Peace Monitor Shot, 15 Rebels Die in Kosovo Violence

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia â€”  An unarmed peace monitor was shot and wounded Friday as renewed fighting spread in Kosovo, and NATO’s commander warned that the separatist province appears to be just weeks away from a return to all-out war.

In another attack about 16 miles south of Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, Yugoslav army tanks were seen firing from the hills at villages near Stimlje. At least 15 guerrillas died in the fierce fighting, Serbian authorities claimed.

In the first wounding of a peace monitor, a Briton and a local translator monitoring a police patrol in western Kosovo, south of the city of Pec, were shot by a guerrilla sniper while Serbian state television claimed Friday night.

Kosovo is in southern Serbia, the larger of two republics making up Yugoslavia. At least 90% of Kosovo’s people are ethnic Albanian.

The verification mission for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE, had “insisted on monitoring the regular shift of the police force in this region when this severe terrorist attack happened,� the state TV report said.

The two men’s wounds are not life-threatening, and they were recovering in a hospital in Pristina, OSCE spokesman Walter Kemp said from Vienna.

But an attack on unarmed members of the peace monitoring mission, which includes about 80 U.S. civilians, is another ominous escalation just three months after the threat of North Atlantic Treaty Organization airstrikes stopped Kosovo’s war.

Hundreds of people, mostly civilians, died in last year’s Serbian crackdown on the guerrillas.

U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO’s supreme commander, repeated a warning that Serbian and ethnic Albanian forces are rearming and regrouping for a new war that is fast approaching.

“There is a strong possibility, absent diplomatic agreement or some implicit understanding in the next six to eight weeks, that we will see a resumption of very widespread fighting,� Clark said during a visit to Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

NATO has a small, French-led rescue force stationed in neighboring Macedonia, waiting to move by helicopter across the border into Kosovo if the order comes to evacuate the civilian peace monitors, who now number about 700. The OSCE will have 2,000 unarmed monitors once it reaches full strength.

The fighting is not serious enough yet for a rescue mission, but the Yugoslav government has already made clear that it would view a NATO rescue mission as an invasion.

The British peace monitor was traveling in an armored vehicle when he and his translator were shot, the OSCE said in a statement.

The OSCE vehicle was at the front of a police convoy in the village of Gornji Ratis, near the western Kosovo town of Decani, when a sniper opened fire shortly after 3 p.m., according to the Serbian government’s account.

Although skirmishes have marred Kosovo’s informal cease-fire since soon after most Serbian forces withdrew to avoid the threatened NATO airstrikes, the list of flash points is getting longer as tensions mount.

In the last week of December, Serbian forces battled guerrillas for four days outside Podujevo, a strategic town on Kosovo’s northern border with the rest of Serbia.

Once the guns fell silent near Podujevo, the guerrillas captured eight Yugoslav soldiers. The Yugoslav army sent in tanks and threatened to attack the rebels.

Tensions eased after the OSCE negotiated the soldiers’ release Wednesday, but heavy fighting broke out Friday in southern Kosovo near Stimlje. Yugoslav army tanks were seen firing from hills outside Stimlje, and the Serb-run media center in Pristina claimed that 15 guerrillas were killed.