By William Drozdiak
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, March 12, 1998; Page A19

BRUSSELS, March 11—Faced with the danger of another Balkans war, the NATO allies held emergency talks today with Albania and agreed to increase military and civilian aid to prevent bloodshed in Yugoslavia's Kosovo region from spilling across its borders.

NATO approved a plan to help Albania stem the flow of arms, drugs and guerrilla fighters into Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians -- who make up 90 percent of the population -- have been brutally repressed in recent days by Serbian police. Kosovo is a province of Serbia, the dominant republic in Yugoslavia.

NATO also began mobilizing food, tents and blankets to help Albania cope with a sudden surge of refugees if the violence worsens.

But the United States and its European allies stopped short of embracing an Albanian suggestion to dispatch a NATO-led peacekeeping force to the Albanian-Yugoslav border that would be designed to prevent the conflict in Kosovo from spreading.

Albania's deputy defense minister Perikli Teta said his country would welcome a monitoring force similar to the one now serving under a U.N. mandate in neighboring Macedonia, where 700 American and Scandinavian soldiers are stationed along the Yugoslav border. Teta said the "positive experience" in Macedonia showed how preventive deployments could help defuse tensions in the volatile region.

NATO military analysts, however, concluded there was no imminent threat to Albania's sovereignty that called for an urgent deployment of NATO troops. They reported that in the absence of any massing of troops or equipment near the border, sending a NATO rapid reaction force would be a premature and possibly even provocative gesture that could escalate violence between Serbs and Albanians.

NATO Secretary General Javier Solana is scheduled to visit the Albanian capital of Tirana on Thursday. "The situation in Kosovo is very high on our agenda. . . . Albania has the solidarity of NATO," Solana told reporters.

Today's meeting was called under the Partnership for Peace program that NATO established to bolster military and political ties with Central and Eastern European states that are not in line for early membership in the Western alliance.

The partnership allows those countries who feel their security interests are directly threatened to convoke an emergency meeting with NATO's 16 members.

The United States has proposed that a NATO force composed mainly of European soldiers should replace the U.S. and Scandinavian soldiers in Macedonia when their U.N. mandate expires in August.

If the Kosovo crisis spirals out of control, NATO officials said it was likely that alliance forces would be sent to restore order if only to prevent a regional conflict that could align NATO members Greece and Turkey on opposite sides. Greece is a historical ally of Serbia while Turkey has criticized the Serbian crackdown on Kosovo's ethnic Albanians.

Senior U.S. officials said that with 36,000 troops in the Persian Gulf region poised to strike Iraq and 8,500 still in Bosnia, it is reasonable to assume that the Europeans should shoulder the brunt of NATO deployments in other potential flash points, including Macedonia and Albania.

But European governments also have been apprehensive about getting bogged down in the Balkans.

The 10-nation Western European Union, which professes ambitions to become Europe's chief defense component, refused to get involved in restoring law and order in Albania last year during a wave of civilian unrest.

That mission eventually was undertaken by Italy and a few other European states, but only when they felt their own security interests would be jeopardized by a sudden surge of refugees.