Yugoslav FM Visits NATO HeadquartersThe foreign minister of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia visited the NATO headquarters on Wednesday, the first by a Belgrade official since the 1999 air strike against the Balkan nation.NATO Secretary General George Robertson described the visit as important and historic while meeting 37-year-old Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic. Head of the Serbian Civic Alliance, Svilanovic supported Vojislav Kostunica's rise to the Yugoslav presidency last year. He said that peace and stability in the Balkans is one of Belgrade's absolute priorities. The visitor talked with NATO's North Atlantic Council about making changes to the ground safety zone, where the NATO-led peacekeeping troops in Kosovo are not allowed to enter while only lightly armed Yugoslav police is allowed to patrol. However, well-armed ethnic Albanian rebels have therefore penetrated into the five-kilometer buffer zone, where they killed four Yugoslav policemen last November and seized several police outposts. Svilanovic said that Yugoslavia wants to change the scope of the zone but did not make himself clear what changes he meant. The Yugoslav foreign minister also talked with NATO officials about the country's concerns about the potential health hazards of depleted-uranium ammunition. The issue has hit the headlines across Europe recently after 17 peacekeepers from six NATO countries have died of leukemia that was linked by some with the use of the ammunition tipped with depleted-uranium heavy metal for increased armor penetration capability. |
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