March 18, 1999
Web posted at: 1:14 p.m. EST (1814 GMT)

In this story: Accusations of fraud, insincerity Bracing for 'very large-scale' fighting RELATED STORIES, SITES

PARIS (CNN) -- With Serb negotiators refusing to discuss a proposed settlement for Kosovo, glum international mediators seemed ready Wednesday to end 3-day-old Paris peace talks, paving the way for possible NATO airstrikes on Yugoslavia.

Chief negotiator Chris Hill of the United States said the mediators did "not anticipate any further progress."

French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine and British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook were to return to the talks Thursday to decide whether they should continue.

Ethnic Albanian leaders have said they would sign the accord, which grants them a degree of self-rule in Kosovo but not independence. However, the Serbs have rejected the provision that calls for 28,000 NATO troops to guarantee the peace in Kosovo and have demanded other significant changes in the peace plan.

Hill said there will probably be a signing ceremony with the ethnic Albanians "very shortly." But a Russian mediator said unless both sides signed, there would be no agreement.

"It takes two to tango," Boris Mayorsky said at a news conference Wednesday.

Earlier in the day, the Yugoslav delegation and ethnic Albanian representatives accused each other of fraud and insincerity.

President Milan Milutinovic of Serbia, the dominant republic in Yugoslavia, told reporters the Yugoslav delegation had made viable proposals for Kosovo's future institutions but that "the others would like to have just a fraud."

The ethnic Albanian side said the Serbs were trying to change 70 percent of the proposed political agreement -- changes that would give the ethnic Albanian majority even less autonomy than it has now.

NATO has threatened to bomb Yugoslavia if Belgrade is the only party to block a peace agreement for Kosovo, the province in Serbia where 2,000 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced by the fighting between Serbs and separatist ethnic Albanians.

A source in the six-nation Balkan Contact Group overseeing the peace talks said there was a chance Vedrine and Cook would go to Belgrade this weekend to pressure Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to accept the accord.

"This would show we had done everything possible to get an agreement," the source said.

Bracing for 'very large-scale' fighting

In Washington, U.S. officials expressed grave concern over the massing of Yugoslav forces in and around Kosovo, saying the buildup violated both an October cease-fire and the spirit of the peace talks. The United States claims more than 30,000 Yugoslav army troops are stationed in the region, with tanks and heavy weapons.

NATO's commander, U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark, told a congressional committee Wednesday that Serb forces appear poised to resume fighting in Kosovo on a "very large scale" if there is no peace agreement.

The supreme commander of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army, Suleiman Selimi, said Yugoslav troops were setting up anti-aircraft missiles in rugged territory northwest of the provincial capital, Pristina. KLA fighters in the Cicavica mountains saw the missiles being unloaded from trucks, Selimi said.

The ethnic Albanian Kosovo Information Center reported large movements of Yugoslav army and police forces in Kosovo. In the northern Podujevo region, 30 army vehicles arrived Wednesday as reinforcements, it said.

Fighting and shelling were reported along a 9-mile front in northern Kosovo, and 7,000 ethnic Albanians fled after Serbian security forces shelled a village.

With peace prospects dim, plans for NATO airstrikes against Yugoslav military targets were being resurrected, amid speculation that attacks could be mounted as early as next week.

But the tactic is complicated by Russia's long-standing opposition and by Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov's planned trip to Washington next week, the Contact Group source said.

"If Primakov was still in the United States, that would hardly be the most propitious moment to launch airstrikes," he said; but if NATO did hold off, there could be more problems.

"How could you send Cook and Vedrine to Belgrade to give Milosevic a final, final warning and then follow that up with a week of total inaction? It's an extremely complex situation," he said.

Correspondent Tom Mintier, the Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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