4 Are Reported Killed as Clashes in Kosovo Go On

Serbian gunners shelled villages in Kosovo with heavy artillery Saturday, and fighting flared along the province’s southern border with Macedonia. Four people were killed in the clashes, ethnic Albanian and Serbian sources said.

The artillery attack targeted three villages in the Decani area, 45 miles west of Pristina, the provincial capital, said the Kosovo Information Center, which is close to Albanian leaders in the province.

A 3-year-old boy was killed while sleeping in his bed in Gramocel, the center said. Another ethnic Albanian was reportedly found dead in nearby Babaloc.

Serbian attacks also injured three people in Gramocel and three others in Prilip, the center said. None of the reports could be independently confirmed.

Serbian police and army forces have recently stepped up their campaign to crush the Kosovo Liberation Army, the armed wing of the Albanian independence movement. The crackdown has killed more than 200 people.

The militants have been gaining in popularity and numbers after years of heavy-handed rule by Serbian authorities in Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians represent 90% of the population of 2.2 million.

In fighting elsewhere, Serbian sources said that two men were killed in a border clash Saturday between Serb-led Yugoslav army troops and an armed group attempting to illegally enter the province from Macedonia. They were the first reported dead along the Yugoslav-Macedonian frontier.

Representatives of 16 Central European and Balkan countries meeting Saturday on Brioni Island, Croatia, condemned violence and all forms of terrorism in embattled Kosovo.

Speaking to reporters on Brioni, Ilir Meta, Albania’s state secretary for European integration, repeated his government’s calls for outside assistance to cope with the continuing influx of Kosovo refugees.

An estimated 10,000 Kosovo Albanian refugees fled to northern Albania last week.

Also Saturday, diplomats in New York said that Britain and the United States want the U.N. Security Council to authorize force against Yugoslavia for the attacks in Kosovo.

No resolution has been drafted, but the two countries were said to be contemplating a document that would authorize “all necessary measures” against the government in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, to prepare the legal groundwork for any action by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

A similar phrase was used in November 1990 when the United States succeeded in persuading the 15-member body to approve its military action in the Persian Gulf to expel Iraqi troops from Kuwait.

Russia, an ally of Yugoslavia and its president, Slobodan Milosevic, has said that any NATO operation in Kosovo would have to be authorized by the entire Security Council, where it exercises a veto. Moscow may well block any resolution authorizing force.

NATO defense ministers are scheduled to meet this week in Brussels with Kosovo at the top of their agenda, but U.S. officials have said they do not expect a swift decision on military action.