Kosovo Accord Raises Hopes for End to Ethnic Fighting

VIENNA — Senior European and U.S. officials Thursday expressed guarded optimism that an agreement between Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and the leader of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian community will spur talks to end warfare in the province.

“We’re trying for a diplomatic solution, so within that framework, what happened in the last 24 hours is a good procedural step,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told reporters during a stopover here on her way back to Washington from the Moscow summit.

But in a speech to representatives of the 54-nation Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE, she cautioned that talks were at an early stage.

“They can still fail,” she said.

Kosovo is a southern province of Serbia, the larger of Yugoslavia’s two republics. Ethnic Albanians, who constitute 90% of Kosovo’s 2 million people, are seeking independence.

Under terms of the accord reached between Milosevic and ethnic Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova, the Yugoslav president reportedly committed himself to negotiations on giving Kosovo limited autonomy from Serbian control--but with the loophole that any concessions toward looser ties between republic and province could be reviewed after three to five years. The agreement was brokered Wednesday by Christopher Hill, the U.S. ambassador to neighboring Macedonia.

Milosevic, an exceptionally cunning political tactician, has a well-earned reputation for paying lip service to Western-sponsored peace initiatives to win time to advance his own agenda.

Nevertheless, Wednesday’s agreement comes amid other encouraging signs in the region that collectively have brought a rare ray of hope that at least a truce, if not a permanent settlement, may soon come to one of the most volatile corners of the Balkans.

Milosevic came under additional pressure to resolve the crisis after Albright and Russia’s acting foreign minister, Yevgeny M. Primakov, put together a joint statement Wednesday during the U.S.-Russian summit in Moscow demanding that the Yugoslav leader halt all attacks against ethnic Albanians and “intensify the negotiating process.” Bound to the Serbs by strong ethnic and religious ties, Russia has tended to be their main protector.

An easing of ethnic hatreds and a broad-based reconstruction program after 3 1/2 years of bitter war in nearby Bosnia-Herzegovina also have generated optimism in a region long consumed by deep internal differences.

Simmering resentment in Kosovo over years of harsh, discriminatory rule by minority Serbs exploded into ethnic violence in February, breathing life into a secessionist Albanian guerrilla movement that quickly seized large areas of the province. However, heavily armed Serbian security forces eventually retook much of the lost territory, carrying out brutal reprisals against ethnic Albanian combatants and civilians, in many instances involving the systematic destruction of entire villages.

On Thursday, Serbian forces shelled two villages where troops had battled rebels the day before. The Serbian Media Center in Pristina, the provincial capital, said at least 20 rebels from the Kosovo Liberation Army were killed and one Serbian police officer was wounded during the fighting in the villages of Ljubicevo and Jeskovo.

Months of warfare in the province have generated more than 200,000 refugees, many of whom fled into nearby forests. With no access to humanitarian aid and with harsh fall and winter weather only about six to eight weeks away, the search for ways to stop the fighting has taken on urgency.

“We . . . have to get displaced people in Kosovo home,” Albright told delegates in her speech to the OSCE, a body that links the United States and Canada with more than 50 European and some Central Asian countries.

Sources at North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Brussels said Thursday that final planning is underway for an operation that could mean deploying a military force of about 20,000 NATO-led troops to back up any agreement in Kosovo.