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UNITED NATIONS, August 19 (Itar-Tass) - The international peace force for Kosovo, or KFOR, is failing to control the terror which is sweeping across the Kosovo province, Russia's first deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Gennady Gatilov said.
"The Russian delegation has stated with regret that the international forces deployed in Kosovo are not coping with the wave of terror that has gripped this province," Gatilov said in an interview with Itar-Tass on Wednesday.
He said that on the initiative of the Russian delegation, the UN Secretariat had reported to the UN Security Council the situation in Kosovo and "in progress of discussion of this issue, we drew attention, on the basis of the statement of the Russian Foreign Ministry, to the extremely dangerous situation in this province".
Gatilov said disarmament of Kosovo's Albanian guerrillas is going extremely slow and "there is a risk that the agreement on disarmament of the Albanian extremists in Kosovo will not be fulfilled by deadline".
"In this connection, we called on the international community to take energetic measures to straighten the dangerous tendencies in the development of the situation in Kosovo and return the process into the channel of political settlement with full respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia," Gatilov said.
He said the text of the Russian Foreign Ministry's statement on Kosovo had been passed to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and to his Kosovo envoy Bernard Kouchner.
Russia also has asked the UN Secretariat to publish the statement as an official document of the United Nations.
Asked about the reaction of Security Council members to Russia's initiatives, Gatilov said "on the whole, all delegations have acknowledged that there are certain difficulties with the implementation of Resolution 1244".
However, "Council members related it mostly to temporary problems with the deployment of the (UN) mission's civilian contingent and called for more energetic efforts in terms of effective putting its work on the track".
However, the proposal by the Russian delegation to pass the Security Councils's serious statement for the press was blocked be representatives of some of Council members, Gatilov said.
"Not all of elements of the statement proposed by the Russian delegation were supported, in particular the part where we spoke of the need for taking additional measures for demilitarisation of the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army), as well as of taking forcible measures for disarmament of Albanian extremists in Kosovo", he said.
However, Security Council members on the whole acknowledged that "the problem really exists and further energetic efforts need to be taken for straightening the situation," Gatilov said.