U.S. Pledges Emergency Aid for Kosovo

WASHINGTON — The Clinton administration announced Monday that the United States will provide $500 million in short-term humanitarian assistance to help restore civil order in postwar Kosovo.

In a speech here to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger said the U.S. offer will be presented formally at a donors conference in Brussels scheduled for Wednesday for those nations underwriting short-term international assistance for the devastated province.

“We won the war, but it will be a hollow victory if we lose the peace,” Berger said. “Our victory is not complete when thousands, hundreds of thousands, of Kosovars are returning to shattered lives.”

The administration’s pledge, which raises the total U.S. funding for nonmilitary purposes in Kosovo to $800 million since March 1998, makes the United States among the largest providers of emergency recovery funds for the separatist province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s main republic. The 15-member European Union has offered $500 million to $700 million per year over the next three years. EU officials have estimated that it could take up to $30 billion to put Kosovo back together.

At a separate State Department news conference Monday, President Clinton’s special advisor for the Balkans, James Dobbins, said the U.S. money will be used for food, shelter, winterization and other immediate needs including the clearance of mines and ordnance.

U.S. officials stressed that the pledge announced Monday was separate from any commitment the United States might make in support of a far more ambitious, long-term vision to boost the entire region of southeastern Europe with a development project on par with the post-World War II Marshall Plan.

Clinton is scheduled to meet with leaders of more than 35 other nations Friday in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, to launch that project, formally called the Balkans Stability Pact. Berger described the goal of this larger plan as the creation of “a framework for promoting democracy, prosperity and security across the region.”

In a broad assessment of the initial postwar period in Kosovo, Dobbins and a group of State Department specialists indicated that fears of a possible famine have been reduced due to food aid and because many ethnic Albanian refugees returned home early enough to plant crops. It is believed that as many as 1 million ethnic Albanians were driven from their homeland by Yugoslav troops--or fled during NATO’s air campaign to stop the “ethnic cleansing.”

They said that food donors, headed by the United States, had already provided enough food to sustain 80% of the population during the next several months, while there are indications that soon only about 60% of the population will require food aid.

“Fields are being planted, there are harvests coming in, and it looks good,” said Julia Taft, assistant secretary of State for populations, refugees and migration. “There will still be dependency until next summer of some sort, but the [U.N.’s] World Food Program has assured us that the pipeline is good.”

Other U.S. officials said initial reports also indicate that the Serbs may have planted fewer land mines than expected but that ordnance-disposal workers will have their hands full with another task: disarming and clearing an estimated 11,000 unexploded munitions, most of them small bomblets left behind in the wake of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s controversial use of cluster bombs.

“There are impressions of the de-miners going in there that they are not encountering the number of mines that they expected to see,” said Eric Newsom, assistant secretary of State for political and military affairs. “What they are finding is lots of UXOs.”

The term UXO is an abbreviation for unexploded ordnance.

Newsom said the number of unexploded bomblets was based on an estimated 2% failure rate for such ordnance. During the war, NATO’s use of cluster bombs was controversial, largely because of their high failure rate and the fact that their small size and bright color made unexploded bomblets a lure, especially for small children.

The Pentagon has ultimate responsibility for clearing unexploded NATO ordnance in Kosovo, and Newsom said that because weather is likely to halt clearance efforts sometime in October, full-scale removal won’t get underway until spring.

Newsom said 20 people are known to have been killed in an estimated 150 to 170 accidents involving either mines or unexploded ordnance since NATO-led troops entered the province in June. Of those, 30% were children younger than 14.