Holbrooke seeks last-minute peace
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Your support makes all the difference.AMERICA'S trouble-shooting diplomat, Richard Holbrooke, toured Belgrade and other Balkan capitals yesterday in what is being seen as a final warning to Serbia to stop the fighting in its troubled Kosovo province before Nato intervenes.
Mr Holbrooke's goal was to persuade Serbia's President Slobodan Milosevic, whom he was due to meet last night, to abide by western calls to withdraw his 40,000 to 50,000 police and troops from Kosovo, where armed Albanian separatists have seized control of large swathes of territory.
Earlier yesterday Mr Holbrooke flew into neighbouring Macedonia, which borders Kosovo and Serbia and which fears the fighting over the frontier will destabilise the fragile peace within its borders between the Slav minority and the Albanian minority.
Following talks with the Macedonian President Kiro Gligorov and the Kosovo Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova, Mr Holbrooke said: "We have to prevent the events in Kosovo from escalating into a general war ... that goal will not be easy to achieve. We are pleased that Macedonia is not part of this problem and we strongly support its territorial integrity."
Mr Holbrooke's pessimistic remarks reflect a growing fear that the conflict is too far gone now for a diplomatic solution. Mr Holbrooke - who was recently appointed American ambassador to the United Nations - was widely credited as the force behind the November 1995 Dayton Ohio agreement that ended Bosnia's bloody conflict.
Talk of air strikes against Serbia, which were reinforced by Nato's Secretary- General Javier Solana on Monday, has thoroughly alarmed Serbia's Balkan neighbours, whatever they think of Mr Milosevic's violent attempt to subdue an Albanian insurrection.
"I would like to tell those in comfortable capitals in the West and north who find pleasure in games of war that enough blood was shed because of rashness and amateurishness in Bosnia," the Greek foreign minister, Theodoros Pangalos, said yesterday.
"We saluted Nato's preparedness to prevent the spread [of war] to Macedonia and Albania and the guarantees it gave for our integrity and sovereignty," said Macedonia's foreign minister, Blagoj Handzinski.
Fear of a general Balkan conflagration has united Macedonia and Greece, which were until recently the bitterest of neighbours.
"The countries of the region represent the voice of logic," Mr Pangalos said. "We have the most to win if there is a peaceful solution and the most to lose if there is a war."
Fighting in Kosovo continued as Mr Holbrooke arrived. Serb sources in Kosovo reported yesterday that 800 Serb civilians had been evacuated from one of the few Serb enclaves in Kosovo, 30 miles west of the capital, Pristina near the town of Klina.
They said that ethnic Albanians had driven them out, burning down houses there.
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