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Around the World

Rebel leaders mixed on peace talks

The division of views raises the prospect that even if a majority of the rebel commanders endorse the agreement in the next two weeks, a militant minority might actively oppose it by refusing to disarm and by threatening any cease-fire.

18 days of negotiations between ethnic Albanians and Serbian government officials in France ended Tuesday with the ethnic Albanians saying they supported the agreement in principle. But they said they needed until March 15 to gauge popular reaction in Kosovo before signing the accord, which would give the province's ethnic Albanian majority political autonomy, but not independence, from Serbia.

Even if most of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian civilians support the proposal, gaining the endorsement of an estimated 10,000 or so guerrillas in the Kosovo Liberation Army - which has been waging a year-long secessionist war - will be critical to the deal's success.

Serbian delegates to the talks returned home to Belgrade and declared victory, saying they had succeeded in keeping a NATO peacekeeping force out of Kosovo. The presence of a NATO force was a key demand of the United States and its Western allies who drafted the peace plan and ran the negotiations.

The achievement of a consensus within the Kosovo Liberation Army may be complicated by what two ethnic Albanian sources described as a "coup" conducted in the midst of the negotiations by the hard line faction that stayed at home in Kosovo and claimed on Monday to have appointed a regional commander, Suleiman Salimi, as the rebel army's new general commander.

The debate within the guerrilla group is expected to intensify when the five rebel members of the 16-person ethnic Albanian delegation to the talks return to Pristina today. They had been slated to arrive yesterday, but the government threatened to deny permission for their flight to land. In the end, U.S. and French officials were able to obtain a promise from the government that its troops would not threaten the rebel commanders.

The chief opponent of the accord is Adem Demaci, a guerrilla political spokesperson who initially opposed the negotiations and encouraged rebel delegates in France to reject the draft accord.

Demaci complained that attaining Kosovo's independence was the only acceptable goal for any political settlement, and he insisted that the agreement contain a clear reference to a future referendum in which Kosovo citizens could vote for independence, according to sources here.

He also emphasized that NATO troops, which under the proposal would deploy in Kosovo once the agreement is signed, could not be trusted to protect ethnic Albanians until independence was achieved, and insisted disarmament of the rebel army would leave ethnic Albanian civilians vulnerable to Serbian attack.

After hearing Demaci's critiques, various rebel commanders telephoned the castle in Rambouillet, France, where the talks were held, to raise objections. These calls had a particular impact on Hashim Thaqi, a guerrilla commander who led the ethnic Albanian delegation.

Over the past weekend, Thaqi attempted to pressure other delegates to oppose the deal, and raised objections up to the last few minutes of the talks, according to Western diplomats and ethnic Albanian sources. His efforts caught them by surprise, because Thaqi's comments earlier in the talks had led the diplomats to conclude he was on board.

"Thaqi became the flavor of the chateau" at Rambouillet, with both Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and chief U.S. envoy Christopher Hill repeatedly saying positive things about him, said one senior U.S. official. In fact, the Clinton administration does not consider Thaqi a lost cause even now, and has invited him to visit Washington for a possible meeting with President Clinton, several sources said.

"There's no question there is a split," said Hill, who witnessed some of the infighting firsthand. But Hill said he expected the group to try to paper over the dispute in coming weeks, and predicted they would conclude the accord enjoyed wide public support in Kosovo. "Everyone understands that if they're not with the Americans on this, they're in real trouble," he said.

61 dead in Chinese air crash off coast

Yang Xiaoping said she had just delivered a tank of cooking fuel to a customer who lives several hundred yards from the crash site. Yang said she wasn't prepared for the scene of fiery destruction she witnessed after rushing to the scene.

"The field was full of pieces from the airplane and the explosion - hands, flesh, all kinds of organs, people's clothes," she said. "No one was alive, not even one person."

Several local residents who had been working in the vicinity of the mustard-root field where the plane hit were injured by flying debris and were receiving medical attention, Yang said. Homes and other buildings in the village were unaffected by the crash, she said.

The disaster was the eighth major airline accident in China in as many years. While much of China's fleet of passenger planes was purchased from American and European companies in the last several years, older models like flight 4509's Russian-built Tupolev 154, are still in use.

China's airline industry has grown swiftly in the last decade to meet the demands of the country's swelling ranks of business travelers and tourists, but management has sometimes lagged behind. Spotty maintenance practices and antiquated air-traffic control equipment have increased the risk of accidents. The government had announced plans Wednesday, before the crash, to invest $1.2 billion to improve China's air traffic control system.

The flight bound for the bustling economic center of Wenzhou took off from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, China's most populous province. An aviation official at the Wenzhou airport said that extra flights had been added to accommodate the flood of people traveling to and from their hometowns for Chinese New Year celebrations, which ended Monday.

02-25-99