Big powers try to get tough with Milosevic

WITH the partial and last-minute assent of Russia, the United States and major European powers yesterday adopted a package of sanctions to force the Yugoslav President, Slobodan Milosevic, to negotiate a peaceful and political settlement of the bloody crisis in Kosovo.

After a frantic morning of bargaining, which extended their meeting by more than two hours, the foreign ministers of the six-nation Contact Group agreed to place an arms embargo against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia before the United Nations Security Council, and to ban exports of equipment which could be used for internal repression.

These steps had initially been ruled out by Russia's representative, the deputy Foreign Minister Nikolai Afanasyevsky. But Robin Cook, who was chairing the meeting at Lancaster House, then Madeleine Albright, the US Secretary of State, and finally Klaus Kinkel of Germany spoke with the Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov by phone for 30 minutes in all to win his approval, and a second closing statement was distributed to reporters, incorporating the changes.

Thus was the meeting, billed as the moment when the West would read the riot act to Mr Milosevic, saved from virtual failure. Without Russia, Yugoslavia's chief arms supplier, an arms embargo would have been meaningless. Now, British officials said last night, Russia will not not use its veto when the matter comes to the UN, perhaps within days.

The five other Contact members - Britain, the US, France, Germany and Italy - will also refuse visas to Yugoslav and Serbian ministers and senior officials responsible for the violent clampdown in ethnically Albanian Kosovo in which at least 80 people have died, and will halt financial support for trade and investment, including Yugoslavia's privatisation programme, whose proceeds analysts believe go directly into strengthening the police and military who carried out the brutalities.

Russia says it cannot back these moves, but will review its position if Mr Milosevic remains intransigent. The Contact Group is giving him 10 days to withdraw his special police units from the province, allow access to the Red Cross and commit himself to dialogue with the Albanian majority. Failing that, the Five will impose a freeze on foreign-held funds of the republic and Serbia.

In addition, the group is demanding that Mary Robinson, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, be allowed to visit Kosovo, and wants the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal to indict anyone suspected of committing such offences in Kosovo.

The West is determined not to allow a repeat of Bosnia, whose civil war from 1992-95 might have been cut short had the West acted quickly and decisively. "This crisis is not an internal affair of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia," Mrs Albright told her colleagues. That, however, is precisely the point where Russia takes issue with the others. They see Kosovo as a second Bosnia in the making - "ethnic cleansing all over again," in Ms Albright's words - and a potential powder keg for the entire southern Balkans. But Russia sees above all the parallels with Chechnya, part of the Russian Federation whose own independence struggle was savagely put down by Moscow in the face of intense international criticism.

The question is, of course, what happens if President Milosevic ignores these threats and sanctions as he has ignored so many others in the past ? The next steps would be an end to air links, perhaps a wider trade embargo.