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Albanian Separatists Want Political Solution To Serbia Crisis
by Dave Clark
KONCULJ, Yugoslavia (AFP) - Ethnic Albanians fighting a guerrilla war in southern Serbia said Saturday that they hoped an agreement could be reached on their independence claims after they captured this town on the Kosovo border.
"The thing now is to find a political solution. We are not bloodthirsty, we don't want to kill and be killed," said Jonuz Musliu, the head of the political wing of the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medveda and Bujanovac (UPCMB).
Musliu was speaking after the UCPMB declared a ceasefire following a three-day campaign that resulted in it taking control of the ethnic Albanian majority town of Konculj and several neighboring villages.
"From midnight we have been observing a ceasefire," said Shefket Musliu, the UPCMB's general headquarters' commander, "It will be respected by our side, I can't speak for the other side but we will stay in our positions."
The UPCMB army continues to insist that Serb and Yugoslav forces must leave the Presevo valley region, but its leaders said they hoped this could be arranged without further bloodshed.
"Konculj is an ethnically clean Albanian town, why should Serb police come here? All we want is to live free like everyone else in the world," the military commander said.
"We will respond if attacked," his political colleague explained, "But we will do nothing to stop the free movement of civilians - Serbs or Albanians - we are only against the Serb police, army and paramilitaries."
The two men were speaking sitting in their three story family home in Konculj, which they said they had not seen for seven months until Serb police quit the town Wednesday following a gunbattle in a village overlooking the town Tuesday.
Three Serb police were killed in the battle, and their bodies taken to the Albanian HQ in Dobrosin, three miles (five kilometers) southwest of Konculj, before being handed over to the Red Cross and thence to their families. The leaders claimed that no UPCMB troops had been killed or injured during the offensive.
The leaders claimed that when earlier in the year the Serbs had killed one of their men they had had to pay a 30,000 Deutschmark ($13,000) bribe to get him back, but said they had not demanded cash in turn.
"We have plenty of money, we don't want any more from them, we just want justice," Jonuz Musliu said.
Saturday the UPCMB were in complete control of Konculj and the hills around it. Heavily armed UPCMB members circulated freely and transported supplies to bases in the woods outside.
North of Konculj, a string of abandoned ethnic Albanian villages are also in UPCMB hands, with control of the hills looking down on Velika Trnovac as well.
The former Serb police check point on the road coming into Konculj from Kosovo was ransacked and severely damaged and is no longer manned, allowing traffic free access to the town.
Serb police in Lucane, the first town on the road from Konculj to the regional center Bujanovac, still partially under their control, said that UPCMB’s superior firepower had forced them to retreat.
The UPCMB aims to unite the Presevo valley area of Serbia with the neighboring province of Kosovo, which also has an ethnic Albanian majority population seeking independence from Belgrade.
Kosovo has been administered by the United Nations since June of last year when a NATO air campaign forced Yugoslav forces to leave the province, where they had been fighting to suppress an ethnic Albanian resurgence.
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