ALBANIA (new incidents at Kosova-Albanian border)
Serb forces - threat Albania's territorial integrity

Tirana, 15 December (ARTA) 1700CET --

The Albanian Foreign Ministry informs that the "Yugoslav" bordering post in Koshare, situated about 300 meters deep in the "Yugoslav" territory, opened fire in the direction of the Padesh-Tropojè bordering post and in the direction of the houses in the Padesh village, on 11 December, at around 1940CET. Consequently, one of the shells has fallen in the house of an Albanian citizen, Rexhep Ahmeti.

The same day, at around 2000CET, a few artillery shells, launched from Mali i Gllavès-Padesh, have fallen 300-400 meters deep in the Albanian territory. Similar means of provocation of the "Yugoslav" military forces, also continued on Sunday, on 13 December, at around 1830CET, again in the Padesh-Tropojè region, in which case, artillery fire was aimed at the houses in the village of Padesh. Rexhep Ahmeti

Mystery ailment kills children Three Die in Kosovo
Juliette Terzieff National Post

Classmates, neighbours and a host of heavily armed Kosovo Liberation Army fighters gathered yesterday to bid farewell to two 7-year-olds, Arben Hoti and Arieta Berisha, and 11-year old Driljan Hoti, all struck down by a mysterious illness. Mourners were forced to duck for cover in mud and snow-covered ground when firing rang out over the funeral services.

"They were fine yesterday, out in the fields playing with their friends," remembered the children's uncle, a KLA fighter who wouldn't give his name.

Shortly after the family's evening meal, the children fell ill with 40-degree fevers and convulsions, but gunfire nearby kept family members from seeking medical help. "It was awful. We tried cold water, we tried to make them throw up, and all the time we looked out the window at the car knowing we dare not try to leave the village," said the uncle. The children died within hours, all at about 2 a.m. yesterday.

Residents here stay indoors after dark for fear of becoming part of a growing statistic of civilians killed since last February.

KLA patrols surrounded the more than 200 people at the service, simultaneously bowing their heads out of respect and keeping a wary eye on the road leading to nearby Malishevo, where about 100 Serb police are garrisoned. Two hoja, or prayer leaders led the group in chants and prayers.

Machinegun fire ripped through the air leading guests to depart hastily.

"We get no peace, not even on such an occasion," complained Besim, a local teacher who counted the two boys among his students. Several civilians and 16 KLA fighters gathered in a house nearby that serves as a camp for the rebel army to finish saying their goodbyes. Huddled around a wood-burning stove all hung their heads as Besim spoke quietly. "This is their doing, the Serbs,'' he said. "They created this situation by fostering hate and now innocent children are dying."

Besim remembered the boys as good students who were kind-hearted though traumatized by recent experiences. Like everyone in Caralluka, the Hoti family was forced to leave the village when Yugoslav forces came in during June and returned only recently to find their home burned. "Arben was the type who would share anything with his classmates. He always wanted to help out. "

The Malishevo area remains particularly tense thanks to the continued police presence despite an October ceasefire agreement that is largely holding throughout Kosovo. "Before March, there were no police in this area at all. How is anyone supposed to feel secure when we can see them riding around in their armoured vehicles,"queried Muhammed Rasniqi, village co-ordinator in Banya, four kilometres from the police positions. "The ceasefire means nothing when people are too afraid to leave their homes with dying children."

Doctors of the World, a humanitarian organization operating here, was in Banya yesterday to administer to the sick mere hours after the children died.

"It's heartbreakingly sad that we're here now, so soon afterwards," said one doctor who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "Unfortunately, we simply can not be everywhere we are needed."


Kosovo peace still on track, Holbrooke says

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP) - U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke warned Kosovo's warring factions that they were ``playing with dynamite'' yesterday - a day after two shootouts left 37 people dead.

Arriving in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, Holbrooke said the latest bloodshed ``will not in any way deter the international community'' from working for peace in the region.

Holbrooke brokered an Oct. 12 agreement to end the fighting in Kosovo, a province in Serbia, Yugoslavia's dominant republic. Kosovo's ethnic Albanians make up more than 90 percent of its 2 million residents, and most favor independence from Serbia.

The October deal averted threatened NATO airstrikes and bought time for diplomats to try to work out a political settlement for Kosovo.

Holbrooke said NATO still has its airstrike orders in place and repeated that progress toward a peaceful settlement ``must be made because we are concerned that the fighting may flare up.''

``We want to tell all the people involved that they are playing with dynamite,'' he said.

He later traveled to the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade for talks with President Slobodan Milosevic.

Before meeting Milosevic, Holbrooke said that ``progress, very little, but progress'' had been made in trying to find a negotiated solution.

``The important thing to me is that both sides are engaged'' in indirect negotiations through U.S. envoys, Holbrooke told reporters.

On Monday, Yugoslav soldiers killed 31 ethnic Albanian separatists in a five-hour gunbattle near the border with Albania. The guerrillas use Albania as a sanctuary and conduit for arms.

Yesterday, detonations and shots were heard from the area, which has been sealed off by Yugoslav forces. Residents said the army sent in armored vehicles and at least one helicopter and were barring anyone from entering.

A peace monitor, who declined to be named, said the blockage violated the 2-month-old peace agreement.

Monitors who had hiked to the site Monday said they saw bodies, all wearing camouflage uniforms, lying within a few hundred yards of the border. They said they appeared to be Kosovo Liberation Army rebels.

Later Monday, at least six Serbs, including five teen-agers, were killed in the western Kosovo town of Pec when assailants opened fire in a bar.

All Serb schools in Pec remained closed yesterday to protest the killings, which were blamed on ethnic Albanian rebels.

In Washington, State Department spokesman James Foley assailed the killings of both the ethnic Albanians and the Serb teen-agers.

``We condemn in the strongest possible terms this wanton murder of innocent civilians,'' he said. ``Actions like this can only lead to a spiral of retribution that will make reaching a settlement for the region all the more difficult.''


U.S. envoy issues new warning after 37 are slain in Kosovo

December 16, 1998

BY DUSAN STOJANOVIC Associated Press

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke warned Kosovo's warring factions Tuesday, a day after two shoot-outs left 37 people dead, that they are "playing with dynamite."

Holbrooke said on arrival in Pristina, the capital of the Albanian-majority Serbian province, that the latest bloodshed "will not in any way deter the international community" from working for peace in the region.

Holbrooke brokered an Oct. 12 agreement to end the fighting in Kosovo, a province of Yugoslavia's dominant republic of Serbia where ethnic Albanians make up 90 percent of the two million residents.

The deal averted threatened NATO air strikes and bought time for diplomats to try to work out an agreement on the future of the province where ethnic Albanians are seeking independence.

Later Tuesday, Holbrooke traveled to the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade for talks with President Slobodan Milosevic.

Holbrooke returned to the region a day after Yugoslav soldiers killed 31 ethnic Albanian separatists in a five-hour gun battle near the border with Albania. The guerrillas use Albania as a sanctuary and conduit for arms.

Later Monday, at least six Serbs, including five teenagers, were killed in the western Kosovo town of Pec when assailants opened fire in a bar.

All Serb schools in Pec remained closed Tuesday to protest the killings, which were blamed on ethnic Albanian rebels.

Alluding to Monday's shootings, Holbrooke said, "We want to tell all the people involved that they are playing with dynamite."

On Tuesday, detonations and shots were heard from the border area, which has been sealed by Yugoslav forces. Area residents said the army sent armored vehicles and one helicopter into the region and barred anyone from entering.

A peace verifier, who declined to be named, said denying monitors access to the scene violates the two-month-old agreement, and that a formal protest will be filed.

Verifiers who had hiked to the site on Monday said they saw bodies, all wearing camouflage uniforms, lying within a few hundred yards of the border. They said they appeared to be Kosovo Liberation Army rebels.

Before going into the meeting with Milosevic, Holbrooke said that "progress -- very little, but progress" was made in trying to find a negotiated solution to the Kosovo conflict.

"The important thing to me is that both sides are engaged" in indirect negotiations through U.S. envoys, Holbrooke told reporters.

U.S.-led diplomatic efforts appear stalled, however, raising fears that the fighting could worsen.

Dozens of people on both sides have been killed since the October agreement. That pact had sought to end the violence after Milosevic launched a crackdown on separatist rebels in February that killed hundreds and left an estimated 300,000 homeless.


Crumbling Of Kosovo Truce Alarms NATO, EU

FoxNews 8.11 a.m. ET (1311 GMT) December 15, 1998

MADRID — Fearing the breakdown of Kosovo's fragile cease-fire, NATO and the European Union Tuesday urged both sides to back away from fresh clashes and begin peace negotiations.

Their move followed the killing by Yugoslav army forces of 31 ethnic Albanian guerrillas trying to infiltrate troubled Kosovo province Monday. It was the heaviest death toll there since the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) declared a unilateral truce in October and Yugoslavia withdrew some troops under threat of NATO air strikes.

"I condemn the actions that have taken place in the last few days, in the last few hours, and I call on both sides to show restraint,'' NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana told Reuters at the start of a conference on Bosnia in Madrid.

Austrian Foreign Minister Wolfgang Schuessel, current president of the 15-member European Union, said the apparent KLA infiltration bid was particularly alarming.

"This indicates the situation is worsening,'' he said.

"I think the reasons for that are, on the one hand, there is not enough withdrawal on the Serbian-Yugoslav side. But on the other hand you have to admit that there is a vacuum and the (KLA) are filling that vacuum.''

Schuessel added: "This is absolutely irresponsible and will damage the prospects of peace.

"Therefore, we are strongly committed to encourage the Kosova Albanians to finally start negotiations ...this is the important thing.''

According to a military assessment by NATO, Kosovo has a window of a couple of months for political negotiations to take hold and avert a resumption of fighting. The latest clash suggests even that tight timeframe may be too optimistic.

Solana said the upsurge of violence raised concern for the safety of 2,000 unarmed observers who will be fully deployed by mid-January in the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM), led by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

U.S. Balkans envoy Richard Holbrooke, who secured the troop withdrawal pledge from Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, was returning to Belgrade Tuesday to stress that he must comply fully with international demands.

Milosevic asserted in a recent interview that NATO's ''extraction force,'' currently deploying in northern Macedonia next to the southern border of Kosovo, would be treated as an aggressor if it crossed into Yugoslav territory.

NATO says Milosevic knows very well he agreed to the force, which is intended to come to the rescue of KVM teams who get into trouble or are threatened. The force, led by French helicopter troops, is also authorized by the United Nations.

"I can tell you that the extraction force is well defined. It is within the mandate of the U.N. Security Council, and it will do what it is supposed to do — extract verifiers if they are having problems,'' Solana said.

The standoff between Belgrade and the major powers was all too familiar to many participants at the Bosnia Peace Implementation Council, where speakers warned of a make-or-break year to establish self-sustaining, multi-ethnic democracy or give in to the segregation sought by nationalist hard-liners.

Echoing a recent theme from Washington, Bosnian Muslim minister Haris Silajdzic said all of the problems of ex-Yugoslavia stemmed from the same source — President Milosevic. But he questioned the U.S. engagement of Belgrade.

"Why is the regime in Belgrade so sacred that whenever they attack somebody, everybody goes there to talk to them?'' he asked.

His Life in Ruins, Kosovo Trader Puts Faith in Guns

Balkans: Amid a tattered truce and fear of Serbian attack, many of the province's ethnic Albanians still nurture hopes of independence.

By PAUL WATSON, Times Staff Writer

LAUSA, Yugoslavia--Haxhi Gecaj was a man of wealth, a trader and village intellectual who taught the Kosovo farmers who respected him the righteous ideals of peaceful resistance.

But Gecaj's family property--the three-story house with its 24 rooms full of furniture and appliances, the four cars, the four-wheel-drive truck, the 32,000 pounds of wheat and flour--is now gone, all of it destroyed or stolen by Serbian security forces. The walls of his house are black with soot from the fire that gutted the building after the Serbs' mortar bombs smashed through the red-tiled roof. Somehow, the satellite TV dish survived. So did two small corner rooms on the top floor. Gecaj has moved back into them with his wife and their three children, ages 5 months to 7 years, and a grandmother. "It's better to live in one room in your own home than as a guest anywhere else," said Gecaj, who shares a small room with five men, all brothers or comrades, who were sitting on three beds amid a gray haze of cigarette smoke. The women and children live in the adjacent room. With his house and business in ruins, Gecaj has little left to lose and, in his eyes, much to gain if he keeps fighting for what he believes in. That is why an AK-47 assault rifle hangs above his bed. It's in a row of five, one of which is mounted with a scope. A Kalashnikov rifle is propped up on the other side of the room. Camouflage fatigues hang on the far wall. "In case of attack, we must protect ourselves," Gecaj said as he sat beside a wood-burning stove and talked about how a rich trader became a guerrilla fighter in a war for independence. Kosovo is part of Serbia, the dominant republic in what remains of Yugoslavia, and Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has repeatedly said he will never let it break away. About 90% of Kosovo's people are ethnic Albanians, who voted for independence in an unofficial 1991 referendum. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization's threat this fall to bomb Serbian targets brought a tentative peace to Kosovo, but isolated clashes continue, and NATO commanders warn that diplomats have only a few months at most to avert more war. Yugoslav army troops fought a five-hour battle with ethnic Albanian guerrillas early Monday, killing 31 and wounding 12 near Gorozup and Liken, about 45 miles southwest of the provincial capital, Pristina, the state-run Serbian Media Center reported. It was the most serious battle since U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke brokered the tentative peace deal with Milosevic in mid-October. The ethnic Albanian casualties in the fighting early Monday were dressed in uniforms of the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, and were smuggling weapons into the territory, according to the government's account, which did not list any casualties on the Serbian side. The ethnic Albanians' Kosovo Information Center confirmed the clashes and said heavy explosions were heard from two villages sealed off by Serbian security forces. Amid escalating tensions, U.S. envoy Christopher Hill is trying to negotiate a peace agreement that would keep Kosovo in Serbia, but both sides have rejected each draft accord he has proposed. Ethnic Albanian negotiators have suggested that they would accept an interim deal that would delay a decision on Kosovo's status for three years, but only if Kosovo becomes the third republic in Yugoslavia's federation. They also insist that Kosovo's people must be allowed to choose in an official referendum between staying in Yugoslavia and going it alone. An eight-month Serbian offensive that ended in October destroyed thousands of homes and forced about 250,000 people to flee, but ethnic Albanians have not dropped their demand for independence. Their leaders, including Ibrahim Rugova, have repeated that position to Hill, despite a clear message from Western governments that they don't want Kosovo to separate from Serbia. Rugova led years of peaceful resistance to the Serbs but this year has been forced to accept the armed struggle. Before war broke out in late February, Gecaj thought peaceful protest was the right path to freedom. He was a local leader of the struggle as the head of Rugova's Democratic Alliance of Kosovo. Gecaj started to question his ideals after Serbian police killed a teacher in Lausa on Nov. 27, 1997, apparently in retaliation for an attack on police trying to enforce tax collection in a nearby village. At the teacher's funeral the next day, members of what was then a small group of fighters calling itself the Kosovo Liberation Army appeared in public for the first time. One of Gecaj's brothers had been a student of the teacher as a child, and he had come back from Germany to pay his respects. Before long, the Gecaj clan was a core cell in the KLA. The seven Gecaj brothers and their families, 35 people in all, lived in four houses in a large walled compound near the town of Srbica, about 20 miles northwest of Pristina. Gecaj thinks that Serbian paramilitary police were well informed and that they singled out the family compound as a target. "You know that the main cell of a movement is always the intellectuals, so they knew what they were doing," he said. The war spread until large swaths of Kosovo were crumbling and in flames, but few places suffered as much as Lausa. The area is so badly damaged that only a dozen families out of a prewar population of 4,600 have come back. Fear keeps some people away. Serbian police still patrol the region, Gecaj said. They maintain a post just a few minutes' walk from Gecaj's house. "Every day, we have police moving through the middle of town," he said. With two enemy forces so close, the slightest spark could reignite Kosovo's war. Since Gecaj's base is also his home, his three children may be living on the front line once more, this time in a virtual ghost town.

Kosovo a tinderbox of fear and tension (Detroit News)

Serbs' occupation of Albanian outpost seen as likely flashpoint
By Dave Carpenter / Associated Press


MALISEVO, Yugoslavia -- A heavy silence pervades the dead zone at the center of Kosovo's suspended war, where only packs of wild dogs and fear thrive. Suddenly a lone figure in a black beret appears in the rubble of the decimated ghost town, tracked intently by a gunman in blue on a distant rooftop. The ethnic Albanian refugee feels the Serb sniper's gaze but averts his eyes as he trudges through a nightmarish landscape of charred, smashed buildings. "Even if they kill me, I had to see my hometown again," says Adem Mazreku, 72, gesturing to the police base where a tank barrel aims menacingly at the town. "But as long as they are here, we won't come back." Malisevo, a key strategic town in the Drenica region that is the heartland of Kosovo's separatist rebels, has become a focal point of unsuccessful diplomacy to settle the conflict in the Serbian province. The UN refugee agency says it is a "symbol of fear" among tens of thousands of displaced people -- a stark reminder that all is not well in Kosovo despite the lack of fighting. Despite a two-month-old truce, a Serb-Albanian standoff over the eerie town remains unresolved. Many fear it will provide the spark to ignite new fighting across Kosovo by spring. Located 25 miles southwest of the capital Pristina, Malisevo was the main stronghold of the Kosovo Liberation Army when Serbian police overran it in July, sending 3,000 residents fleeing ahead of a scorched-earth offensive. Diplomats and humanitarian officials have pressed Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw police from their fortress in order to facilitate the ethnic Albanians' return to their homes. But Milosevic has refused. Daily patrols of Serb armored vehicles and truckloads of policemen through area villages send children scurrying. The Serbs maintain the police contingent is necessary to prevent the KLA from reclaiming Malisevo. They reject the rebels' demand that they withdraw -- and international diplomats acknowledge that their presence does not violate the October agreement, as the guerrillas claim. "Police will remain stationed in Malisevo regardless of the KLA's request," said a senior police official. "Nowhere in the world should police withdraw on terrorists' demand." Barely two miles away, KLA fighters walk around openly in the village of Dragobilje. "These activities must stop," says Daja Cet, a stern-faced local KLA commander. "Only Albanians live in this area. Their patrols are a provocation." The potential for explosive incidents is so high that international monitors have begun accompanying police on their rounds, producing the unlikely sight of U.S. armored cars leading Serb convoys. In the meantime, few dare linger in Malisevo. Neighboring villages were buzzing with alarm in recent days after reports that a Serb sniper fired from the police station at two people who were trying to move out of their damaged homes. Still, every day a handful of people cautiously make their way through the wreckage to visit their former homes. For many, it is a matter not of curiosity but desperation. Sevdije Mazreku, 22, a neighbor of Adem but no relation, passes him on her way into town and inquires about the danger. Eight months pregnant with her fourth child, she has made the long walk from another village in order to fetch belongings left behind in panic last summer. "I'm very afraid, but I had to come back," she says. "I have no other way to get clothes for my children." At mention of her coming baby, she smiles plaintively. "Who can be happy giving birth to a baby in the middle of a war without the basic necessities," she asks.