Separatist Albanians yesterday named a team to conduct peace talks in Kosovo as western envoys urged the Yugoslav authorities to join in negotiations to end the conflict.
Ethnic Albanian political leaders were, however, unable to coax representatives of the hard-line Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) into the negotiating team, raising doubts about the prospects of an early settlement.
Six months of fighting between the KLA and Serbian security forces have killed over 500 people and forced more than 200,000 people to flee into the hills. With winter just two months away, talks must start soon to avert a humanitarian disaster.
Mr Ibrahim Rugova, the leader of Kosovo's biggest party, the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), announced his team in the company of the big power Contact Group envoys, representatives of the European Union presidency and the current chairman of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).
"The situation in Kosovo is very dangerous and very grave, so we must move into a negotiating process. We want to have a climate for negotiations that will eventually take the people under protection," Mr Rugova said.
"I have appointed a negotiating team which encloses representatives of the political parties represented in the parliament of Kosovo," he said. The assembly was elected last March in a vote unrecognised by Yugoslav authorities who for a decade have maintained harsh police rule in Kosovo, a province of Serbia whose 1.8 million population is 90 per cent ethnic Albanian.
"We appeal to the Yugoslav side to take this chance and enter into a substantial dialogue," said the Austrian ambassador, Mr Wolfgang Petritsch, representing the EU.
Mr Rugova named five Kosovar party chiefs as negotiators, but will not himself be on the team, a gesture to Western mediators anxious to bypass objections to his lofty leadership style. Western diplomats said Mr Adem Demaqi, a former political prisoner regarded by some as the Nelson Mandela of Kosovo, had rejected a role in negotiations. Earlier, sources at the ethnic Albanian Koha Ditore daily newspaper said the KLA had named Mr Demaqi as its envoy on the talks team.
Mr Rugova's relations with the KLA have been poor to non-existent and the guerrillas, funded by right-wing emigre Albanian groups, have resisted political control. The US special envoy, Mr Chris Hill, told reporters: "With the formation of this team, Albanians are demonstrating their readiness to engage in meaningful negotiation. The other [Yugoslav] side must do the same . . . " Ethnic Albanians demand complete independence from Yugoslavia, while Belgrade is prepared to discuss only as yet undefined forms of autonomy.
Meanwhile, in Tirana, Albania has branded Serb attacks on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo and military violations of its border as intolerable. In its second protest in three days, the Albanian foreign ministry said violations of its border by Serb troops fighting rebels of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) looked like becoming routine.
"Every delay in solving the Kosovo conflict increases the size of the bloodshed and the humanitarian catastrophe there as well as the danger of it spreading to the rest of the region," the foreign ministry statement said.