WASHINGTON - The United States will introduce a set of proposals at the upcoming meeting of the Contact Group in a bid to break the deadlock in Kosovo, a top us official said Monday. Consensus is not the goal of the meeting Wednesday in Rome, the official said. A strong substantive package is the goal. We will not settle for an agreement just for the sake of an agreement.

We will not settle for a lowest common denominator solution, he said. The United States considers that the package cannot be disaggregated, the official said. He warned that if the contact group on the former Yugoslavia Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and the United States rejects the package, Washington would seek to show much more leadership on the political and diplomatic fronts while continuing to work with the contact group.

The official said the package had two components: Positive incentives to encourage Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to begin talks with ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, and an appropriate group of potential punitive measures if Milosevic fails to cooperate. The official said the United States was discouraged by the Contact Group's meeting in Bonn on March 25 during which it granted Belgrade a four-week delay before applying sanctions decided in London March 9.

(AFP)