[kcc-news] Serbs Relent and Return Bodies of 40 Slain Albanian Villagers

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NYTimes: Trickiest Divides Are Among Big Powers at Kosova Talks
Pentagon Sees Risk in Going Into Kosova
Serbs Relent and Return Bodies of 40 Slain Albanian Villagers
Thousands Remember Kosova Victims
With Eye on Kosova Talks, NATO Plans
Moving Beyond History's Shadows
W.Post: For the Record
Heavyweights head for talks


----------

NYTimes
February 11, 1999

Trickiest Divides Are Among Big Powers at Kosova Talks

By JANE PERLEZ


RAMBOUILLET, France -- So far, the arguments in the early days of the
Kosovo peace conference have not been among the Serbian and ethnic Albanian
delegates, who are being kept busy by the negotiators on subjects like a
new constitution and elections.

The more tricky divisions have been among the hosts -- the United States,
four European nations and Russia -- as they have tried to resolve their
differences on vital issues like disarming the two sides and deploying a
peacekeeping mission in the event of a settlement.

One of the most important documents of the conference, a paper known as the
military annex, was sent to NATO Wednesday night, officials said, after
last-minute debates on how the United Nations should bless it and how
quickly the two sides in the conflict should be expected to demobilize.

The military aspect is critical because in the end the outcome of the peace
effort here is likely to come down to one major factor: Will the Yugoslav
president, Slobodan Milosevic, accept foreign troops on Serbian soil and
allow them to turn Kosovo into a quasi-protectorate?

A string of statements from Belgrade in the last two days has indicated
that the government is rejecting the idea.

To better gauge the temperature of the peace effort, Milosevic, who has
remained in Belgrade, is sending the prime minister of Serbia, Milan
Milutinovic, to the talks on Thursday.

Before the prime minister's arrival, the United States and the Europeans
settled their differences on some of the military questions.

On Wednesday morning, French officials said the deployment of NATO
peacekeepers in Kosovo needed to be backed by a U.N. Security Council
resolution, a proposition the Clinton administration opposed. Washington,
according to State Department officials, was sticking to its stand that
NATO should be able to act independently of the United Nations.

The debate played out in Paris, Rambouillet, London and Washington with a
compromise worked out Wednesday afternoon by the British. Instead of the
United Nations being asked to "authorize" the deployment, the Security
Council will be asked to "endorse" it, a British diplomat said.

In this way, all sides could claim victory. For the French, the United
Nations still got a nod. For the Americans, the "neuralgic word
'authorize"' was avoided, the diplomat said.

A senior French official described Wednesday why the U.N. involvement was
so important .

"When NATO is out of an area, the question is can NATO act on its own?" he
said, referring to the fact that NATO would be deploying troops beyond the
territory of the 16 member nations in a mission not intended to defend
those members. The official said the French position was that a Security
Council resolution was needed when NATO deployed troops outside alliance
territory.

A more practical debate that affects the two sides in the conflict on the
ground in Kosovo was over how quickly the Kosovo Liberation Army, the
guerrilla group of ethnic Albanians who have been fighting Serbian forces,
should be required to demobilize. So far, the guerrillas have not been
formally asked whether they will disband. Five of the 16 ethnic Albanian
delegates at the conference here are members of the Kosovo Liberation Army.


There seemed to be some doubt about whether the insurgents would accept
such a deal, but Western officials said they were pressing ahead with plans
for the Kosovo Liberation Army to give up its arms.







An official familiar with the thinking of the guerrillas said, "They know
they have to be reconstituted, the question is how."

But a Western diplomat involved in drafting the demobilization plans said
the guerrillas would be required to give up their heavy weapons by a
certain time and that there would be a prohibition on carrying light
weapons.

At the request of Washington, the diplomat said, some adjustments were made
in the military annex that would allow the Kosovo Liberation Army to
demobilize a little more slowly than was originally envisioned. Because the
Serbian forces and the Yugoslav army would be allowed to keep a permanent,
though minimized, presence in Kosovo, the guerrillas were being offered the
concession of slower demobilization, the diplomat said.

The Serbian security police, who according to NATO military planners now
number 11,000 in Kosovo, would be required to reduce their forces to 2,500
over three to six months, the diplomat said. The Yugoslav army, which now
has about 15,000 soldiers in Kosovo, is being called on to reduce its
forces to 1,500 for border patrols by the end of the year.

The insurgents' overriding concern, according to participants in the talks,
has been their security and the security of the ethnic Albanian population,
which last summer and fall was attacked in villages with scorched-earth
tactics by the Serbs.




--------



February 11, 1999




Pentagon Sees Risk in Going Into Kosova



By ELIZABETH BECKER





WASHINGTON -- Even as NATO contemplates sending peacekeepers to Kosovo,
senior Pentagon officials are raising serious concerns about sending
American troops into a hostile region of Serbia without clear-cut military
goals.

Senior Pentagon officials expressed worries about casualties and about what
they described as the lack of a strategy for quickly removing peacekeepers
from Kosovo, a war-ravaged ethnic Albanian province in southern Serbia.
These officials cite continuing confusion at peace talks in France about
the exact military objectives in dealing with what amounts to a civil war
within Serbia.

"There's a strong desire for there to be a focus, with a definite plan in
hand, before a decision is made to commit as opposed to going in with a
vague idea that it will work out," said a senior military official. Senior
Pentagon officials are making such concerns known to the White House.

Other officials debate whether the Pentagon has enough forces to support a
NATO commitment in Kosovo, given U.S. commitments around the globe,
including policing a no-flight zone in Iraq and an armistice in Bosnia.

"Are we big enough to do what we are already doing, much less to do more in
Kosovo?" another senior Pentagon official asked.

Many of the Pentagon's concerns were echoed Wednesday at a House hearing on
a U.S. role in a Kosovo settlement. After Clinton administration officials
described a plan that could send as many as 4,000 U.S. ground troops to
Kosovo to enforce a peace agreement, several members of Congress questioned
whether this would be another drawn-out commitment.

"Such solutions do not eliminate the underlying problem; they promise to
drag on indefinitely, at high cost to our own nation," said Rep. Benjamin
Gilman, R-N.Y., chairman of the House International Relations Committee.

For now, President Clinton appears to be heeding military warnings,
refusing to commit troops, even as U.S. diplomats push for the nation's
involvement at peace talks between the Yugoslav government and ethnic
Albanians in Rambouillet, France.

"We don't yet have an agreement so we don't know with any certainty what is
the security environment," said a Pentagon official. "It does no one any
good to do an exercise in wishful thinking without a meeting of minds."

Walter Slocombe, the undersecretary of defense for policy, argued that
solving the Kosovo conflict was in "America's security interests."

The Kosovo conflict could widen and engulf the Balkans in more warfare, he
said, sparking renewed violence in Bosnia "where we have invested a great
deal and made a great deal of progress."

Some senior military officials, however, have yet to be convinced that
deploying troops to Kosovo would be in the vital national interest.

In addition to calling on the United States for troops, NATO is planning
for a possible peacekeeping mission includes about 8,000 troops from
Britain, 5,000 from France and 2,800 from Germany.

"Every time there is a significant troop deployment, we are very concerned
about questions like the desired end and what is the command-and-control
structure," said Capt. Michael Doubleday, a spokesman at the Pentagon.







At the hearing Wednesday, Thomas Pickering, undersecretary of state for
political affairs, reiterated that the Clinton administration believed the
president could dispatch U.S. troops for a peacekeeping mission without
seeking formal congressional approval.

"The president has broad authority," he said, "to act in the national
interest."

But Pickering added that officials were "not seeking to introduce American
ground forces into a situation in which they would have to engage in
combat" to attain an objective.

That is the exactly the sort of promise that Pentagon military planners say
causes them to worry.

Ivo Daalder, a Balkans specialist formerly at the National Security
Council, said that any mission to Kosovo "is going to be a really tough job
in which people will get killed."

"The backlash will be tremendous if they aren't up front about how serious
this is," said Daalder, now with the Brookings Institution.

Underlying these military concerns are questions about who is at fault in
this war and what that means for an American involvement.

In testimony last week, Secretary of Defense William Cohen said that "the
notion that somehow only the Serbs have engaged in atrocities is
incorrect."

He argued that the ethnic Albanian forces in Kosovo were responsible for
the majority of recent cease-fire violations. Although small in scale,
these violations produced "a reaction by the Serbs, who characteristically
then engage in the kind of brutality we've seen," Cohen said. "So it has
been on both sides."

In testimony Wednesday, Pickering said that Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic "raised the stakes one year ago by instituting a crackdown
against the civilian population of Kosovo, killing hundreds of people and
driving thousands from their homes."

Members of private groups working on Kosovo who consult with officials at
both the State and Defense departments say they have noted the patterns of
violations and responses for the last several months.

"The Pentagon approaches the question with a box-checking mentality," said
John Hooper, executive director of Balkans Watch. "The majority of
violations were from the Kosovo Albanians. But they were not the ones to
displace 600,000 people from their homes, did not destroy over 19,000 homes
and about 490 villages. All of that has been done by the Serbs."



------



February 11, 1999




Serbs Relent and Return Bodies of 40 Slain Albanian Villagers



By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS



RACAK, Serbia -- Serbs relented and returned the bodies of 40 Kosovo
Albanian villagers to their families Wednesday, nearly a month after a
round of killings helped initiate the peace talks now under way outside
Paris.

Their return clears the way for a mass funeral as early as Thursday near
the hillside where the mutilated bodies were found on Jan. 16 after what
has been called a massacre by international investigators.

Women and girls collapsed in each other's arms, wailing, as men carried 40
coffins one by one through the blue courtyard gate of the mosque in Racak,
25 miles south of Kosovo's provincial capital, Pristina.

Serbian authorities had held the bodies for two weeks after autopsies were
completed, saying that Kosovo Albanians wanted to make a "spectacle" of
their funeral during the internationally sponsored peace talks at
Rambouillet, France.

After days of mediation by international monitors, Serbian authorities
abruptly gave way, telling the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe that the families could pick up the corpses, said an O.S.C.E.
spokesman, Walter Ebenberger.

Serbian officials claim the villagers were killed in a battle between
Serbian troops and the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army, which has been
fighting for the independence for Kosovo, a province of Yugoslavia's main
republic of Serbia.

More than 2,000 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands left
homeless in a year of conflict.

International investigators said that the Racak killings were a massacre,
apparently in retaliation for rebel attacks on police.

Villagers were skeptical and bitter when word of the return of the bodies
finally came.

"They are playing jokes on us," protested Hysni Azemi, waiting outside the
Pristina morgue to be taken in to identify his brother.

Kosovo Albanians lined the last few miles of the route to Racak, waiting
for four trucks carrying the coffins. A Serbian police armored personnel
carrier moved through the crowd, the gunner in the turret staring silently
at the villagers staring silently back at him.

Blue stick-on notes on the coffins identified the bodies inside. Villagers
crowded into the mosque to search through the names for their loved ones'
remains, breaking into tears when they found them.





-----




February 11, 1999




Thousands Remember Kosova Victims


Filed at 6:55 a.m. EST





By The Associated Press



RACAK, Yugoslavia (AP) -- Thousands of ethnic Albanians streamed into the
Kosovo village of Racak today to bid farewell to 40 villagers whose
slayings last month generated international pressure to end the year-old
war.

Men, women and children walked down a snow-covered dirt road to the now
virtually uninhabited village, where coffins bearing the victims' bodies
lay inside a small mosque.

Wooden planks were laid on a muddy hillside where a funeral was planned for
later, not far from where their bodies were found Jan. 16 by international
peace monitors who accused Serb forces of a massacre.

Men of all ages, wearing skullcaps, lined up in front of the mosque to pay
their final respects. Marshals wearing red armbands stood along the road,
while the victims' relatives shared their grief.

The dead were to be buried on a hillside plot to be named ``Graveyard of
Heroes.''

As the villagers gathered for the funeral, Serb and ethnic Albanian
delegations entered a sixth day of talks in Rambouillet, France, that were
organized swiftly after the Racak killings.

The mourners, however, found it hard to talk of peace, and remained bitter
at the long delay in retrieving the bodies.

Serbian authorities took the bodies from the mosque shortly after the
slayings, insisting on autopsies to further their claim that the victims
died in battle with the Kosovo Liberation Army. They refused to give them
up until Wednesday, saying Kosovo Albanians wanted to make a ``spectacle''
of their funeral while negotiations on the future of the separatist Serbian
province were under way in France.

Villagers grimly recounted the events of Jan. 15, the day of the killings
during a Serb police offensive in the area around the village 25 miles
southwest of Pristina.

Ihrije Jakupi, 52, lost her husband and 16-year-old son in the attack.

``The Serbs locked the women in the cellar. They took the men up the hill
behind the houses where Mr. Walker found them,'' she said, referring to
William Walker, the American diplomat who heads the international
monitoring mission.

They threatened to kill the women too, she said, if they didn't hand over
any weapons they were keeping.

``The children were screaming,'' she said. ``They took my husband and my
son and I never saw them again.''

Shefki Nur Hyseni, 89, lost his only son, Haqif, who also left behind a
wife and nine children. The family had been living in Racak since the
grocery store they owned in nearby Stimlje was burned last July.

``I want my family to be strong and bear this grief,'' said the elderly
Hyseni, who was away from the village on Jan. 15.

With 11 family members to take care of, he said, he has no idea how they
can get by.

``I cannot provide for the basics,'' he said. ``There is no roof over our
head.''

There were no fresh reports of clashes today in the province, where more
than 2,000 people have been killed since last February and some 300,000
driven from their homes.

Negotiations were under way for the release of two Serb policemen kidnapped
near Mitrovica, 25 miles northwest of Pristina. The two, dressed in
civilian clothes, were taken from their unmarked car Wednesday.

The body of a man was found near the western town of Pec, shot in the head,
the official Tanjug news agency reported. There was no word whether he was
Serb or ethnic Albanian.


-----




With Eye on Kosova Talks, NATO Plans



By William Drozdiak and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, February 11, 1999; Page A31

As skepticism mounted in Congress about sending U.S. troops to Kosovo, NATO
forged ahead yesterday with plans to deploy an advance rapid-reaction force
in the region within days of any peace settlement between Serbian
authorities and ethnic Albanian separatist leaders.

NATO and diplomatic sources said the advance force of up to 10,000 troops
would move swiftly into Kosovo to begin disarming combatants if there is a
peace accord. Serbian officials and Kosovo's secessionist leaders, who are
negotiating under international supervision outside Paris, are facing a
deadline of Feb. 19 to accept a Western peace agreement that would restore
considerable autonomy to Kosovo, a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia's
dominant republic.

NATO ambassadors in Brussels yesterday approved an accelerated deployment
timetable for the international peacekeeping force, which eventually could
swell to as many as 30,000 troops. Senior NATO diplomats said planning for
the vanguard "enabling force" – which will be commanded by a British
general – should be completed by Monday.

The Pentagon has begun detailed discussions with the White House about the
size and responsibilities of the U.S. component of the peacekeeping force
and is trying to limit both. It wants to restrict the U.S. contribution to
4,000 troops and, as with the three-year-old peacekeeping mission in
Bosnia, is insisting that any force sent into Kosovo not have primary
responsibility for nonmilitary activities, such as resettling refugees,
building homes and setting up the new Kosovo government.

While mindful of the stakes – including the possibility that the war in
Kosovo could spread to other parts of the Balkans – top Pentagon officials
remain opposed to deploying U.S. ground troops in Kosovo. This, in large
part, is because they believe the troops will have to remain there beyond
the three years now envisioned and that even a small force of up to 4,000
will be a drain on military morale and resources.

However, Pentagon officials are convinced that the White House is headed
toward ordering deployment anyway. One senior military official described
the feeling at the Pentagon this way: "If it's inevitable that we're going
to get committed to Kosovo, the attitude is, let's manage our descent into
hell, not plunge."

A growing number of members of Congress also are expressing doubts about
deploying U.S. forces in Kosovo. At a House International Relations
Committee hearing yesterday, members pummeled officials from the state and
defense departments who came to explain the administration's Kosovo policy.


Undersecretary of State Thomas R. Pickering acknowledged the panel's
concerns but told the committee that "NATO's credibility as the guarantor
of peace in Europe is at stake."

Committee Chairman Benjamin A. Gilman (R-N.Y.) said a negotiated settlement
and a follow-on peacekeeping mission "are nothing more than holding
actions" that will not eliminate the fundamental hostilities between the
ethnic Albanian rebels and Belgrade government.

"I have enormous difficulties with the proposal to send troops to Kosovo,"
said Rep. Doug Bereuter (R-Neb.). "I'm concerned about the constitutional
process and whether it's a vital national interest to devote such a large
portion of our military capabilities to keep the peace at two places in the
Balkans."

Several committee members referred to administration promises of 1995 to
bring U.S. troops home from Bosnia within a year; about 6,700 Americans are
still deployed there. "I feel that the same thing could be true of Kosovo
and that we are indeed going into a second Bosnia," said Rep. Pat Danner
(D-Mo.).

Britain and France, along with Germany, Italy and Spain, are planning to
contribute the majority of troops to the NATO-led force, alliance sources
said. But NATO officials said there is unanimous consent in allied capitals
that an American presence – even a small one – would be a vital ingredient
for success.

"We cannot have the Americans out and only the Europeans present," a senior
European diplomat said. "That is a recipe for the kind of policy disaster
that took place in Bosnia."

At their meeting today, NATO ambassadors also agreed there would be no
question of divided authority and that the commander of a Kosovo
peacekeeping force would report directly to alliance headquarters. France
had suggested that the six-nation Balkan "contact group" – the United
States, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and Italy – should be consulted,
but the idea was rejected.

NATO military officials said the first troops to arrive in Kosovo would
come from an allied rapid-reaction force based in Rheindahlen, Germany, and
commanded by British Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson. Those troops would join up with
1,700 members of a French-led force based across the border in Macedonia.
They were deployed there to protect civilian monitors sent to Kosovo to
verify terms of a truce reached last October that has all but fallen apart.


NATO military officials said the key consideration for them was for
peacekeeping troops to be deployed as fast as possible to keep any peace
deal from unraveling. In the case of enforcing the Bosnia peace agreement,
NATO forces were able to mobilize during a three-week hiatus between the
conclusion of the accords reached in Dayton, Ohio, and the signing of a
peace agreement in Paris.

But in Kosovo, NATO forces will not have any extra time to prepare for
their mission if a deal is worked out by the fixed deadline.

Drozdiak reported from Berlin, Priest from Washington.


© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company


---




Moving Beyond History's Shadows
Kosova Talks Present New European Focus

By Charles Trueheart
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, February 10, 1999; Page A17

RAMBOUILLET, France, Feb. 9—The snow-draped forest surrounding the turreted
chateau lends an ethereal, storybook air to the place where the Kosovo
negotiations, now in their third day, grind forward.

Reports from within, however, suggest a routine closer to diplomatic boot
camp, as international mediators leading the talks with Yugoslav-Serbian
representatives and Kosovo's ethnic Albanians cast themselves in the role
of disciplinarians.

History, past and future, casts long shadows on their effort to forge an
agreement that will satisfy, or at least defer, the ethnic Albanian impulse
for an independent Kosovo without violating what Yugoslavia regards as its
sovereign territory.

More than 1,500 people have been killed in fighting over that question in
the past year. The two sides are facing an international deadline of Feb.
19 to accept an interim three-year settlement that would grant considerable
autonomy, though not independence, to Kosovo -- a province of Serbia where
90 percent of the population is ethnic Albanian.

"This is not easy," U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill declared today.
"Frankly, it's not a lot of fun."

Hill and his two mediator colleagues, Wolfgang Petritsch of Austria and
Boris Maiorsky of Russia, said they were making progress in part by trying
to keep the two sides focused on the future settlement of differences
rather than on the murky, bloody past -- what Petritsch referred to as
"19th-century issues" -- they persist in bringing up.

And when the opposing parties attempt to stray from the peacemaking agenda
with "extra ideas" -- an ethnic Albanian proposal for an immediate
cease-fire, for example -- they have to be politely refocused. "It's always
good to encourage ideas," Hill said, "but sometimes the supply exceeds the
demand."

Rambouillet, like the Palestinian-Israeli peace conference on Maryland's
Eastern Shore last fall and the Bosnian peace talks in Dayton, Ohio, in
1995, is not so much an alternative to shuttle diplomacy as shuttle
diplomacy in miniature. Staircases and hallways replace jets and
motorcades.

The castle's ornate, paneled public salons have been converted into
"holding rooms" and "control rooms" with telecommunications and computer
equipment. Elsewhere are conference rooms and armchair clusters where
unofficial conversations can take place.

The 13-member Serbian delegation is led by Deputy Prime Minister Ratko
Markovic, a close associate of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and
author of the 1989 constitution that abolished Kosovo's autonomy. The 16
Kosovo negotiators encompass the full spectrum of ethnic Albanian politics
in the province, ranging from Kosovo's pacifist elected leader, Ibrahim
Rugova, to five members of the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army, which has
been battling Serbian forces.

The two sides have not yet faced each other in negotiations, but they must
maneuver uncomfortably around each other in the buffet-style lunchrooms.
One witness said the opposing camps seldom exchange more than grunts and
glances, though sitting only a few feet away.

All the participants are living on the premises, and many must share
hallway bathrooms -- though not, apparently, with members of opposing
delegations.

The close quarters and unstated lockup reflect the circumstances of these
negotiations -- a peace settlement its organizers imply they are prepared
to impose by military force whether the negotiators decide to sign it or
not.

The recent historical precedent for the negotiations is the Bosnian peace
talks, which were held in the no-nonsense surroundings of Wright-Patterson
Air Force Base in Dayton.

The contrast is not just about lodging or food, with Dayton losing
effortlessly to 17th-century French elegance and meals catered by Paris's
acclaimed Le Notre restaurant.

Nor is it just about personalities. Richard C. Holbrooke, the
hard-charging, high-profile U.S. diplomat who negotiated the Dayton
accords, is not here. In his place as U.S. negotiator is Hill, who served
as Holbrooke's deputy at Dayton and has been the primary American
negotiator in Kosovo for the past six months.

The contrast with Dayton is about substance, too -- about how the Bosnia
peace accord has worked, and whether it is a model for the Kosovo
antagonists and peacemakers, or a cautionary symbol of what to avoid.

Pessimists inside and outside the chateau look at Dayton and remember that
the warring sides came to the table exhausted from three years of war.
Each, for its own reason, was eager to sue for peace.

In Kosovo, the combatants have only begun to fight. Western diplomats
estimate each side feels it has time on its side, and neither has much
incentive to compromise -- beyond their apprehension of threatened NATO
airstrikes or an internationally imposed settlement. Even as they negotiate
an end to their fighting in Rambouillet, the combatants are girding for the
return of hostilities in the springtime should peace talks fail.

Then there's whether Dayton has worked. "People make fun of Dayton, but for
three years no one has been killed in anger," a Western diplomat said. "I
think the absence of funerals is a good thing."

The Dayton accords were a U.S. production. Rambouillet, European leaders
hope, will be remembered as the place where Europe assumed leadership to
settle its own battles of ethnicity and nationhood -- assumed at least some
of the leadership, that is, from the United States.

French President Jacques Chirac, who was determined to hold this conference
here, cast his opening charge to the negotiators Saturday in just those
terms. France, he said, "has known the face of barbarism. But it knew to
stanch wounds believed to be eternal. It knew to abolish hatred thought to
be ancestral. . . . The message has a meaning here, in this place, where
General [Charles] de Gaulle and [German] Chancellor [Konrad] Adenauer built
the future."

He was referring to a meeting at Rambouillet between the French and German
leaders a half-century ago that sealed the beginnings of what is known the
European Union. Today at Rambouillet the European Union is taking a lead
role alongside negotiators from the United States and Russia, and under the
joint chairmanship of France and Britain, to conduct the Kosovo
negotiations.

More important to the legacy of Rambouillet, and to the architecture of the
continent's defense and security, Europe is preparing to flex an
independent muscle by taking command of the prospective Kosovo peacekeeping
force. A British general, Sir Michael Jackson, is set to lead the
multinational force of 30,000 or more troops to which Britain and France
alone will contribute half the personnel. A French general already is
commanding a European-led "extraction force" poised to protect civilian
monitors in Kosovo.

The deployment of U.S. troops -- perhaps 5,000 at most -- technically under
European command is a vexing political problem that the Clinton
administration is hoping to finesse by pointing out that all NATO forces
are under the supreme command of U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark. But it
answers a complaint heard in Washington for most of the decade -- that
Europe has neither the collective unity nor the individual will to assume
its responsibilities, forcing the United States to shoulder the burden.

The foundation of that new European responsibility for its own military
action, independent of United States participation or NATO consensus, was
laid at an Anglo-French summit in St. Malo, France, in early December.

"The European Union must have capacity for autonomous action, backed up by
credible military forces, the means to decide to use them, and a readiness
to do so in order to respond to international crises," read the joint
declaration. Eight weeks later, those intentions are on the verge of being
tested.




© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company


------


For the Record



Wednesday, February 10, 1999; Page A22

>From a Pentagon news briefing yesterday by Navy Capt. Michael Doubleday:

Q: The foreign minister of Yugoslavia has said . . . that under no
conditions would Yugoslavia be willing to have foreign peacekeeping troops
in Kosovo. . . .

Capt. Doubleday: . . . NATO has already taken a very firm stance on this. .
. . If the Serbs are responsible for the failure of these talks . . . there
will be very swift and severe consequences. . . .

Q: . . . Would it be acceptable to the United States for American forces to
serve under a foreign ground commander in Kosovo?

A: . . . I would only point out that the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe
is an American. The chain of command in Europe in the Southern Region runs
through another American four-star officer . . . Adm. John Ellis. . . .
There are many examples . . . of U.S. forces operating with allies in a
variety of circumstances where a U.S. commander is not in operational
control.

We make a distinction. Operational control has to do with the ability of a
commander to organize and to employ forces in a way that fulfills the
mission. . . . This, however, does not extend to logistics, to
administrative, to disciplinary control, which is maintained by individual
nations. . . . In the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia . . . where the
United States has been providing a unit . . . we have always been under the
operational control of the U.N. commander there, who is normally from one
of the Scandinavian countries.


© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company


-------




Thursday, February 11, 1999 Published at 07:16 GMT

Heavyweights head for talks

BBC


British Foreign Minister Robin Cook and French counterpart Hubert Vedrine
are returning to the Kosovo peace conference near Paris for their second
visit this week to try to accelerate the talks.

A spokeswoman for the French Foreign minister,Hubert Vedrine, said they
wanted to keep up the pressure on both the Serb and ethnic Albanian
delegations.

The talks, taking place at Rambouillet near Paris, have stalled over the
failure of both sides to sign up to an initial peace agreement.

The Albanian delegation is demanding an immediate ceasefire and the
deployment of international peacekeeping troops in Kosovo; the Serb
delegation wants guarantees that Kosovo will not become an independent
state.

Serbian President, Milan Milutinovic, is also expected to go to Rambouillet
for a meeting with the Serbian delegation and the two foreign ministers,
the co-chairmen of the peace talks.

BBC Defence Correspondent Mark Laity says there is growing concern at the
slow pace of talks.

On Tuesday Mr Cook and Mr Vedrine urged the Serbian and ethnic Albanian
delegations to concentrate on the draft interim accord and not to be
distracted by what they called "secondary issues".

The talks have also seen a variety of leaks and counter-proposals by the
two parties as the International Contact Group on Yugoslavia tries to focus
on their own proposal.

Nato has threatened military action unless a deal is agreed by a week on
Saturday.



Nato accelerates

Meanwhile, Nato has accelerated planning for sending up to 30,000 troops in
a UK-led implementation force if there is a settlement.




The BBC correspondent says Nato's problem is that it is vital to move in
quickly if there is a deal but that the heavy armour that is needed will
take weeks to arrive.



The UK Government is considering whether to order the loading of armoured
vehicles as soon as Sunday or Monday to start the 10-day trip from Germany
to the region.

Bodies returned

In Kosovo the bodies of 40 ethnic Albanians killed last month have been
returned to their village of Racak to await burial.

International monitors - who have accused Serb forces of carrying out a
massacre - accompanied the convoy.

A large crowd followed the coffins as they were carried one by one though
the gates of the village mosque.

Serb officials released the bodies after international monitors resolved a
long-running dispute between the authorities - who were insisting that the
bodies should be released in batches - and the families, who said that as
they had died together they should be buried together.

A spokesman for the monitors said he hoped the burials would take place on
Thursday.

The BBC correspondent in Pristina, Jacky Rowland says international
officials have accused the Serbs and the ethnic Albanian rebels of using
the dispute for political ends.


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