U.S. Tells Serbia Kosovo Violence Risks Reprisals

U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright warned Saturday that Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic faces tough punitive measures for the campaign of violence against ethnic Albanians in the Serbian province of Kosovo, but she said there are no immediate plans for an armed intervention.

The U.S. intends to press its European allies Monday to take tough diplomatic measures against the regime in Belgrade at an emergency meeting on the crisis scheduled in London with the six-nation Contact Group on the former Yugoslav federation, Albright told reporters here.

“We’ve already taken steps to ensure Serbia pays a price for its conduct in Kosovo, and we’re urging our allies to follow suit at the Contact Group on Monday,” she said after meeting with Italian Foreign Minister Lamberto Dini. “Unfortunately, the one thing he [Milosevic] truly understands is decisive and firm action on the part of the international community.”

However, winning unanimous support from the other five nations for genuinely tough action is expected to be so difficult that the U.S. could end up urging like-minded nations to act outside the Contact Group framework.

Russia, a member of the group, has declared Kosovo an internal Serbian matter, and it is the only nation that decided not to send its foreign minister to the London meeting. Moscow will be represented by a deputy foreign minister, Nikolai Afanasievsky.

Besides the U.S. and Russia, the Contact Group is made up of Britain, France, Germany and Italy. By Monday, Albright will have consulted with all four of her West European counterparts after traveling today to Bonn, Paris and London.

Dini described the situation in Kosovo as “most urgent,” but he referred to a need only to “redirect the situation within the limits of diplomacy.”

“There is the danger that this [violence] could topple the balance which is so delicate, so fragile” in the area, he said.

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Kosovo--a province of Serbia where authorities suppress a population that is 90% ethnic Albanian--has long been considered one of the most explosive ethnic mixtures in the Balkan region.

Kosovo has simmered with tension since Milosevic revoked the region’s right of autonomy nine years ago in what became the first step in his ill-fated plan to turn much of the central Balkans into a Greater Serbia.

That plan came apart during the bloody, 3 1/2-year ethnic war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Last month, Serbian authorities launched attacks against an Albanian separatist group known as the Kosovo Liberation Army, or UCK.

Serbian authorities have reported that 45 Albanians and six Serbian police officers have been killed during the crackdown, but unconfirmed reports from the region assert much higher death tolls.

Last month, the United States offered Milosevic a series of minor concessions in response to the Serbian leader’s help in installing Serbian moderate Milorad Dodik as the Bosnian Serb prime minister and as an encouragement for Milosevic to move his regime more toward the mainstream of European nations.

However, in the wake of the explosion of violence in Kosovo, the administration suspended these concessions, which included allowing Yugoslavia to open an additional consulate in the United States, offering landing rights to Belgrade’s national airline, JAT, and permitting an expansion of the Yugoslav U.N. mission in New York.

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Albright is expected to have her hands full in attempting to win agreement within the Contact Group for tough diplomatic measures against Serbia because Russia and, to a lesser extent, Italy and France are said to be less eager to undertake such action.

This reluctance is believed to be one reason why any idea of even tougher measures, such as military force, did not come up in Rome and is unlikely to come up today during Albright’s discussions with German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel in Cologne and with his French counterpart, Hubert Vedrine, in Paris.

“We believe the armed movements and violent, brutal reaction of the Belgrade government led to an explosive situation that we must try to bring back to diplomacy,” Dini said. “We expect the Belgrade government to take measures to give autonomy [to Kosovo, but] Belgrade has refused to do this.”

While Albright said she did not discuss the prospect of a military intervention in Kosovo with Dini, her rhetoric was aggressive.

“We’re not going to tolerate a return to the politics of ‘divide and rule’ anywhere in the former Yugoslavia,” she said. “We are not going to stand by and watch the Serbian authorities do in Kosovo what they can no longer get away with doing in Bosnia. The onus is on them to act responsibly and to build confidence through dialogue.

“We’ve got a broad range of options available to us, and we do not rule anything out,” she stated. “But I’m not going to speculate on what the appropriate response would be to the circumstances as they evolve.”

Elaborating on Albright’s comments, a senior State Department official said the lessons of recent history in the region show that only quick, determined action by the international community can contain the crisis.

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Europe and the United States failed to act firmly as the Yugoslav federation began to break apart in 1991, leading to the prolonged war in Bosnia.

“We don’t want to make the mistakes we made in 1991,” the State Department official said. “We want to act swiftly and decisively. We want to see the situation turned around.”

The official rejected allegations that comments made last month by Washington’s special envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, describing the Kosovo separatist group UCK as a terrorist organization were taken by Milosevic as a signal that he would have a free hand against Albanian separatists in the province.

“When we see a group undertaking terrorist acts, we have to be clear about that, and the UCK clearly engaged in terrorist acts, like killing unarmed civilians,” the official said. “Despite this, there is no doubt on the part of the U.S. government that the responsibility for this crisis lies with Milosevic.”

In addition to consulting with Italian leaders, Albright met with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican, mainly to discuss Cuba in the wake of the papal visit there in January.

A State Department official present at the meeting said that Albright, who studied the downfall of communism in Eastern Europe as an academic before entering government, told the pope that his visits to Communist Poland in the early 1980s played a critical role in bringing down the government there and that his visit to Havana could prove to have been “a point of departure” for Cuba too.

“It’s a hope that the Castro government will follow up with the political and religious freedom that we saw a signal of during the pope’s visit,” the official said.

Albright met last week with Cuban Americans in Florida and is said to be assessing new ways to ease repression in Cuba.

“She shared her hope that Cuba will indeed become open to the world, so that the world can indeed become open to Cuba,” State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said.