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PRISTINA, Aug 28 (Reuters) - The West should consider military action to secure the release of Kosovo Albanians in Serbian jails, the newly appointed foreign minister of Kosovo's self-proclaimed provisional government said on Saturday.
In an interview with Reuters, Bardhyl Mahmuti also said the international community should be more active in arresting war crimes suspects if it wanted to calm the situation in Kosovo.
Ethnic Albanian violence against Serbs has plagued Kosovo since NATO-led peacekeepers arrived in June. Mahmuti said it was hard to tell people to calm down when thousands of their loved ones were missing and war criminals were still at large.
``These two elements greatly complicate the situation in terms of creating real internal stability,'' said Mahmuti, who gained prominence as a foreign-based spokesman for the Kosovo Liberation Army and was appointed to his new post on Thursday.
Campaigners estimate about 7,000 Kosovo Albanians are now held in prisons elsewhere in Serbia, having been detained as Serb forces sought to crush ethnic Albanian separatists.
Kosovo Albanian leaders say the prisoners are innocent of any crime, some having been arrested simply for their political views, others just because they were men of fighting age. Yugoslav officials maintain the detentions are legitimate.
Mahmuti said the West could pursue several avenues to force Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's hand.
``Faced with pressure, Serbs always retreat. That was the case in Kosovo,'' he said, referring to the NATO bombing campaign which drove Serbian forces from the province in June.
``There are ways of putting on pressure. There's even an attack, starting air strikes,'' he said. ``It was the air strikes, after all, that made Milosevic surrender.''
Mahmuti said it was time to step up efforts to bring war criminals to justice. The KFOR peacekeeping force has arrested a handful of suspects since it entered Kosovo.
``There are many people who are implicated in crimes. They're around everywhere in Kosovo,'' he said. ``It's two and a half months since NATO came to Kosovo, since KFOR came to Kosovo, and we haven't seen results.''
``You can't calm people who have been through suffering and so much violence if war criminals aren't arrested,'' he added.
Mahmuti, who lived in Switzerland after spending most of the 1980s as a political prisoner in Yugoslavia, has emerged as a leading figure in Kosovo's post-war political landscape.
His Democratic Union Party, which he leads and founded last month, has already won the support of several KLA commanders keen to make the transition from military to political leaders.
The provisional government, headed by KLA leader Hashim Thaqi, is not recognised as such by Western governments or the United Nations administration in official charge here. But its members are consulted and courted by international officials.
Mahmuti said he was confident he would be able to make the government's views known in foreign capitals.
``The governments involved in this crisis and in solving this crisis should be aware that nothing can be done in Kosovo without the agreement of the Albanians,'' he said.
The provisional government argues it is the best representative of Kosovo's overwhelmingly ethnic Albanian majority until elections are held, probably sometime next year.
Mahmuti's post had been reserved for the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), the moderate party led by Ibrahim Rugova which dominated Kosovo Albanian politics for most of the 1990s until the KLA emerged advocating armed resistance to Serb repression.
The LDK has so far refused to take part in the provisional government. But Mahmuti said the fact he had taken up his post did not mean Rugova's party was out of the picture. ``The door is always open... We'll see if they agree to participate,'' he said.
``I'm very interested in having an even bigger accord among the political forces,'' he added. ``I could give up this post and make way for someone else.''