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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: George Papadopoulos who wrote (17441)	3/14/2001 10:14:59 AM
From: George Papadopoulos	Respond to of 17770

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.