Albright Prepared For Serb Attack

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will meet on Monday with the NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark to accelerate contingency plans for an attack on Serb forces in the embattled Yugoslav province of Kosovo, she said Sunday.

Renewing an old warning, Albright said "there is beginning to be identification of the forces" that would be used in an attempt to halt a Serb offensive that has claimed a high civilian toll and left tens of thousands of people homeless refugees.

"Neither the United States nor the European allies can tolerate this much longer," she said on a busy day in the Balkans that was marked also by positive signs.

Here, in Bosnia's Serb republic, Albright met with leaders who are credited with trying to implement the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords that ended 3-1/2 years of ethnic warfare in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

She visited a rebuilt feeder station that supplies electricity to 100,000 people and three industrial zones, a project completed just three days ago using $1.6 million in U.S. aid, clean water will also be provided to the area.

"You should be very proud. It's a great message to run on," she told Biljana Plavsic, the president of the Serb republic, who broke from war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic and will seek election in nationwide elections in two weeks.

By the end of the year, Albright said, the United States will have provided $100 million in aid to the Bosnian republic and $240 million to all of Bosnia. "The election will be a chance to tell us what kind of country Bosnia will be," she said.

She then went to Sarajevo, the capital, by helicopter, stopping first at Stup, a suburb. There, in a speech to hundreds of returned refugees, she made it clear the United States would offer assistance only to areas that promote tolerance.

"We have no interest in subsidizing intolerance," Albright said. "Whatever the outcome of the vote, we will provide support only to those communities that meet their responsibility to implement Dayton by welcoming refugees, making joint institutions work, by upholding justice and the law."

Albright also took an indirect slap at Germany and Austria, which are eager to have Bosnian refugees depart.

"I hope our European allies will recognize," she said, "that it is also irresponsible to force them to return where there is no security, no housing and no jobs."

Albright has been criticized in some quarters for leveling threats against the Serbs in Kosovo and against Iraq for defying U.N. weapons inspectors without implementing them. But she renewed her warning to the Serbs Sunday while also stressing that the top U.S. priority in Kosovo was finding a diplomatic solution to the struggle between the Serbs and ethnic Albanians who are seeking independence.

U.S. aid to refugees in the province will be boosted from $10 million to $30 million, she said.

Written by Barry Schweid