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Yugoslav Troops Can Enter Buffer Zone: NATO
NATO said on Thursday that the Yugoslav troops are now allowed to enter the buffer zone bordering the Yugoslav province of Kosovo and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
The Western military alliance was forced to take the move as ethnic Albanian extremists from Kosovo had been resorting to violence in the buffer zone and even into neighboring Macedonia.
These separatists occupied a stretch of the buffer zone in southern Serbia last year and began launching attacks on Yugoslav police in the Presevo Valley. Recently, Kosovo Albanian gunmen seized adjacent Macedonian land by exploiting the gateway created by the buffer zone.
Three Yugoslav policemen were killed on Wednesday by a land mine planted in the Presevo Valley, taking the death toll to around 40 in the past few months of attacks.
NATO Secretary-General George Robertson said Thursday that NATO had authorized its peacekeeping command in Kosovo to "allow the controlled return of FRY forces into the ground safety zone, into a narrow sector next to the border with the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia."
It was the first step in a phased and conditioned reduction, as promised by NATO foreign ministers late last month, of the buffer zone established after June 1999 when the NATO-led international peacekeeping force entered Kosovo.
The commander of the peacekeeping force, General Carlo Cabigiosu of Italy, would check the situation as Yugoslav forces move back into the buffer zone where only government policemen with pistols have hitherto been allowed to patrol.
Cabigiosu would also decide on the level of armament the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia should deploy. NATO sources said that it was likely to include armored vehicles and possibly helicopters but no tanks.
The NATO chief said that further returns of the buffer zone still had to be subject to the approval by the North Atlantic Council, the decision-taking body of NATO.
The buffer zone is a five-kilometer-wide, 400-kilometer-long land strip immediately outside the Kosovo province into the Serbian republic.
"Do not expect an overnight blitz," said a NATO official who added that the depth of the Yugoslav deployment in the southern end of the buffer zone was still to be decided.
Observers have noted that a carefully coordinated operation would be needed in the border area in that it had international peacekeepers to the west, Macedonian army to the south and Yugoslav troops to the east, with the ethnic Albanian extremists sandwiched in the middle. Unwanted cross-fires could wreck havoc there.
NATO sources said that the operation would require planning and aerial surveillance, which has been hampered by bad weather recently.
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