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Belgrade To Sign Ceasefire On Albanian Clashes Saturday
BELGRADE, March 10 (News Agencies) - A cease-fire accord aimed at ending clashes in southern Serbia would be signed by Belgrade officials on Saturday, with NATO guarantees, a Yugoslav minister said Friday.
Yugoslav Minister for Ethnic Minorities Rasim Ljajic told Belgrade radio B92 that he and Serbian deputy Prime Minister Nebojsa Covic would sign the accord with NATO officials led by the Alliance special envoy Peter Feith.
He said ethnic Albanians, who have been waging a campaign against Serbian forces in a southern Serbian buffer zone near Kosovo and Macedonia, "will also be included in the accord...but there would no direct contacts" between them and Belgrade officials.
"I see no reason for them not to sign the accord, but NATO will guarantee it will be respected," he said.
There was no immediate confirmation from the Albanian side, although an Albanian source said KFOR commander, General Carlo Cabigiosu, had met earlier Friday with the commander of the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac (UCPMB), Shefqet Musliu.
The two, who met in the UCPMB-held village of Konculj in southern Serbia, had discussed a possible ceasefire accord, the source said.
Meanwhile, an Albanian source close to the group said the UCPMB would sign the agreement Sunday, under the aegis of NATO, but he did not elaborate.
In Belgrade, Ljajic said that the signing would be followed by a "process whereby Yugoslav military and police forces would enter into the buffer zone" towards Macedonia, as agreed by NATO on Thursday.
Ljajic said the deployment could begin on Sunday. Earlier Friday, Yugoslav Interior Minister Zoran Zivkovic told reporters that Belgrade troops would start returning to the buffer zone "in two days."
Zivkovic said a "plan on structure and numbers of soldiers and weaponry is being drafted".
NATO gave Belgrade the green light Thursday to partially re-occupy the zone, which was set up in June 1999 to keep NATO peacekeepers in Kosovo apart from Yugoslav forces who were driven out of the Serbian province by the alliance's bombers.
The area has been off limits to all forces except lightly armed Serbian police since then, giving hundreds of ethnic Albanian fighters the chance to gain control of some 200 square kilometers (around 70 square miles) of land.
According to NATO, General Cabigiosu, as KFOR's commander, has been tasked with deciding the timetable and number of Yugoslav troops to be allowed back into the buffer zone.
On Friday, one Serb policemen was killed and three others wounded in what Belgrade officials described as "one of the most violent attacks" by the Albanian separatists since last November.
Covic and some other government officials were trapped for several hours in the village of Lucane by fighting close-by, before they were able to return to the nearby town of Bujanovac.
The clashes in Lucane ended late Friday, officials in Bujanovac said, but gave no details of casualties.
Covic, Belgrade's chief envoy to the region, said on Tuesday that Belgrade and the separatists "should sign a ceasefire in the Ground Safety Zone in southern Serbia on March 10, with the KFOR and NATO as guarantors."
The accord is expected to pave the way for negotiations on forging a long-term peace in the troubled region, which this week saw neighboring Macedonia, with its large ethnic Albanian minority, increasingly embroiled in the conflict.
Belgrade and the separatists have both submitted plans to settle the yearlong conflict in which the heavily armed fighters have chased out Serbian local police, the only force legally entitled to enter the buffer zone separating Kosovo's peacekeepers and Serbian forces.
The separatists are demanding a referendum on autonomy or even union with mainly Albanian Kosovo, while Belgrade will only consider greater Albanian integration into Serbia's political mainstream.
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