http://www.centraleurope.com/yugoslaviatoday/news.php3?id=230930&section=default

Kostunica Expects UN Action on Guerrillas in South

BUJANOVAC, Dec 17, 2000 -- (Reuters) Yugoslav President Vojislav
Kostunica said on Saturday he expected the UN Security Council to act next
week to force ethnic Albanian guerrillas out of southern Serbia.

Guerrillas killed four Serb police in the ethnically-mixed zone neighboring
Kosovo
last month and there have been scores of other clashes.

UN Security Council members last Wednesday condemned the violence and
promised a formal meeting on the issue on Tuesday.

"The last stage of our diplomatic struggle will be on Tuesday. I am very
optimistic
with diplomacy, now it is on the offensive," Kostunica told reporters after a
the
Yugoslav and Serbian governments met in the tense region to discuss the
conflict.

"We are expecting some changes on Tuesday... something much more concrete,
so that terrorists would leave the safety zone," he said, adding that Yugoslav
Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic would attend the meeting.

Belgrade is not permitted to send heavy security forces into a five km (three
mile)-wide "demilitarized" buffer zone, as one of the ceasefire conditions
demanded by NATO at the end of the 1999 Kosovo war.

Belgrade says that condition, combined with the failure of NATO-led
peacekeeping troops to prevent armed ethnic Albanians crossing the Kosovo
border, has allowed the guerrillas a free rein in the zone.

The guerrillas say they are fighting to protect local ethnic Albanians from
harassment by Serbian police. Belgrade insists they are separatists intent on
appending the Presevo Valley area of Serbia to ethnic Albanian-dominated
Kosovo.

BELGRADE WANTS UN DEADLINE

At their Saturday session the Serbian and Yugoslav governments agreed to set up
a coordinating body in Bujanovac to monitor the situation and drafted a
declaration urging the UN to set a deadline for the guerrillas to leave the
area.

"The federal and republic governments will in the future be permanently present,
on duty, here in the south," Kostunica said after the joint session.

The declaration drafted on Saturday and to be submitted to the federal
parliament
for adoption urges the UN Security Council "to set the shortest possible
deadline
and take steps for the withdrawal of the terrorists from the safety zone".

"Otherwise, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia calls upon its legitimate and
legal
right to resolve the problem by itself by applying all the internationally
permitted
measures for fighting terrorism," it said.

The NATO-led KFOR peacekeeping force in Kosovo said on Saturday that four
Serbs had been shot at in the buffer zone on Friday afternoon. One man was
injured in the arm, KFOR said in a statement issued in the provincial capital
Pristina.

Allies of Kostunica earlier this week said they had information the guerrillas
planned new attacks to coincide with the Serbian parliamentary election on
December 23.

General Vladimir Lazarevic, who heads the Yugoslav army's third corps in charge
of southern Serbia, said there were 1,000-2,000 "terrorists" in the boundary
area,
Tanjug news agency reported.