http://sg.dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/world/article.html?s=singapore/headlines\
/001129/world/afp/KFOR_fighting_to_reduce_tension_in_southern_Serbia__Washington\
.html

Wednesday, November 29 6:11 AM SGT

KFOR fighting to reduce tension in southern Serbia: Washington

WASHINGTON, Nov 28 (AFP) -

NATO's multinational peacekeeping force for Kosovo (KFOR) is talking with both
Albanians and
Yugoslavs in an effort to reduce tensions in southern Serbia, a US official said
Tuesday.

"The NATO-led Kosovo force continues its dialogue with both the Albanian and the
Yugoslav
leaderships in order to further reduce tensions there," said State Department
spokesman Richard
Boucher.

"The United States is actively engaged with our allies, with Albanian leaders in
Kosovo and
elsewhere in the valley to stop the violence in the Presevo Valley region," he
added.

But he stopped short of confirming a Monday night cease-fire between Belgrade
and Albanian
separatists, announced earlier Tuesday by a top KFOR official who requested
anonymity.

"There is no reported fighting today between Albanian militants or Serbian
security forces in the
Presevo Valley region in Serbia," he said.

US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, on a recent trip to Vienna, Austria,
to attend an
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), broached the subject
with Russian,
French, German and Greek representatives, he added.

Albright also had the chance, on the sidelines of the meeting, to speak for five
or 10 minutes with the
Yugoslav foreign minister.

"They had a very brief but direct discussion about the situation in Kosovo and,
particularly, in this
area, agreeing that it was a concern to both of them," Boucher said.

He added that Belgrade was not pushing to have its forces enter into the
five-kilometer-wide
(3.7-mile) demilitarized zone between the provinces of Kosovo and Serbia, where
most of last
week's fighting took place.

"The way the rules read now is that the Yugoslav forces won't go in. And what we
heard from the
Yugoslavs, I think publicly, as well as in our meetings, is that they did not
intend to enter the buffer
zone."

According to a senior North Atlantic Treaty Organization official on Tuesday,
Yugoslav authorities
and ethnic Albanian separatists have agreed on an indefinite cease-fire
following a week of clashes
provoked by a rebel offensive over the Kosovo border in Serbia proper.

The official said he had helped broker the accord between the Yugoslav
authorities and the
guerrillas, who have dug in inside a demilitarized buffer zone on the Serbian
side of the boundary.

Both parties had "agreed to an indefinite cease-fire and agreed to resolve the
situation peacefully,"
the official, who asked not to be named, told reporters in Pristina.

Last week, the rebels captured Konculj after killing three members of a lightly
armed police
detachment, linking up two groups of villages already under their control and
cutting the road
between Bujanovac, a major town in the Presevo Valley, and the UN-run province
of Kosovo.

The Presevo Valley, like Kosovo, has a predominantly ethnic Albanian population.
Its western edge
falls in the buffer zone, but it also extends into areas under full Yugoslav
control.

In January, the self-proclaimed Liberation Army of Presevo, Medveda and
Bujanovac (UCPMB)
declared an independence struggle, basing itself in the Ground Safety Zone
(GSZ), from which both
NATO troops based in Kosovo and the Yugoslav army are forbidden to enter.