Ethnic Albanian Rebels Step Up Attacks in Balkans

Ethnic Albanian guerrillas Friday staged their strongest attack yet on Yugoslav forces in southern Serbia’s tense Presevo Valley, killing a Serbian policeman and wounding six other people, authorities here said.

“They’ve been shooting at the house we’re in for several hours,” Biserka Matic, a member of a Serbian government team dealing with the conflict, told B-92 Radio in Belgrade by telephone during the shootout in the village of Lucane. “We don’t dare poke our noses outside, as they are firing at everything that moves.”

Yugoslav leaders and some Western analysts say a recent wave of guerrilla raids in southern Serbia and northern Macedonia is aimed at derailing the rapidly improving ties between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the new democratic authorities in Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia and its dominant republic, Serbia.

James Lyon, a Yugoslavia specialist for the nongovernmental International Crisis Group, suggested that the rebels are trying to provoke a Serbian overreaction in the mistaken belief that NATO would then come to their aid, as it did in 1999. In March that year, NATO launched an 11-week air war to punish Yugoslavia’s then-president, Slobodan Milosevic, for his repression of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, a Serbian province.

“It’s obvious to anyone with half a brain that this time NATO is not going to intervene and the diplomatic tables are turned,” Lyon said. “The difficulty is, the Albanian extremists do not realize it and do not believe it. They are still convinced the same diplomatic alignment is in place as in 1998 and 1999. They just don’t get it.”

Matic, the Serbian official who came under fire Friday, said that Belgrade authorities remain determined to avoid any major upsurge in fighting.

“Those who think that the solution is in war, in entering the ground zone and finally having a showdown, are right in one way: when you look at the number of the victims that are falling,” Matic said. “But I still believe the solution is in negotiations, because in case of war these casualties would be far bigger.”

Many observers say the rebels’ long-term aim is to slice off parts of southern Serbia and northern Macedonia that are heavily ethnic Albanian in population and attach them to an ultimately independent “Greater Kosovo” or “Greater Albania.” Backers of the guerrillas often say they are merely defending ethnic Albanian communities from repression.

Today, Yugoslavia intends to sign a cease-fire document for the Presevo Valley region that NATO is presenting to both sides in the conflict, said Rasim Ljajic, the Yugoslav minister for minority affairs. That will fulfill a NATO precondition and set the stage, Ljajic said, for the Sunday deployment of Yugoslav soldiers and Serbian police into part of a buffer zone between Kosovo and Serbia proper that is adjacent to the Macedonian border.

Yugoslav Interior Minister Zoran Zivkovic said Friday that he expects Yugoslav forces to start returning to the buffer zone Sunday.

NATO has expressed hope that this move could help suppress guerrilla activity that threatens to destabilize Macedonia, where about one-quarter of the population is ethnic Albanian.

The ethnic Albanian guerrillas active in the Presevo Valley appear unlikely to agree to a cease-fire today. It wasn’t immediately clear what force the document might carry if only one side signs it, but NATO has been eager to ensure that the Yugoslav army acts with some degree of restraint even after entering the 3-mile-wide buffer zone.

The zone was established in mid-1999 to keep Yugoslav forces separated from the KFOR peacekeeping troops who entered Kosovo after the bombing campaign.

Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Nebojsa Covic, head of the Belgrade team dealing with the crisis, also was caught Friday in a building that was under attack for eight hours in Lucane, in the Presevo Valley.

“The police outpost was directly hit with two mortar shells,” Covic said. “Police Officer Stanko Miladinovic was injured in that attack. He died later.

“The aim of these attacks is to bring down the peace efforts and to prevent implementation of NATO’s and the international community’s decisions. They do not want a cease-fire, although the rest of the world wants it. Of course, the ones who do not want it will have to bear the consequences.”

Zivkovic, the Yugoslav interior minister, said that “it is obvious that only one force there wants war, disturbances, wants to kill and sow insecurity, and they are the Albanian extremists.”

At least 34 people have been killed in the Presevo Valley area over a period of more than a year, including three Yugoslav soldiers who died in a land mine explosion Wednesday.

Sejdullah Kadriu, a political representative for the guerrillas, said Friday afternoon that three rebels were wounded in the fighting in Lucane. There also were reports of the guerrillas claiming that shells fired by Serbian forces had landed on civilian homes.

Clashes between guerrillas and security forces also continued Friday in Macedonia. A freelance journalist who was traveling with a 15-vehicle Macedonian police convoy that came under fire overnight Thursday described that attack, in which the driver of a jeep was killed.

The jeep hit a land mine and was then targeted with two blasts from a grenade launcher, a police spokesman said. Angelique Kourounis, the journalist, said that after the explosion, she spent an hour hiding by the bank of a river.

“When we thought it was finished and headed toward the car to get out of there, we were attacked by hand-held rocket grenade launchers,” Kourounis said in Skopje, the Macedonian capital. “They were obviously waiting for us. We jumped into mud and then hid inside a building. The whole time we could hear shooting outside. . . . In the morning, we saw men in black uniforms on the roofs of the houses in [the village of] Brest shooting at us.”

The convoy made it back to Skopje on Friday afternoon.