Yugoslavia Urges Action After Blast
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:47 a.m. ET
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (AP) -- Yugoslavia's leaders promised a crackdown on terrorism along the Kosovo border and demanded action from NATO peacekeepers following two explosions that left at least 10 Serbs dead.
Serb authorities blamed ethnic Albanian militants for the mine that killed three police officers Sunday and a bus bombing within Kosovo that killed at least seven civilians Friday.
The rebels denied responsibility and said one of their commanders was killed by Serb police later Sunday in Lucane, just outside a buffer zone separating Kosovo province from the rest of Serbia, the larger of the two republics that make up Yugoslavia.
Top Yugoslav and Serbian leaders met late Sunday to discuss the mounting violence, and President Vojislav Kostunica's office released a statement pledging a ``series of measures against terrorism'' in the area.
Yugoslavia also urged NATO-led peacekeepers to stop the flow of arms and guerrillas in the buffer zone, which rebels have used to stage attacks on Serbian police and Yugoslav army troops.
The militants want to join the zone with Kosovo as part of a push for independence for the Serbian province, which has been run by the United Nations and NATO-led peacekeepers since June 1999, when Yugoslavia halted its crackdown on the Albanian majority after a NATO bombing campaign.
Friday's bombing of a bus carrying Serbs to visit the graves of relatives in Kosovo killed at least seven people and wounded 43, the deadliest attack in the province since 13 Serb farmers were machine-gunned to death while tilling their fields in July 1999.
``I think that the terrorists the other day were trying to send a message to several constituencies at once,'' Brig. Gen. Rob Fry, commander of the British peacekeepers, said Sunday.
The three policemen died Sunday when their van was demolished by what were believed to be anti-tank mines on a road near Lucane, a southern Serbian village just outside the three-mile-wide buffer zone.
The zone was created to prevent what officials feared would be clashes between Serbian forces and the NATO-led peacekeepers patrolling Kosovo under the 1999 peace deal for the province.
Only lightly armed Serbian police are allowed to enter the zone, and ethnic Albanian militants have taken control of most of the strip in recent months.
Yugoslav authorities say the peacekeepers have failed to fulfill a mandate to keep the ethnic Albanian militants and their weapons out of the buffer zone.
Yugoslav Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic appealed Sunday to NATO Secretary-General George Robertson to ensure that the peacekeeping force immediately seal Kosovo's boundary with Serbia.
The militants have attacked Serbian police inside the zone and sometimes launch attacks across the line into Serbia proper. The explosion Sunday took place about 200 yards outside the zone.
Serbian police came under fire while trying to pull out the wreckage of the wrecked police vehicle, a government statement said.
No one was injured, but Serbian officials reported a further exchange of gunfire between police and the rebels in the buffer zone later Sunday.
A spokesman for the ethnic Albanian militants, Jonuz Musliu, said one rebel commander was killed by Serb police Sunday in Lucane and another commander and a soldier were wounded.
Musliu, the political officer of the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac, denied the group was behind the policemen's deaths and condemned the bus bombing.
Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Nebojsa Covic, who submitted a peace plan for the buffer zone to NATO earlier this week, said the government's patience was wearing thin.
``It is not permissible that such attacks continue,'' Covic said. ``We also demand from the international community specific decisions.''
Meanwhile, U.N. officials in Kosovo's capital, Pristina, said a German forensic team had begun identifying victims in the bus attack by examining bodies and body parts laid out in a large tent. There were fears that the death toll could rise.
Hundreds of Serbs gathered Sunday in the Serb enclave of Gracanica, some six miles south of Pristina, to protest Friday's bombing.
Tens of thousands of Serbs have fled their homes in Kosovo since the United Nations and NATO took over, fearing reprisals following former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's crackdown on the province's ethnic Albanians.