Caught Off Guard, NATO Seeks Consensus on a Kosovo Strategy

BRUSSELS — Caught flat-footed by last week’s blood bath in the Serbian province of Kosovo, NATO struggled Wednesday to find the right strategy to bring Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to heel.

“Frankly, there is disarray about what to do on Kosovo,” a French diplomat said. “Are we going to have airstrikes while we have hundreds of our citizens there?”

Currently, more than 700 European and North American peace monitors are in Kosovo to keep tabs on the cease-fire reached there in October. Western military action could not only put them in harm’s way but leave them vulnerable to being used as hostages by Yugoslav or Serbian troops.

Ambassadors of the 16 member nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization heard a distressing report Wednesday from American Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO’s top commander in Europe, and German Gen. Klaus Naumann, chairman of the alliance’s Military Committee, who met with Milosevic in Yugoslavia on Tuesday.

Milosevic was unmoved by the two top NATO generals, reportedly saying that no “pressure from outside” would cause him to relinquish his “legitimate right to fight terrorism.”

“Our problem is that if Milosevic is part of the problem, he is also part of the solution,” one NATO official said.

On Friday, 45 members of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian community were killed near the village of Racak, and witnesses blamed masked men wearing uniforms of Yugoslavia’s security forces. The apparent massacre appeared to fly directly in the face of guarantees that Milosevic gave U.S. mediator Richard Holbrooke in October to avert imminent strikes by ship-based cruise missiles and more than 400 NAT0 warplanes.

“I think we were both not surprised, but disappointed, by the very obdurate position that we encountered in Belgrade,” Clark said after returning to NATO headquarters outside Brussels. He described the meeting with Milosevic as “very blunt, direct and forceful.”

The ambassadors, who as the North Atlantic Council constitute NATO’s policymaking body, correspondingly ordered a series of what alliance officials termed “precautionary measures.” The limited actions appear designed to make the NATO orders authorizing aerial attacks on Yugoslavia, on hold since October, seem even closer to execution, while still leaving room for negotiations.

According to alliance officials, the advance notice needed to conduct raids on Yugoslavia from the air is being cut from 96 hours to 48 hours.

NATO’s Strike Force South, which includes the U.S. Navy carrier Enterprise, was ordered from the Aegean Sea into the Adriatic, closer to Yugoslavia. A second alliance naval force will be deployed to Brindisi, Italy.

“Even the most moderate option available to Gen. Clark would cause enormous damage for Yugoslavia,” a Western diplomat based at NATO said.

The alliance has come under withering attack in the European press for not acting immediately to punish Milosevic and his military after the Racak massacre. But NATO officials say they must take into account the safety of the more than 700 unarmed observers sent into Kosovo by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. On Wednesday, they also demanded that Yugoslavia reverse itself and allow Louise Arbour, chief prosecutor at the special war crimes tribunal in The Hague, to conduct an investigation in Kosovo so that those responsible for the killings could be identified with greater certainty.

Sending the OSCE monitors to Kosovo was meant to ensure that Milosevic’s verbal pledges to Holbrooke were kept, but officials at NATO headquarters are now worried, in the words of one, that the observers might be “rounded up” to serve as hostages.

Yugoslavia’s government ordered the American leader of the group, William Walker, to leave the country after he denounced the Racak killings as the work of Serbian security forces. However, Milosevic has insisted that he wants to cooperate with the remaining OSCE personnel.

According to NATO sources, the drafting of an emergency plan to evacuate or rescue the monitors from Kosovo was being accelerated Wednesday. A French-led “extraction force” of 1,800 troops is already on the ground in the neighboring nation of Macedonia; by the end of January, a NATO meeting will be held to assemble reinforcements.

Diplomats and NATO officials insist that the possibilities for a political solution in Kosovo have not been exhausted, and that other international players--the United Nations, the European Union, the six-nation Contact Group on the former Yugoslavia--are also at work. The German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, warned earlier in the week against the temptation “to flex muscles.”

Some alliance members may be worried about provoking Russia, which firmly opposes a punitive raid on Yugoslavia since there is no empowering resolution from the U.N. Security Council. Western diplomats also caution that there is a very real possibility that NATO airstrikes would embolden armed Kosovo separatists into proclaiming their independence from Serbia, Yugoslavia’s dominant republic--a step fraught with danger for stability throughout the ethnic checkerboard that is the Balkans.

“We’re only at the start of the search for a consensus,” a high-ranking Western diplomat at NATO said.

But one official of the alliance, speaking on condition he not be identified by name, said he believed that the use of military force has now become inevitable. According to alliance intelligence, he said, all 10,000 of the police officers and other security troops that Milosevic assured Holbrooke would be withdrawn from the mostly ethnic Albanian province have now returned.

“Everybody [NATO member nations] has been like a rabbit, caught in the beam of a headlight and not able to react,” the official said. “We sort of let Kosovo go on autopilot, convinced ourselves the OSCE could keep a lid on it. I think Milosevic at the moment has simply concluded NATO is not going to do anything.”

“This massacre is obviously not something spontaneous,” the alliance official said. “Some limited [military] response to this atrocity is the best guarantee it won’t happen again.”

At the Pentagon on Wednesday, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, speaking of Kosovo, told reporters: “I believe NATO credibility remains on the line. It is quite clear NATO has the ability not just to threaten airstrikes but to carry them out.”

He said NATO’s activation order, a prelude to military action, “remains in effect, and we are prepared to execute that if that is the will of the NATO membership.”

Meanwhile, the State Department announced that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will meet late next week in Europe with British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook and French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine to discuss Kosovo and Iraq.

Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.