I like Kostunica, he is no puppet pragmatist<g>
usatoday.com
Yugoslav leader assails NATO Says peacekeepers are helping guerrillas
By David J. Lynch
USA TODAY
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica accused
NATO peacekeepers in Kosovo Tuesday of ''direct collaboration'' with
anti-government ethnic Albanian guerrillas in southern Serbia.
The peacekeeper force ''enabled and in some way supported or was helping
the terrorists,'' he said. ''In the case of some units, there was direct
collaboration between (the peacekeepers and the rebels).''
Kostunica's statements, in an interview with USA TODAY, came one day
after NATO agreed to allow Yugoslav soldiers to return to part of a buffer
zone ringing Kosovo. The ''ground safety zone'' was created at the end of
NATO's war in 1999 with Yugoslavia, which waged a crackdown against
ethnic Albanian separatists in the Serbian province of Kosovo.
The 3-mile-wide buffer zone was designed to prevent incidents between
Yugoslav forces and NATO peacekeepers. But Albanian guerrillas moved
into the vacuum and have been seizing ethnic Albanian villages in Serbia's
Presevo Valley and in neighboring Macedonia. More than 5,000 U.S.
soldiers are in the peacekeeping force, and they are based in eastern Kosovo,
which is adjacent to the area where fighting has occurred.
Kostunica, a former constitutional law specialist who rode a wave of popular
protest to power last October, is a Serb nationalist who opposed the
U.S.-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. He has complained that
peacekeepers are not doing enough to stop ethnic Albanian fighters from
crossing into southern Serbia from United Nations-administered Kosovo.
On Tuesday, he said the peacekeepers, wary of taking casualties, should
show ''more courage'' and confront armed Albanians.
The peacekeeping force, known by the acronym KFOR, was slow to react to
the ethnic Albanian insurgency. In recent weeks, U.S.-led peacekeepers have
stepped up their patrols and conducted surveillance overflights of rebel-held
territory.
But, Kostunica said, ''flights of KFOR helicopters have been traced that gave
the impression of being used as a sort of logistics support to the terrorists
rather than surveilling them.''
In Brussels, NATO spokesman Mark Laity responded: ''Such comments are
simply wrong. It's simply pointless getting involved in this kind of exchange
when the cooperation between Serbia and KFOR is so important to the
future of the area.''
In the 50-minute interview, Kostunica also said he:
* Doubts investigators will have sufficient evidence to arrest former president
Slobodan Milosevic by March 31, the congressional deadline for cutting off
$100 million in U.S. aid unless Belgrade cooperates with international war
crimes investigators.
* Views Milosevic as a war criminal -- along with the former leaders of
Croatia and Bosnia and military commanders from NATO and the Albanian
guerrillas. |
