Kosovo Rebels Want To Keep Weapons
Tuesday, 22 June 1999
P R I S T I N A , Y U G O S L A V I A (AP)
ONLY A day after pledging to warehouse their weapons and end
their fight, a top Kosovo Liberation Army leader said Tuesday the
rebels never agreed to give up their guns and still hope to form an
army.
There also was evidence the rebels - or supporters - were
continuing to take revenge on Serb civilians. Serb houses burned
in the western city of Pec and a Serb power company worker
was shot in the capital. British troops reportedly had to defuse a
land mine in the heart of Pristina.
The violence followed the first deaths in Kosovo's peace force.
Two soldiers from the British contingent were killed Monday
when unexploded NATO ordnance they were trying to destroy
accidentally blew up. Two villagers helping the peacekeepers also
were killed and a third was hurt.
Rrustem Mustafa, a KLA commander known for his hard-line
views, said an agreement in which the rebels pledged to turn in
their weapons, disband and put away their uniforms doesn't
mean the end of the insurgents or their struggle for an
independent Kosovo.
"The agreement does not demand that we give up our arms,"
Mustafa, known as "Commander Remi," told the rebels' Kosova
Press news service. "The arms will be gathered at certain places
and the KLA will take care of them while NATO has a right to
observe them."
Mustafa appears to be technically correct on the issue of arms - at
least for the time being. The agreement reached Monday
between NATO and the KLA calls for the rebels and
peacekeepers to have joint control over the weapons storehouses
for 90 days, after which the insurgent army is to disband as a
military force.
Mustafa also said he hoped the KLA would form a regular army.
That wouldn't sit well with the government in Belgrade or with
its Russian supporters, especially because the peace plan calls for
Kosovo to remain a part of Serbia.
"Those who thought that the KLA will be destroyed
miscalculated," Mustafa said.
Under the agreement, the international community can consider
permitting an army for Kosovo along the lines of the U.S. National
Guard. Presumably, many of its members would be former rebel
fighters.
Above the divided city of Pec, smoke from burning houses rose
into the mountains. A group of ethnic Albanians watched one
Serb house burn; they claimed the Serbs had set the fire
themselves. The residents were nowhere to be seen.
Italian peacekeepers sent in heavily armed soldiers to remove a
Serb family that said a KLA fighter had come into their home and
robbed them. While soldiers on the street and in the courtyard
provided cover, soldiers stormed the house and escorted the men
and women out. An Italian soldier carried one old man out over
his shoulder.
In Pristina, British peacekeepers defused a bomb only 100 feet
from the Grand Hotel, the Kosovo capital's biggest hotel and a
major gathering place for foreign journalists, the state-run Tanjug
news agency said. It was unclear who placed the bomb.
Also in Pristina's bustling downtown, two men opened fire on a
Serb civilian Tuesday, wounding him in the chest, the
independent Beta news agency reported. Beta, citing witnesses,
said the gunmen walked away calmly after the shooting.
And in Prizren, German soldiers arrested a KLA fighter on a
routine weapons check Tuesday. The man was later identified by
former inmates of an alleged KLA torture chamber at a local
police station as being one of those who tortured them.
More details emerged Tuesday of an explosion in Negrovce that
killed Lt. Gareth Evans and Sgt. Balaram Rai from the British
army's 69th Gurkha Field Squadron.
Lt. Col. Nick Clissitt, a spokesman for the British military in
Kosovo, said residents had piled up unexploded NATO cluster
bombs they found around their village and called in the
peacekeepers to help them destroy them.
Since the pile was too close to a schoolhouse, villagers helped the
Gurkhas move them to three smaller piles, which they planned to
detonate.
"It was during the wiring of the charges that two piles detonated
prematurely with tragic results," Clissitt said.
Although unexploded bombs, uncleared minefields and
booby-traps pose substantial hazards in Kosovo, droves of
refugees are disregarding calls for them to stay in refugee camps
over the border in Albania and Macedonia until the danger can
be reduced.
Dozens of civilians already have died in explosions of land mines
since the peacekeepers entered Kosovo on June 12. Peacekeepers'
spokesman Lt. Col. Robin Clifford said mine blasts killed one
civilian Monday and a child on Sunday.
"I would repeat the call to refugees ... to exercise caution and
restraint when moving around Kosovo, because it is not yet safe,"
he said.
President Clinton made a similar appeal during a visit to a
Macedonian tent city Tuesday, urging a cheering crowd at the
Stenkovec refugee camp to seek reconciliation in Kosovo - not
revenge.
"I don't want any child hurt. I don't want anyone else to lose an
arm or a leg or a child because of a land mine," he said. "So be
patient with us. ... You are going to be able to go back in safety
and security."
But they continued to return. The U.N. refugee agency said more
than 170,000 of the 860,000 or so refugees who fled from
Kosovo have returned in little more than a week.
Another 600,000 are in camps or with host families in
neighboring countries and 88,000 more have been evacuated to
other countries farther away, including 7,500 to the United
States.
In other developments:
-Yugoslavia's parliament scheduled a session Thursday to end the
state of war, following NATO's official ending of its bombing
campaign on Monday.
The state of war, in effect since March 24, banned men of
military age from leaving the country, let the army take over key
institutions and subjected the news media to censorship.
-With the 78-day air war over, U.S. warplanes sent to Europe as
part of the allied bombing campaign are coming home. The first of
367 military planes is to return Wednesday, the Pentagon said.
-The foreign ministers of Italy, Britain, Germany and France will
visit Kosovo on Wednesday to meet with U.N. special
representative Sergio Vieira de Mello and NATO's Kosovo
commander, Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson. |
