By
The Associated Press
BUJANOVAC, Yugoslavia - Clashes between ethnic Albanian rebels and Serbian security forces flared yesterday in a tense southern region bordering Kosovo, a day after an explosion ripped through a police van killing three Serb officers.
The two-hour exchanges of machine-gun and mortar fire early yesterday centered on the village of Lucane, on the edge of a three-mile-wide buffer zone between Kosovo and the rest of Serbia, and over the strategic Saint Ilija hill in the north. No casualties were immediately reported.
Yugoslavia blamed the latest attacks on Kosovo's ethnic Albanian militants, who denied responsibility. The ethnic Albanians said one of their commanders was killed by Serb police late Sunday in Lucane.
The new fighting further fueled tensions in the region. A bus bombing killed at least seven Serb civilians Friday inside Kosovo.
With violence mounting, top leaders of Yugoslavia and Serbia, its largest republic, met late Sunday, and President Vojislav Kostunica's office released a statement pledging a "series of measures against terrorism" in the area.
"That means that we'll no longer allow that our troops and citizens be moving targets for Albanian terrorists," Serbia's Interior Minister Zoran Zivkovic said, adding that the actions by Albanian extremists were not a fight for democracy, but "plain terrorism."
Yugoslavia also criticized NATO-led peacekeepers in Kosovo and urged them to act immediately to keep the guerrillas out of the buffer zone, which they have used to stage attacks on Serbian police and Yugoslav army troops.
The militants want the zone to be united with Kosovo as part of a push for independence for the southern Serbian province, run by the United Nations and NATO-led peacekeepers since June 1999, when Yugoslavia halted its crackdown on the Albanian majority after a NATO bombing campaign.
Friday's bombing of a bus carrying Serbs to visit the graves of relatives in Kosovo killed at least seven people and wounded 43, making it the deadliest attack in the province since 14 Serb farmers were machine-gunned to death while tilling their fields in July 1999.
The three Serb policemen died Sunday when their van was demolished by what were believed to be antitank mines on a road near Lucane, a southern Serbian village just outside the buffer zone.
The zone was created to prevent what officials feared would be clashes between Serbian forces and the NATO-led peacekeepers patrolling Kosovo under the 1999 peace deal for the province.
Only lightly armed Serbian police are allowed to enter the zone, and ethnic Albanian militants have taken control of most of the strip in recent months.
Yugoslav authorities say the peacekeepers have failed to fulfill a mandate to keep the ethnic Albanian militants and their weapons out of the buffer zone.
Yugoslav Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic appealed Sunday to NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson to ensure that the peacekeeping force immediately seals Kosovo's boundary with Serbia.
But Robertson would not go that far.
"I deplore the escalation of the violence in southern Serbia and urge the leadership of both sides to exercise maximum restraint," he said in a statement. "The problems in the region cannot be solved by violence - they can only be settled through direct negotiations between the parties."
Since November, the militants have attacked Serbian police inside the zone and have sometimes launched attacks across the line into the rest of Serbia. The explosion Sunday took place about 200 yards outside the zone.
Serbian police came under fire while trying to pull the victims of the explosion out of the wrecked police vehicle, a government statement said. No policemen were injured by the gunfire.
Jonuz Musliu, the political officer of the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac, denied the group was behind the policemen's deaths and condemned the bus bombing.
Tens of thousands of Serbs have fled their homes in Kosovo since the United Nations and NATO took over, fearing reprisals from ethnic Albanians.
