Albanian rebels agree peace deal in victory for Serb moderation
( 2001-05-22 10:34) (7)
Ethnic Albanian rebels operating in southern Serbia on Monday agreed to lay down their arms, bringing to an end a year-long conflict between Belgrade and militant separatists.
The deal is a victory for Serbia's new policy of reducing ethnic tensions by involving Albanians in the political process and co-operating closely with its former enemies in NATO and the West to isolate extremists, western diplomats said.
To press home their triumph, the most militant of the ethnic Albanian guerrilla leaders, Muhamet Xhemaili, was arrested by Yugoslav forces as he tried to cross into neighbouring Kosovo late Monday, Deputy Prime Minister Nebojsa Covic announced.
"We have arrested one of the most militant commanders of the LAPMB," Covic told Belgrade's B-92 radio.
The arrest removed the only dark cloud which had hung over the peace deal for several hours on a day when diplomacy took precedence over the gun.
Xhemaili, who commanded the group controlling the northern end of rebel-held territory around the village of Car, had refused to sign up to the deal.
But an AFP correspondent in Xhemaili's headquarters in Muhovac found Monday that his fighters had already abandoned their positions and that local civilians had handed their weapons in to NATO.
A NATO spokesman said that between 40 and 50 guerrillas from the Car group had handed themselves in.
The Western diplomats said the deal will serve to further isolate ethnic Albanian militants fighting in neighbouring Macedonia and boost Belgrade's democratic credentials in the debate over the future of Kosovo, a breakaway Serbian province with a majority ethnic Albanian population.
The deal comes three days before government forces were due to redeploy into a formerly demilitarised zone which the rebels had been exploiting as a safe haven from which to launch attacks.
"We have achieved our goal to resolve the crisis in the most peaceful way possible. The most important thing is that we have avoided clashes, victims and destruction," said Serbia's vice-Prime Minister Nebosja Covic.
NATO's envoy to southern Serbia, Pieter Feith, was also delighted at the outcome, which he said "sends a strong signal to the region as a whole, especially to the Albanian community in and around Kosovo that armed violence has no future and that it is best to pursue their political aspiration through peaceful means".
In the border village of Konculj, the rebels' main headquarters, the LAPMB commander Shefqet Musliu signed a statement reading: "The Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac hereby commits itself to fully demilitarise, demobilise, disarm and disband".
The statement was witnessed by NATO's envoy to Yugoslavia, Shawn Sullivan, and the alliance has guaranteed that surrendering fighters will be pardoned and allowed to go back to civilian life.
The LAPMB arrived on the scene in January last year when a group of former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army set up camp in Dobrosin, a village in a three-mile (five-kilometre) wide buffer zone separating Kosovo from the rest of Serbia.
The zone had been set up in June 1999 to separate NATO peacekeepers deployed in Kosovo from Yugoslav troops, but it was exploited by the rebels as a base for their campaign to "liberate" the Presevo valley and its mainly ethnic Albanian population from Serb rule.
For more than a year the gangs launched sporadic attacks on Serb police and the Yugoslav army.
When Vojislav Kostunica was elected president of Yugoslavia in September last year to replace Slobodan Milosevic, the new democratic regime in Belgrade began a policy of developing minority rights in Presevo, in order to isolate the extremists.
At the same time NATO stepped up border patrols inside Kosovo in a bid to cut rebel supply lines, and on March 14 the Alliance began progressively allowing Belgrade's forces back into the DMZ.
Direct talks, overseen by NATO, were opened between Belgrade and rebel leaders, leading to Monday's peace deal. On Thursday a joint police and army force will begin re-occupying "Sector B", the last section of buffer zone still off limits.
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