Yugoslav Army

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- The growing financial ties between China and Yugoslavia appear to be extending the life of President Slobodan Milosevics regime and undermining Western efforts to limit his access to hard currency. Last December, $300 million was transferred from bank accounts in China to Serbia, enabling the government in Belgrade to avert a financial crisis. Economists believe the amount should be enough to forestall hyperinflation for six months and allow the government to pay pensions as well as military and police salaries for several months.

BRUSSELS, Belgium - On his first visit to NATO headquarters as secretary of state, Colin L. Powell said yesterday that the United States agreed in principle to a "phased and conditioned" return of the Yugoslav army to a buffer zone in southern Serbia. The five-mile zone, which is adjacent to where American troops are stationed inside Kosovo, has become a major flash point between armed Albanian militants and local Serbs. The United States and NATO are concerned that the estimated 1,000 Albanians in the zone could grow into a full-blown insurgency and lead to fighting between soldiers of the Yugoslav army and the Albanian militants.

JANEZ DRNOVSEK, 57 Former president of Slovenia Former President Janez Drnovsek, who helped lead Slovenia to independence from Yugoslavia and later enthralled many of his countrymen by adopting a New Age lifestyle, died yesterday, his office said. Mild-mannered but resolute, Mr. Drnovsek became a political icon in part for working to keep violence at a minimum when Slovenia gained independence in 1991. He later led the country to European Union and NATO membership. In recent years, as he battled cancer, he made a radical transformation to a holistic lifestyle and wrote several New Age-influenced books.

AFTER 17 days and a partial agreement in the Kosovo negotiations, nothing is assured.If the Yugoslav army and Albanian rebels don't renew fighting before the March 15 resumption of negotiations in France; if President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia accepts a NATO peace-keeping force in Kosovo; if Albanian extremists settle without a guarantee of sovereignty, and if Congress allows a few thousand U.S. troops among 30,000 NATO troops on the ground -- then the...

KRAGUJEVAC, Yugoslavia -- Milenko Vesnic was ready to die for the right to build Yugo cars.The 53-year-old assembly-line foreman said he was among scores of laborers who stood by the gates of the vast Zastava factory last month, daring NATO to bomb what was once Yugoslavia's industrial crown jewel.And NATO struck. Twice.Now, Zastava is a wreck and Vesnic, along with thousands of other employees, has little to do but look at the ruins."If we lose the factory, we lose everything," Vesnic said.

GENEVA -- A raging battle between Serbs and Croats in a United Nations-protected area near the Adriatic Sea derailed Western-mediated peace talks in Geneva yesterday and threatened to plunge the remains of Yugoslavia into a fiercer and deadlier phase of war.In violation of a promise to halt a 3-day-old military aggression, Croatian government troops infiltrated several miles into Serb-occupied territory near the coast and continued to fight along a 65-mile...

ALL EUROPE has a stake in the war in Kosovo, to see that it does not create a wider war, does not compound atrocities, does not become a clash of Serbia against Albania or of Christendom against Islam.The trouble is that warring between Serbia's strong man, Slobodan Milosevic, and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) of ethnic Albanian rebels threatens to provoke those things.NATO's ultimatum to the two sides Thursday was a triumph for U.S. diplomacy. The alliance is committed to imposing a political settlement, giving neither side all it seeks through terror.

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- Despite a slight letup in fighting yesterday, Western medical volunteers decided that conditions around the besieged city of Vukovar remained too dangerous to risk a second mercy mission to evacuate wounded from the front lines of Yugoslavia's civil war.The international aid organization Doctors Without Borders managed to rescue 109 seriously injured patients after a harrowing, 13-hour journey through the Serb-Croat war zone from...

The Black Sea fleet was the part of the Soviet navy that shadowed the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Eastern Mediterranean. Obsolete as it is, the fleet is capable of doing a powerful amount of harm, some of it nuclear. But with the lesson of the Yugoslav army in view, the Black Sea fleet is a menace particularly to the two countries that claim it, Russia and Ukraine. One of the things the 300-vessel armada has the capability to do is blow itself out of the water.Russia and Ukraine have threatened to destroy the Commonwealth of Independent States in their rival claims on the fleet, tied to their rival claims on the Crimean peninsula.

In respite, Yugoslavia's cooler heads (if any) have a chance to prevail. Now that the federal army has proclaimed victory and a cease-fire in its two-day war with secessionist Slovenia, the federal presidency can seek compromise.But Yugoslavia's European neighbors should not leave that to chance and Yugoslav passions. They are right to pursue the opportunity for good works provided by the recently strengthened Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE).Austria and Italy invoked use of the Conflict Prevention Center in Vienna, set up by the CSCE summit last November.