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Refugees Flee Tense Serbia For Kosovo Ahead Of Ceasefire Deadline
by Dave Clark
PRISTINA (AFP) - More than 1,000 ethnic Albanians fled southern Serbia for Kosovo on Sunday, fearing a Yugoslav army offensive against ethnic Albanian fighters when a NATO brokered ceasefire expires, the U.N. refugee agency said.
The displaced persons reported the "heavy presence of tanks" near their villages around Bujanovac, the nearest large town to the front line, and feared an attack, Peter Deck, a field officer for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said.
No firing was reported in the disputed border region on Sunday, a spokesman for Kosovo's NATO-led peacekeeping force said, but members of the Liberation Army for Presevo, Medveda and Bujanovac (UPCMB) were digging in preparation for a Yugoslav attack, witnesses said.
"It's calm. There have been no reports of firing," Flight Lieutenant Mark Whitty, the acting chief spokesman for Kosovo's KFOR peacekeeping force, said.
According to differing NATO sources, a ceasefire deal negotiated by the parties was due to expire either at midnight Sunday (2300 GMT) or at 7:00 pm Monday (1800 GMT), but the warring parties themselves gave differing accounts of the situation.
For the Serbs, Bozo Prelevic, one of Serbia's three interior ministers, told the independent news agency Beta that his government did not negotiate with "Kosovar terrorists."
Novica Zdravkovic, the chief of police in Vranje, whose officers fought for four days against the UPCMB last week and saw three of their colleagues killed, said he had heard nothing about any ceasefire deal.
For his part, Shefket Musliu, the UCPMB's general commander, said Saturday that the UPCMB had declared an indefinite unilateral ceasefire, but would respond if attacked.
Prelevic warned Friday that if KFOR could not cut off UPCMB’s supply routes from Kosovo, where the peacekeepers are in charge of security, and force the UCPMB to end their campaign by 7:00 pm Monday, then Serb forces would return to the demilitarized zone along the border, risking provoking the alliance.
The buffer zone is a product of the Military Technical Agreement signed in Kumanovo, Macedonia, in June last year ahead of the KFOR deployment in Kosovo.
Under its terms, the Yugoslav army is not allowed into the three-mile (five-kilometer) wide zone, creating a power vacuum which has allowed the UPCMB movement to flourish.
Serb police are allowed to patrol the zone, but they are not allowed to deploy weapons more powerful than a 12 millimeter heavy machine gun.
Officers said that they were outgunned by the UPCMB, who captured the border town of Konculj in an offensive launched Tuesday, and now dominate the hills around the village of Lucane, on the edge of the buffer zone.
Lucane is the last village on the road from the Kosovo border to Bujanovac, a regional center with a largely ethnic Albanian population and one of the rebels' main stated objectives.
Refugees arriving at the frontier from villages around Bujanovac told UNHCR representatives that Yugoslav army tanks had been deployed between the town and Lucane, which the UPCMB and Serb police said is now a divided frontline town.
Both Kosovo's chief U.N. administrator, Bernard Kouchner, and President Vojislav Kostunica of Yugoslavia were to attend the OSCE Ministerial Council in Vienna Monday, but U.N. officials in Pristina were unable to confirm they would discuss the crisis.
On Serbian RTS television Sunday night, Kostunica called for U.N. resolution 1244 and the Military Technical Agreement to be respected. He also repeated his call for a meeting with moderate Kosovo leader Ibrahim Rugova to discuss the status of the U.N.-run province.
"Without dialogue with representatives of the international community and Albanian representatives in Kosovo, there will not be peace in Kosovo, nor in southern Serbia," he said.
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