By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 6, 1998; Page A01

A Yugoslav military drive to force tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians from the southern region of the Serbian province of Kosovo this week has provoked some top Western officials to call for urgent consideration of military intervention to halt the shelling, shootings and expulsions.

With the Clinton administration unable to agree on a policy, the British government yesterday circulated a draft United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing "all necessary measures" to stabilize the region and halt what many Westerners have called brutal ethnic cleansing by Yugoslavia.

The language of the draft British resolution, which invokes Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, is comparable to what the Security Council approved before the West intervened against Iraq in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and before NATO intervened in Bosnia in 1996. Officials said it should deter further brutality against the Kosovars by providing a legal basis for action such as bombardment of Serb forces by NATO planes.

But the officials emphasized that no foreign military action in or over Kosovo is imminent, partly because NATO has not begun planning for it. Also, Security Council approval of the initiative remains highly problematic given Russia's longstanding sympathies for the Yugoslav government's policies, officials said.

The draft resolution would set a deadline for Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to halt all use of force and "take necessary further steps" to achieve a peaceful settlement in Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians constitute 90 percent of the population but Serbs run the government. The rising violence in Kosovo yesterday provoked ethnic Albanian leaders to boycott a scheduled negotiating session with Serbs on the Kosovars' demand for independence.

Several officials said the British resolution is supported by some officials at the National Security Council and the State Department, including Robert S. Gelbard, President Clinton's special representative for the Balkans. He and other top U.S. officials have said publicly that Washington is prepared to invoke new economic sanctions against Yugoslavia, But Gelbard, arguing that Milosevic will respond best to the threat of force, has privately advocated that Washington reiterate a warning to use military force, even unilaterally, to stop killings of ethnic Albanians.

But top policy officials at the Pentagon have long been opposed to further military entanglement in the region, with 8,500 troops already deployed in neighboring Bosnia with what many say is a shaky congressional backing. Their position has been that Washington has no compelling national security interest in Kosovo and that the simmering conflict is unlikely to break into open warfare.

This debate between the "activist" and "reluctant" camps within the administration has shifted slightly in the past two weeks, as satellite reconnaissance photographs and the first-person accounts of scores of refugees confirmed that the Yugoslav army and associated paramilitary units are essentially depopulating an eight-mile-wide swath just north of Kosovo's border with Albania.

Helicopter gunships and artillery reportedly have been used to kill several hundred ethnic Albanians and raze their villages, in tactics similar to those used in March against suspected strongholds of ethnic Albanian extremists waging a guerrilla war against Serb police.

The Yugoslav government has said its latest action is meant to halt the smuggling of arms and infiltration of Albanian extremists into Kosovo. But Gelbard and other U.S. officials say Milosevic's scorched-earth tactics have fomented wider support for the guerrillas.

Yugoslav security forces do not operate in "any other gear except conventional warfare with massive brutality," Gelbard told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday. "We have seen a kind of mutually reinforcing response [between the Army and the guerrillas] . . . ratcheting each other up and in the process drastically damaging" the political standing of moderate Albanian leaders.

Two weeks ago, a group of NATO foreign ministers denounced the Yugoslav actions and pledged to begin more concerted study of military options for dealing with the crisis, including the possible deployment of NATO troops inside Albania to deter border crossings or provide humanitarian relief to refugees.

But a sudden intensification of military action inside Kosovo this week, and the resulting exodus from the province of as many as 10,000 refugees, has left officials on both sides of the Atlantic scrambling. "It's too soon to be talking about military options because that implies they really have been developed," a senior defense official said under questioning by reporters Thursday.

Explaining the latest proposal by London, a British official said, "there has been a hardening of the mood in London, from the top down. . . . The only thing that would change Milosevic's actions would be [military] actions in and over Kosovo itself."

The official, who asked not to be named, said British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook had raised the idea of a tougher approach with Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and that London was also urging NATO's Secretary General Javier Solana to examine various military options "with a good deal of urgency." He also said the issue would be raised next week within the European Union and at meetings of NATO defense ministers and members of the "contact group" concerned with keeping peace in the Balkans.

A senior U.S. official said late yesterday that "we do not have a government position yet" on Britain's draft U.N. resolution. But he added that the U.S. position is "evolving pretty rapidly" and said, "I think we are going to favor this."