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October 13, 1999
Web posted at: 12:49 p.m. EDT (1649 GMT)

From staff and wire reports

PRISTINA, Kosovo (CNN) -- U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan arrived in Pristina Wednesday on his first visit to the war-scarred province since fighting between NATO and Yugoslav forces ended in June.

Annan's trip, to examine U.N. efforts to rebuild civilian institutions, comes just two days after a U.N. staff worker was killed on a Pristina street, apparently for speaking Serbian to a group of ethnic Albanians.

The U.N. leader was greeted at Pristina's airport by Kosovo's U.N. administrator, Bernard Kouchner, and taken to a meeting with Serbian and ethnic Albanian officials.

Annan made no comment after the meeting, which was attended by moderate ethnic Albanian politician Ibrahim Rugova, Hashim Thaci, political chief of the disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), and Serb community leader Mocilo Trajkovic, among others.

	MESSAGE BOARD
Rebuilding Kosovo

A Serb delegation withdrew three weeks ago from a multi-ethnic advisory council after the world organization transformed the separatist KLA into a civilian Kosovo Protection Corps under the KLA's former military commander, Agin Ceku.

Trajkovic said his presence at the meeting with Annan did not indicate the Serbs were ready to return to the council.

"We don't want to be part of a council which tries to solve only Albanian problems," he said.

The secretary-general also met with Gen. Klaus Reinhardt, the new commander of NATO's 50,000-strong peacekeeping corps in Kosovo.

Later, Annan was to travel to the town of Gracanica for a visit to one of the most revered monasteries in the Serbian Orthodox faith.

The murder of U.N. staffer Valentin Krumov, 38, on Monday cast a somber shadow on Annan's two-day visit. Krumov, walking with colleagues down Pristina's Mother Teresa Street after his first day on the job, was attacked by ethnic Albanian teenagers when he answered a query about the time in Serbian.

Krumov, a Bulgarian national who earned a doctorate at the University of Georgia in the United States, was beaten and then shot in the head.

The incident highlighted the intense hostility that remains between Kosovo's ethnic Albanian and Serb populations after an 11-week NATO bombardment forced the Serb military and paramilitaries out of the province, ending a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" against the Albanians.

Tens of thousands of Albanians fled Kosovo before and during the air attacks, and returned when NATO's KFOR stepped in to restore order.

But some Albanians have gone on a revenge campaign of their own against Kosovo's Serbs, forcing many of them to flee the province.

The United Nations has been charged with rebuilding Kosovo's administrative infrastructure.

Correspondent Maria Fleet, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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