The Yugoslav President, Mr Slobodan Milosevic, came under increasing pressure yesterday to allow UN war crimes investigators into Kosovo as fresh clashes broke out between ethnic Albanian guerrillas and Serb security forces.
The US special envoy, Mr Richard Holbrooke, said that Mr Milosevic had clearly agreed to grant access to the investigators under a ceasefire deal last month that averted NATO air strikes on Serb targets.
Belgrade has barred Ms Louise Arbour, chief prosecutor of the international war crimes tribunal on the former Yugoslavia, and the body's president, Ms Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, from travelling to Kosovo to gather evidence of alleged Serb atrocities.
Although Mr Holbrooke - addressing a news conference in Berlin - said he was not aware of any violations of the Kosovo ceasefire accord, the Serb-controlled Media Centre said police killed five Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guerrillas after their patrol was fired on near the village of Opterusa. The Albanian Kosovo Information Centre said shooting was heard in the area and witnesses said there had been casualties.
Fighting since the summer between Serb forces and the KLA has left at least 1,000 people dead and turned tens of thousands of Kosovo's residents into refugees.
The 54-member Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) is to send 2,000 observers into Kosovo to check that Serb troops and police do not resume their activities. But a senior British official said London was unhappy at the pace of the deployment and was unilaterally sending 50 men and 20 armoured all-terrain vehicles to join the Kosovo Diplomatic Observer Mission that predates the OSCE observer agreement.
A senior US official meanwhile has promised that the former Bosnian Serb leader, Mr Radovan Karadzic, and military chief, Mr Ratko Mladic, would one day face trial. Mr David Scheffer, US ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, said it was clear that the two indicted men could not move around freely.
Both men were indicted in 1995 by a UN war crimes tribunal on the former Yugoslavia, based in The Hague, but have not been captured. --(Reuters)