NATO acts on Macedonia violence fears

Robertson is considering further assistance

SKOPJE, Macedonia -- NATO advisers are being sent to Macedonia to help the government over fears of an ethnic Albanian insurrection.

NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson said NATO was studying further assistance to the Macedonian government to protect its frontier with Kosovo and southern Serbia.

In Kosovo, U.S. peacekeepers set up observation points near the Macedonian village of Tanusevci, near Macedonia's border with Kosovo.

Fighting broke out in the area between insurgents and Macedonian forces on Monday.

Macedonia's prime minister, Ljubco Georgievski, warned his government was prepared to take "radical measures" against the insurgents.

A police statement said the violence Tanusevci began after armed Albanian groups opened fire on a police patrol. No casualties were reported.

A new group of ethnic Albanian guerrillas, calling themselves a "National Liberation Army," have been operating in the village.

Such violence already has spilled beyond the borders of Kosovo, a Serbian province, with militants active in a southern Serbian buffer zone that is home to large numbers of ethnic Albanians just outside Kosovo.

In a major concession to the new leadership in Yugoslavia and Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic, NATO on Tuesday announced that it was prepared to narrow that zone.

The zone was set up in the wake of the pullout of troops loyal to former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic from Kosovo in 1999, and was meant to reduce any armed threat to NATO from Yugoslav forces.

Only lightly armed Serbian police are allowed in the zone, according to the 1999 Kosovo peace agreement that allowed NATO peacekeepers into Kosovo.

In the Kosovo village of Debelde on Tuesday, U.S. peacekeepers set up in the village about 35 miles southeast of Pristina.

In Geneva, Kris Janowski, the spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said that over the past week 383 ethnic Albanians, primarily women and children, had fled to Kosovo from Debelde.

He said those fleeing cited as a heavy presence of Macedonian security forces and general tension in the area.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Macedonia Government
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe
Kosovo Information
NATO
KFOR

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