PARIS -- Talks on Yugoslavia's disputed, violence-racked enclave of Kosovo teetered on the edge of breakdown yesterday as the ethnic Albanians formally signed a peace agreement, but their battlefield enemies, the Serbs, stayed away.
According to Western diplomats, the plan now is to adjourn the Paris meeting, perhaps through Tuesday or Wednesday.
That would allow Yugoslav officials to ponder the damage that could be wrought by waves of Western warplanes and cruise missiles.
Then the Serbs would be asked to return and give their final answer.
The Clinton administration warned that NATO 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.
"NATO stands ready to take whatever measures are necessary," Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright said in Washington before a closed-door briefing for senators.
In the troubled Serbian province, as many as 30,000 ethnic Albanians have fled their villages over the past week as fighting between Yugoslav security forces and Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas escalated, aid agencies say.
With Yugoslav troops pushing farther into the heart of rebel territory, refugees are running out of homes that haven't been destroyed.
Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic, the ranking Yugoslav commander in the province, reportedly vowed yesterday to step up operations against armed separatists if NATO attacks.
In the French capital, at a table draped with a crimson cloth, four leaders of the 15-member Albanian delegation -- Hashim Thaci, Ibrahim Rugova, Veton Surroi and Rexhap Qosja -- signed the 82-page agreement in hopes it would end the violence that has claimed 2,000 lives and left 200,000 homeless.
The U.S.-backed plan would establish broad self-government and police powers for Kosovo, a Serbian province where 90 percent of the people are ethnic Albanians. The province, home to 2 million people, lost its autonomy in 1989.
The signing ceremony that lasted less than five minutes meant little because Yugoslavia boycotted it. Its delegation, instead, announced the presentation of the text for a rival political agreement.
'Gone backward'
Albright accused Belgrade of having "gone backward." In an initial 17-day series of negotiations on Kosovo, held in February at Rambouillet outside Paris, Belgrade had agreed to the bulk of the power-sharing plan, which maintains Kosovo as an integral part of Yugoslavia for least the next three years.
But when the talks resumed Monday in Paris, Yugoslavia presented 20 pages of proposed changes. Serbia is the dominant partner in the two republics that form Yugoslavia.
"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 French and British foreign ministers who co-chair the Paris negotiations are scheduled to meet today with the delegations and announce whether the talks should be suspended, said Anne Gazeau-Secret, the French Foreign Ministry spokeswoman.
The other sponsoring nations of the Contact Group -- the United States, Russia, Italy and Germany -- will be consulted beforehand, she said.
Though allied diplomats and an unarmed international observer mission would have to be evacuated first, the bombs could start falling on Serbia "relatively quickly," said Kenneth Bacon, the Pentagon spokesman.
He said member nations of NATO have 350 to 400 warplanes, a little more than half of them American, on standby for 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 anti-aircraft weapons NATO pilots faced in neighboring Bosnia in 1995.
'We are ready'
In January, the NATO governments 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 yesterday 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 senators expressed strong doubts about U.S. military action.
"Significant reservations were expressed, but no conclusions were reached," Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi said as he left the briefing by Albright, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and National Security Adviser Samuel R. Berger.
Senate leaders asked to meet with Clinton, perhaps as early as today. "The whole climate changed" as a result of the briefing, said John Czwartacki, Lott's spokesman.
The Senate had been expected to vote on a resolution that would have expressed qualified support for military action. But now the resolution has been pulled from the floor amid doubts raised by information at the briefing.
Though willing to talk about a new allocation of governmental power in the province, Milosevic and his subordinates have flatly opposed the second clause of the proposed accord -- allowing 28,000 NATO-led troops, including 4,000 Americans, to make sure the deal is respected.
In what could be a sign of the differences over Kosovo yet to come, the Russian mediator at the Paris talks, Boris Mayorsky, did not sign the treaty documents yesterday along with the ethnic Albanians, though his U.S. and European Union counterparts did.
On Wednesday, the Russian had downplayed the merits of a deal supported by only one party.
Pub Date: 3/19/99