Subject: OSCE worried over tensions in southern Serbia
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 18:00:13 PST
From: C-afp@... (AFP)
Organization: Copyright 2001 by Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet)
Newsgroups:
clari.world.europe.eastern,clari.world.europe.balkans,clari.world.europe,biz.cla\
rinet.sample
Followup-To: biz.clarinet.sample


BUCHAREST, Jan 23 (AFP) - The Romanian head of the OSCE, Mircea
Dan Geoana said Tuesday the pan-European security body was
"particularly worried" by the security situation in southern Serbia,
scene of a tense stand-off between ethnic Albanian guerrillas and
Serb police.
"We are particularly worried by the situation in southern
Serbia, in the Presevo Valley," a predominantly ethnic Albanian
region which separatists want to see spliced on to an independent
Kosovo, currently run by the United Nations, he said.
Geoana, whose country holds the rotating presidency of the
Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said the "OSCE
has a role to play in the area, even if security is ensured by KFOR"
multinational peacekeepers.
He did not specify what that role might be. Ethnic Albanian
political leaders in the Presevo Valley have called for
international monitors to be deployed in the area, where Belgrade
maintains a heavy military presence.
Frequent clashes have occurred since the end of the Kosovo war
in June 1999, with both sides incurring deaths and injuries.
Geoana also said he wanted to see an OSCE mission under a
Romanian ambassador return to the breakaway southern Russian
republic of Chechnya. Its team, which monitored the 1994-96
conflict, pulled out in 1998 due to safety concerns.
Russian troops poured back into the separatist republic in
October 1999 after a series of escalations in neighbouring Dagestan
and lethal bomb attacks in Moscow blamed by the Kremlin on Chechen
rebels.
Moscow has since then had its voting rights at the Council of
Europe, the European rights assembly, suspended for human rights
abuses in Chechnya.
Geoana said has said he wants the OSCE to concentrate on crisis
prevention rather than resoultion in future, arguing that the former
is "less costly".