Time Running Out For Milosevic
U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke relayed a message Friday to Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic: Time is rapidly running out to avoid NATO airstrikes.
Top Western officials declined to call it Milosevic's last chance to avoid attack. However, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright warned in dispatching Holbrooke back to Belgrade that "time is all but gone" for a peaceful settlement in the Serb province of Kosovo. Holbrooke held new talks with Milosevic Friday.
Meanwhile, NATO countries began preparing for military attacks. CBS News Correspondent Mark Phillips reports that American and other Western embassies in Belgrade have ordered all nonessential personnel out of the country. Newspapers are publishing lists of air raid shelters. NATO is emphasizing that any attack will not be a slap on the wrist.
Divisions remained among NATO allies, however, on the use of force in Yugoslavia. Germany and Italy, among others, are reluctant to proceed without a stronger legal basis for action. Alliance ambassadors also sought at a meeting in Brussels, Belgium, to pressure Russia into dropping its opposition to airstrikes.
The allies were searching for an adequate legal basis for strikes other than a new U.N. Security Council resolution, which will allow Russia to veto the attacks.
"We must not allow NATO strikes," Yeltsin said Friday before a meeting with Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev, Russian news reports said. "We want to achieve a political, peaceful solution without the use of military force, and, I think, we shall succeed."
Hundreds of people have been killed and upwards of 300,000 have been driven from their homes since Milosevic launched a crackdown Feb. 28 against the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army, which is fighting for independence from Serbia, the main republic of Yugoslavia.
Milosevic has defied U.N. orders to withdraw substantial forces from the province, maintaining that they are needed to prevent new attacks by KLA "terrorists."
Holbrooke, who arrived from London where he met with officials of the six-nation Contact Group on the Balkans, said Friday that movement toward authorizing the use of force by NATO continues "in a sustained and intense manner."
"The situation remains just as serious as it has been before," he said shortly before the start of his fourth meeting with Milosevic in five days.
The international demands Holbrooke was presenting to Milosevic included an immediate end to hostilities and a withdrawal of forces and heavy armaments to pre-March levels.
In addition, Holbrooke was expected to press for an international monitoring force to be allowed to oversee compliance.
The KLA announced a unilateral cease-fire throughout Kosovo starting Friday, a move that will add to the pressure on Milosevic to reciprocate.
There were no immediate reports of new gunfire or shelling.