Serbs Moving Out Of Kosovo

Large numbers of Yugoslav federal army troops and tanks and Serbian military police were on the move in Kosovo on Monday, one day before a NATO deadline for them to withdraw or face air strikes.

The withdrawal appears to be President Slobodan Milosevic's 11th-hour attempt to convince NATO he is fulfilling the agreement he reached two weeks ago with U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke to defuse the eight-month Kosovo conflict.

Some army units rumbled back to barracks in Pristina and others may have been headed out off Serbia's southern province altogether. How the movements squared with NATO demands, which have not been made public in detail, remained to be seen.

"The situation on the ground is that there appears to be a lot of movement but we're going to wait until the dust settles," White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said in Washington. "We haven't seen enough."

The independent Serbian news agency Beta quoted a source close to the army general staff as saying army troops would complete withdrawals to garrisons in Kosovo on Monday.

Hundreds of military police also withdrew, setting their bunkers on fire to prevent them being used by ethnic Albanian separatist guerrillas if they slipped down from hillsides to fill vacated areas, something NATO has warned them not to do.

An official at the Kosovo Diplomatic Observers' Mission said there were "indications of a pullout of large numbers of police right out of Kosovo this evening."

The official Yugoslav news agency Tanjug said police would finish dismantling 20 checkpoints on main roads in the evening and withdraw from Kosovo to home bases outside the province.

But Tanjug also quoted police sources as saying some police would still secure Kosovo's main roads.

It was not known how high a police profile would be tolerated by NATO but it could not be so high as to deter 10,000 Kosovo Albanian refugees remaining in the hills from returning to their homes -- the overriding goal of the West.

U.N. Security Council Resolution 1199 requires Yugoslav army and Serbian special police units to stand down in Kosovo after their devastating anti-KLA offensive, and NATO had threatened air strikes unless they complied by Tuesday.

Army movements in the volatile areas of south and central Kosovo were observed on Monday, with units said to be returning to bases within Kosovo.

Witnesses said the largest Serbian police checkpoint in Kosovo, at the strategic Komorane crossroads on the main east-west highway, was dismantled in the afternoon.

Reporters also watched a column of at least 50 vehicles including tanks, armoured personnel carriers, truck-mounted anti-aircraft guns, lorries and bridging equipment withdraw from the junction in driving rain during the morning.

However, KDOM personnel said the column appeared to be the same army task force that had been deployed into the Komorane area just eight dys before -- two days after the latest NATO deadline was established.

Such zero-sum movements greatly complicate the process of verifying compliance with U.N. demands.

In addition, off-the-record briefings by diplomats last week made clear that negotiations between Belgrade and the international community are making significant allowances for the threat posed by the KLA.

The rebels have been trading fire with government security forces -- and generally getting the worst of it -- since March. But Serbian police say their outposts and patrols have come under unprovoked KLA fire every night for the past few weeks.

Belgrade had insisted it could keep the main highways open and protect Kosovo's Serb minority, who number less than 10% of the population, only if it retained some security units at strategic locations.

Western sources have suggested that some recent withdrawals of army units -- including those from Podujevo and Komorane -- have come as a result of local ceasefires brokered between the KLA and the Yugoslav army.

Whether the ceasefires will hold is a matter of intense speculation, but for the moment they seem to have produced positive results.

NATO sources in Brussels, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the NATO ambassadors would probably wait until shortly before Tuesday's deadline before declaring whether Milosevic met the conditions.

About 90% of Kosovo's 2 million residents are ethnic Albanian, and most favor independence.

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