Success eludes parties at Kosovo peace talks

No speeches, no celebrations, and the ceremony lasted less than five minutes. Only one of two delegations attended, and an official negotiator refused to witness the signing.

In these inauspicious circumstances, the Rambouillet "peace process" that was meant to give autonomy and an international peacekeeping force to Kosovo ended in Paris yesterday. Barring a dramatic reversal by the Yugoslav President, Mr Slobodan Milosevic, a bombing campaign against Serbia now appears likely.

The ethnic Albanians had promised to sign the 81-page accord and kept their word. Mr Hashim Thaci, the boyish representative of the Kosovo Liberation Army, sat next to Mr Ibrahim Rugova, the long-suffering Kosovar advocate of peaceful opposition to Serbian rule who was overtaken by the guerrilla war last year.

Mr Rexhep Qosja and the newspaper publisher Mr Veton Surroi also signed the four bound copies.

Earlier in the day, the same men had talked by telephone with their defender, the US Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright.

Mr Hubert Vedrine and Mr Robin Cook, the co-chairmen of the talks, were not there to see this awkward conclusion. The French and British foreign and defence ministers had gone to Bonn to meet their German counterparts in an attempt to find a European response to the failure of the talks.

The US and EU negotiators, Mr Christopher Hill and Mr Wolfgang Petritsch, signed the documents as witnesses, while the Russian negotiator, Mr Boris Maiorsky, stood scowling in the background. Mr Maiorsky sympathises with the Serbs, and clashed repeatedly with Mr Hill in press conferences.

Mr Maiorsky's behaviour showed the difficulty of maintaining unity within the six-nation Contact Group. It also contradicted a statement earlier in the day by the Russian Foreign Minister, Mr Igor Ivanov. "We call on Belgrade to sign the political document that has been worked out," he said. "If military actions start in Kosovo, then they will spill over to other countries, either deliberately or accidentally, and the Balkans as a whole will explode."

The Serbian President, Mr Milan Milutinovic, denounced the Kosovo peace plan as a fraud and said Belgrade would never give in to the threat of force. The plan was "an Albanian document" drawn up with US help. Mr Milutinovic said his delegation had signed its own plan on autonomy and was ready to discuss it with the Kosovo Albanians if they wanted.

The US said the crisis had entered a "decisive phase" and that military planning for possible strikes against Serbian targets was complete.