Belgrade pulls out forces from Kosovo

PRISTINA, Oct 27: Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, facing a deadline this evening, made a last-minute pullback of his military and ...

PRISTINA, Oct 27: Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, facing a deadline this evening, made a last-minute pullback of his military and police forces in Kosovo in order to avert NATO airstrikes.

US officials in Washington said the Clinton administration wanted to make sure the pullback was genuine before declaring that Milosevic had satisfied the terms of the deal he accepted to end the crisis.

White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said: “We want to make sure the movements are a real withdrawal and not a `reconfiguration’ of forces.”

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“They’re going down to the wire,” said Shaun Byrnes, head of the American section of the Kosovo diplomatic observer mission which has been monitoring the situation since July. “It’s been the pattern.”

Several convoys of tanks, armoured personnel carriers, and trucks carrying Yugoslav troops and police left several areas of this southern province of Serbia, the dominant of the two republics in the Yugoslav federation. According to observers, the forces were headed fortheir barracks or back to Serbia.

“They need to pull more people out of Kosovo to satisfy the agreement (American negotiator) Richard Holbrooke made with Milosevic,” Byrnes said in an interview at the end of a strenuous day of patrolling and observing. “We will be out looking tomorrow to see where these people went.”

The observer mission is the spearhead of what eventually will be as many as 2,000 “ground verifiers” under the command of the 54-nation Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which will be checking to see if Milosevic keeps his word.

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In Washington, Lockhart said there appeared to be “a lot of movement” but that President Bill Clinton would wait before judging whether Milosevic had done enough to satisfy western demands.

A NATO source in Brussels, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the alliance’s ambassadors probably would wait until shortly before today’s deadline before declaring whether Milosevic met the conditions.

He said, NATO was ready to use militaryforce once a deadline for compliance runs out at 12.30 am (IST) tomorrow. The deadline has already been extended once since Milosevic agreed on a peace plan.

After talks with his EU colleagues in Luxembourg, British foreign secretary Robin Cook said: “I have seen the agreement and Milosevic has not yet done enough. He has got to try harder.”

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“If he keeps to this agreement that is now being proposed that will certainly be a significant advance — but we want to see the evidence first.”