Serbs Move on New Front in Kosovo

Kosovo’s Cicavica mountains cut through the heart of rebel territory, and Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has chosen this high ground to answer Western demands for peace.

His response came in a series of shuddering blasts that sent up dark plumes of smoke from this deserted village Tuesday afternoon while negotiations for peace in the separatist province stalled in Paris. Hundreds of new refugees fled so suddenly that fresh laundry still hung on a clothesline outside one farmhouse, gently waving in the spring breeze.

The only people left in Lubovac and surrounding villages were a few fighters from the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army who said Milosevic has launched an offensive to take the strategic Cicavica mountains.

“This is their aim, to climb up Cicavica,” Gani Koci, a spokesman for the KLA’s high command, said at the guerrillas’ headquarters in the village of Likoc. “But I don’t think they will succeed. And if they do, they will suffer heavy losses.”

The Serbian forces’ advance is the latest violation of a cease-fire Milosevic agreed to in October after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization threatened to bomb Yugoslav military targets. NATO has repeated that threat without effect ever since.

The Yugoslav army has at least seven times the number of troops and weapons in Kosovo that is permitted under the October agreement, according to NATO estimates, and more reinforcements roll in every day. The army says its forces are only conducting regular exercises.

On Tuesday, foreign cease-fire monitors reported that seven powerful Russian-made T-72 tanks arrived by train and headed to a base just west of the Cicavica mountains. Until now, Milosevic’s troops have made do with older T-55 tanks.

In Washington, Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon called the arrival of the T-72s “most disturbing.”

The Serbs “certainly are bracing for war” even as they continue to take part in Paris peace talks, he said, speculating that the preparations are underway for any of three reasons: to fire back in the event of NATO airstrikes; to resist a NATO move into Kosovo; or to blast the province’s ethnic Albanian population.

Bacon said the buildup has brought Serbian troop levels to between 14,000 and 18,000 within the province, and 21,000 along its perimeter.

KLA fighters indicated Tuesday that they are using land mines to thwart the Serbs’ advance. Asked whether the KLA had laid any mines recently, Koci replied with a cold stare: “You have to be careful where you drive.”

Kosovo is a southern province of Serbia, the more powerful of Yugoslavia’s two remaining republics. About 90% of Kosovo’s 2 million people are ethnic Albanians, but Serbs claim the territory as their cultural heartland.

Koci conceded that a Serbian victory atop Mt. Cicavica would be a major blow to the KLA’s fight for independence, which broke into full-scale war just over a year ago.

The guerrillas hope to quit while they’re ahead by signing an interim peace deal in Paris that would bring 28,000 NATO-led troops to Kosovo and grant three years of self-rule to the province’s ethnic Albanian majority--without guaranteeing a referendum on independence.

Milosevic flatly rejects the deployment of foreign troops in Kosovo, while Washington and the KLA agree that a peacekeeping force led by NATO is essential to any deal.

The Serbian delegation spent Tuesday arguing for changes to political sections of the accord, which would give Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians their own president, legislative assembly, police force and courts.

“We are ready to sign the political statement but only on the condition that our adjustments are accepted,” Serbian President Milan Milutinovic said Tuesday in Paris, without specifying what amendments he wants.

Western mediators insist that they will accept only minor, technical changes to the draft and are trying to pressure Milosevic with threats of NATO airstrikes in the hope of getting a deal before war engulfs Kosovo.

One of the KLA’s most hard-line commanders, who fights under the war name Remi, added another dangerous twist to the faltering peace process Tuesday with a letter denouncing the proposed accord as fraudulent and manipulative.

“We find it necessary to disassociate ourselves from this wrong anti-national policy,” Remi’s headquarters said in a letter published by Koha Ditore, a popular Albanian-language daily newspaper.

Times staff writer Paul Richter in Washington contributed to this report.