[ALBSA-Info] Russian army hawk wants Kosovo security crackdown

[Gazhebo at aol.com]

Russian army hawk wants Kosovo security crackdown
  
MOSCOW, Feb 19 (Reuters) - A leading Russian military hawk said on Monday 
international peacekeeping forces in Kosovo must intensify efforts to quell 
escalating violence in Yugoslavia's ethnic Albanian-dominated southern 
province. 

Colonel-General Leonid Ivashov, head of the military's foreign relations 
department, spoke out on the same day as Yugoslav Interior Minister Zoran 
Zivkovic told NATO-led peacekeepers to crack down on an organised terror 
campaign by ethnic Albanian extremists. 

"It is essential to take decisive action to disarm and isolate extremist 
groups in southern Serbia," Itar-Tass news agency quoted Ivashov as saying in 
the aftermath of a bus bomb last Friday which killed at least ten Serbs. 

"Albanian extremists are in essence throwing down the gauntlet not only to 
Serbia and Yugoslavia but to the international presence regulating the 
situation in Kosovo." 

Ivashov echoed Zivkovic's call for the KFOR peacekeeping force to take a 
tougher line with armed ethnic Albanians operating in a buffer zone along the 
Serbian side of the boundary. Belgrade is forbidden from deploying 
heavily-armed forces in the area. 

"This is an obvious challenge and it must be answered," Ivashov said of 
Friday's bomb attack. "Further delay to this process and the vagueness of 
KFOR's actions only encourages the separatists." 

Russia vocally supported Serbia during NATO's 1999 bombing campaign that 
ended with Kosovo becoming a de facto international protectorate, and has 
frequently called for more protection for the province's Serb minority. 

Russia is likely to press NATO Secretary General George Robertson on the 
issue when he visits Moscow this week.