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Saturday, December 16 9:30 PM SGT

Serb and Yugoslav governments discuss crisis in southern Serbia

BUJANOVAC, Yugoslavia, Dec 16 (AFP) -

Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica flew into this southern Serbian town
Saturday for top-level
talks with Serb and Yugoslav leaders on tackling Albanian rebel violence in the
region.

Kostunica and the prime ministers of both governments, Milomir Minic and Zoran
Zizic, met behind
close doors to discuss, among other things, setting up a coordinating group to
better monitor the
conflict near the Kosovo border.

The news agency Tanjug said the governments would adopt a declaration on the
crisis, and
particularly on the demilitarized zone in the region around Presevo, Medvedja
and Bujanovac.

The self-proclaimed Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac (UCPMB),
which
claims the three towns of that name, has set up bases in the five kilometre
(three mile) buffer zone on
the Serbian side of the administrative boundary with Kosovo.

They want the region, with its large ethnic Albanian population, to be grafted
on to breakaway
Kosovo, which is currently under UN administration.

The rebels have been clashing frequently with Serbian police inside the
demilitarized border zone.

A Serbian police officer in the region told AFP on Friday that the separatists
were increasingly
infiltrating southern Serbia's Presevo valley, strengthening their presence near
Kosovo.

The Belgrade authorities say that between 800 and 1,500 separatists had taken
control of about 200
square kilometres (80 square miles) since the clashes in November, which was
followed by an
uneasy ceasefire.

About 1,000 Serbian protestors calling for the Albanian separatists to be
expelled from the region on
Friday lifted a three-day blockade of a major southern road linking Yugoslavia
with neighboring
Macedonia and Greece.

The protestors want the military-technical agreement signed by NATO and Belgrade
following the
ending of NATO's 1999 bombardment of Serb positions, to be revised.

It allows only for Serbian police equipped with light weapons to patrol the
security zone between
southern Serbia and Kosovo.

Also on Saturday, gunmen ambushed two cars belonging to Kosovo Serbs returning
to the province
through the same disputed zone, wounding one of the passengers, US peacekeepers
reported in
Kosovo.

The two cars were fired upon about a mile (two kilometres) inside southern
Serbia.