Salon News | Kosovo peace talks collapse


Arts & Entertainment Books Comics Health & Body Media Mothers Who Think News People Politics2000 Technology - Free Software Travel & Food Columnists Current News Wire Stories Click here to read the latest stories from the wires. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Search Salon Advanced Search \| Help - - - - - - - - - - - - Recently in Salon News The real Henry Hyde scandal A new book lays out his role in a failed S&L, and it wasn't just a youthful indiscretion. By David Moberg [06/07/99] Disloyalty of Democrats It's hardly a surprise that China was able to steal our nuclear secrets, given the kind of people the Democrats have put in charge. By David Horowitz [06/07/99] The day after As Kosovo prepares for peace, big questions remain about the KLA, Slobodan Milosevic and independence. By Laura Rozen [06/05/99] What did Democrats sacrifice to win gun control? The Republicans got a Draconian juvenile justice bill liberals had been determined -- until last month -- to defeat. By Jake Tapper [06/04/99] The beginning of the end News of a peace deal in Kosovo raises hopes and skepticism among Balkans watchers. By Daryl Lindsey [06/04/99] Complete archives for News - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -		Kosovo peace talks collapse Yugoslav generals balk over troop pullout and NATO control of peacekeeping force. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Laura Rozen June 7, 1999 \| KUMANOVO, Macedonia -- The celebrated Kosovo peace process fell apart early Monday morning as NATO officers walked out of a second day of fruitless talks with Yugoslav generals in a tent-hangar at a dusty French military base near the Macedonia-Yugoslavia border. The truce is over, for now, before it even began. Officials said NATO would intensify its bombing of Serbia, and indeed, almost immediately the sound of planes, absent earlier in the evening, could be heard overhead. "The Yugoslav delegation presented a proposal that would not guarantee the safe return of all the refugees or the full withdrawal of the Yugoslav forces," said British Lt. Gen. Michael Jackson, who is to head the NATO peacekeeping force for Kosovo, as he walked out of the talks after 2:30 a.m. Monday. "NATO therefore has no alternative but to continue and indeed intensify the air campaign until such time as the Yugoslav side are prepared to implement the agreement fully and without ambiguity." Outside the camouflage-style military tent hangar near the Macedonian-Serbian border, where a NATO delegation led by the tall, fierce-looking Jackson held some 16 hours of talks with three Serbian generals Sunday, details of the major sticking points were hard to come by. Most sources agreed that the Serbs wanted to extend the deadline for troop withdrawal from Kosovo by a week or two, and also to increase the number of military and police officers it could station inside the province. But Nebojsa Bujovic, Yugoslavia's deputy foreign minister, said the country's parliament had expected the peacekeeping forces to be "under the auspices of the U.N. or a presence established under a Security Council mandate," rather than NATO, as the NATO powers have insisted. That disagreement could delay a final accord significantly. Analysts in Belgrade were at a loss to explain the collapse of the peace talks, which the Milosevic regime had already begun selling to the Serbian public as an effort to stop the increasingly destructive NATO bombing. "We just don't know what's going on," said Bratislav Grubacic, a Belgrade political analyst and editor of "VIP News," who is rarely at a loss for insight into the machinations of the Milosevic regime. "The delegation of generals shouldn't be doing anything in the negotiations without Milosevic's knowledge." "There are two possibilities," Grubacic continued. "That the Yugoslav Army generals are doing this [stalling] by themselves, under pressure from radical officers on the ground who haven't been defeated enough -- in effect that would be staging a kind of military coup. The second possibility is that Milosevic just wants to let them do this stalling over each detail because he wants to trade it for something more at the end. To say to NATO, 'See what I am faced with? I have to get this in order to close the deal.'" Next page \| "It is classic Serb behavior"


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