NATO Gives Serbs A Final Warning
Allied Forces Prepare to Strike As Peace Talks Appear to Fail
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By Craig R. Whitney New York Times Service
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PARIS - As Serbian forces continued to pour troops and tanks into Kosovo, European and American intermediaries in peace talks here prepared to shut down the negotiations without any agreement, probably on Thursday.
U.S. officials in Washington and French Foreign Ministry officials in Paris warned that the NATO allies were ready to carry out their threat to begin a vast bombing campaign against Serbian military targets in Kosovo and beyond unless President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia accepted an accord.
General Wesley Clark, the alliance's supreme commander, testified before the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday that Serbian forces were ''prepared to resume the conflict on a very large scale should these peace talks fail to result in an agreement or should they conclude that for some reason NATO wasn't serious in its expressed intent.''
Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine of France, co-chairing the peace talks with Foreign Secretary Robin Cook of Britain, said Tuesday that NATO's decision to use force if the Serbs were the main obstacle to peace remained in effect. French diplomats added that France and the United States stood firmly with the rest of the allies in their determination to carry out the threat.
Before the talks break off, the ethnic Albanian rebels who have been fighting for the last year for independence for the province will sign the draft agreement that was worked out at Rambouillet outside Paris last month, according to mediators and representatives of the Albanian delegation.
''One signature, unfortunately, doesn't make an agreement,'' said the Russian mediator, Boris Mayorsky.
The draft provides for autonomy under Serbian sovereignty for a three-year transition period, and 28,000 peacekeepers under command of the NATO alliance to enforce its terms.
But mediators said Wednesday that Serbian negotiators were refusing even to discuss terms of how to put the agreement into effect.
''Based on talks the last few days with the Yugoslav side, we are not anticipating any further progress,'' said Christopher Hill, the American mediator.
Mr. Vedrine and Mr. Cook would confer with the mediators on Thursday afternoon about ending the talks, officials said, and could decide to make one more trip to Belgrade to try to get Mr. Milosevic to change his mind and accept the agreement as have the representatives of the ethnic Albanians, who make up 90 percent of the province's 2 million people.
But diplomats said that it might take the bombing that NATO has been threatening since last fall to get the Serbian side to change its position.
An adviser to the Albanian delegation said that most of them were eager to get back to Kosovo as soon as possible, in view of reports that Mr. Milosevic has moved 30,000 to 40,000 troops into or close to Kosovo, defying an agreement he had made in October to pull out most of his military and police forces.
James Rubin, the spokesman for Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, arrived in Paris on Wednesday and said that she had invited the Kosovo Albanian leaders to Washington after they sign the agreement and the talks end.
Mrs. Albright got the Albanian delegation to accept the accord in principle when the first phase of negotiations in Rambouillet ended Feb. 23, but they asked for time to consult with local military commanders in Kosovo before actually agreeing to sign.
''The Serbs continue to have problems with the political part of the agreement and are not prepared to discuss issues of implementation,'' said Wolfgang Petritsch, the European Union mediator in the talks, at the end of the third day of the talks Wednesday.
The United States, Britain, France, Germany and Italy, co-sponsors of the talks with Russia, say that the NATO peacekeeping force is an indispensable part of the 81-page draft accord.
If the Serbs remain opposed, or intensify the fighting significantly in coming days, the allies would probably not be ready to take action for at least a week, according to officials in Brussels.
The 400 American and British warplanes would not begin striking until after diplomats had been evacuated from Belgrade, the capital of Serbia and what remains of Yugoslavia, and 2,000 civilian cease-fire observers had left Kosovo, officials said.
After that, probably next week, NATO's secretary-general, Javier Solana Madariaga, could order a blitz against selected Serbian military targets by American cruise missiles launched from ships off the Balkan coast in the Adriatic. Depending on Mr. Milosevic's response to those strikes, Mr. Solana could then order a phased bombing campaign to destroy most of Serbia's ability to shoot down allied warplanes with ground-to-air artillery and rockets.
Allied diplomats hope that the threat of further destruction would be enough to get Mr. Milosevic to accept the accord. About 26,000 peacekeepers would deploy throughout the province to oversee the disbanding of the Kosovo Liberation Army, make sure that Serbian police and military forces now attacking civilian areas withdraw to selected areas and, within a year, leave the province altogether, and provide security while the Albanians take responsibility for their own affairs.
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