CALENDAR PRESSES NATO INTO A STRATEGY DECISION

Specter of Refugees in Winter Is Looming

By Joseph Fitchett

International Herald Tribune, Monday, May 24, 1999

PARIS - NATO military pressures and diplomatic bargaining over Kosovo will build sharply over the next few weeks as the alliance focuses on a June 18 summit meeting of the Group of Seven and Russia as a make-or-break date for the air war to produce a political solution, according to officials in allied capitals.If no breakthrough occurs by then, the officials said privately, NATO governments will be faced with a stark choice: to proceed with a ground action against Serbian forces or acknowledge that the alliance has lost any real prospect of allowing ethnic Albanian refugees to return home.The refugees' return has become the central NATO war aim, and the result by which the alliance's performance seems likely to be judged.

If the refugees from Kosovo are forced to spend the winter in camps in Macedonia and other neighboring countries, Western officials said, Mr. Milosevic will have probably won out in the conflict and left NATO with no real objective except punishment of the Belgrade regime. As the air offensive headed into its third month, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization said Sunday favorable weather conditions over the past 24 hours had allowed alliance aircraft to attack a wide range of Serbian forces in Kosovo. The alliance will start working on plans this week for a major increase in allied troop strength around Kosovo in response to a U.S. call Friday to almost double the size of the force to 50,000 men. Most of these troops will come from Britain, France and other European nations; the United States plans to provide less than one-fifth of the total. Nominally, these troops, with their logistic support, will be entering the region to prepare for a role as a peacekeeping force in postwar Kosovo. But once there, the

officials said, they could form the vanguard of a combat force if NATO eventually made the decision, still controversial with every allied government outside Britain, to launch a ground offensive. Robin Cook, the British defense secretary, was asked on NBC whether, if diplomatic efforts failed to end the crisis by July, the alliance might be ready to send troops into Yugoslavia. ''That has to be a decision for the whole of the alliance,'' he said. But he added, ''I don't know anybody in NATO who's going to settle for anything less'' than the peaceful return of the ethnic Albanian refugees to their homes in Kosovo. Mr. Cook also said that signs of dissension within Serbia were mounting. In practical terms, the diplomatic maneuvering among Washington, other NATO capitals, Moscow and Belgrade will come to a head next month when the leaders of the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations have a three-day meeting starting June 18 in Germany, together with President Boris Yeltsin of Russia. The agenda will f

ocus on Kosovo and Western economic assistance to Russia, officials said. So far, Moscow has embraced NATO'speace plan in general terms but rejected the idea of NATO troops handling security in Kosovo. U.S. officials have maintained that ethnic Albanian refugees will only return to areas where NATO forces are in charge. While Washington agrees that Russian troops could be part of a NATO-led force, under the authority of the United Nations, Clinton administration officials reiterated Sunday that they oppose dividing Kosovo into sectors where Russian forces would have control of some areas close to Serbia. ''The real question is whether Russia is going to tell Mr. Milosevic that he has to accept NATO's terms or whether Moscow is going to work at persuading the West to get into time-consuming talks with him about his terms for accepting NATO's terms,'' according to an ambassador at NATO headquarters. Meanwhile, the force buildup could be read as a sharper threat to Mr. Milosevic and sharper pressure on Moscow t

o extract a deal from Mr. Milosevic. Western governments have sought to allow Russia a political success in the negotiations. But if Moscow fails to persuade Belgrade to capitulate, a NATO victory in Kosovo might be possible only at the price of an alliance decision to escalate the military offensive drastically by late summer. The clearest indication of a change in thinking emerged this weekend when the Pentagon acknowledged publicly that NATO will have to consider other military options if the Kosovo air campaign does not achieve its objectives by the autumn. Insisting that the air campaign will produce victory by the fall, the Pentagon spokesman, Kenneth Bacon, said that no one could guarantee that outcome at this stage.

He added, ''You have to be open to other possibilities.''