U.S. Optimistic About Ending Strife in Serbia

U.S. envoys held talks with Yugoslav officials Monday and said they were confident that peace can be restored to a part of Serbia neighboring Kosovo where ethnic Albanian guerrillas are fighting Serbian authorities.

William Montgomery, the American ambassador to Yugoslavia, and U.S. Balkans envoy James Pardew held talks with Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Nebojsa Covic in the southern town of Bujanovac, near the boundary with Kosovo.

“Ambassador Montgomery and I had a very good discussion today with Mr. Covic on the situation in this area,” Pardew said in comments aired on Serbian state television.

“We are working very hard with the international community and the governments of [Yugoslavia] and Serbia to achieve a peaceful solution to this difficult problem. And we are confident that we will be able to do this,” he said.

Four Serbian police officers were killed in clashes with ethnic Albanian guerrillas last month in a 3-mile-wide security zone along the boundary with Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic.

On the Kosovo side, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led peacekeeping force said a joint U.S.-Russian patrol came under fire Sunday from the buffer zone in Serbia proper. The peacekeepers returned fire and suffered no casualties, it said.

Covic said both sides agreed in Monday’s talks that there could be no border changes and that extremism could not be tolerated. He said the Serbian side had received a promise that the NATO-led force would better secure the Kosovo-Serbian boundary to prevent guerrilla infiltration into the buffer zone.

The guerrillas say they are trying to protect the large ethnic Albanian community in the Presevo Valley of southern Serbia from harassment by Serbian police. Belgrade says the guerrillas are separatists bent on annexing the valley to ethnic Albanian-dominated Kosovo.