Subject: KFOR shepherds talks on ending south Serbia violence
Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2000 11:40:19 PST
From: C-afp@... (AFP / Dave Clark)
Organization: Copyright 2000 by Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet)
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PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, Dec 29 (AFP) - NATO-led peacekeepers based
in Kosovo were helping ethnic Albanian leaders and Serb officials
hold talks Friday on ending rebel attacks on police in a buffer zone
bordering the breakaway province.
Leaders of southern Serbia's ethnic Albanian community were
meeting with government officials in the southern Serbian town of
Bujanovac, KFOR sources said, as tensions remained high in the
nearby border zone.
"The KFOR position is not to be a mediator but to facilitate any
contact able to bring a peaceful solution," Major General Georges
Ladveze, the French deputy commander of the NATO-led force, told
reporters.
"We tried to enable the two parties to see their common interest
and to leave their weapons aside and to try to bring a new deal and
a new solution to this problem."
Ladveze could not say whether representatives of the armed
ethnic Albanian groups fighting under the banner of the self-styled
Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac (UCPMB) were at
the discussions.
"I don't know if it was present in an official position," he
said.
The general was speaking against the background of continuing
violence in the three-mile (five-kilometre) wide demilitarised
buffer zone along the Kosovo border inside Serbia, in which the
separatist guerrillas hold at least a dozen villages.
Zoran Djindjic, Serbia's prime minister-designate, has given
KFOR 20 days to stabilise the situation in the border zone, a German
magazine reported Friday.
Djindjic told Der Spiegel in an interview to appear in its
Saturday edition that KFOR must stop the guerilla violence, which he
said was a dangerous threat to stability in the region.
"We are giving the KFOR peacekeeping troops in Kosovo a maximum
of 20 days to stabilize the situation at the border," he was quoted
as saying.
"If there prove to be indications of an Albanian offensive,
however, our police will intervene immediately."
But KFOR's chief spokesman, Major Steven Shappell, told AFP that
the force had received no notice of Djindjic's ultimatum.
"We have received no communication from Mr Djindjic on this
subject," he said.
Some 800 to 1,500 rebels are thought to be based in the
demilitarised zone, which was set up last year to separate Yugoslav
forces from KFOR at the end of the Kosovo conflict but has since
been partly occupied by ethnic Albanian separatists.
The rebels have continued to bring arms and reinforcements over
the frontier from Kosovo, despite efforts by KFOR troops to cut off
their supply lines.
Following a recent offensice which left at least three Serb
police dead, the UCPMB has control of some 200 square kilometres of
territory stretching as far as Veliki Trnovac, an ethnic Albanian
village one mile (two kilometres) from Bujanovac on the edge of the
buffer zone.
Belgrade's troops are banned from the border strip, which can
only be patrolled by lightly armed local police, but since the
election in September of President Vojislav Kostunica, Yugoslavia
has stepped up diplomatic pressure on NATO and the United Nations to
allow it to crack down on the rebels.
On Friday one of Serbia's three acting interior ministers, Bozo
Prelevic, told AFP that Belgrade would not intervene ahead of the
formation of a new Serbian government in January.
"Meanwhile, the international community should more clearly
condemn the terrorists," he said, arguing that the rebels were
attempting to provoke an aggressive Serbian reaction to attract
sympathy to their cause.
Prelevic denied that Belgrade had had any direct contact with
the UCPMB, saying that its only intermediary with the fighters was
Shawn Sullivan, political advisor to Lieutenant General Carlo
Cabigiosu, KFOR's commander.