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"We really learned a lesson, I think, in Bosnia that setting an artificial deadline doesn't work," Albright said. Three years after a peace agreement was reached, U.S. troops remain in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
But the administration faces opposition on Capitol Hill to an open-ended commitment of troops. A spokesperson for newly elected House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) said the House may vote soon on a nonbinding resolution on the wisdom of sending troops to Kosovo.
Albright insisted yesterday that NATO peacekeepers must be part of any agreement to end the ethnic violence in Kosovo, a separatist province of Serbia that is predominantly ethnic Albanian. She warned that unless Serbia withdraws its opposition to the NATO deployment, it will face a bombing campaign by the United States and its allies.
Albright's remarks escalated a war of nerves with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, spelling out Washington's bottom-line positions for the Kosovo peace talks now in their second week at a chateau near Paris.
Earlier, NATO had threatened a bombing campaign if Serbia blocked an agreement. If the Albanians block the agreement, Albright said there would be a withdrawal of international support for their cause, in effect allowing Milosevic's troops to do what they want in the province.
"No NATO force is a deal-breaker from our perspective, and if there is no agreement, then the Serbs need to know that we have said earlier (that) whichever side cratered the talks would be held responsible, and in the Serb case, that means that it would be followed by NATO bombing," Albright said in an interview on ABC-TV.
Albright had ordered U.S. envoy Christopher Hill to go to Belgrade to deliver a warning in person to a defiant Milosevic yesterday that Washington will insist on a NATO-led force.
U.S. officials said there is no doubt that Milosevic is calling the shots for Serbian negotiators now engaged in the peace talks even though he has not put in an appearance at Rambouillet, the conference site. Serbian President Milan Milutinovic, a Milosevic lieutenant and the leader of the Serbian delegation, has said his government will never accept a foreign military force on its territory.
The United States has agreed to contribute about 4,000 troops to a 28,000-strong NATO force to police a Kosovo agreement. Albright said the administration will not make the same mistake in Kosovo that it made in 1995, when it set a one-year time limit on a peacekeeping force in Bosnia.
Clinton's one-year deadline was extended for another year in 1996 and eliminated entirely in 1997. Today, there are about 6,700 U.S. troops in Bosnia, down from a high of 22,500.
Albright said any withdrawal of the NATO force in Kosovo would depend on achieving certain "benchmarks," including local elections and establishment of a police
force that would be acceptable to both sides.
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Elaborating on Albright's comments, State Department spokesman James B. Foley said, "The peace implementation force would be able to withdraw when the
Kosovo institutions are up and running and considered to be self-sustainable and that stability has itself become self-sustaining."
When a questioner suggested that it could take a very long time to meet that standard, Foley said, "Well, theoretically you're right." But he said the Contact Group, a
six-nation consortium that coordinates Balkan peace efforts, will insist that the institutions be created in a relatively short period of time.
NATO has said it will send peacekeepers to the embattled province only if the Serbian government and the ethnic Albanian rebels agree to a cease-fire and actually
stop fighting. The purpose of the NATO force would be to disarm government and rebel troops and to keep order until an ethnically neutral police force can be trained
and deployed.
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The United States and its allies in the Contact Group ordered the warring factions to complete their work at Rambouillet by Saturday. Although differences remain on
both sides, the ethnic Albanians have accepted the broad outlines of the Contact Group's proposal to give them a large measure of self-rule short of their objective of
full independence. The Albanian side has also endorsed the NATO peacekeeping force.
LA TIMES-WASHINGTON POST-02-16-99 2026EST
Caldera's idea, which would require a change in standards adopted five years ago, reflects growing alarm within the Army, Navy and Air Force that they are failing to attract enough recruits and that the shortage will get worse if the trend is not reversed.
"Frankly, right now we have rules that don't make sense," he said. The rules have "put us in a box that really hurts. Everyday we turn away people who want to join."
Like the Air Force and Navy, the Army is facing the worst peacetime recruiting shortfall in its history.
Of the major services, only the Marines have attracted a sufficient number of recruits in recent years.
"The Army is an institution that should not write off young people in America who need a second chance," Caldera added at a breakfast with defense reporters.
"The military should not be the one that slams the door of opportunity in your face."
Under Defense Department policy, 10 percent of new recruits are allowed to be high-school dropouts who have passed the high school equivalence test and score well on armed services entrance exams.
But for many years, especially during the downsizing of the 1990s, the services set much higher standards in practice. They either required that all new recruits have high school diplomas or allowed in only a few with the equivalent of a diploma.
But as downsizing bottomed out several years ago and the economy got stronger, recruiting stations went empty.
The Army fell 2,300 short of its recruiting goal in the first quarter of 1999 and Caldera said the projected shortfall could reach 10,000 this year. The Navy faced 6,900 empty positions last year.
Although it has reached its goal in the first quarter of fiscal year 1999, last month it announced it will
increase from five to 10 percent the number of high school dropouts its accepts.
The Air Force, which has faced a severe pilot shortage for several years, projects it will be 2,000
pilots short of the 13,641 it needs by 2002. In addition to the pilots, who are mostly officers, the Air
Force had a shortfall of 421 in its enlisted ranks for the first quarter of this year and continued to slip
in the second quarter, said Air Force officials.
``We're coming up on the greatest shortest we've ever had in peacetime,'' said Lt. Col. Russ Frasz,
an Air Force recruiting official.
The services have responded with signing bonuses, retention bonuses and more money for college
education. They have put thousands of more recruiters into the field and tens of millions of dollars
into new advertising campaigns.
The Navy, for example, added 500 recruiters last year, opened 150 new recruiting stations and
increased its advertising budget this year from $58 million to $70 million.
What it got in return was 9,012 new sailors, 789 more than it needed. But that was only for the first
quarter of the year and, given the shortfall in recent years, no one in the Navy has relaxed. ``We are
getting back on track but there is still hard work to do,'' said Rear Adm. Barbara McGann, the
Navy's top recruiting official.
Caldera, who took over as Army secretary in July, said civilian leaders who grew up in the activist
1960s have failed to make the case to the new generation that military service should be a civic
responsibility, adding: ``There are young people out there who are hungry for someone to talk to them
about responsibility.''
LA TIMES-WASHINGTON POST-02-16-99 1905EST
King, an unemployed laborer, is the first of three white men charged in the crime to stand trial. He could get the death penalty.
Prosecutor Guy James Gray said that King's tattoos and writings in his apartment show King was an angry racist who wanted to form a hate group and "needed to do something dramatic in order to gain in their warped world respect for his newly formed gang."
The jury consists of 11 whites and one black. Jasper County, from which the jurors were drawn, is 18 percent black.
King's attorney, Haden "Sonny" Cribbs, made no opening statement, reserving the option to do so later. "The evidence, it appears overwhelming," he acknowledged Monday. "But you've got to prove the accused has done the offense."
The sheriff described to jurors what he saw early in his investigation. Rowles said the evidence wasn't consistent with a routine hit-and-run accident: There were no skid marks, and the bloody trail did not run parallel to the tire tracks.
"It was going through my mind - we've got a problem. Somebody's dragging something," Rowles said.
The lighter with three K's forming a triangle was also engraved with the word "Possum," the nickname King picked up while in prison for burglary.
The jurors were given a folder of photos of Byrd's battered remains, which an investigator said were missing a right arm, neck and head.
"It looked like an animal drug down the road," Tommy Robinson testified.
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Ten months after striking their historic peace accord, legislators in the Belfast Assembly voted 77-29 in favor of plans to create a 12-member administration for Northern Ireland.
The verdict followed months of painstaking negotiations and two days of often bruising debate.
As expected, all 40 Catholics and eight "neutral" politicians present voted in favor of the blueprint, which outlines plans for the transfer of some powers from the British government.
More significantly and against expectations, Protestant leader David Trimble, the new government's designated head, kept the support of exactly half the Assembly's 58 pro-British, Protestant members.
Trimble had appeared likely to lose a majority of the Protestant votes, a worrying sign for those trying to make the deal work. Two members of Trimble's Ulster Unionist Party had vowed to defy their leader, but one changed his mind at the last moment.
After the vote, a relieved Trimble told reporters that the next steps required to make the so-called Good Friday peace accord work rested with the outlawed Irish Republican Army. Despite sticking to a July 1997 truce, the IRA has refused to start surrendering its weapons in support of the agreement.
Trimble warned that if the IRA doesn't soon start destroying its weapons stockpiles in cooperation with international inspectors, its allied Sinn Fein party will lose its two administration posts.
The British government, which has directly governed Northern Ireland since 1972, has set March 10 as its preferred date to start handing powers back to the local administration.
"The onus is now on paramilitaries, all of them, to act," Trimble said, referring to the accord's goal of seeing the IRA and outlawed pro-British groups completely disarm by May 2000. "And that must take place between now and the 10th of March. There is nothing more we can do to implement this agreement."
Now that the blueprint has been approved, the British government can press ahead for Northern Ireland's four biggest parties - the Ulster Unionists, Sinn Fein, the hard-line Protestants of the Democratic Unionist Party and the moderate Catholics of the Social Democratic and Labor Party - to nominate their candidates for administration posts.
Unlike Sinn Fein, politicians affiliated with armed pro-British groups did not win enough votes in Northern Ireland to merit a share of power.
Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, who skipped the Belfast vote in favor of lobbying British Prime Minister Tony Blair in London, said the result showed that Trimble's hold over Protestant opinion is "much stronger than we're led to believe."
"I think in many ways it is a very historic vote," Adams said.
Adams called on Trimble to stop raising the demand for IRA disarmament "as an obstacle to progress, rather than what it should be - a goal of the process."
He also said there was no possibility of persuading IRA commanders to discard any of the outlawed group's many tons of hidden weaponry before Sinn Fein politicians are allowed to take office.
Meanwhile yesterday, police put on display what they called their biggest seizure of IRA weaponry in Belfast in the past two years.
Police said they arrested a man in connection with the discovery of an assault rifle, explosives and bomb-making parts in Catholic west Belfast.
With the capture of Abdullah Ocalan, Turkish officials claimed a crushing victory over his rebel movement and hoped for an end to the long conflict that has claimed 37,000 lives and strained relations with neighboring countries.
Kurds, however, were outraged by the arrest of the man seen as the symbol of their drive for autonomy. And they took out their fury on Greece, accusing it of allowing Ocalan to be taken out of hiding from the Greek Embassy in Kenya and transported to Turkey for arrest.
Breaking down doors and smashing windows, Kurdish protesters occupied Greek embassies and consulates in at least 21 European cities, as well as a consulate in Vancouver, Canada. At least three protesters tried to set themselves on fire, while weeping demonstrators waved the red flag of Kurdistan and held up posters of Ocalan.
European governments - particularly Germany, which has the largest Kurdish community in Western Europe - feared they would continue to feel the brunt of Kurdish outrage, since Turkey was expected to put Ocalan on trial for terrorism charges.
Greek and Kenyan diplomats were trapped in occupied embassies in Bonn, Germany, and briefly in Milan, Italy, while police freed hostages when they stormed the Kenyan Embassy in Paris and the Greek consulate in Leipzig, Germany.
In Vienna, Kurds took the Greek ambassador and four others hostage and threatened to burn the Kenyan Embassy if officials didn't open talks with them. In The Hague, Netherlands, they broke into the ambassador's residence and, finding the ambassador wasn't home, took his wife and 8-year-old son and their Philippine maid hostage. All the hostages were reported uninjured.
In the Turkish city of Istanbul, about 1,000 Kurds marched through a Kurdish neighborhood, setting cars on fire.
Ocalan had been on the run for months from a relentless Turkish manhunt, wandering from capital to capital, looking for a country that would give him refuge and serve as a base from which to lead his movement. He was being held yesterday on the tiny, virtually uninhabited island of Imrali in the Marmara Sea, Turkey's private ATV television said.
But the circumstances of his capture remained unclear.
02-17-99
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