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NATO Anxious About Albanian Secession IdeasBy R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, February 28, 2000; Page A09MUCIBABA, Yugoslavia—NATO officials are growing increasingly concerned that ethnic Albanians who fought to separate Kosovo from Serbia are now trying to orchestrate the political independence of another chunk of Serbian land, exacerbating tensions along Kosovo's eastern border.
In recent weeks, a growing number of ethnic Albanians have been fleeing the southern Serbian municipalities of Presevo, Bujanovac, and Medveda and crossing into Kosovo near here as Yugoslav police and special forces units launch aggressive searches for ethnic Albanian separatists. Ethnic Albanians compose 80 percent of the population in those areas, and Belgrade believes they want to break away and join Kosovo. Such a move could add 480 square miles to Kosovo, an increase of roughly 10 percent.
Western officials and ethnic Albanians agree that Belgrade's anxieties are not imaginary. Smugglers began bringing significant quantities of arms into Presevo, Bujanovac, and Medveda from Kosovo six months ago, they say, and fighters have been trickling in ever since.
According to ethnic Albanians who have fled the area, Yugoslavia is trying to quell the separatist threat by increasing forces and stepping up intimidation, burning homes and arresting young men. But they also acknowledge that ethnic Albanian extremists are squaring for a conflict that could draw the West in on their side.
As Yugoslav authorities have intensified their activities, residents have started to respond by forming village self-defense units whose members have sworn oaths to follow Kosovo's model and rid their region of Serbian political control.
Three police stations were reportedly bombed in the past month; Serbs blamed the rebels, but the rebels claim the attacks were staged. Several policemen have been wounded in shootouts with ethnic Albanian fighters. In a sign of growing militancy that echoes the precursors of the Kosovo conflict, members of one such defense unit showed up at a funeral for two slain ethnic Albanians last month wearing uniforms and carrying weapons.
The patches on their shoulders read, "Liberation Army of Presevo, Bujanovac, and Medveda."
Acting on a series of alarms sounded by the leaders of NATO's peacekeeping force in Kosovo, who want to avoid any new conflict, U.S. Gen. Wesley K. Clark, NATO's supreme commander for Europe, flew to Tirana, Albania, last week to try to persuade top ethnic Albanian leaders to help stymie further secessionist provocations in southern Serbia.
Clark, who has been a key ally of ethnic Albanians, went so far as to depict the idea of a new breakaway region in Serbia as "romantic adventurism," according to Arben Xhaferri, an Albanian leader in Macedonia who attended the meeting. NATO officials say they are nonetheless worried that funds sent by ethnic Albanians abroad to support the Kosovo insurrection now are being used to pay for arms and organizing in southern Serbia.
"Presevo is an issue of real concern," said a Western diplomat in the Kosovo capital of Pristina. "There is a potential for big involvement by Serb security forces," and considerable anxiety that if reports of abuses mount, U.S. and allied troops stationed in Kosovo could be pressured to intervene.
The rising tensions have prompted the Pentagon to abandon a rule that prohibited U.S. soldiers from coming within a mile of the Kosovo-Serbia border. Soon, 30 U.S. troops who have been patrolling southeastern Kosovo will be stationed at a new base now under construction in a muddy field here, less than 100 yards from Kosovo's provincial boundary with Serbia.
Kosovo is a province of Serbia, the Yugoslav federation's dominant republic, but it has been under United Nations control since last year's war between NATO and Yugoslavia.
Although U.S. and Yugoslav forces have been sworn enemies since the war, U.S. officials say that in this endeavor, their military forces have a common purpose: to isolate southern Serbia from outside agitators by halting the flow of materiel and ethnic Albanian separatists across these hills.
"Our main focus is Presevo," said Sgt. Orlando Abreau, a U.S. soldier from Brooklyn, N.Y., as he helped oversee the base's construction. "We don't want them to start a war there." Nonetheless, he added with a baleful look around the desolate village of Mucibaba, "everything you could think up happens up here."
On Jan. 21, three Serb farmers returning from southern Serbia to the Kosovo village of Pasjane were killed near the edge of the site where the base is being constructed. NATO officials say they suspect the slayings were committed by ethnic Albanians to send a blunt message that Serbs are unwelcome near this smuggling route.
Several days after those slayings, NATO and ethnic Albanian sources said, a six-man Serbian paramilitary squad stole across the Kosovo border and attempted to take revenge by blowing up an ethnic Albanian school in the village of Surlane. But residents who saw them beat one man and slit his throat while the others fled.
Similar tit-for-tat violence occurred recently in the nearby southern Serbian village of Dobrcane, prompting women and children from 150 families there to flee to Kosovo. The cycle began with a gun battle between police and an ex-Kosovo Liberation Army fighter they were trying to arrest--one of an estimated 700 KLA fighters who were raised in the Presevo and Bujanovac municipalities.
NATO officials say that after two ethnic Albanian farmers were allegedly slain by Serb paramilitaries, the village came under the control of ethnic Albanian rebels, a situation confirmed by NATO peacekeepers peering at the village over the border through binoculars. The rebel group there is one of four operating the region, according to Western officials, who say the groups have not come under a single command yet.
"The security situation [along the Kosovo-Serbian border] . . . has been deteriorating," said Gen. Vladimir Lazarevic, commander of Yugoslavia's Third Army, in an interview published in Belgrade last week. "Incidents have been caused by Albanian terrorist forces, infiltrated from Kosovo. . . . Several Serbian villages have . . . been depopulated."
Ethnic Albanians say that besides Dobrcane, the villages of Bukovac and Susjare have been emptied recently. "You do see burned houses," said a Western aid worker in the Kosovo city of Gnjilane who visited the region and interviewed some of the 7,000 people from southern Serbia who have fled to Kosovo. Many ethnic Albanians from southern Serbia say ethnic tensions existed there for years but remained in the background until the war.
"During the [NATO] bombing, there was selective violence against political groups and individuals. Paramilitary groups . . . burned houses--40 in the first month in Presevo--killed people, and stole," said Tahir Delice, a former head of Presevo's town council and member of the Serbian parliament who now runs the Council for Displaced People from Presevo and Bujanovac, based in Kosovo.
Yugoslav Interior Ministry and army special forces troops who had stayed in Kosovo through NATO's bombardment resettled in southern Serbia after the war ended. They have mined the border and hidden artillery pieces in the hills. Now there are 600 bunked in the Presevo youth center and Yumko textile factory, and another 100 in a barracks near the Macedonian border, residents say.
Under the terms of the cease-fire with NATO, Yugoslav forces are not supposed to come within three miles of the Kosovo border. However, some of the villages where ethnic Albanians have reported harassment by Yugoslav troops closer to Kosovo than that.
Shaqir Shaqiri, a native of Presevo who is now deputy commander of the Kosovo Protection Corps in Gnjilane--a police force that includes former KLA rebels --said "For sure, there's going to be a war. . . . The best solution would be for them to join Kosovo. Belgrade does not need a place it cannot rule. The residents are going to face a moment when they will have to get their weapons and defend themselves."© Copyright 2000 The Washington Post Company
http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/Kosovo/Story/0,2763,141426,00.html
Albanian gunmen stir trouble in SerbiaTheir own community denounces KLA fighters seeking to provoke a Nato intervention across the border
Kosovo: special report
Jonathan Steele in Gnjilane
Monday February 28, 2000Armed clashes between ethnic Albanian fighters and Yugoslav forces in the border region between Serbia proper and the province of Kosovo threatens to turn into a new flashpoint and raises the possibility of Nato troops operating inside Serbia.
The new trouble spot is the south-western corner of Serbia which is largely populated by Albanians. Former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army have started to operate in the border villages, carrying guns, wearing paramilitary uniforms and attacking Serb police in an apparent bid to provoke a Serb reaction and Nato help.
A Serb policeman died and three others were wounded on Saturday night when Albanian gunmen ambushed a patrol on the main road between Gnjilane and Bujanovac. The attack with automatic rifles and grenades occurred about six kilometres inside Serbia near the village of Konsulj. The police returned fire, killing an Albanian, according to the state-owned news agency, Tanjug. The incident followed explosions in Bujanovac the previous night.
Although General Wesley Clark, Nato's supreme commander in Europe, has warned Albanians that Nato does not want to see fighting, United States forces are taking no chances. They have started to build a mini-base right on the border line between Kosovo and Serbia proper, close to the village of Dobrosin, from where tanks and troops in an observation tower look down on the increasingly brazen street forays by guerrillas in broad daylight.
Albanian leaders in the Kosovo's main city, Pristina, as well as ordinary people in the region, say they are against cross-border violence for fear of reprisals against the 70,000 Albanians who live in southern Serbia and a new round of ethnic cleansing by Serb security forces. But evidence on the ground suggests that embittered and now demobilised guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army have started armed patrols and military training for local people.
In their first interview with journalists at the weekend, local gunmen described what they called "the little army in uniform which arose among people to defend ourselves".
There was a strange sense of deja vu as we made the encounter, just like two years ago when the world first became aware of the Kosovo Liberation Army itself - the whispered contacts, the trail on muddy roads behind a car, the walk on snow-covered fields and through coppices of dwarf oak, and finally the meeting in a village house with a group of half a dozen men with AK-47 Kalashnikov assault rifles.
The difference this time was that instead of the red-and-gold shoulder badge with the Albanian eagle and the letters UCK (the Albanian initials for the KLA), they now wear badges saying UCPMB, the initials of Presevo, Medveda, and Bujenovac. These are three towns in southern Serbia, in the area the guerrillas call "eastern Kosovo".
Speaking the Swiss dialect of French, their leader, dressed in civilian clothes, said: "Our soldiers have not come from somewhere else. They are from this village and region. It was part of Kosovo originally, but the borders were changed after the second world war. People here must have the right to decide how and where they want to live."
The UCPMB was formed on January 26, he said, after Serb police entered the village of Dobrosin and killed Isa Saqipi, 31, and his brother Shaip, 35. They were innocently cutting wood, he insisted. "There have always been incidents but after that January event people began to reflect and organise," he said.
He acknowledged that half of Dobrosin's 2,500 inhabitants had fled across the border to Kosovo. The two broth ers' graves, a mere 200 yards from the barrels of the American tanks on the hill, are covered with wreaths.
Dobrosin lies just inside the five-kilometre-deep "Ground Safety Zone", which the Yugoslav forces accepted when they signed the agreement which ended Nato's bombing last June and authorised the international peacekeeping force in Kosovo (K-For). Local Serb police are allowed to operate in the zone, but Yugoslav army troops and special police with heavy weapons are forbidden.
Although US forces who control Kosovo's eastern sector send low-flying helicopters along the border line, they respect Serbia's sovereignty by not penetrating the buffer zone. But the ceasefire agreement has a major loophole. Negotiated in a rush as part of the package which put Kosovo under United Nations administration, it said any violation "would be subject to K-For military action" but did not specify what exactly might trigger a K-For response.
"If atrocities occur in the area, we will go in and take action. We're working on what the definition of an atrocity is," Major Michael Boehme, information officer Camp Monteith, the US base in Gnjilane, told the Guardian yesterday.
The K-For commander, General Klaus Reinhardt, along with Dr Bernard Kouchner, the top UN administrator and the American general in command of the eastern sector, were preparing detailed guidelines, he said.Gary Carrell, an American policeman who commands the UN police in the area, said his staff had held "preliminary meetings" with the Serbian police on the border in the last few weeks.
Albanians cross the border freely and the main aim was to prevent people involved in assassinations of Serbs from slipping away. "We're pretty sure the suspects in the killing of three Serbs in Kosovo last month were from Presevo," he said. But the plan for further meetings with the Serb police was vetoed by Jock Covey, the American who is deputy head of the UN administration. The Serb police, known as the MUP, won a fearful reputation among Albanians during last year's expulsions and killings.
It is hard to gauge what support the UCPMB has. Hundreds of people from the region have fled to Kosovo in recent weeks because of stepped-up Serb police action and alleged intimidation.
An inhabitant of Bujenovac, who has brought his family to Kosovo, said he spoke for many when he denounced the UCPMB. But he insisted on anonymity. "In Presevo it is not so bad, since the population is 95% Albanian. In Bujenovac where the Serbs are 40% it is much tougher for Albanians," he said.
Yugoslav officials agree that violence in the region is growing. General Vladimir Lazarevic, the commander of the Yugoslav Third Army, told a Belgrade newspaper recently that "the adverse political and security situation in Kosovo is spreading to municipalities bordering Kosovo".
But he rejected the notion that Albanians leaving the area for Kosovo were refugees. "This is a plan aimed at convincing the world that Serbia is expelling Albanians." He added that K-For wanted to provide a pretext for more drastic measures, diplomatic, political, and perhaps military.Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2000
http://www.clari.net/hot/wed/co/Qkosovo-yugo-deny.R1Xw_AFS.html
UN denies Kosovo civil guard involved in Serb police killingMonday, 28-Feb-2000 9:50AM
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, Feb 28 (AFP) - Kosovo's UN administrators denied Monday that a member of Kosovo's civil protection organisation was involved in the killing of a Serb police officer across the internal boundary.
Spokeswoman Susan Manuel said the ethnic Albanian killed in Saturday's raid on a Serb police patrol that left one officer dead and three injured was not a member of the Kosovo Protection Corps, (KPC) the civilian successor of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army.
The official Yugoslav agency Tanjug on Sunday said the ethnic Albanian killed in the attack near the southeastern town of Bujanovac was a KPC member, and even gave his membership number.
"He was not one of the 540 who have been sworn in" to the KPC so far, Manuel said.
"More than 20,000 people who applied for the KPC were given provisional cards by the International Office of Migration" which handled the selection tests for former KLA members wanting to join the civil defence group, she said.
The KLA was officially demilitarised in September and transformed into an organisation to deal with natural disasters in the post-war Yugoslav province.
The KPC will eventually be made up of 3,000 regular members and 2,000 reservists with a strictly civilian mandate.
KFOR peacekeepers have described the situation around the eastern boundary with Serbia as tense after a spate of incidents targeting both Serbs and ethnic Albanians, of whom some 75,000 live in the Serbian area.Story from AFP Copyright 2000 by Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet)
http://anon.free.anonymizer.com/http://www.xs4all.nl/~freeserb/news/e-ponedeljak28februar.html
Monday, February 28th, 2000Serb Minister said U.S. and Albanians plan conflict
A Serbian minister accused the United States and Kosovo Albanian "terrorists" Monday of planning to provoke conflict in an Albanian-populated area of southern Serbia close to Kosovo. Djura Lazic, minister without portfolio, said recent ethnic Albanian attacks in the region were part of a plan to justify new NATO intervention and extend Kosovo to this area of Serbia. He said they were also designed to drive remaining Serbs out of Kosovo, which is now under de facto international rule.
"The aim is not only ethnic cleansing of Kosovo of Serbs, Montenegrins, Gypsies, Gorans and other non-Albanians but also provoking conflicts and the fire of war in Bujanovac, Medvedja and Presevo," Lazic told the official Tanjug news agency. The three towns are in an area of Serbia just east of Kosovo, still legally part of Yugoslavia. Lazic also criticised NATO plans to hold a military exercise in Kosovo in March, saying it would encourage Albanian "terrorists".© Copyrights Free Serbia, 1999.
Betreff: RFE/RL BALKAN REPORT, Vol. 4, No. 17, 29 February 2000
Datum: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 20:10:31 +0100
Von: RFE/RL List Manager <listmanager@list.rferl.org>
RADIO FREE EUROPE/RADIO LIBERTY, PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC
_____________________________________________________________
RFE/RL BALKAN REPORT Vol. 17, No. 1, 29 February 2000ENTER THE UCPMB.
"The Guardian's" Jonathan Steele reported on 28 February that a new branch of the former Kosova Liberation Army (UCK) has emerged in southwestern Serbia. It is called the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja, and Bujanovac (UCPMB) and has already begun operating in the border area. Its aim is to provoke the Serbian forces through armed incidents and bring about NATO intervention in Serbia itself.
U.S. forces are taking no chances and have already built a small base near the border village of Dobrosin to keep an eye on things. A spokesman said that "if atrocities occur in the area, we will go in and take action. We're working on what the definition of an atrocity is." Meanwhile, ethnic Albanian fighters and civilians pass back and forth across what seems to be a very porous border.
The UCPMB's ideological underpinning is that the region is really "eastern Kosova," which was annexed to Serbia at the end of World War II. Its activities have already provoked repressive measures from the Serbian authorities. Steele quoted a local man as saying that this does not cause particular problems for Albanians in Presevo, where the population "is 95 percent Albanian. In Bujanovac where the Serbs are 40 percent, it is much tougher for the Albanians," he added. Stay tuned. (Patrick Moore)
http://www.clari.net/hot/wed/at/Qkosovo-yugo-un.RMCY_AFT.html
UN official shot in legs near Kosovo-Serbia borderTuesday, 29-Feb-2000 10:00AM
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, Feb 29 (AFP) - A United Nations official was shot in the legs Tuesday while driving on the Serbian side of the internal boundary between Kosovo and Serbia, said a spokeswoman for the UN mission in Kosovo (UNMIK).
Marcel Grogan was shot in both legs while driving in a "clearly marked UN vehicle" some five kilometres (three miles) west of the predominantly ethnic Albanian town of Presevo in southwest Serbia at around 12:30 p.m. (1130 GMT), Susan Manuel said.
He was driven by the other occupant of the car, Vladimir Azalov, to a US military checkpoint on the Kosovo side of the frontier from where he was transported to the US base at Camp Bondsteel near the town of Gnjilane in southeast Kosovo, she said.
He underwent surgery in the camp hospital and was not in danger, Manuel said.
It was known known who the attackers were, she said.
The nationality of the wounded man, who works for the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs in Belgrade, was not known, although a UN official in Belgrade said Azalov was Russian.
The official, who asked not to be named, said the men had been "investigating the situation" in the area, where some 75,000 ethnic Albanians live.
The region has been tense in recent months, with an outbreak of fighting on Saturday that left one Serb police officer dead and three injured.
An ethnic Albanian was also killed in the attack on the police patrol, the official Yugoslav news agency Tanjug said.
Presevo is some 10 kilometres (six miles) east of the internal boundary.
A five-kilometre wide demilitarised zone runs along the Serbian side of the border in line with an agreement signed with NATO last June which ended the alliance's 78-day air campaign against Belgrade.Story from AFP Copyright 2000 by Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet)
http://news2.thls.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_661000/661246.stm
Tuesday, 29 February, 2000, 15:28 GMTUN official shot in southern Serbia
Tension has increased since Saturday's shoot-out By Jacky Rowland in Belgrade
A United Nations official has been wounded in a shooting incident in southeastern Serbia on the boundary with Kosovo.
Although the official, Marcel Grogan, was not seriously hurt, the incident is a sign of increasing tension in the region.
The shooting happened near the town of Bujanovac in an Albanian-dominated region of Serbia.
Officials from the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs were making a visit to a number of Albanian-dominated towns in the area.
Witnesses say the officials were travelling in a UN vehicle, which apparently drove into an ambush in the village of Dobracane.
The village lies on the boundary with Kosovo and is inhabited purely by ethnic Albanians.
Mr Grogan was hit in the leg by several bullets. Witnesses say a helicopter from the Kosovo peace keeping force, K-For, flew in to rescue him.Shoot-out
This shooting incident comes less than three days after an attack on the same road against a Serbian police patrol.
A Serbian policeman was killed and three police officers wounded in an attack which the Serbian authorities blame on Kosovo Albanians extremists near the village of Konculj.
The Serbs say the attackers crossed over from Kosovo and launched an ambush on the police using hand grenades and automatic weapons.
The police returned fire, killing one Kosovo Albanian, identified as Fatmir Ibisi, a member of the Kosovo Protection Force, made up of members of the officially disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army.
The boundary region is emerging as a new trouble spot for the authorities in Belgrade who are already concerned about events in Kosovo and in the smaller republic of Montenegro.
The boundary with Kosovo is heavily patrolled by Serbian police who withdrew from the territory itself as part of an agreement with Nato last June.
These apparent infiltrations into Serbia-proper as also of concern to K-For, since they indicate that the peace-keeping force is not in control of parts of eastern Kosovo.
http://anon.free.anonymizer.com/http://www.xs4all.nl/~freeserb/news/e-utorak29februar.html
Tuesday, February 29th, 2000U.N. official shot on Kosovo border. A Serb wounded near Gnjilane
A United Nations official has been wounded in a shooting incident in southeastern Serbia on the boundary with Kosovo. Although the official, Marcel Grogan, was not seriously hurt, the incident is a sign of increasing tension in the region. The shooting happened near the town of Bujanovac in an Albanian-dominated region of Serbia. Officials from the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs were making a visit to a number of Albanian-dominated towns in the area.
Witnesses say the officials were travelling in a UN vehicle, which apparently drove into an ambush in the village of Dobracane. The village lies on the boundary with Kosovo and is inhabited purely by ethnic Albanians. Grogan was hit in the leg by several bullets. Witnesses say a helicopter from the Kosovo peace keeping force, K-For, flew in to rescue him. This shooting incident comes less than three days after an attack on the same road against a Serbian police patrol.
A Serb was heavily injured in a bomb attack that occurred around 12:00 hours in the village of Cernica, near Gnjilane.
http://www.freeb92.net/archive/e/
FREEB92 DAILY NEWS - FROM THE B2-92 NEWSROOM – BELGRADE
Feb 29, 2000 19:38 CETNew liberation army in southern Serbia
FRANKFURT, Tuesday – Tension is growing in the border municipalities of southern Serbia with the alleged formation of the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovic, German daily Frankfurter Rundschau wrote today. A German journalist, writing from the village of Dobrosin reports seeing fighters wearing Albanian insignia with the acronym UCPMB, adding that the entrance to the village was guarded by men in combat uniforms armed with Kalashnikov rifles. He quotes one member of the unit as saying that the organisation was still not a regular army but could mobilise up to 10,000 men. The paper reports that KFOR US headquarters in Gnjilane were watching the developments on the other side of the border with growing concern.
A United Nations employee officially stationed in Belgrade was wounded today near Presevo, on the Albanian border, international sources told Beta agency. The UN official was one of two travelling in a marked United Nations vehicle when fire was opened from an unknown direction. Sources close to the UN in Pristina reported that the employee, Marcel Grogan, was wounded in the leg in the attack and had undergone surgery in the US base near Urosevac in Kosovo. Grogan and the other official had been on an official visit to the region and were not in or travelling towards Kosovo. Beta's sources were unable to give the exact location of the incident.
Meanwhile, eyewitness reports have appeared today of a Yugoslav Army checkpoint near the Bozaj border crossing between Yugoslavia and Albania. According to the reports, army troops are checking vehicles and passengers about five kilometres from the crossing, but traffic is flowing smoothly in both directions.
http://www.kforonline.com/news/updates/nu_01mar00.htm
KFOR Press Update
Pristina, 01 March 2000
by Lt.-Col. Henning Philipp, KFOR SpokespersonUnited Nations Officer Wounded in Serbia
Yesterday an Irish United Nations officer was shot at and injured in the legs while on duty in Southern Serbia, near the village of Dobrosin. His colleague was able to drive him to safety at KFOR boundary crossing with Kosovo from where the injured man was air-evacuated to the US medical facility in Camp Bondsteel.
Reportedly the attackers were a group of men wearing green uniforms with red patches on their sleeves.
This incident is worrying for a number of reasons. It confirms that there are people in the boundary region with Kosovo that are prepared to use force to achieve their aims. This is not of benefit for Kosovo. Stability is key to progress in this province. Much needed investment and economic opportunity will be scared away if further conflict seems possible.
KFOR will not allow the territory of Kosovo to be used to support any activity aimed at using force and inciting tensions in the region of Presevo, Bujanovac and Medveda. KFOR will do everything in its power to prevent the export of violence and will ensure a secure environment for Kosovo.
http://www.clari.net/hot/wed/az/Qkosovo-yugo.Rsdi_AM1.html
Ethnic Albanian fighters based in Serbia-Kosovo border zoneWednesday, 01-Mar-2000 6:00AM
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, March 1 (AFP) - Ethnic Albanian guerrillas are fighting Serbian forces from a base in the demilitarised zone between Kosovo and Serbia proper, an ethnic Albanian daily reported on Wednesday.
The Albanian-language newspaper Zeri published an interview with a man presented as the head of the the so-called UCPMB - a "liberation army" for the mainly ethnic-Albanian towns of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac, on the Serb side of the republic's internal boundary with its southern province of Kosovo.
The fighters are based in the village of Dobrosin, just 500 metres (yards) from the US-controlled eastern sector of Kosovo, said Zeri, which sent a journalist into the area.
In the group's first interview with the press, its "commander," whose identity was not revealed, said his group had a "complete military structure" and claimed it was behind an attack Saturday on a Serb police patrol that killed one Serb officer and wounded three others.
"Our men were on patrol when they came across a Serb patrol and were forced to open fire. Unfortunately one of our best men was killed," said the commander.
Zeri reported that the armed men in the village were dressed in combat fatigues and berets with the UCPMB emblem on their berets and jackets.
It said they patrol the five kilometre- (three mile-) wide demilitarized zone closed to all forces except local police under a so-called military technical agreement signed last June between NATO and the Yugoslav army.
"We first appeared in public on January 26 at the funeral of the Saqipi brothers in Dobrosin," the leader said, referring to the burial of two ethnic Albanians whose family claims were murdered by Serbian police.
"To show we are men who will defend our people and not leave them in the clutches of the Serb criminals, we decided to appear publicly with the insignia of our army," the man told Zeri.
"We are not the Kosovo Liberation Army," which fought against Belgrade for an independent Kosovo and which was demilitarised by international peacekeepers last September, the man said.
"We are the army of the people here," he said.Story from AFP Copyright 2000 by Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet)
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000301/wl/yugoslavia_kosovo_62.html
Wednesday March 1 10:34 AM ETKFOR Vows to Prevent Kosovo 'Export of Violence'
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (Reuters) - The NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo vowed Wednesday to do everything in its power to prevent any ``export of violence'' to a tense neighboring area in southern Serbia.
KFOR, expressing concern about the shooting of a U.N. employee Tuesday, said it would ``not allow the territory of Kosovo to be used to support any activity aimed at using force and inciting tensions'' in the region east of the province.
This part of Serbia has a large ethnic Albanian population and has seen several violent incidents over the past few months.
Irishman Marcel Grogan of the U.N.'s office of humanitarian affairs was shot and wounded in the leg while travelling in a marked U.N. vehicle near the Serbian village of Dobrosin close to the administrative border with Kosovo Tuesday.
KFOR said the attackers were reportedly a group of men ''wearing green uniforms with red patches on their sleeves.''
KFOR spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Henning Philipp said he did not have further details. ``We have not confirmed that they are really ethnic Albanians,'' he told reporters. ``I don't know.''
But he said according to recent intelligence people on the Kosovo side of the boundary line also were ``somehow connected'' to activities in the Presevo valley east of the province.
``What we are doing is to try hard to prevent this export of violence, this potential export of violence, by controlling the border very, very strictly,'' Philipp said.
``We are aware of some people in groups who are aiming at destabilizing the situation in the Presevo valley,'' he said.
Yugoslavia surrendered control of Kosovo, its southernmost province, to international peacekeepers last June after 11 weeks of NATO air strikes.
Western diplomats and politicians have accused Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic of reinforcing troops in the region east of Kosovo to spread fear and drive out ethnic Albanians.
Belgrade says it is responding to ``terrorism'' by ethnic Albanian guerrillas infiltrating from Kosovo.
Sunday, Yugoslavia's official Tanjug news agency said a Serb policeman and an ethnic Albanian guerrilla were killed in a shoot-out the previous night east of Kosovo.
KFOR said Tuesday's shooting of the U.N. employee confirmed that there were people in the boundary region with Kosovo prepared to use force to achieve their aims.
``This is not of benefit for Kosovo,'' its statement said. ''Much needed investment and economic opportunity will be scared away if further conflict seems possible.''Copyright © 2000 Reuters Limited
http://www.clari.net/hot/wed/au/Uyugoslavia-attack.R89__AM1.html
Albanian group acknowledges attack in SerbiaWednesday, 01-Mar-2000 11:00AM
By STEFAN RACINBELGRADE, Yugoslavia, March 1 (UPI) -- An armed group of ethnic Albanians in southern Serbia that calls itself the Liberation Army of Presevo, Bujanovac and Medvedja has assumed responsibility for an attack last Saturday on a Serbian police patrol near Bujanovac, near Serbia's administrative boundary with Kosovo, the Albanian-language Pristina newspaper Zeri said Wednesday.
The paper, cited by the Beta news agency, also said the group has its headquarters inside Serbia proper, 500 meters from the boundary.
Zeri quoted a man - who, it said, had introduced himself as commander of the liberation army -- as saying his group was responsible for the attack at the village of Konculj, in which a police officer was killed and three others were wounded.
According to the paper, which did not disclose the man's name, he said his movement had built up a complete military structure. He told Zeri: "Our men were patrolling the area when they ran into a Serbian patrol car, and were forced to open fire. Unfortunately, one of our men was killed."
Members of the now disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army have laid claims to the region of Presevo, Bujanovac and Medvedja, which is inhabited by between 80,000 and 100,000 Albanians, a majority population. The region lies alongside Kosovo's eastern boundary, and KLA nationalists have called for its inclusion in Kosovo.
There have been suggestions on the Serbian side that the region should be exchanged for a sizeable triangular area north of Mitrovica, which also would include the Serb-dominated northern region down to the dividing Ibar River and the important Trepca complex of mines and factories.
The KFOR spokesman, German Lt. Col. Henning Philip, said in Pristina Wednesday that the NATO-led multinational peacekeeping force would not allow the territory of Kosovo to be used for provoking violence in the Serbian region of Medvedja, Bujanovac or Presevo.
Speaking about Tuesday's shooting in the village of Dobrosin in southern Serbia in which a U.N. official was wounded, Henning said the incident confirmed the readiness of the inhabitants of that region to achieve their objectives through violence.
Henning also said KFOR had arrested two Albanians on suspicion that they took part in a mortar attack on the 14th century Serbian Monastery of Visoki Decani, in northwestern Kosovo.
The attack took place Sunday night some 100 meters from an Italian KFOR checkpoint. However, because telephone connections were down, the few remaining monks managed to get word of the incident through by radio to the Serbian National Council in Kosovo only on Tuesday, Beta agency said.
Another KFOR spokesman, Canadian Lt. Col. Philip Anideau, told reporters later on Tuesday that all the mortar shells had missed the church and fell in the monastery gardens, where investigators had found nine craters. He said nobody had been hurt in the attack.Story from UPI / STEFAN RACIN
Copyright 2000 by United Press International (via ClariNet)
http://www.clari.net/hot/wed/ch/Qyugo-kosovo-border.RfLS_AM1.html
Armed Albanians in Serbia-Kosovo demilitarised zoneWednesday, 01-Mar-2000 11:50AM
BELGRADE, March 1 (AFP) - Armed ethnic Albanians have infiltrated the tense demilitarised zone between Serbia and its province of Kosovo, the independent news agency Beta reported Wednesday.
The agency quoted "witnesses who were stopped by a seven-member group armed with automatic weapons," in the five-kilometer (three-mile) demilitarised zone, near the village of Dobrosin.
Dobrosin, home to some 1,200 ethnic Albanians, is situated in an inaccesible, tickly wooded mountains within the territory of Serbia proper.
The agency said the witnesses claimed the armed group wore green uniforms with black berets similar to those of Canadian troops deployed as KFOR peacekeepers in Kosovo and were within 50 meters of the last checkpoint operated by US troops in the province.
After they searched the passengers in the vehicle, the armed men said they had no connection with the pro-independence guerillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which was officially demilitarised last September.
They were reportedly members of the UCPMB or the Liberation Army for Presevo-Medvedja-Bujanovac, three southern Serbian towns bordering Kosovo which are home to some 75,000 ethnic Albanians.
Tension rose over the weekend in the region, after a Serbian police officer was killed and three injured in an attack blamed by Belgrade on "Albanian terrorists".
One ethnic Albanian also died in the attack which took place near Bujanovac on Saturday, while on Tuesday, a UN official was wounded.
On Wednesday, the NATO-led peacekeeping force KFOR accused unnamed groups of "destabilising" the zone.
"We are aware of some people and groups who are aiming at destabilising the situation in the Presevo valley" in southwest Serbia, said the spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Henning Philipp.
The statement coincided with Kosovo press report that ethnic Albanian guerrillas have been fighting Serbian forces from a base inside the demilitarised Presevo Valley.
Witnesses told Beta that the woods around Dobrosin village used to be a KLA hideout during the Kosovo war, adding that women and children had already fled to Gnjilane, a town inside the province.
Beta also reported that several buses with Albanians from Bujanovac, the biggest town in the tense southern Serbian region, were seen leaving towards Gnjilane.Story from AFP Copyright 2000 by Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20000301/aponline164559_000.htm
Ethnic Albanians Flee SerbiaBy Elena Becatoros
Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, March 1, 2000; 4:45 p.m. ESTGNJILANE, Yugoslavia –– Ethnic Albanian guerrillas are again battling Serb police, but this time not in Kosovo. Now the clashes are in Serbia proper and have sparked a new flight of Albanian refugees.
The newly formed rebel group calls itself the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac, after three predominantly ethnic Albanian towns just outside Kosovo in southern Serbia. Known by its Albanian acronym UCPMB, its fighters say they are trying to protect villagers in the region from brutal attacks by Serb forces.
One rebel fighter who identified himself only by his code name, Trim, said the group wasn't out to start a war but to prevent violence in the area by Serb forces.
Armed fighters in camouflage uniforms with red patches sporting the Albanian symbol of a black double-headed eagle and the UCPMB acronym were visible Wednesday in the village of Dobrasin, located east of Kosovo a few hundred yards from the border. Both the uniforms and the patches closely resemble those of the now disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army, which fought for independence for the province.
The Serbs accuse the fighters of infiltrating from Kosovo, now under NATO control. The alliance, worried about the potential for escalation, has increased manpower on the Kosovo side of the border.
"We are watching the boundary," said Lt. Cmdr. Philip Anido, a spokesman for Kosovo's NATO-led peacekeepers. "We will stop anyone crossing the boundary illegally."
Tension in the area escalated sharply after two ethnic Albanian brothers were shot and killed Jan. 26 by Serb forces as they returned from cutting wood on the edge of Dobrasin. More recently, a Serb police major and a fighter were killed over the weekend, and three other police officers wounded, and a U.N. worker was wounded Tuesday.
Fleeing the fighting, nearly 1,300 people over the past two months have streamed into the closest Kosovo town, Gnjilane, about 30 miles southeast of the provincial capital, Pristina, said Bekim Dauti, with the International Rescue Committee, one of the largest refugee aid agencies based in the United States.
The true number of displaced people could be double that, since many take refuge with relatives and do not register with aid agencies, he added.
More than 100 displaced people have registered in the past three days, Dauti said, adding that most said they fled their homes because they were "tortured or maltreated" by Serb forces, or were accused of having relatives in the KLA.
On Tuesday, rebel fighters shot and wounded an Irish U.N. aid worker, Marcel Grogan, after apparently mistaking his car for a vehicle of Serb forces.
When they realized he was a U.N. worker, "they seemed to be quite embarrassed," Grogan said, recovering from a gunshot wound to the leg. "In fact, one of them said to me that he was sorry that I was wounded."
Dobrasin, the village closest to Kosovo, is almost empty, locals say. Dozens of families have fled across the border, and those who remain stay well away from the eastern edge of the village, where they say Serb forces are stationed.
"There was a lot of shooting, and we left," said Remizije Saqipi, who has taken refuge with her husband and eight children in the nearby Kosovo village of Malisevo. "We left everything there, we took nothing."
But some villagers say they are determined to remain in Dobrasin.
"I am going to stay here. We will defend our country as best we can.
Where could we go? Become refugees? We did nothing bad to the Serbs," said Zelami Shefkiu.
He said the situation could deteriorate further. "Maybe it is going to be a war like in Kosovo. But I don't care, I'm not scared. Because this is my village, this is my house and no one has the right to tell me to leave here."© Copyright 2000 The Associated Press
http://news2.thls.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_662000/662719.stm
Wednesday, 1 March, 2000, 16:52 GMTKFOR border warning
The NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo has accused unnamed groups of trying to increase tension in a demilitarised zone between Kosovo and an area in southwest Serbia.
A K-FOR statement said the shooting on Tuesday of a UN official in the area confirmed the presence of such groups.
It said it would be controlling the border very strictly to prevent violence from spilling over into this part of Serbia which has a large ethnic Albanian population.
Some local Albanians have accused Serbs of deploying reinforced police units in the area in violation of an agreement between NATO and Belgrade last June.From the newsroom of the BBC World Service
http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/2000/03/F.RU.000301145508.html
Yugoslavia: Ethnic Tensions Running High In Serbia's Presevo ValleyBy Ron Synovitz
Recent ethnic violence in the Kosovo city of Mitrovica has distracted the attention of international media from another region where tensions between Serbs and Albanians are heating up -- the Presevo Valley in southern Serbia, just to the east of Kosovo. RFE/RL Correspondent Ron Synovitz examines the situation in the area.
Prague, 1 March 2000 (RFE/RL) -- Ethnic tensions are running high in the Presevo Valley, the southernmost part of Serbia still administered by Belgrade. NATO intelligence confirms that ethnic Albanian extremists are responsible for a series of recent bomb attacks on Serbian targets in the region. NATO officials -- who asked to remain anonymous -- say the extremists have been crossing into Serbia proper from Kosovo.
At the same time, NATO also has confirmed that Belgrade has sent 400 well-armed Interior Ministry police to the area since the attacks began in December. They are bolstering a strong police and Yugoslav Army presence that has existed since the army's Pristina Corps withdrew to the Presevo Valley last June.
In the region's latest violence, a United Nations humanitarian worker was shot in both legs yesterday by unknown attackers while driving on the Serbian side of the five-kilometer demilitarized zone that divides Kosovo from Serbia proper. That attack came after a weekend gunfight in the village of Konculj, also located on the Serbian side of the demilitarized zone near the town of Bujanovac. The state-run Yugoslav Tanjug news agency reports that a Serbian policeman and an ethnic Albanian were killed in the gunfight.
An RFE/RL correspondent who traveled to Konculj after the clash says ethnic Albanians in the village are living in fear of Serbian police, who are entering houses at random and beating residents. Many have now left the village.
Our correspondent also says the current pattern of discrimination and police brutality around Presevo is reminiscent of Belgrade's policies in Kosovo during the 1990s.
Riza Halimi, the ethnic Albanian mayor of Presevo, says Serbian police have been very active in the last two months and that their behavior toward ethnic Albanians has been brutal. Halimi says his office has collected many statements from ethnic Albanians who attest to having been physically mistreated by Serbian police.
"During December, after those first explosions that took place in Bujanovac and Presevo, we witnessed a significant buildup of police forces. On the other hand, we haven't noticed any changes in the army's movements."
Ethnic Albanians in southern Serbia say Belgrade is attempting, once again, to carry out ethnic cleansing of a region where Serbs are in the minority. Before fighting broke out between Yugoslav forces and Kosovar Albanians in early 1998, there were about 100,000 ethnic Albanians living in or around Presevo, Bujanovac and Medvedja.
In the past year, according to ethnic Albanian sources, about 20,000 have fled to Kosovo from the three towns. A spokeswoman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Pristina, Pola Gedini confirms that 6,000 ethnic Albanians from the towns have been registered in Kosovo's capital. She estimates that at least another 2,000 ethnic Albanians who have fled have not been registered.
RFE/RL's correspondent in the region reports that few ethnic Albanians now remain in Medvedja -- a town that had been comprised mostly of ethnic Albanians two years ago.
In Brussels, NATO officials say radical elements of the former Kosovo Liberation Army, or UCK, who are known to be infiltrating the Presevo Valley now wear a new acronym as insignia -- UCPMB, which stands for the Liberation Organization for Presevo-Medvedja-Bujanovac. NATO Supreme-Commander General Wesley Clark last week urged ethnic Albanian leaders in Kosovo and Macedonia to use their influence to discourage fresh violence by these extremists.
Since Clark's talks with former UCK chief Hashim Thaci and Macedonian Albanian leader Arben Xhaferri, both have published statements warning that provocations in southern Serbia will only benefit Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. But Belgrade has banned Albanian-language newspapers from Serbia proper.
Djura Lazic, a Yugoslav minister without portfolio, says the aim of ethnic Albanian attacks is to provoke Serbian police action and portray ethnic Albanians in the area as being under threat. He said their ultimate aim is to justify a new NATO intervention.
NATO officials say they have no intention of sending alliance troops into the Presevo Valley. NATO has increased its border patrols on the Kosovo side of the 5-kilometer demilitarized zone with Serbia proper in a bid to stop infiltrations and weapon smuggling.
NATO spokesman Francois le Blevennec says those moves reflect the alliance's policy of keeping extremists from both sides from escalating the crisis:
"We are even-handed and we will stop those who want to destabilize the region, particularly in this [Presevo Valley] area. We will do everything we can to stop extremists from both sides -- and we underline three times: both sides -- from causing trouble."
Macedonia, which is immediately south of the Presevo Valley, has also placed its troops on alert along its border with Serbia proper. The Macedonian border guard has been reinforced and the frequency of border patrols increased.01-03-00
© 1995-1999 Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Inc., http://www.rferl.org
UNHCR-Refugees Daily, March 1, 2000
http://www.unhcr.ch/news/media/daily.htm#yugoslaviaYUGOSLAVIA: Albanians flee area 'repopulated' with Serbs
Terrified ethnic Albanians have been fleeing into Kosovo from the tense border Serbian region where a UN official was shot in the legs by unidentified attackers yesterday, reports AFP. UNHCR said 102 such refugees were registered last week. "The escalation of displacement indicates not only an increase in security incidents but an increase in general fear," UNHCR spokeswoman Paula Ghedini said. She added that many people in the region were "genuinely terrified."
People fleeing the region were reporting armed Albanians moving into villages on the boundary, she added. "If Albanians are trying to protect their families and friends, their presence could be seen as a provocation" by the Serbs, she said. Some 6,000 ethnic Albanians have fled the region since last June, although many men have returned to look after their homes and livestock, she added.
Meanwhile the Financial Times reports NATO leaders have accused Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic of populating the divided Kosovo town of Mitrovica and the surrounding region with Belgrade loyalists, including paramilitaries and police, under the guise of resettling refugees. They say he wants to destabilise the region and divide the province.
Human rights groups in Belgrade claim the government is using the 80,000 to 90,000 Serb refugees who fled Kosovo to regain control over the north by encouraging them to settle there. Analysts say Belgrade regards the refugees as potential tool in the political game.[AFP - UN official shot in legs near Kosovo-Serbia border; The Financial Times - UN official shot near Kosovo border KFOR]
http://www.kosovapress.com/english/mars/1_3_2000_1.htm
United Nations officer wounded in SerbiaPrishtinë, March 1 (Kosovapress) - An Irish United Nation officer was shot and injured in the legs yesterday while he was on duty in southern Serbia, near the village Dobrosin. His colleague was able to drive him to safety at KFOR boundary crossing with Kosova from where the injured man was air-evacuated to the medical facility in camp Bondsteel. As we are learned the attackers were a group of men wearing green uniforms with red patches on their sleeves. This incident is worrying for a number of reasons. It confirms that there are people in the boundary region with Kosova that are prepared to use force to achieve their aims. This is not a benefit for Kosova. Stability is key to progress in this province. Much needed investment and economic opportunity will be scared away if further conflict seems possible. We wont let the territory of Kosova to be used to support any activity aimed at using force and inciting tensions in the region of Presheva, Bujanoc and Medvegja. We will do everything in its power to prevent the export of violence and will ensure a secure environment for Kosova.
http://www.kosovapress.com/english/mars/1_3_2000.htm
There is massive flux of refugees from the Eastern KosovaGjilan, March 1 (Kosovapress) - The clashes between the Serb Police and Albanians in the vicinity of the village of Konçul, where a Serb major and an Albanian have been killed, have forced many Albanian families to leave their homes and to settle at their relatives in the districts of Gjilani and Kamenica. But, the Kosovapress reporter informs from those municipalities that the deportation of the people is not very high. Now, it is clear that everybody at last understood that the Serb goal is to deport Albanians from their territories where they have lived for centuries, and to reduce the geographical map of Albanians in Balkan. The event of the village of Konçul is not very clear yet but, everybody is aware about the execution of two Albanian brothers from the village of Dobrosin and one another in Letovicë. As a consequence, all the residents of the village of Dobrosin were forced to leave the village. But, always there are Albanians who do not want to leave their countries even if it costs by the prize of their life.
http://anon.free.anonymizer.com/http://www.xs4all.nl/~freeserb/news/e-sreda01mart.html
Wednesday, March 01st, 2000Armed Albanian groups patrols in southern Serbia
Armed Albanian groups, calling them selves Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac, patrolled on southern Serbia and controlled the traffic. This formation took responsibility for the attack made on Saturday on Serbian police patrol when one police officer was killed and three wounded. Albanians were in green uniforms, same like Canadian soldiers have on Kosovo, they had black berets and they were armed with automatic weapons. Members of those formation said that they do not have anything with KLA. KFOR spokesmen German senior Hening Phillip said that international forces would not allowed using territory of Kosovo for provocation of violence and incident in that region. However, UNMIK announced that they do not have any authorization on territory out of Kosovo.
Pristina-based daily newspaper in Albanian - "Zeri", reported today that the Albanian paramilitary formation from southern Serbia, which calls itself Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac, claimed responsibility for ambushing the police patrol from Bujanovac on Saturday near the village of Konculj. A police officer was killed and three other were wounded in this attack.© Copyrights Free Serbia, 1999.
http://www.freeb92.net/archive/e/
FREEB92 DAILY NEWS FROM THE B2-92 NEWSROOM – BELGRADE
Mar 01, 2000 18:31 CETNew liberation armies in southern Serbia
PRISTINA, Wednesday – An armed Albanian group from southern Serbia calling itself the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedje and Bujanovic today claimed responsibility for Saturday's attack on a police patrol near Bujanovic. Pristina daily Zeri wrote today that the group had its headquarters about five hundred metres from the administrative border of Kosovo. The paper quoted an anonymous man claiming to be the leader of the Liberation Army as saying that his movement had a complete military structure and taking responsibility for the killing of police officer Slavisa Dimitrijevic and the wounding of three other policemen.
International forces will not permit Kosovo to be used to provoke violence in the regions of Bujanovic, Medvedje or Presevo across the border in Serbia proper, KFOR spokesman Hoening Philip said today. Philip described yesterday's shooting incident in the Serbian village of Dobrosin, in which a UN official was wounded, as confirming that that the residents of the region were prepared to achieve their goals by violence. He added that KFOR had arrested two Albanians suspected of having taken part in a mortar attack on Visoki Decani monastery.
The head of the UN's Belgrade office, Robert Painter, said today that UN officer Marcel Grogan was hit twice in the legs when uniformed attackers fired on a UN official vehicle. Grogan is in hospital at a US base in Kosovo, recovering from surgery. According to Painter the assailants identified themselves as an armed Albanian faction from villages in south Serbia.
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/europe/030200kosovo-kla.html
March 2, 2000Kosovo Rebels Regrouping Nearby in Serbia
By STEVEN ERLANGER
DOBROSIN, Serbia, March 1 -- Just across the boundary line from Kosovo, guarded more visibly now by American troops in watchtowers, armed Albanians wearing uniforms of a new branch of the Kosovo Liberation Army are training for a battle the West does not want them to have.
Their numbers and leadership are a mystery, but today fewer than 20 men, wearing a mixture of German and American fatigues, did exercises in a muddy field with their weapons, including a heavy machine gun.
On their arms they wear a cloth badge of red, black and yellow that looks exactly like that of the supposedly disbanded and disarmed Kosovo Liberation Army. The only difference is their name: the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac, all towns in Serbia itself, although their populations are largely ethnic Albanian.
Their commander here would not give his name, but said he had been wanted by the Serbs since the mid-1980's. The men said they were all former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the guerrilla army of Kosovo Albanians that fought for independence from Serbia, and villagers said they were local people.
They are acting "to defend their country, their village and their land," said Zymer Zajidi, 30, a farmer.
Senior officials of the United Nations and the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo, known as KFOR, say the men appear to be members of the Albanian rebel group who refused to turn in their weapons and now want to "liberate" what they call "Eastern Kosovo," where at least 70,000 Albanians live in the arc from Medvedja in the north to Presevo in the south.
By ordering the ambushing of Serbian police officers and sometimes the intimidation of Serbian farmers, the leaders of this new army "are hoping that the Serbs will retaliate with excessive force against civilian populations and create a wave of outrage and pressure on KFOR to respond," said a United Nations official. "It's explosive and dangerous, and we hope KFOR uses restraint."
Gen. Klaus Reinhardt, the German who commands the peacekeepers, said in an interview that he had pushed the Americans hard to seal the boundary between Kosovo and the rest of Serbia. And in fact, less than two weeks ago, the Americans moved checkpoints and built observation towers on the boundary line.
One overlooks this village from a hill, while listening equipment and American tanks line the ridge above Dobrosin. The Americans are now at the edge of a three-mile demilitarized zone in which the Serbian police can operate, but not Serbian troops with heavy weapons, a zone in which Dobrosin sits.
General Reinhardt is adamant in saying his troops will not support any new insurgency in Serbia. Still, the situation is not always so clear on the ground. An American sergeant first class, commanding this checkpoint, said, "We're just here to make sure the locals are O.K." But when asked what he could do if the Serbian police returned and the locals were not O.K., he shrugged and said, "There ain't much we can do, unless they shoot at us."
The soldiers can return fire, he said. Wouldn't that encourage the Albanians to fire on the Americans if the Serbs came, to make it seem as if the Serbs were shooting? He shrugged again.
The Americans now have serious checkpoints and towers along the three main roads into the area from Kosovo, officials said. But despite those, it was a simple matter to drive over primitive country roads of mud, ice and snow in the demilitarized zone in a four-wheel-drive vehicle and avoid any checkpoint, in a region that has for centuries been used by smugglers and drug runners.
The fighters were nervous today, even brusque, and would not give their names or allow photographs of their faces.
On Tuesday they shot up a car belonging to the office of the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, which had come from Belgrade and apparently did not stop at one of their checkpoints. An Irish man was wounded in the leg, and the fighters, embarrassed and worried about a possible Serbian response, took the man and his Serbian interpreter to the Americans near the watchtower for medical help.
The fighters say their organization was born on Jan. 26, when two local farmers here, brothers named Isa and Shaip Saqipi, 36 and 32, were killed by the Serbian police as they were returning to the village from cutting wood in the hills.
The villagers say the Serbs of the militarized police were on an operation, with full uniforms, flak jackets and heavy weapons, including a tank. Some seven Serbian policemen were in the village and 40 more in the hills.
That was the last time the Serbian police have shown up here, but this village of about 1,500 now has fewer than 30 families living in it, the rest having fled into Kosovo, staying with friends and relatives in Gnjilane, Malisevo and Podgradje, where the Americans have another checkpoint.
"We live here with one eye open," said Halim Hasani, a teacher in the village. "We're always ready to flee." He said people were afraid now even to go shopping in Bujanovac, because the Serbian police had checkpoints along the road and sometimes turned the villagers back.
Asked if he thought the presence of the fighters might bring the Serbian police back to Dobrosin, he went silent, then said, "Possibly." He stopped, then added hopefully: "But they attack no one. They are only working to defend our land."
But sometimes these fighters do attack, and they are being disingenuous when they say their group was born with the deaths of the Saqipi brothers a month ago. The Serbian police have been complaining of attacks on Serbian villagers around Medvedja since the late summer, and United Nations officials in Pristina say the group has been active in Dobrosin at least since November.
In mid-January three Serbs were killed in nearby Mucibaba, closer to Presevo, and the Serbs moved in at least four units of the Interior Ministry's militarized police to the area.
Ambushes of policemen have intensified, with one killed and three wounded last weekend. One Albanian fighter was also killed in a shootout. And the Serbs say they found a bomb over the weekend in a courthouse in Bujanovac, which they blamed on "armed Albanian terrorists."
Attacks on more moderate or loyal Albanian politicians in Serbia have also increased, including the murder last month of Zemail Mustafi, the Albanian vice president of the Bujanovac branch of President Slobodan Milosevic's ruling Socialist Party.
And more Albanian civilians -- nearly 300, according to the United Nations -- have gone into Kosovo from Serbia proper since Friday.
"KFOR is being played with by these guys," said a senior United Nations official, who is assuming that their leadership is based in Kosovo and tied to parts of the supposedly disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army. In particular, the official says he believes that the leaders are associated with Rexhep Selimi, who headed the rebel group's ministry for public order and security. But no one seems to know for sure.
Lt. Col. James Shufelt, in an interview at the American military headquarters at Camp Bondsteel, said: "The concern here isn't that the Serbian police will come across, but that Albanian attacks on Serb police and army will inspire a response great enough to cause public clamor for a KFOR response."
His commander, Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, said: "I don't believe we can ever fully seal the border between Serbia and Kosovo. But we have sent a clear message that any cross-border insurgency will not be tolerated or supported."
At the same time, he said, "we've gotten some very good feedback that the people of Dobrosin feel better because of our presence."
But perhaps emboldened, too. The fighters are carrying out exercises within sight of the American watchtowers, and say that once, when the Serbian police were near the village, American helicopters flew overhead and the Serbs withdrew.
Vahid Sylejman, 39, a villager, said he was sure the Americans would come to their rescue if the Serbs came again. "Why else are they there?" he asked, pointing to the tanks on the ridge.
Mr. Zajidi said: "We have a kind of protection from the Americans. If they were not on the hill, no one would be left in this village at all."Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/World/Europe/2000-03/serbia020300.shtml
In Serbia, Albanian gunmen go silently to workBy Raymond Whitaker in Dobrosin, Serbia
2 March 2000The guerrillas who appeared round the corner in a muddy village in southern Serbia were reluctant to talk, and even more wary of being photographed.
"I have a reward on my head of 200,000 Deutschmarks," said their bearded, middle-aged leader, who refused to give his name. But he wanted to dispel some of the fears aroused by his shadowy movement, UCPMB, which has been accused of trying to embroil Nato in a new war against Serbia.
The UCPMB emerged barely a month ago in what is called "east Kosovo". The letters in its name are the Albanian initials for the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medveda and Bujanovac, three districts in southern Serbia where some 70,000 Albanians far outnumber Serbs. The group has been responsible for a number of armed attacks in recent days, the latest of which occurred while we were in the village of Dobrosin.
"We have a checkpoint outside the village on the road to Bujanovac," the leader said. "Half an hour ago we signalled a vehicle to stop, but it kept on towards us. Our soldier fired a warning shot, and when that failed he was ordered to shoot at the vehicle. Finally it stopped, and we discovered a man was wounded.
"He was a Serbian translator for an American journalist, travelling in an aid vehicle. We did not have the means to treat him here, so a villager drove the vehicle up to the American checkpoint on the border. We are very sorry this happened, but before the war in Kosovo the Serbs used to use aid vehicles for military purposes."
This did not accord with what we heard when we returned to Kosovo through the checkpoint, half a mile away. American soldiers said the man had been hit by two bullets, fired through the windscreen. After first aid he had been evacuated by helicopter to Camp Bondsteel, the main US base in Kosovo. The man was neither Serbian nor a translator but an Irish UN aid worker, Marcel Grogan, who was carrying out an assessment of needs in the district. Although he was based in Belgrade, his vehicle had UN markings. He was relatively lucky – the bullets hit his leg, and he is recovering.
We had heard a shot while we were sitting with Saqip Saqipi, 63, a woodcutter whose two sons, Isa and Shaip, were killed by Serbian policemen on 26 January. Their deaths, shot on their tractor while returning to Dobrosin with a load of wood, led to the foundation of the UCPMB, the local leader later told me. "The first time we appeared in uniform was at their funeral. This village is where it began. But we are simply local people defending our homes and our families. We are not looking for a fight with Serbia; we have been forced into this. We do not want to expand the conflict, nor are we seeking union with Kosovo."
But the UCPMB has called for Albanians to be united, and its creation has alarmed commanders of the K-For peacekeepers in Kosovo, as well as political leaders in the West. It is clearly modelled on the officially disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army – the shoulder patches worn by the guerrillas in Dobrosin are identical, apart from the initials – and nearly all its recruits used to be in the KLA.
At first the men looked out of place in Dobrosin, which has large houses built with money earned mainly in Switzerland, and cars with Swiss plates. Their uniforms were as mixed as their weapons – a welter of different camouflages, a couple of black jump-suits, an AK-47 here, a pistol there, one machine-gun and several long-bladed knives.
The village's appearance of prosperity was deceptive. Half the population of 2,600 fled to Kosovo, fearing Serbian retaliation, after K-For arrived last June, and most of the rest followed after the murder of the woodcutters in January.
"I thought I had everything after I came back from working in Switzerland and Germany," said the UCPMB leader, whose wife and four children are one of the few families who remain. "I built a big house one kilometre from here, but I have not been able to go there for five years."
Villagers said there had been repeated maltreatment this winter by Serbian police, particularly the MUP, the paramilitary interior ministry units notorious for atrocities in Kosovo, which had recently stepped up its presence. People had been beaten and robbed when they tried to go to Bujanovac, and the Serbs had come into Dobrosin several times, on one occasion stealing dozens of cars. The intimidation, blamed on policemen who used to be based in Kosovo, culminated in the killing of the woodcutters five weeks ago.
The UCPMB leader refused to discuss the strength of his group or recent local actions attributed to it, including the killing of three Serbs taken from their car, explosions in Bujanovac last Saturday and an ambush on police the following day, in which an Albanian and a Serbian policeman was killed. A villager said the Albanian was a UCPMB fighter.
In the past fortnight the Americans have moved their checkpoint and several armoured vehicles up to the border line, and erected a fortified observation post that overlooks Dobrosin. But in Gnjilane, the main town in the American zone, First Lieutenant Scott Olson, a US military spokesman, said plans for the reinforcement had been made "in response to local concerns on the Kosovo side" before the recent violence.
He said the local battalion commander, Colonel Jeff Snow, had requested a meeting with the UCPMB to explain the reasons for the move, but had also warned them that K-For would not intervene in fighting on the other side. Any men with weapons or uniforms who came into Kosovo would be detained.
In Gnjilane we also met an extremist who claimed the UCPMB was fighting for "the liberation of east Kosovo", but the Dobrosin commander dismissed him as "a drunk", saying: "It is the Belgrade regime which wants to destabilise things here. This is being imposed on us by people from outside."
Drawing his pistol, he said: "They won't get me alive. If they catch me, I'll shoot myself with this."© 2000 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd.
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/world/2000/0302/wor1.htm
Thursday, March 2, 2000Ex-KLA fighters linkedto shooting in Serbia
A small, hardline gang of former Kosovo Liberation Army fighters has been linked to the shooting of an Irish UN worker this week, writes Christian Jennings, from Dobrecin in Serbia
SERBIA: An Irish worker with the United Nations, Mr Marcel Grogan, would not have recognised the group of Albanian guerillas who opened fire on his white UN vehicle on Tuesday, even if he had caught sight of them before they machine gunned the four-wheel drive Toyota.
Mr Grogan, who worked for the UN Humanitarian Affairs office in Belgrade, was driving with a local translator in southern Serbia just after midday on Tuesday when his vehicle, clearly marked with UN plates, came under fire outside the town of Bujanovac, five miles short of the Kosovan boundary with Serbia.
Mr Grogan took two high-velocity rounds in the legs. Then, much to his surprise, say UN staff in the Kosovan regional capital Pristina, his uniformed Albanian attackers appeared at the side of the road and apologised for having shot him.
He is now recovering in the huge US military facility at Camp Bondsteel in eastern Kosovo, after being evacuated by helicopter from a US boundary checkpoint on the Kosovo-Serbia demarcation line.
Without knowing it, he was one of the first international workers in the former Yugoslavia to have met the latest guerilla group thrown up by the Kosovo conflict.
"Who are the UCMPB?" reads the headline in the leading Kosovan newspaper, Koha Ditore earlier this week.
The answer is a small, hardline gang of former Kosovo Liberation Army fighters who have sprung up in the mountainous terrain of eastern Kosovo and southern Serbia. Their aim is to protect their homes and villages from increasing attacks by Serbs.
The UCMPB translates as "Liberation Army for Medujeva, Preshevo and Bujanovac", and is predominantly drawn from three Albanian communities in southern Serbia, whose 70,000-strong ethnic Albanian population finds itself the target of a new round of harassment, attacks and forced displacement by Serb special police.
The area lies on the edge of the boundary with Kosovo, and the heartland of the UCMPB is the oak woods and muddy hills of the Presevo valley running alongside it. A group of 30 lightly-armed fighters currently control the village of Dobrecin, lying 700 metres inside Serbia, across the boundary from a NATO outpost operated by soldiers from the First US Infantry Division.
Half of the 2,500-strong population of Dobrecin fled to Kosovo last summer when NATO entered the province, and the rest followed in January this year, after Serb policemen shot dead two Albanian brothers collecting firewood just outside the village. The UCMPB was formed as a reaction to this incident.
Serb units of special police are just two miles up the road, at a roadblock just outside the town of Bujanovac. For them, the armed Albanian rebel presence just 4,000 metres away is like a red rag to a bull and NATO fears that the tiny village of Dobrecin, clearly visible from the US watchtowers on the boundary, may come under attack any day.
Under the terms of the Military Technical Agreement signed in June last year between NATO and the Belgrade administration of President Slobodan Milosevic, Dobrecin lies within a 5 km security buffer zone where only local Serb police are allowed to operate.
One US official with NATO said this week that NATO would intervene in the area in the event of an "atrocity" but in Pristina a NATO spokesman, Col Henning Philip, refused to speculate on what might constitute such an act.
One Serb special policeman was killed and three injured last weekend in an attack by the UCMPB near the village of Konculj, which lies seven miles north of Dobrecin. An Albanian fighter was also killed. The only thing certain for the Balkans' newest rebel group is that reprisals cannot be far away and NATO might not be so keen to intervene as the guerrillas might think.
The NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo vowed yesterday to do everything in its power to prevent any "export of violence" to a tense neighbouring area in southern Serbia.
Kfor, expressing concern about the shooting of the Irish UN employee on Tuesday, said it would "not allow the territory of Kosovo to be used to support any activity aimed at using force and inciting tensions" in the region east of the province. This part of Serbia has a large ethnic Albanian population and has seen several violent incidents over the past few months.
Western diplomats and politicians have accused President Milosevic of reinforcing troops in the region east of Kosovo to spread fear and drive out ethnic Albanians. Belgrade says it is responding to "terrorism" by ethnic Albanian guerrillas infiltrating from Kosovo. Kfor said Tuesday's shooting confirmed that there were people in the boundary region with Kosovo prepared to use force to achieve their aims. –(Reuters)
THE IRISH TIMES
http://www.clari.net/hot/wed/bq/Qyugo-army-border.Rub1_AM2.html
NATO wants to destabilise Serbia-Kosovo border: generalThursday, 02-Mar-2000 5:00AM
BELGRADE, March 2 (AFP) - A Yugoslav general accused NATO on Thursday of trying to destabilise the tense demilitarised zone between southern Serbia and its province of Kosovo.
In an interview with Belgrade's independent Beta news agency, Vladimir Lazarevic, the commander of the 3rd Yugoslav army in charge of southern Serbia, rejected NATO reports of Yugoslav troop reinforcements in the region.
He said the the NATO claims were an attempt to "hide their intentions to destabilise" the region, dismissing the reports as a "notorious lie."
Tension rose over the weekend in the region after a Serbian police officer was killed and three injured in an attack blamed by Belgrade on "Albanian terrorists". An ethnic Albanian also died in the attack which took place near Bujanovac on Saturday.
Part of the southern Serbian region is a five kilometre (three mile) wide demilitarized zone closed to all forces except local police under a so-called military technical agreement signed last June between NATO and the Yugoslav army.
Lazarevic said: "We are performing regular duties and we are observing what is happening in Kosovo and in the five-kilometer zone."
Lazarevic took command of the Yugoslav Third Army last month. He was a former commander of the Pristina corps during the NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia in 1999.
Yugoslav Army and Serb police units withdrew from Kosovo in June 1999. The province has been administered since then by the United Nations, while security is provided by the NATO-led multinational KFOR troops and UN police.Story from AFP Copyright 2000 by Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet)
http://www.clari.net/hot/wed/au/Userbia-kosovo.RyN4_AM2.html
Serbs claim Albanian militia outfit is patrolling its territoryThursday, 02-Mar-2000 10:00AM
By STEFAN RACINBELGRADE, Yugoslavia, March 2 (UPI) -- The presence of an ethnic Albanian militia in the towns of Presevo, Bujanovac and Medvedja, which are near the administrative border with Kosovo, has made the region tense, Belgrade's Radio B2-92 reported Thursday.
Witnesses quoted by the radio station said they were stopped in the village of Dobrosin by a seven-man patrol armed with automatic weapons and wearing green uniforms and black berets. The group calls itself the Kosovo Protection Corps. Its members are reportedly former Kosovo Liberation Army men.
The encounter was inside the 5 kilometer buffer zone and only 50 meters from the last U.S. KFOR checkpoint on the road from Gnjilane to Dobrosin, the witnesses said. The Pristina-based Albanian-language newspaper Zeri said the KPC had its headquarters in Dobrosin, only 500 meters from the border.
The U.N. office in Belgrade reported Thursday that their officials ran into armed, uniformed men who said they came from Albanian villages along Kosovo's border with Serbia.
According to the newspaper Zero, U.S. KFOR troops said they had met some people who said they were from a group formed to protect Dobrosin from Serb aggression.
The KPC reportedly claimed responsibility for an attack on a Serbian police patrol in the village of Konculj Saturday. In that incident, a police officer was killed and three others were wounded. According to Serb police accounts, a KPC member was also killed in the attack.
The mayor of Presevo, Riza Halimi, told Radio B2-92 that the KPC had been formed on Feb. 4. He said he had not seen any of its members, however.
"There have been no sightings of the group in the Presevo municipality," he said. "I was in Dobrosin and heard that armed men had been seen in the village. People to whom we talked confirmed the existence of such a group moving around here."
In remarks published by the Danas newspaper Thursday, Zoran Andjelkovic, the president of the Belgrade government-sponsored Serbian executive council in Kosovo, linked NATO maneuvers scheduled for later this month with "terrorist actions of Kosovo Protection Corps." He said NATO wanted to frighten the Serbian people and bring more pressure on them.
NATO wanted to transplant terrorism to southern Serbia, Andjelkovic said. This shows that the KLA continues to exist under a new name, "something we have said all the time," he said.
Andjelkovic said he hoped that "the (Serbian) state will do everything to prevent Presevo and Medvedja from becoming a battleground for terrorist groups from Kosovo and Metohia."
The Serb general commanding the army in south Serbia also accused NATO of trying to worsen the situation in the three south Serbian towns of Presevo, Bujanovac and Medvedja, in Pcinj district. He said this was part of the plan to annex the region and further break up Serbia.
Dobrosin is located in inaccessible mountainous terrain. Before the NATO-led multinational forces arrived in Kosovo, the area and the surrounding woods were a hideout for KLA members in their fight with Serbian security forces.
According to the Belgrade newspaper Blic, since Jan. 26 all women and children from Dobrosin have moved to Gnjilane.
In another incident, the Russian soldier who was wounded in Albanian-dominated Srbica Tuesday died in hospital Thursday.Story from UPI / STEFAN RACIN
Copyright 2000 by United Press International (via ClariNet)
http://www.unhcr.ch/news/media/daily.htm
UNHCR-Refugees Daily, March 2, 2000YUGOSLAVIA: Albanians flee fighting in Serbia
Rebel Albanians are battling Serb police in an area of Serbia with a large ethnic Albanian minority, who are now fleeing, reports AP. Nearly 1,300 people have streamed into the closest Kosovo town of Gnjilane, about 30km southeast of Pristina, in the past two months, said Bekim Dauti of the International Rescue Committee. But the true number of displaced people could be double that, as many take refuge with relatives and do not register with aid agencies, he added. More than 100 people have arrived and registered with the Red Cross in the past three days, Dauti said. They said they left their homes because they were ``tortured, maltreated,'' and some were accused of having relatives in the Kosovo Liberation Army, he said. ``The UN High Commissioner for Refugees is particularly concerned due to the displacement,'' said spokeswoman Paula Ghedini in Pristina. ``Recently we've been hearing of increasing tension and an escalation of provocation.'' Dobrasin, the village closest to Kosovo, is almost empty, locals say. Those who remain there say dozens of refugees from surrounding towns and villages have passed through on their way to Kosovo. Deutsche Presse-Agentur reports UNHCR today expressed alarm over reports of rising tensions between Serbs and minority ethnic Albanians living in southern Serbia, resulting in a noticeable increase in displaced people arriving in Kosovo. UNHCR estimated 60,000 to 70,000 ethnic Albanians still live in the Presevo-Bujanovac area along southern Serbia's provincial border with Kosovo. The New York Times adds the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac on Tuesday shot up a car belonging to UNHCR, which had come from Belgrade and apparently did not stop at one of their checkpoints.
http://www.unhcr.ch/news/pr/pr000302.htm
UNHCR-Press releases
Geneva, 2 March 2000ETHNIC ALBANIANS UNDER PRESSURE IN SOUTHERN SERBIA
UNHCR expressed alarm Thursday over reports of rising tensions between Serbs and minority ethnic Albanians living in southern Serbia, resulting in a noticeable increase in displaced people arriving in neighboring Kosovo.
An estimated 60,000 to 70,000 ethnic Albanians still live in the Presevo-Bujanovac area along southern Serbia’s provincial border with Kosovo. There have been increasing reports of instability along the border in recent weeks, including accounts from displaced Albanians of harassment and intimidation by Serb police and military. In another incident, an Albanian splinter group active in the region opened fire on a U.N. vehicle on Tuesday, wounding one U.N. staff member.
UNHCR Special Envoy Dennis McNamara said the volatile situation in the Presevo area was another example of the precarious situation of minorities throughout the region. McNamara said the increasing harassment of Albanians in southern Serbia may also be linked to recent ethnic unrest in the northern city of Mitrovica. At the same time, there has been an upsurge in attacks on non-Albanians – Serbs and Roma – across Kosovo.
"Coming on the heels of the recent disturbances in Mitrovica, it may be no accident that the Albanian minority in southern Serbia is now feeling under increasing pressure," he said. "Mitrovica is just the most visible tip of the iceberg when we look at the overall situation of minorities in the region. Harassment and intimidation in one place can bring retaliation and instability in another, feeding into this continuing cycle of violence and revenge.’’
Between 5,000 and 6,000 ethnic Albanians are believed to have fled the Presevo-Bujanovac-Mevedja area of southern Serbia since last June, many of them entering nearby Kosovo east of Gnjilane. Although the influx into Kosovo had slowed for a time, UNHCR field officers in the region are again reporting increasing numbers of new arrivals. In the fourth week of February, 102 ethnic Albanians from southern Serbia asked UNHCR in Gnjilane for assistance.
The new arrivals report an increase in the Serb military and police presence in southern Serbia and give consistent accounts of harassment, beatings, confiscation of houses and apartments, forced conscription, rape threats and demands for money. Most of the new arrivals are young families who say the security situation for ethnic Albanians had deteriorated to such an extent that life had become intolerable and they could no longer stay in their homes.
"This continuing harassment and intimidation of minorities by all sides has got to stop if the cycle of violence and displacement is ever going to end," said McNamara, who is also the Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs in Kosovo. "And for that to happen we need several things, including more direct bilateral pressure from governments on the leadership of both sides. In Kosovo, it also requires continued robust measures by KFOR and the already over-stretched U.N. police in protecting minorities; vigorous action in stopping the movement across provincial borders of armed groups; international judges and prosecutors to ensure those carrying out these crimes are punished; and – last but not least – strong community leadership to end this spiral of hatred and revenge."
UNHCR and its NGO partners are providing temporary shelter for the new arrivals from
http://www.clari.net/hot/wed/aw/Qkosovo-unhcr.RKB6_AM2.html
UN refugee agency says more Albanians fleeing southern SerbiaThursday, 02-Mar-2000 9:30AM
GENEVA, Mar 2 (AFP) - The UN refugee agency expressed alarm Thursday over an increase in the number of ethnic Albanians fleeing reported abuse by authorities in southern Serbia.
Accounts by Albanians who have left southern Serbia for the neighbouring, UN-administered province of Kosovo speak of harassment and intimidation by Serb police and military, the UNHCR said in a statement.
It said that 5,000-6,000 ethnic Albanians had fled the Presevo-Bujanovac area bordering Kosovo since June. Some 60,000-70,000 ethnic Albanians still live in the area, it said.
"Although the influx into Kosovo had slowed for a time, UNHCR field officers in the region are again reporting increasing numbers of new arrivals," the release said.
Around 100 ethnic Albanians from sourthern Serbia asked UNHCR in Gnjilane in Kosovo for help in the last week of February, it said.
"The new arrivals report an increase in the Serb military and police presence in southern Serbia and give consistent accounts of harassment, beatings, confiscation of houses and apartments, forced conscription, rape threats and demands for money," it added.
In another incident, an Albanian group active in the region opened fire on a UN vehicle on Tuesday wounding a UN staff member, it said.
Special UNHCR envoy Dennis McNamara said the volatile conditions in the Presevo-Bujanovac area was another example of the precarious situation for minorities in the region.
"Coming on the heels of the recent disturbances in Mitrovica, it may be no accident that the Albanian minority in southern Serbia is now feeling under increasing pressure," McNamara said, referring to a tense northern Kosovo town which is divided between Serb and Albanian neighbourhoods.
"Harassment and intimidation in one place can bring retaliation and instability in another, feeding into this continuing cycle of violence and revenge," he said.Story from AFP Copyright 2000 by Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet)
http://www.excite.co.uk/news/news_story/european/reuters_european_news_20000302161204_0.txt
Ethnic Albanians flee south Serbia for Kosovo - UNThursday 2 March 2000
GENEVA, March 3 (Reuters) - The U.N. refugee agency expressed alarm on Thursday over "consistent accounts" from ethnic Albanians fleeing southern Serbia that Serb military and police had harassed and beaten them. In a statement, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said that in the past week, at least 102 ethnic Albanians had fled ethnic tension in the Presevo-Bujanovac area along southern Serbia's provincial border with Kosovo.
The fear which has led minority ethnic Albanians to flee to Gnjilane in eastern Kosovo may be linked to recent ethnic violence in the northern city of Mitrovica, the agency said. UNHCR called for "an end to the spiral of hatred and revenge".
"The new arrivals report an increase in the Serb military and police presence in southern Serbia and give consistent accounts of harassment, beatings, confiscation of houses and apartments, forced conscription, rape threats and demands for money," UNHCR said.
Spokesman Ron Redmond said the ethnic Albanians "say the beatings and threats are coming from people in uniforms -- Serb police and military. Many are former Serb police who worked in Kosovo."
An estimated 60,000 to 70,000 ethnic Albanians remain in the Presevo-Bujanovac area, according to the Geneva-based agency.
Dennis McNamara, UNHCR's special envoy to the troubled region, said: "Coming on the heels of the recent disturbances in Mitrovica, it may be no accident that the Albanian minority in southern Serbia is now feeling under increasing pressure.
"Harassment and intimidation in one place can bring retaliation and instability in another, feeding into this continuing cycle of violence and revenge," he added.
"This continuing harassment and intimidation of minorities by all sides has got to stop if the cycle of violence and displacement is ever going to end."© Copyright Reuters Limited
http://www.clari.net/hot/wed/bq/Uyugoslavia-peacekeepers.RGZ__AM3.html
Peacekeepers check reports of terroristsThursday, 02-Mar-2000 5:00PM
TIRANA, Albania, March 2 (UPI) - Peacekeepers have received information that Albanian terrorists from Kosovo are pushing violence in south Serbia, Henning Philip, a KFOR spokesman, said on Thursday in Scopje.
Philip said KFOR will enforce the border control with Serbia to prevent the escalation of violence.
Meanwhile, the Bulgarian ambassador in Tirana, Boby Bobed, expressed his government's concern about the new tensions close to Bulgaria's border. Bobev could not confirm any infiltration of extremist Albanians from the Kosovo border.
Arber Xhaferri, the most influential Albanian leader in Macedonia, has appealed to Albanians in south Serbia to avoid any pitfalls, because any new conflict there would not serve Albanian national interests.
The U.N. Belgrade office said today their officials ran into an ambush set by armed and uniformed men who said they came from Albanian villages along Kosovo's border with Serbia.
Paper Zero quoted an American KFOR spokesman saying they had met some people who told them a group would be formed to protect Dobrasin from Serb aggression.
Since last June 6, numerous Albanians have left the region to resettle in Kosovo, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees office said.Story from UPI Copyright 2000 by United Press International (via ClariNet)
http://anon.free.anonymizer.com/http://www.xs4all.nl/~freeserb/news/e-cetvrtak02mart.html
Thursday, March 02nd, 2000Tension in southern Serbia
Tension in southern Serbia, in Presevo area on Serbian-Kosovo administrative bored rise and armed Albanian, members of the self-proclaimed Liberation Army of Presevo, Bujanovac and Medvedja, were patrolling the border area, media reported. Presevo Mayor Riza Halimi told Radio B292 that information about the new armed group had appeared as early as February 4. He claimed, however, that he had not seen any of its members. The mayor of Bujanovic, Stojance Arsic, said today that members of the new formation were in fact Albanian terrorists who had infiltrated in the area from the territory of Kosovo. He stressed that those formation does not have support by local municipality and that life in the area was still normal
Sainovic: NATO Responsible of Destabilization of Serbia
Nikola Sainovic, member of Executive Board of Socialist Party of Serbia accused NATO of attempting to destabilize southern Serbia. He alleged that the aim of the Kosovo Protection Corps established by the international administration in Kosovo was to provoke the non-Albanian population, both in and out of Kosovo. He said that method "kill and blame the victim" was on the "power by those who would like to continue the crises and make it constant". He stressed that Serbian authorities would react "on legal way and in all Serbian citizens interest". There was no any para-military formation in southern Serbia, Sainovic told media. As a proof he adduced that one of terrorists, who killed policeman last Saturday, was member of Kosovo Protection Core from Gnjilane.
http://www.freeb92.net/archive/e/
FREEB92 DAILY NEWS FROM THE B2-92 NEWSROOM – BELGRADE
Mar 02, 2000 18:20 CETTension rising in southern Serbia
PRESEVO, Thursday – Reports today from administrative border of Kosovo indicate rising tension in southern Serbia. Witnesses who were detained near the village of Dobrosin by a seven-member armed Albanian patrol have reported that members of the self-proclaimed Liberation Army of Presevo, Bujanovac and Medvedja were patrolling the area in uniforms and carrying automatic rifles.
Presevo Mayor Riza Halimi told Radio B292 that information about the new armed group had appeared as early as February 4. He claimed, however, that he had not seen any of its members.
The mayor of Bujanovic, Stojance Arsic, said today that members of the new formation were in fact Albanian terrorists who had infiltrated the three border municipalities from the territory of Kosovo.
Socialist Party representative Nikola Sainovic today accused NATO and Western European countries of attempting to destabilise southern Serbia. He alleged that the aim of the Kosovo Protection Corps established by the international administration in Kosovo was to provoke the non-Albanian population, both in and out of Kosovo. Sainovic also denied the existence of Serbian paramilitary units in south Serbia.
Another senior Socialist official, Zivorad Igic, said today that the increasing number of incidents near the southern Serbian border was an attempt by Albanian extremists to divert public attention from the problems in Kosovo. Igic, speaking to Jagodina's Palma Plus television, accused international forces in Kosovo of encouraging Albanian separatism and terrorism to broaden into other parts of Serbia.
NATO European Commander Wesley Clark today expressed the Alliance's concern over the situation in the demilitarised zone between Kosovo and Serbia proper, adding that Kosovo Albanians had been told that NATO was against any violence in the region or any spread of violence.
http://www.kosovapress.com/english/mars/3_3_2000.htm
East Kosova is part of Kosova tooPrishtinë, March 3 (Kosovapress) - During the Turkish-Serb war on the years 1876-78. Serbs cleansed about 650 Albanians dwellings from Nishi, Leskoc, Vranjë, Toplica, Kurshumlia and Prokuple expelling over 300,000 Albanians. By the end of this war. It was held the conference in Berlin, which legitimated the occupation and ethnic cleansing of this Albanian region. By this anti-human decisions profited and Montenegro, which occupied one of the oldest cities Iliro-Albanian, Ulqin and districts Plavë and Guci etc. On the year 1913, at the Ambassadors Conference in London Albanian lands one small were rejected on sale and they were used like playing cards by the Great Powers.
This tragically injustice, instead to get improved, it went more deeply after the end of war second. The Albanian lands, occupied by Yugoslav monarchs, they get departed on three slavish republics. The district of Kosova was limited on 10887 km square. While the Albanian district of Çarmeria was cleansed by Greek chauvinists. So and during the Titist period, Albanian lands did not change at all, the statute of occupied lands in Albania did not change too. After the year 1990 the Albanian state was suffering, and the occupied Albanians remained betrayed and following their legal parties who forgot the occupations and all their energies spend on using for some kind of "ideology", "democracy", "party", "religion" etc.
They were need many years to wake up. Their sleep was disturbed by freedom gun, guns of one army which was borning with a name of Kosova Liberation Army. By their struggle, and by the USA support and some other alliances, the serb occupator was expelled out of Kosova. But there left three municipal under the Serb regime, Presheva, Bujanoc and Medvegja, where upon their population is a great pressure and violence by the Serb chauvinists. Milosheviq`s regime wants for the cleanse those Albanian areas of East Kosova. The arrests, murders and expels have pushed on the Albanian on self-defense and reorganization against enemy. They have no other choice: for self-defense or to leave their century native places.
About the issues on East Kosova, Great Powers have different attitudes. The countries who are friendly to Serbia, they say the borders can never change. So and they say, that Kosova with its 10887 km square it is undeparted part of "Yugoslavia"? Those countries about East Kosova make guilty the Albanians who want to be part of Kosova. They never think that this part never was part of Serbia. To days borders were set by force violence, decided by international conferences.
Some wise attitudes have the neighbors around Kosova who made genocide on Albanians, Serb-Macedonian-Montenegro. But today they say for all this is guilty the murder regime of Milosheviq.
The matter of East Kosova it is concerned and to Kosovars, their fate they think they have to share together, they seek and demand this part of to be free from the Serb egoists. Somebody think that the population of this part should keep quiet and wait for the better days. But some one think such as Baton Haxhiu and his magazine, which alarms the danger and consequences which will have and free Kosova by this fire-game.
This category of people brings you to think that finally Albanians are guilty about this, who organize for self-defense. Their organization they see as "pale imitation" of KLA and "adventure". They have courage to ask publicly the political parties (think: why they do not get distanced from this adventure) ?!
What is the truth? The matter of East Kosova is a very wise process which requires smartness and calmness, ready and decident to solve that by self organization and with cooperation with our best friends in the world. The desire of 100,000 Albanians of East Kosova have been expressed and by referendum. They have openly declared to join Kosova with its 10887 km square, they do not agree to live always in fear and with a Serb knife on throat. They can not always endure the cruelty, cowards and Serb massacres. Nobody has right to tell them, as we were told sometimes by Berisha`s party, stay under the Serbia! Patient and do not move! We are sure that for the name of Kosova, East Kosova will keep calm and for many years. But it is the Serb military and police who kills, murder and cut, they who use different methods just to expel the innocent residents of this region.
Till now there have bee registered 6.000 expelled, but the number is much more with the others who are not registered where it counts up to 10.000.
Beside the North Kosova, East Kosova remains very actual matter for the Albanians in Balkan, and it is a debt to bring peace and stability in region and around. First step and absolutely decision is that East Kosova to be observed and controlled by International communities.
Beginning a Vegetable Garden
NATO Anxious About Albanian Secession Ideas By R. Jeffrey Smith In recent weeks, a growing number of ethnic Albanians have been fleeing the southern Serbian municipalities of Presevo, Bujanovac, and Medveda and crossing into Kosovo near here as Yugoslav police and special forces units launch aggressive searches for ethnic Albanian separatists. Ethnic Albanians compose 80 percent of the population in those areas, and Belgrade believes they want to break away and join Kosovo. Such a move could add 480 square miles to Kosovo, an increase of roughly 10 percent. Western officials and ethnic Albanians agree that Belgrade's anxieties are not imaginary. Smugglers began bringing significant quantities of arms into Presevo, Bujanovac, and Medveda from Kosovo six months ago, they say, and fighters have been trickling in ever since. According to ethnic Albanians who have fled the area, Yugoslavia is trying to quell the separatist threat by increasing forces and stepping up intimidation, burning homes and arresting young men. But they also acknowledge that ethnic Albanian extremists are squaring for a conflict that could draw the West in on their side. As Yugoslav authorities have intensified their activities, residents have started to respond by forming village self-defense units whose members have sworn oaths to follow Kosovo's model and rid their region of Serbian political control. Three police stations were reportedly bombed in the past month; Serbs blamed the rebels, but the rebels claim the attacks were staged. Several policemen have been wounded in shootouts with ethnic Albanian fighters. In a sign of growing militancy that echoes the precursors of the Kosovo conflict, members of one such defense unit showed up at a funeral for two slain ethnic Albanians last month wearing uniforms and carrying weapons. The patches on their shoulders read, "Liberation Army of Presevo, Bujanovac, and Medveda." Acting on a series of alarms sounded by the leaders of NATO's peacekeeping force in Kosovo, who want to avoid any new conflict, U.S. Gen. Wesley K. Clark, NATO's supreme commander for Europe, flew to Tirana, Albania, last week to try to persuade top ethnic Albanian leaders to help stymie further secessionist provocations in southern Serbia. Clark, who has been a key ally of ethnic Albanians, went so far as to depict the idea of a new breakaway region in Serbia as "romantic adventurism," according to Arben Xhaferri, an Albanian leader in Macedonia who attended the meeting. NATO officials say they are nonetheless worried that funds sent by ethnic Albanians abroad to support the Kosovo insurrection now are being used to pay for arms and organizing in southern Serbia. "Presevo is an issue of real concern," said a Western diplomat in the Kosovo capital of Pristina. "There is a potential for big involvement by Serb security forces," and considerable anxiety that if reports of abuses mount, U.S. and allied troops stationed in Kosovo could be pressured to intervene. The rising tensions have prompted the Pentagon to abandon a rule that prohibited U.S. soldiers from coming within a mile of the Kosovo-Serbia border. Soon, 30 U.S. troops who have been patrolling southeastern Kosovo will be stationed at a new base now under construction in a muddy field here, less than 100 yards from Kosovo's provincial boundary with Serbia. Kosovo is a province of Serbia, the Yugoslav federation's dominant republic, but it has been under United Nations control since last year's war between NATO and Yugoslavia. Although U.S. and Yugoslav forces have been sworn enemies since the war, U.S. officials say that in this endeavor, their military forces have a common purpose: to isolate southern Serbia from outside agitators by halting the flow of materiel and ethnic Albanian separatists across these hills. "Our main focus is Presevo," said Sgt. Orlando Abreau, a U.S. soldier from Brooklyn, N.Y., as he helped oversee the base's construction. "We don't want them to start a war there." Nonetheless, he added with a baleful look around the desolate village of Mucibaba, "everything you could think up happens up here." On Jan. 21, three Serb farmers returning from southern Serbia to the Kosovo village of Pasjane were killed near the edge of the site where the base is being constructed. NATO officials say they suspect the slayings were committed by ethnic Albanians to send a blunt message that Serbs are unwelcome near this smuggling route. Several days after those slayings, NATO and ethnic Albanian sources said, a six-man Serbian paramilitary squad stole across the Kosovo border and attempted to take revenge by blowing up an ethnic Albanian school in the village of Surlane. But residents who saw them beat one man and slit his throat while the others fled. Similar tit-for-tat violence occurred recently in the nearby southern Serbian village of Dobrcane, prompting women and children from 150 families there to flee to Kosovo. The cycle began with a gun battle between police and an ex-Kosovo Liberation Army fighter they were trying to arrest--one of an estimated 700 KLA fighters who were raised in the Presevo and Bujanovac municipalities. NATO officials say that after two ethnic Albanian farmers were allegedly slain by Serb paramilitaries, the village came under the control of ethnic Albanian rebels, a situation confirmed by NATO peacekeepers peering at the village over the border through binoculars. The rebel group there is one of four operating the region, according to Western officials, who say the groups have not come under a single command yet. "The security situation [along the Kosovo-Serbian border] . . . has been deteriorating," said Gen. Vladimir Lazarevic, commander of Yugoslavia's Third Army, in an interview published in Belgrade last week. "Incidents have been caused by Albanian terrorist forces, infiltrated from Kosovo. . . . Several Serbian villages have . . . been depopulated." Ethnic Albanians say that besides Dobrcane, the villages of Bukovac and Susjare have been emptied recently. "You do see burned houses," said a Western aid worker in the Kosovo city of Gnjilane who visited the region and interviewed some of the 7,000 people from southern Serbia who have fled to Kosovo. Many ethnic Albanians from southern Serbia say ethnic tensions existed there for years but remained in the background until the war. "During the [NATO] bombing, there was selective violence against political groups and individuals. Paramilitary groups . . . burned houses--40 in the first month in Presevo--killed people, and stole," said Tahir Delice, a former head of Presevo's town council and member of the Serbian parliament who now runs the Council for Displaced People from Presevo and Bujanovac, based in Kosovo. Yugoslav Interior Ministry and army special forces troops who had stayed in Kosovo through NATO's bombardment resettled in southern Serbia after the war ended. They have mined the border and hidden artillery pieces in the hills. Now there are 600 bunked in the Presevo youth center and Yumko textile factory, and another 100 in a barracks near the Macedonian border, residents say. Under the terms of the cease-fire with NATO, Yugoslav forces are not supposed to come within three miles of the Kosovo border. However, some of the villages where ethnic Albanians have reported harassment by Yugoslav troops closer to Kosovo than that. Shaqir Shaqiri, a native of Presevo who is now deputy commander of the Kosovo Protection Corps in Gnjilane--a police force that includes former KLA rebels --said "For sure, there's going to be a war. . . . The best solution would be for them to join Kosovo. Belgrade does not need a place it cannot rule. The residents are going to face a moment when they will have to get their weapons and defend themselves." © Copyright 2000 The Washington Post Company |
Why Not Plant a Tree.
Create Focal Point
