Kosovo approaching a 'powder keg,' NATO official says
Copyright © 1999 Nando Media
Copyright © 1999 Associated Press
By ANNE THOMPSON
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (February 25, 1999 4:59 p.m. EST nandotimes.com) - Explosions and the sound of gunfire broke out Thursday between Yugoslav army forces and Kosovo rebels in defiance of Western warnings that they hold to a cease-fire during the 2 1/2-week lull in peace talks.
German Gen. Klaus Naumann, head of NATO's panel of military planners, expressed concern over the fighting as well as what he called a "significant" buildup of Yugoslav forces in and near Kosovo.
The situation in Kosovo, the ethnic Albanian-majority province in southern Serbia where more than 2,000 people have died in fighting the past year, is "more than tense. It's almost a powder keg," Naumann said Thursday.
The blasts and small-arms fire Thursday erupted from Bukos, 20 miles northwest of the provincial capital of Pristina, where Serb tanks and mortars were targeting separatist Kosovo Liberation Army positions near the village.
Clashes in the same area on Tuesday, the day the peace talks ended, left one Serb civilian dead and five Serb policemen wounded, and monitors with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe reported that at least 15 Yugoslav tanks had massed in the region.
Under the circumstances, it is "absolutely necessary that military pressure is kept up" and that NATO maintain the option to stage airstrikes against the Serbs, Naumann said.
The fighting came as ethnic Albanian negotiators returned to Kosovo from peace talks in Rambouillet, France, which ended this week without substantial agreement on how to bring lasting peace to the impoverished, mountainous province in Serbia, the main republic in Yugoslavia.
While the Serbs refused to let NATO troops enforce a peace plan - a key ingredient to any deal - ethnic Albanians agreed to sign a tentative agreement when talks resume March 15 after consulting with KLA commanders back in Kosovo.
In a milestone decision, the German parliament on Thursday approved what would be its largest deployment of troops - as many as 6,000 of an expected 28,000 NATO-led peacekeeping force - to serve outside the country since World War II.
The Clinton administration, which has offered to send up to 4,000 U.S. troops as well, expressed concern Thursday that both sides in the Kosovo dispute will use the recess in peace talks to fortify their military positions.
Officials warned Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic that airstrikes remain a possibility and urged the Kosovo Albanian side to "show restraint or risk losing NATO support."
Both NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana and U.S. officials said they expected the two sides to refrain from fighting during the pause.
NATO's commander in Europe, Gen. Wesley Clark, said Thursday that the alliance was monitoring a Serb military buildup on the Kosovo border and was ready to strike Serb targets.
Some 1,800 NATO troops are already in neighboring Macedonia, and Clark, speaking at a NATO conference in Valencia, Spain, said another contingent was en route.
Fighting in Kosovo began almost a year ago when Milosevic sent forces to crush the KLA insurrection. Besides the high casualties, 300,000 residents in Kosovo - mostly ethnic Albanians - have been displaced.
More than 90 percent of Kosovo's 2 million populace is ethnic Albanian, and most of them want independence.
The ethnic Albanian refusal to sign a peace deal in Rambouillet made it impossible for NATO to follow through on threatened air strikes designed to make Serbs cooperate.
With divisions among the Albanians a longstanding barrier to a peace deal, an alliance announced Wednesday among moderate rebels and pacifist politicians signaled hope that negotiators could return to talks with a signed agreement.
But a day later, KLA hard-liner Adem Demaci refused to work with pacifists led by Ibrahim Rugova.
Demaci called attempts to form a joint leadership nothing but a "vain and private attempt of the people who failed during the negotiations in Rambouillet," according to comments published Thursday in the Albanian newspaper Koha Ditore Times.
Meanwhile, an aircraft carrying most of the ethnic Albanian delegation at Rambouillet landed Thursday in Pristina. Three KLA delegates were driven off without incident in OSCE vehicles, likely to rebel-controlled territory.
Two other KLA delegates will probably return to Kosovo by Macedonia or Albania. The Serb government, which considers the KLA terrorists, allowed the rebels to leave for talks in France only after international pressure. |
