Monitors leave Kosovo as talks collapse

The co-chairmen of the Kosovo peace talks suspended negotiations yesterday, one day after the ethnic Albanian delegation signed a peace accord which the Serbs rejected. Amid anticipation of NATO military action against Serbia, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe announced it was withdrawing 1,400 monitors from Kosovo and Western diplomats began leaving Belgrade.

"After consultation with our partners in the Contact Group . . . we consider there is no purpose in extending the talks any further," the foreign ministers of Britain and France, Mr Robin Cook and Mr Hubert Vedrine, said in a terse six-point statement. "The negotiations are adjourned."

The OSCE chairman, the Norwegian Foreign Minister, Mr Knut Vollebaek, said all members of the Kosovo Verification Mission would be out of the Serb province by today. Western leaders are concerned that Serbia might take KVM members hostage. "We solemnly warn the authorities in Belgrade against any military offensive on the ground and any impediment to the freedom of the KVM," the statement by Mr Cook and Mr Vedrine said.

At a press conference at the alliance's headquarters in Mons, Belgium, Gen Wesley Clark said that if military action was taken, "it would not be a one- or two-bomb affair. The attack would be as long and as difficult as [President Slobodan] Milosevic [of Yugoslavia] wants to make it."

The co-chairmen clearly blamed the Yugoslav Federation, which is dominated by Serbia, for the breakdown of the second round of the talks that began in Rambouillet on February 6th. But the Serb President, Mr Milan Milutinovic, who represented Mr Milosevic in the Rambouillet and Paris talks, was defiant. "Why would we sign?" he asked yesterday, calling the agreement which the ethnic Albanian delegation signed on Thursday "a fraud" and "a big deceit".

President Clinton said yesterday NATO military action against Yugoslav military targets may be necessary to protect Kosovo's ethnic Albanians, secure NATO's credibility and prevent a wider Balkan war. "Make no mistake, if we and our allies do not have the will to act there will be more massacres. In dealing with aggressors in the Balkans, hesitation is a license to kill," he said.

Representatives of Kosovar Albanians at the Paris peace conference have cancelled a weekend trip to Washington because of the current situation in the Serbian province, and will return to Kosovo, the US State Department said.