WASHINGTON -- Of all the times that Richard Holbrooke, the Clinton administration's envoy, has negotiated with Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav leader, the room for maneuvering has probably never been so restricted nor the options so unpalatable.
Three days after President Clinton announced that Milosevic had gone over "the threshhold," Holbrooke was still negotiating to avert NATO airstrikes that Washington finds itself on the point of ordering, but which administration officials acknowledge is not their favored option.As long as Serbian forces march across Kosovo, torching villages, sending refugees fleeing and bringing retaliation from the guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army, Holbrooke has made it plain that he cannot remain in Belgrade very long.
Administration officials said Monday that they had set a rough deadline of 24 hours for Holbrooke to get a cease-fire or stop negotiating.
It was too embarrassing, they suggested, for Holbrooke to be talking to Milosevic while his forces were battering ethnic Albanian civilians, actions that the threatened airstrikes are supposed to stop.
In the event that Holbrooke leaves Belgrade without an agreement, he would go first to NATO headquarters in Brussels, where the secretary general of NATO, Javier Solana, has the authority to tell NATO commanders to go ahead with airstrikes.
Privately, administration policymakers acknowledge that bombing is "not a good option," as one expressed it Monday. "It creates all kinds of problems."
Airstrikes against Serbian forces would embolden the Kosovo Liberation Army, a guerrilla group that has been fighting for the past year for the independence of the province.
By strengthening the guerrillas, the bombing would also strengthen the clamor within Kosovo for independence. Thus, very quickly, Kosovo could change from being the autonomous region envisioned in the Paris peace agreement to a quasi-independent statelet, on the border of Albania and Macedonia where restive Albanian populations would be eager to redraw their borders.