Envoys Demand Kosovo Separatists Unite for Talks

International officials on Saturday demanded that the leaders of pro-independence ethnic Albanians in Kosovo province unite as a condition for any fruitful talks with the Serbian government.

French and Austrian diplomats led a group of international officials to Pristina, the provincial capital, for talks with ethnic Albanians. The diplomats want to bring together the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, and the followers of Ibrahim Rugova, a moderate ethnic Albanian leader.

“We want to give a strong signal to the Kosovo Albanian side [that] it’s time now to start real negotiating at a broad base . . . that represents all the Kosovo Albanian political forces,” said Wolfgang Petritsch, Austria’s ambassador to Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital.

Kosovo is located in southern Serbia, the dominant republic in Yugoslavia.

Petritsch, along with the French ambassador to neighboring Macedonia, Jacques Huntzinger, met first with Fehmi Agani, the head of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian negotiating team.

Petritsch said the diplomats received a “positive response” from Agani, “but we are still short of a real and definite commitment.”

Agani represents Rugova’s camp, which has said it will accept broad autonomy within Serbia. But the KLA is determined to fight for full independence.

Representatives of the six-member international Contact Group--comprising Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the U.S. and Russia--also attended the talks and later met with KLA spokesman Adem Demaci.

The KLA has been excluded from political negotiations because of its continued military activity.

Petritsch said the rebels must decide whether to continue fighting or join negotiations.

The meetings come on the heels of what has been the bloodiest week in Kosovo since Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic agreed to scale back his troops in October. More than 1,000 people have been killed and up to 300,000 forced from their homes since fighting began in February.

Outside Pristina on Saturday, hundreds of Serbs attended the burial of Zvonko Bojanic, a municipal leader whose body was found dumped along a roadside early Friday. He had been badly beaten and was shot between the eyes.

The Serbs blame the KLA for the killing, but Demaci has denied that the rebels were involved and suggested that Serbian secret police may have been behind it.

Serbian police said, however, that the five assailants who broke into Bojanic’s home and kidnapped him Thursday night wore KLA uniforms.

Also Saturday, relatives of 36 ethnic Albanian guerrilla fighters killed in a border clash Monday recovered the bodies from the Serb-run morgue in Prizren and were preparing to bury them in a collective ceremony today.

Yugoslav soldiers crossed from Kosovo into Albania on Friday and fired into a village, but there were no casualties, Albanian police said Saturday.

“Six Yugoslav soldiers crossed into Albanian territory and opened automatic fire at the Zharke village,” an Albanian Interior Ministry statement said.

“The firing lasted [45 minutes] while 14 other soldiers watched from Yugoslav territory. Then they withdrew,” the statement added.

Guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which wants the province to be independent, have been battling Serbian security forces inside Kosovo since February.

Soldiers and arms are smuggled into Kosovo from northern Albania across a rugged mountain border.

Incidents in the area are relatively common.

Yugoslavia claims a total of 16 border incidents have occurred since Oct. 16, when it agreed to the deployment of 2,000 international peace monitors--”verifiers”--by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.