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Albanian Rebels In Serbia Lay Down Arms
BUJANOVAC, Yugoslavia, May 21 (News Agencies) - Muslim Albanian groups agreed to abandon their separatist struggle in southern Serbia on Monday, as their comrades in nearby Macedonia were pounded by tanks and helicopter gunships.
Serbia's victory over the rebel threat came thanks to a deal struck with the rebels to boost minority rights and offer the fighters an amnesty, but Skopje was in no mood for compromise as it bombarded rebel-held villages.
In the southern Serbian village of Konculj, rebel leader Shefqet Musliu, signed a statement reading: "The Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac [LAPMB] hereby commits itself to fully demilitarize, demobilize, disarm and disband".
The statement was witnessed by NATO envoys, who have guaranteed that any rebel fighters who hand themselves in to peacekeepers guarding the frontier of the breakaway province of Kosovo will be pardoned and allowed to go free.
More than 240 rebels have already done so, and many more are expected to follow before the end of the amnesty on Thursday, NATO officials said.
The deal is seen by western diplomats as a victory for Serbia's new policy of reducing ethnic tensions by involving Albanians in the political process and co-operating closely with its former enemies in NATO and the West to isolate "extremists".
It will also serve to further isolate Albanian rebels fighting in Macedonia and boost Belgrade's democratic credentials in the debate over the future of Kosovo, which has a majority ethnic Albanian population, western officials said.
"We have achieved our goal to resolve the crisis in the most peaceful way possible. The most important thing is that we have avoided clashes, victims and destruction," said Serbia's vice-Prime Minister Nebosja Covic.
"Conditions for the full reintegration of Albanians into Serbia and Yugoslavia have been achieved," he added.
NATO's envoy to southern Serbia, Pieter Feith, was also delighted at the outcome, which he said "sends a strong signal to the region as a whole, especially to the Albanian community in and around Kosovo that armed violence has no future and that it is best to pursue their political aspiration through peaceful means".
"The momentum achieved now will bring Serbia and Yugoslavia closer to NATO with the view to an early adhesion to Partnership for Peace," he said, referring to a program set up to help former Communist states join NATO.
The LAPMB arrived on the scene in January last year when a group of former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) set up camp in Dobrosin, a village in a three-mile (five-kilometer) wide buffer zone separating Kosovo from the rest of Serbia.
The zone had been set up in June 1999 to separate NATO peacekeepers deployed in Kosovo from Yugoslav troops, but rebels used it as a base for their campaign to liberate the Presevo valley and its mainly Muslim Albanian population from Serb rule.
For more than a year the movement launched sporadic attacks on Serb police and the Yugoslav army, until NATO and Belgrade began working together to isolate them politically.
On Thursday, a joint police and army force will begin re-occupying "Sector B", the last section of buffer zone still off limits, and they are not now expected to encounter organized resistance.
In Macedonia however, another Muslim Albanian group also founded by KLA veterans, remains in control of a large swathe of territory in which Red Cross officials estimate 10,000 civilians are trapped by fighting.
The government has refused to deal directly with the group, the National Liberation Army (NLA), and on Monday pounded its positions with tanks, artillery and helicopter gunships.
Defense ministry spokesman Georgi Trendafilov said the army was responding to "provocations" from the Albanian rebels, who had attacked government forces with heavy machine guns, mortars and anti-aircraft cannon.
"The provocations began at 4:30 am Monday [0230 GMT] but intensified in the afternoon, when we were obliged to respond with helicopter gunships," army spokesman Colonel Blagoja Markovski said.
"One guerrilla position, two jeeps and an arms dump were destroyed," he said.
On Thursday, Macedonia's ethnically mixed coalition government declared a unilateral ceasefire in its battle with the rebels, amid fears that civilians living in frontline villages could fall victim to the shelling.
The leader of the rebels in the area of Monday's attacks, Commander Hoxha, said by telephone that six civilians had been injured in the helicopter strike, which he described as a "surprise attack".
There was no way of immediately confirming the claim, and both sides in the conflict have previously released inaccurate casualty figures.
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