on Tuesday, Western officials raised objections.

British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said two peacekeeping forces under separate command would be unacceptable because that could lead to the partition of Kosovo, with a Russian-policed Serbian sector in the north and a NATO-policed ethnic Albanian sector in the south--a split that could kindle separatist passions throughout the Balkans.

“We are not going to do anything which could increase the chances of some sort of partition, whether virtual or real,” NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said in Brussels.

U.S. and NATO officials insisted that the peacekeeping force should have a unified NATO command structure. Whether Russia joins it or deploys its own separate force, they said, is an issue they will settle with Moscow--not with Milosevic.

Nonetheless, State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said: “The areas of agreement [between Russia and the West] are sufficiently large, broad and deep. The open question [is] the ball being in Milosevic’s court, whether he will take this opportunity.”

In other developments Wednesday:

* The International Court of Justice in The Hague rejected Yugoslavia’s request to halt the NATO assault but expressed concern about the legal basis for the airstrikes. Judges at the U.N. tribunal declined to impose an interim ruling to halt the air campaign, saying Yugoslavia’s complaints against eight NATO members involved did not fall under the Genocide Convention. The court threw out Yugoslav complaints against the other two NATO members, the United States and Spain, on a legal technicality.

* A cargo plane from the former Soviet republic of Moldova dropped leaflets into Kosovo for the International Rescue Committee, a New York-based relief group, alerting refugees driven from their homes in the province of plans to airdrop food aid beginning today. Crew members of the plane reported explosions, which they judged to be Yugoslav antiaircraft fire, going off at lower altitudes but decided they were not endangered. Officials of the relief agency said they would go ahead with today’s deliveries.

* Macedonia has agreed to take in as many as 30,000 NATO troops in preparation for deployment as a peacekeeping force in Kosovo, Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski said in Washington. Macedonia already has 16,000 NATO troops on its territory as a nucleus for the Kosovo force and has been working closely with the Western alliance in giving shelter to about 250,000 ethnic Albanian refugees from Kosovo.

Times staff writers Tyler Marshall, Paul Richter, James Gerstenzang and Melissa Healy in Washington and Richard C. Paddock in Moscow contributed to this report.

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* KOSOVO ASSESSMENT

U.N. team that visited Kosovo says it found evidence of ‘well-planned violence’ there. A11