PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, — NATO troops and
Canadian forensic experts congregated Saturday
in a Kosovo village to investigate reports of a
newly found mass grave containing victims of
Serb-Albanian ethnic bloodshed. A statement by
the NATO-led Kosovo peacekeeping force said
U.S. troops and the forensic team were at Donja
Stubla, a village near Vitina, about 25 miles
south of Pristina, the provincial capital.
“AT THIS time, it is unclear whether
the grave site is
Serbian, Albanian or other,” said statement.
Most victims found in mass graves have been
Albanians, killed during the pinnacle of the more than
yearlong Serb crackdown on Kosovo’s Albanian majority
that ended in June after NATO’s bombing campaign led to
a pullout of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s
forces. An estimated 10,000 ethnic Albanians are believed
to have been killed by his troops.
But Serbs also have been targeted, either during the
fighting by the Kosovo Liberation Army or afterward in
revenge killings. And the retaliation by ethnic Albanians also
has encompassed Gypsies, or Roma.
PEACEKEEPERS’ STRUGGLE
Ethnically motivated violence and generally rampant
criminality is hurting attempts by the more than 35,000
peacekeepers and a fledgling force of international police to
establish order in the wake of Kosovo’s upheaval. NATO’s
supreme commander in Europe vowed to keep Kosovo
open to all ethnic groups on Friday, and the United Nations
announced new regulations to help the peacekeepers
enforce order.
“People of every ethnic group and religious persuasion
have to be given the right to live here,” U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark
told reporters after meetings with local and international leaders
in Kosovo.
Clark condemned revenge attacks by
ethnic Albanians on the Serb minority in the province and a
string of attacks on peacekeepers that have occurred,
including the wounding of a Russian soldier by a sniper late
last week.
EXPANDED POWERS
In an attempt to curb such incidents, the U.N. mission
to Kosovo announced new regulations authorizing
peacekeepers and U.N. police to detain or remove anyone
at any time, if such a move is deemed in the interest of
maintaining order.
The regulations would also allow peacekeepers to expel
people from the province, U.N. legal officials said.
The KLA has been blamed for many of the Hashim Thaci,
has repeatedly denied the group’s involvement.
Clark said he was unable to say who was responsible
for the violence but said much of it appeared to have been
spontaneous, with some signs of organized crime
involvement.
In the latest killings possibly rooted in ethnic
hatreds, an ethnic Albanian man and woman
were found shot to death on Friday in Pristina, said
the peacekeepers’ statement. Also Friday,
the NATO-led troops found 120 pistols and other weapons
in a van near Orahovac, about 37 miles southwest of
Pristina. Three ethnic Albanians were being questioned.
OTHER DEVELOPMENTS:
NATO’s peacekeepers said on Saturday they had seized
120 pistols and other guns and detained three ethnic
Albanians after stopping a van in southern Kosovo. In its
daily update of incidents, the KFOR peacekeeping force
also reported a Serb woman had been slightly wounded in a
drive-by shooting and grenade attack in the southern
Yugoslav province. But it said the overall situation had been
calm in the past 24 hours and that criminal offences were
gradually declining.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to
this report.