U.S., Yugoslavia Begin to Shake Off Distrust

The postwar wall of distrust between Yugoslavia and the United States crumbled a bit more Monday as Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica shook hands and spoke briefly here with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

The surprise meeting was the highest-level contact between the two governments in the nearly 18 months since the U.S. led a 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia to end a vicious civil war in the Serbian province of Kosovo.

After her chat with Kostunica on the sidelines of an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe gathering, Albright briefly met with Yugoslav Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic to discuss attacks by ethnic Albanian rebels in southern Serbia’s Presevo Valley, a State Department official said.

The discussion between Albright and Svilanovic was along the lines of “what can you do, what can we do?” said the official, who requested anonymity, citing department policy.

The two were “looking at how to really calm the violence there because we all recognize it’s counterproductive,” the official added.

Ethnic Albanian rebels attacked deep into an area of southern Serbia along the border with Kosovo, which has been under international control since the war ended in June 1999. Serbia is the dominant republic of Yugoslavia.

The Yugoslav army responded Sunday by deploying tanks near the border and warning of a possible counterattack.

Yugoslavia and the rebels, who want to unite a mainly ethnic Albanian zone of southern Serbia proper with an eventually independent Kosovo, backed away slightly Monday from earlier threats and counter-threats. The rebels announced that they will continue a cease-fire until Friday. Yugoslav officials extended a Monday deadline for the international community to crack down on the incursion and said they would be satisfied if the guerrillas withdrew by Friday.

The ethnic Albanian fighters call themselves the Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac Liberation Army after the three main towns in the zone.

Kostunica refers to the guerrillas as “terrorists,” as did Slobodan Milosevic, his recently ousted predecessor. The Yugoslav government estimates that at least 1,000 fighters have crossed into the buffer zone from an area of eastern Kosovo controlled by U.S. troops serving with the international peacekeeping force.

In his speech to the OSCE ministers’ meeting here, Kostunica said the guerrillas had “ethnically cleansed” Serbs from the area and warned that “the Kosovo issue is the most difficult and the most important European issue today” because “it could easily set the entire region ablaze.”

“In Kosovo proper, violence is escalating, and it is no longer based on ethnicity only but has assumed political dimensions as well,” Kostunica said. “We are talking about classic terrorism, which in the 1960s and the early 1970s affected developed European countries.

“We are talking about a bid to implement by sheer force a political solution that does not have support from the people,” he added. “The violence is spilling over into southern Serbia.”

Kostunica told reporters that he had written to North Atlantic Treaty Organization and United Nations leaders asking for changes to a postwar agreement that allows only lightly armed Serbian police to enter the buffer zone.

Serbian officials say the rebel incursions began last November, and Kostunica again blamed Kosovo’s U.N. administration and the NATO-led peacekeeping force for failing to stop the attacks. The buffer zone extends three miles into southern Serbia proper along the Kosovo border.

Serbia’s government says four police officers were killed in fighting last week. The latest casualty was a 10-year-old ethnic Albanian who died when his family tried to flee the combat zone on a tractor Sunday and set off an antitank mine, Serbian authorities said.

As the ethnic Albanian rebels advanced last week, Serbian residents fled villages, set up roadblocks and demanded tougher action from Kostunica, who has to defend his political flank against withering criticism from Milosevic. The former Yugoslav president, driven from power last month, was reelected as head of the Socialist Party on Saturday, and Serbia-wide elections are set for Dec. 23.

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that about 2,000 people, mostly ethnic Albanians, have fled into Kosovo to escape the fighting in the buffer zone.

Just last week, as Albright prepared to leave for Europe, her advisors said “a scheduling conflict” would prevent her from meeting Kostunica, who hasn’t hidden his anger at the NATO airstrikes and foreign control of Kosovo.

Despite lingering bitterness, Kostunica turned to shake Albright’s hand Monday after he signed documents to bring Yugoslavia back into the OSCE, the State Department official said. The two “exchanged a few words--nothing serious,” the official added.

“The difference now is the fact that we’re talking to these people” about disputes, the official said.

Although U.S. and Yugoslav officials plan to continue talks during the coming days in a bid to avert more fighting in Serbia, it’s too early to discuss a joint effort to deal with the ethnic Albanian rebels, the official cautioned.

“I’m not sure we’re at the point of cooperation yet,” he said. “It’s a question of how to keep each side’s people doing what they can to limit the violence there.”

Albright also discussed the border conflict with several of her European counterparts, including Russian Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov and British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook.