Pristina, Yugoslavia — Hundreds of heavily armed Yugoslav army troops moved without incident into a military buffer zone just outside Kosovo Wednesday as part of a NATO-backed attempt to douse an ethnic Albanian rebel movement that threatens to embroil the Balkans in another war.
With western monitors looking on, the troops took control of part of a three-mile-wide buffer zone bordering Kosovo from which they have been banned since turning Kosovo over to NATO in 1999. There were no reports of clashes in the operation, which took place after the signing of a cease-fire with commanders of some of the Albanian guerrillas in the area.
Under an agreement with NATO, the Yugoslav army is now allowed to patrol a 9.6 square mile area in the Presevo Valley region of Serbia Yugoslavia's dominant republic. The area is bordered by Kosovo on the west and Macedonia on the south.
News accounts from inside the zone said troops backed by armored personnel carriers moved along dirt roads, checking for mines as they went. Many houses they passed were boarded up, but here and there Albanian civilians watched them.
Elsewhere in the region new violence flared. A few miles away in Macedonia, heavy machine gun and mortar fire could be heard near the mainly ethnic Albanian town of Tetovo. Authorities said that gunmen had attacked Macedonian security forces there.
And in the Kosovo town of Kosovska Mitrovica, about 50 members of the province's Serb minority attacked NATO troops with rocks and bottles, protesting the arrest of three Serbs on charges of assaulting a Canadian and a Danish police officer.
NATO warplanes attacked the Yugoslav army during the 1999 bombing campaign to drive it out of Kosovo, where it was violently suppressing an Albanian separatist movement. But NATO's relations with it have improved vastly since President Slobodan Milosevic was forced from power in Belgrade last October and a new democratic government took office.
This has upset many Albanians in Kosovo, who worry it will end their hopes for an independent Kosovo.
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