Yugoslav Military Threatens New Fight : Kosovo: Army accuses NATO of violating peace agreement. General says it will reenter province if U.N. does not allow Serb soldiers in to protect minorities from attack.

The Yugoslav army is making ominous threats that it will force its way back into Kosovo if the United Nations doesn’t soon deliver on a promise to let some Serbian soldiers and police return to the southern province.

Angered by almost daily attacks on Serbs and other ethnic minorities in Kosovo, the Yugoslav military accuses the U.N. and NATO-led peacekeepers of violating the June peace accord that ended the war over Kosovo.

Under the deal, called the Military Technical Agreement, the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army is supposed to be dismantled and Yugoslav sovereignty over Kosovo assured, but the opposite is happening, Yugoslav Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic charged in an interview here.

By overturning federal laws, the U.N. civilian administration running Kosovo--a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s dominant republic--is also violating a U.N. Security Council resolution affirming Yugoslav sovereignty over Kosovo, the general charged. He said that, for example, the U.N. is moving to introduce new passports and customs rules for the province.

“They didn’t do what they were supposed to do: protect the borders, provide security for the non-Albanian population, disarm the KLA, create a platform for the political solution of the future of Kosovo,” said Pavkovic, commander of the Yugoslav 3rd Army troops who fought in Kosovo.

“The [Yugoslav] army will not do anything until it gets the order to act, but it is ready to act,” he said. “Since [peacekeeping] units have done nothing about the [U.N.] resolution and the Military Technical Agreement, we feel we have the right to ask them to pull out from our country because they didn’t respect anything that was agreed.”

That may be mere bluster coming from a general facing about 40,000 NATO-led ground troops in Kosovo and commanding a much more poorly equipped force already battered by 78 days of intense NATO airstrikes.

But the Yugoslav army may also have something other than a conventional ground attack in mind. Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo claim that Serbian security forces and paramilitary units are already secretly working in civilian clothes in the territory.

Yugoslav Gen. Vladimir Lazarevic, commander of the Pristina Corps--which NATO forced to retreat--has told a newspaper in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, that his troops are obsessed with returning to Kosovo and “are waiting for the appropriate decision command.”

“We are asking to return to Kosovo in accord with the international agreement,” Lazarevic told the Nedeljni Telegraf on Wednesday. “If not, then our state will have to find other ways.

“I would not prejudge that now,” he added. “I just know that this would not be favorable for anyone in the region.”

The peace deal that Yugoslavia ratified on June 3 guarantees that “an agreed number of Serb personnel will be allowed to return to Kosovo” to perform such duties as “maintaining a presence at sites of Serb heritage and . . . at key border crossings.”

The details were left open for negotiation later, but the Serbs insist they were promised that several hundred soldiers and police could return to guard Orthodox churches and other sites as well as to secure border posts.

Although the KLA guerrillas are due to disband by next Sunday, the NATO-led force and U.N. administration have agreed to let the rebel army form a “Kosovo Corps” to, among other things, respond to natural disasters.

Modeled after the U.S. National Guard, the corps would have 3,000 uniformed members carrying weapons, with an additional 2,000 reservists, helicopters, a security force and an honor guard.

To Serbian authorities, that sounds like the core of a new army that Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians could use to push for independence. Russia’s government also opposes the plan and will try to stop it in the Security Council, First Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Avdeyev reportedly told officials in Belgrade last week.

“The greatest and most painful problem is the separating of Kosovo from Yugoslavia, hidden behind a slogan on preserving its territorial integrity,” Avdeyev was quoted as saying by Tanjug, the state-run Yugoslav news agency.

Pavkovic was more blunt during an interview at the Yugoslav army officers club in the southern city of Nis.

“Patience is running out,” he said. “Kosovar Serbs are more endangered every day, our laws are suspended, the KLA gets clear support--all of those questions test the patience of our people and of our government.”

Pavkovic insisted that his troops suffered minimal losses by carefully hiding during the allied airstrikes and that they are still strong enough to take on the NATO-led force in Kosovo, known as KFOR.

“Right now, our army is very capable of confronting KFOR troops and taking Kosovo back,” he said. “Without great air support, KFOR troops would have little chance against our army.

“A ground-to-ground war is more convenient for us,” he said, “since your side is very sensitive to casualties and you would quickly pull out on your own.”

There are already signs that Serbian forces may have begun a covert operation against the peacekeeping mission, which most Serbs fear will lead to Kosovo breaking away from Serbia.

Ethnic Albanians accuse the Serbs of secretly infiltrating notorious paramilitary units through a land corridor linking Serbia proper with a Serbian enclave protected by French peacekeeping troops in the divided city of Kosovska Mitrovica.

The city has been the scene of bloody street battles over the past few days involving ethnic Albanians, Serbs and French soldiers.

Zeqir Maxhuni, a lawyer and vice president of the Albanian Republican Party in Kosovska Mitrovica, charged that Serbian paramilitary troops have slipped into Kosovo from Serbia proper in recent weeks and that French troops controlling the northern region have done nothing to stop them.

French Gen. Jean-Claude Thomann, second in command of the KFOR troops, said military officials suspect that Serbian paramilitary soldiers are in northern Kosovo but don’t know for certain. The problem, he said, is that KFOR troops are charged with maintaining peace while protecting both ethnic Albanians and ethnic Serbs. That, he said, doesn’t give KFOR the authority to ban people from moving around Kosovo.

“We’re not police,” Thomann said. “There is no border between Serbia and Kosovo. When we’re checking cars, the soldiers are looking for weapons and ammunition.”

Thomann acknowledged that even rumors of Serbian paramilitary units moving into Kosovska Mitrovica have exacerbated tensions in the troubled city and helped to fuel two days of violent confrontations at either end of the city’s main bridge over the Ibar River. He said those skirmishes grew out of frustrations among Albanians over their inability to return to homes in the northern section of the city and out of a sense among ethnic Serbs that they represent Serbia’s last stand in the province.

“We cannot challenge in a few days the state of mind of people after all that has happened in the last four months and over the last few years,” Thomann said. “They have very different ideas about the future of Kosovo. . . . We want a multiethnic Kosovo with the freedom of movement for everyone. How to fulfill that ideal is a problem.”

Three months after Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic surrendered to NATO, ethnic violence continues in Kosovo. More than 218,000 people, mostly Serbs, have fled the province amid almost daily attacks by ethnic Albanians, according to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

A survey released Friday by the U.N. in Kosovo estimated that 97,000 Serbs still live in the province but found that Serbs are continuing to leave, many out of fear or because they see no future in the province.

NATO bombing killed 161 Yugoslav soldiers in the 3rd Army and wounded 299 more, Pavkovic said. Soon after the war ended, Milosevic said that the army suffered a total of 462 dead and that the Serbian police lost 114 men.

Pavkovic said the 3rd Army lost only 13 tanks, six armored personnel carriers, three artillery pieces, nine antiaircraft guns and 10 vehicles.

Despite NATO’s claims that its airstrikes were inflicting heavier losses, troops found the remains of surprisingly few heavy weapons after entering Kosovo in June.

Watson reported from Nis and Martelle from Kosovska Mitrovica.