World

Restoring The Peace In Kosovo

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

December 25, 1998 / 12:48 PM EST / CBS

After four days of clashes left at least 13 people dead in Kosovo, the head of the organization overseeing a fragile truce is questioning whether the peace mission can continue without cooperation by the warring sides.

International peace verifiers reported the province quiet Monday following a Christmas Eve offensive by Serbian forces.

In a sometimes-fierce battle Sunday, artillery, mortar and machine-gun fire sounded for hours across the snowy fields of rebel-controlled territory as the two sides fought from trenches, villages and dirt roads.

At least five people - three Serb policeman, a Serb civilian and a Kosovo Liberation Army fighter - were reported wounded as the worst period of violence in months continued in the secessionist province of southern Serbia.

William Walker, the American diplomat who heads the Kosovo Verification Mission, countered assumptions that a return to war is inevitable by stressing that the scope of violence remains limited.

"This is what I would call sporadic fighting," he said in a TV interview after Sunday's clash ended. "Both sides are being relatively cautious" and not using full firepower, he said.

"We're trying to talk to both sides, get them to stand down, show some humanity ... in terms of getting the wounded out," Walker said.

Verifiers from the 54-nation peace mission, led by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, mediated the evacuation of two wounded Serbs and one ethnic Albanian after the firefight.

Spokesman Jorgen Grunnet said teams of international monitors held talks late on Sunday with commanders of Serb security forces and ethnic Albanian rebels in the area, where more than a dozen people have been killed since Thursday in a series of clashes.

"They had contacts with both sides and tried to influence them in keeping the cease-fire agreement," Grunnet said.

Sunday's clash was attributed to the funeral of a Serb farmer, killed by rebels the previous day. The Serbs said they needed to ensure the safety of other civilians while evacuating the body; the KLA complained the heavy Serb buildup was a provocation preventing civilians who fled the previous fighting from returning.

A new trouble spot emerged Sunday night when Serb police sealed off a suburb of Kosovska Mitrovica and began searching for "terrorists," their term for the rebels. The Serb-run Media Center said men in KLA uniforms had shot dead three Gypsy men in the town 25 miles northwest of the capital, Pristina.

Shootings blamed on the rebels have resulted in harsh crackdowns backed by tanks and artillery.

Four days of clashes, centered on the KLA stronghold of Lapastica and neighboring Obranca, have eroded a shaky truce that held through the late fall and winter across Kosovo, a secessionist province of Serbia, the dominant republic left in Yugoslavia.

Despite an October agreement that halted mor than seven months of fighting, neither side has shown a willingness to negotiate a settlement.

The KLA insists on independence and on driving Serb police out of the predominantly Albanian province, while the Serbian government says it will never let Kosovo go.

More than 1,000 people have been killed since Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic began an offensive against the rebels in February, and about 300,000 have been driven from their homes.

Polish Foreign Minister Bronislaw Geremek, current head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said on Sunday that, if the latest violence escalated, the OSCE would have to reconsider the nature of its mission in Kosovo, which is supposed to be overseeing the truce and helping implement a political settlement.