RAMBOUILLET, France -- After 17 days of negotiations, the ethnic Albanians have agreed to sign a Kosovo peace agreement within two weeks, the State Department said Tuesday.
James P. Rubin, the department spokesman, told reporters that ethnic Albanians said they would sign after "technical consultations" with residents in Kosovo, where a yearlong conflict between separatists and the Serbs has killed more than 2,000 people.The announcement came nearly 1 1/2 hours after the deadline for the Kosovo peace conference passed with the Serbs and ethnic Albanians entrenched in their positions despite NATO threats of airstrikes.
The ethnic Albanian delegation signed a statement approving the agreement in the presence of Christopher Hill, the chief U.S. mediator and ambassador to Macedonia.
The Serb side, meanwhile, continues to reject NATO deployment in Kosovo and raised further objections to a political agreement.
At the White House Tuesday, President Clinton expressed hope for "some sort of resolution." There has been a lot of progress, he said, including a 40-page document, but there are "still some important disagreements."
Yugoslav deputy Prime Minister Vuk Draskovic described the talks as a failure, blaming U.S. officials who he said "want the blood of the Serbs."
"I am afraid the Rambouillet conference failed, and we must say very clearly who is guilty for that," Draskovic told Associated Press Television News.
Calling U.S. officials "advocates of Albanian terrorism," Draskovic accused them of attempts "to produce failure of the conference and blame the Serbs."
In Pristina, capital of Kosovo, the political wing of the Kosovo Liberation Army said it was sticking to its demands for a referendum on independence and NATO guarantees of any accord.
Rubin said Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is "hoping that Kosovo Albanians will seize the historic opportunity for peace that they never had before, a historic opportunity in which they will get something they never had before, which is autonomy, real self-government, running their own lives, getting rid of Serbian forces that have oppressed them, and bringing in NATO troops to protect them."
Peace appeared as elusive as ever Tuesday in Kosovo. New fighting broke out between Yugoslav army troops and Serb police and the ethnic Albanian rebels amid heightened tensions over the fate of the peace talks.
Clinton called anew Tuesday for both sides in the Kosovo conflict to restrain themselves.
Getting the Kosovo Albanians to sign puts greater pressure on the Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and the Serbs, who have adamantly refused a military annex to the proposed interim agreement calling for about 28,000 NATO troops to enforce the deal.
But as long as the Kosovo Albanians refused to sign the agreement, Albright acknowledged, it didn't make sense to bomb the Serbs.
Fighting in the southern Serbian province, whose population is 90 percent ethnic Albanian, has also left another 300,000 homeless.
Fighting resumed in northern Kosovo, with ethnic Albanian rebels targeting a Serb village where a civilian was killed the night before. Five Serb policemen were reported injured.
As Serb mourners gathered under police escort in the home of Mirko Milosevic -- the civilian killed Monday in Bukos by the Kosovo Liberation Army -- the rebels sprayed the house with bullets.
The mourners and police were trapped for more than an hour in the house, said Associated Press photographer Srdjan Ilic, who suffered a small cut on the leg from flying shrapnel.
Monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, observing from a nearby hill, also confirmed the fighting, adding that the Yugoslav army sent in reinforcements -- including a tank, an anti-aircraft gun and dozens of soldiers.