To the extent that optimism and the Balkans can ever be used in the same sentence, there were reasons for the world to look toward the upcoming peace talks between Serbia and the Kosovo rebels with some measure of hope.

NATO — not just the United States this time — is resolute. There is a firm deadline of Feb. 19 for the two belligerents to cease fire, with a credible threat of force to back it up. There is a clear peace plan to be negotiated with an enforced three-year separation to give it a chance to work. Russia, although not yet supporting NATO military intervention, at last concedes that the horror must stop.

So it seems inevitable, in keeping with the region’s centuries-long role as one of the world’s great festering wounds, that there would be a snag. Yugoslav President Slobadan Milosevic, the Serbian dictator/ethnic cleanser, has made it clear for weeks that he will not attend the talks that begin Saturday in a chateau outside Paris. His concern that he will be arrested as a war criminal is entirely justified paranoia.

Now, the leaders of the Kosovo Albanian rebels say they will not participate. There is no point, they say, in negotiating with Milosevic, either in person or through his underlings. With the Serb massacre two weeks ago of the entire Kosovan village of Racak still fresh, their pessimism is warranted.

The prospect of conducting negotiations without the principals would seem pointless if there were something to negotiate. For now, there is not. NATO must force the Serbian troops to withdraw from Kosovo immediately. The Kosovars must have, at minimum, the three-year period of freedom from any Serbian presence if any semblance of a society is to arise from the devastation Milosevec has wrought. Whether Kosovo should be a sovereign nation or a province of a rebuilt Yugoslavia is a political matter that cannot be settled until humanity is restored.

Should Feb. 19 find the Serbs and the Kosovo Liberation Army still engaged, NATO officials believe they can conduct the airstrikes with the precision that will punish the combatants without harming civilians. They also believe they can put a peacekeeping force on the ground without becoming mired in a war that cannot be won. But beyond the military tactics lies the question of a political strategy to deal with Milosevec.

Milosevec is, in the realm of the tyrant, a master manipulator with (outside of Iraq and North Korea) no equal. He slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Bosnians and got away with it. He appeared to cave in to the threat of airstrikes in Kosovo last fall, reneged on his promise to withdraw, and got away with it. At a time when the rest of Europe prospers, he has led Yugoslavia first to economic collapse and now to the brink of civil war. His refusal to negotiate notwithstanding, NATO must not let him get away with that if there is to be any hope for Kosovo.