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Yugoslav Leader Blasts NATO
Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica accused NATO peacekeepers in Kosovo Tuesday of "direct collaboration" with anti-government ethnic Albanian guerrillas in southern Serbia. "KFOR enabled and in some way supported or was helping the terrorists," Kostunica said, using an acronym for the peacekeeping force, which includes more than 5,000 U.S. troops. "For sure, in the case of some units, there was direct collaboration between KFOR 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 so-called "ground safety zone" was created at the end of NATO's war in 1999 with Yugoslavia over Kosovo, a Serbian province where the ethnic Albanian majority had waged a separatist rebellion.
The three-mile-wide buffer zone was designed to prevent incidents between Yugoslav forces and NATO peacekeepers. But Albanian guerrillas moved into the vacuum, seizing control of ethnic Albanian villages in Serbia's Presevo Valley and in neighboring Macedonia. U.S. soldiers are based in eastern Kosovo, adjacent to the area where fighting has occurred recently.
Kostunica has complained that peacekeepers are not doing enough to stop ethnic Albanian fighters from crossing into southern Serbia from U.N.-administered Kosovo. Tuesday, he broadened his indictment, saying KFOR troops, wary of taking casualties, should show "more courage" and confront armed Albanians.
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."
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