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Belgrade Calls On NATO To Act As U.N. Says Stop Hunting Down Serbs
BELGRADE, Feb 19 (News Agencies) - Belgrade expressed growing impatience with NATO forces in Kosovo Monday, demanding tougher action against Albanian separatists after a series of weekend attacks which left 11 Serbs dead and dozens injured.
Interior Minister Zoran Zivkovic warned that Belgrade would not allow its units in trouble-hit southern Serbia to be "moving targets" for separatists, following a mine blast that killed three Serb policemen Sunday.
"We will not allow our policemen and any citizen in this territory to be moving targets for the Albanian terrorists and all contingency measures will be taken to protect their lives," Zivkovic told a news conference marking 100 days of the new democratic government, and Belgrade's growing exasperation with KFOR.
Zivkovic's remarks came after Serbian leaders agreed on a series of "selective" measures to tackle the violence, and claiming the ethnic Albanian Liberation army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac (UCPMB) were behind the attacks.
The minister refused to reveal what kind of measures had been decided, saying they were "not accessible to the public."
"We have showed a maximum of tolerance, patience and a wish to solve this problem in a way which would avert the suffering of all, including these terrorists," Zivkovic said.
He insisted that the Albanian separatists' reaction "obviously shows that they are not interested in peace in that area."
"This is not a liberation struggle, or a fight for human rights or democratization, but pure terrorism," he said.
Separatists control more than 200 square kilometers (approximately 70 square miles) of the area, situated around a buffer zone separating U.N.-administered Kosovo from southern Serbia.
The police killings happened two days after a remote-controlled bomb, blamed by Yugoslav authorities on Albanian separatists, destroyed a bus carrying Serbs inside Kosovo on Friday. At least 10 died, including a two-year old baby, and 43 were injured.
Zivkovic insisted that the "verbal support" of the international community, notably NATO, the U.N. and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), should be reinforced by "concrete actions in Kosovo and in southern Serbia."
The U.N. mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and NATO-led peacekeepers in the province "are afraid of being considered as enemies by the Albanian terrorists."
"They must consider them as rivals... their mandate is to make Kosovo an arms-free territory," Zivkovic insisted.
Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica said after a meeting Sunday with top officials to discuss the Kosovo crisis, that UNMIK and KFOR "still fail to fulfill their mandate" under U.N. Security Council resolution 1244, which ended the 1999 war in the province.
Although KFOR "is responsible for the situation" in the buffer zone under the military accord, "the fact is that the Albanian terrorists use that area for their criminal actions."
Zivkovic said that "tens of thousands of armed Albanians in various uniforms" - operating openly in the five-kilometer (three-mile) buffer zone which is off limits to all Serb forces except lightly armed police - "is proof that the international forces have failed to do the major part of the job they were given."
"KFOR and UNMIK must be enemies of Albanian terrorists because this is the consequence of their mandate... to protect civilians from terrorists," Zivkovic told reporters in Belgrade.
On Sunday, Yugoslav Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic demanded in a letter to NATO Secretary-General George Robertson, to take concrete measures to end violence, notably to stop the flow of arms to ethnic Albanian separatists in the Presevo valley.
If this was not done, "Yugoslavia will be obliged to assume its responsibilities and proceed to resolve the problem in an appropriate manner," the letter said.
Svilanovic reiterated Belgrade's demands for the reduction or abolition of the buffer zone, set up to keep Yugoslav security forces under former hardline leader Slobodan Milosevic away from KFOR.
The new Belgrade government maintains the security strip has been rendered redundant by the arrival in power of Milosevic's moderate successor Kostunica.
Meanwhile, U.N. officials charged Monday that Serbs were being ruthlessly hunted down in Kosovo and warned Albanians in the province they risk losing international support if the killing does not stop.
Thousands of Serbs protested at the weekend against the Friday bus bomb attack.
But freezing weather and snowfall dampened the protests Monday, with only 200 people turning out briefly and peacefully in the Serbian half of the ethnically divided northern town of Kosovska Mitrovica, KFOR peacekeepers said.
Other enclaves where the 100,000 or so Serbs still in Kosovo live under heavy guard were mostly quiet, officials said, although three small protests blocked off roads in villages near the southern town of Gnjilane. A U.N. police vehicle was damaged in one of the gatherings.
In the provincial capital Pristina, U.N. officials said their patience with the unrelenting violence - and with the Albanians' persistent reluctance to help investigations - was wearing thin.
"It seems the minority community is being hunted down one by one and extreme members of the society will not rest until the province is ethnically cleansed," said Eric Morris, head of the UNHCR refugee agency here.
"These incidents committed by a few will lead to the erosion of the support of the international community for Kosovo and ultimately affect everyone," he warned.
He expressed "great concern for the future of the province, which day by day is losing the sympathy of the international community."
International administrators have denounced the killings as a bid to empty the province of non-Albanians, more than 800,000 of whom were driven out by former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic in 1999. Around 70,000 ethnic Albanians live in the disputed border region currently.
"Extremist Albanians want an ethnically cleansed Kosovo," KFOR commander General Carlo Cabigiosu told reporters last week.
Hunting down the killers has been made difficult by Albanian reluctance to help police, a wall of silence put down to fear of reprisals but also to a perceived indifference to the fate of Serbs.
"We have not seen outrage or indignation except in the words of the Albanian political leaders. There is a tacit apathy that in some way encourages the men of violence, and that must change," said U.N. police spokesman Derek Chappell.
While most of the Serbian protests were peaceful vigils, several have turned violent, with U.N. police targeted by stone throwing and petrol bombs, Chappell said.
Police in southern Serbia on Sunday shot dead a commander of ethnic Albanian separatists fighting for the border region to be joined to Kosovo, a separatist spokesman said. Two others were wounded trying to retrieve the body in the village of Lucane.
And in nearby Macedonia, which also has a large Albanian minority, police stepped up security after shootouts on the Kosovo border.
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