[ALBSA-Info] {QIKSH «ALBEUROPA»} NEWS: More Clashes in Yugoslavia (AP, Feb. 19, 2001)

[Wolfgang Plarre]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010219/aponline110928_000.htm

More Clashes in Yugoslavia 

By Dragan Ilic
Associated Press Writer
Monday, Feb. 19, 2001; 11:09 a.m. EST

BUJANOVAC, Yugoslavia -- Clashes between ethnic Albanian rebels and
Serbian security forces flared Monday in a tense southern region
bordering Kosovo, a day after an explosion ripped through a police van
killing three Serb officers. 
    The two-hour exchanges of machine-gun and mortar fire early Monday
centered on the village of Lucane, on the edge of a three-mile-wide
buffer zone between Kosovo and the rest of Serbia, and over the
strategic Saint Ilija hill in the north. No casualties were immediately
reported. 
    Yugoslavia blamed the latest attacks on Kosovo's ethnic Albanian
militants, who denied responsibility. The ethnic Albanians said one of
their commanders was killed by Serb police late Sunday in Lucane. 
    The new fighting further fueled tensions in the region. A bus
bombing killed at least seven Serb civilians Friday inside Kosovo. 
    With violence mounting, top leaders of Yugoslavia and Serbia, its
largest republic, met late Sunday, and President Vojislav Kostunica's
office released a statement pledging a "series of measures against
terrorism" in the area. 
    "That means that we'll no longer allow that our troops and citizens
be moving targets for Albanian terrorists," Serbia's Interior Minister
Zoran Zivkovic said, adding that the actions by Albanian extremists were
not a fight for democracy, but "plain terrorism." 
    Yugoslavia also criticized NATO-led peacekeepers in Kosovo and urged
them to act immediately to keep the guerrillas out of the buffer zone,
which they have used to stage attacks on Serbian police and Yugoslav
army troops. 
    The militants want the zone to be united with Kosovo as part of a
push for independence for the southern Serbian province, run by the
United Nations and NATO-led peacekeepers since June 1999, when
Yugoslavia halted its crackdown on the Albanian majority after a NATO
bombing campaign. 
    Friday's bombing of a bus carrying Serbs to visit the graves of
relatives in Kosovo killed at least seven people and wounded 43, making
it the deadliest attack in the province since 14 Serb farmers were
machine-gunned to death while tilling their fields in July 1999. 
    The three Serb policemen died Sunday when their van was demolished
by what were believed to be antitank mines on a road near Lucane, a
southern Serbian village just outside the buffer zone. 
    The zone was created to prevent what officials feared would be
clashes between Serbian forces and the NATO-led peacekeepers patrolling
Kosovo under the 1999 peace deal for the province. 
    Only lightly armed Serbian police are allowed to enter the zone, and
ethnic Albanian militants have taken control of most of the strip in
recent months.
    Yugoslav authorities say the peacekeepers have failed to fulfill a
mandate to keep the ethnic Albanian militants and their weapons out of
the buffer zone. 
    Yugoslav Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic appealed Sunday to NATO
Secretary General Lord Robertson to ensure that the peacekeeping force
immediately seals Kosovo's boundary with Serbia. 
    But Robertson would not go that far. 
    "I deplore the escalation of the violence in southern Serbia and
urge the leadership of both sides to exercise maximum restraint," he
said in a statement. "The problems in the region cannot be solved by
violence - they can only be settled through direct negotiations between
the parties." 
    Since November, the militants have attacked Serbian police inside
the zone and have sometimes launched attacks across the line into the
rest of Serbia. The explosion Sunday took place about 200 yards outside
the zone. 
    Serbian police came under fire while trying to pull the victims of
the explosion out of the wrecked police vehicle, a government statement
said. No policemen were injured by the gunfire. 
    Jonuz Musliu, the political officer of the Liberation Army of
Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac, denied the group was behind the
policemen's deaths and condemned the bus bombing. 
    Tens of thousands of Serbs have fled their homes in Kosovo since the
United Nations and NATO took over, fearing reprisals from ethnic
Albanians. 

© Copyright 2001 The Associated Press


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