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NATO plans for Kosovo handover

Ethnic Albanian rebels
Ethnic Albanian rebels used the buffer zone as a safe haven  


PRISTINA, Yugoslavia -- NATO-led peacekeepers said they will boost their presence near a volatile Kosovo buffer zone before the final part of the sector is handed back to Yugoslav forces.

The deployment, announced on Sunday, was made in an effort to reassure residents and prevent an exodus of up to 20,000 people.

NATO would not say how many soldiers would be moved to the border of the buffer zone known as Sector B on the Kosovo border.

But an U.N. refugee agency warned last week that without effective confidence-building measures before and during the Yugoslav troop deployment up to 20,000 people may flee from the zone.

The handover had been approved at NATO headquarters in Brussels last week and is due to take place on Thursday.

Details of the change were signed on Sunday in the village of Merdare near the Kosovo border by both Serbian officials and Lieutenant General Thorstein Skiaker, the commander of the NATO-led peacekeeping force.

Brigadier General Kenneth Quinlan, the head of the U.S.-run sector of Kosovo, urged the families who live in the five-kilometre (three-mile) buffer zone to remain in their houses when Yugoslav army and Serbian police forces start moving into the last 20 percent of the zone.

Quinlan said the handover marked a "significant step toward regional normalcy once completed," the Associated Press reported.

A Yugoslav military source said that more than 4,000 government troops have been deployed in the zone so far, and up to 2,000 more are planned to take up positions and patrol the last sector.

Serbia's Deputy Prime Minister Nebojsa Covic was reported by AP as saying: "The entry of our security forces into the Sector B (of the buffer zone) is seen as a peaceful operation with full protection of all citizens in the area."

He warned that any hostility by local ethnic Albanian rebels would be met with "adequate response" and offered any amnesty for those handing over weapons.

More than 3,000 ethnic Albanians have already fled the Presevo Valley in southern Serbia for Kosovo amid fighting last week.

The agency, UNHCR, has warned that an exodus will grow if the return of Yugoslav forces to the sensitive area next to the Kosovo border is botched.

The area was demilitarised and NATO-peacekeepers moved in as part of a peace deal at the end of NATO's bombing campaign in 1999 against Serb-dominated Yugoslavia.

The zone was created to keep Yugoslav and Serbian troops away from Kosovo.

NATO has been handing back parts of the five kilometre (three mile) wide buffer zone to Yugoslav forces in the past few months and all that remains is 20 percent.







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• NATO in Kosovo
• Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

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