| Attackers fire at U.S. forces in Kosovo 04/10/2001 Associated Press
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia – Gunmen fired on U.S. and Polish peacekeepers in Kosovo as they were patrolling the rugged mountains near the border with Macedonia, a U.S. army spokeswoman said today.
NATO-led peacekeepers returned fire and suffered no injuries in Monday's gunfight, the first since a joint U.S-Russian patrol came under attack in December, said Capt. Alayne Cramer, a spokeswoman for U.S. forces in Kosovo. No suspects were detained.
The attack occurred southwest of the Kosovo village of Krivenik, where an Associated Press Television News producer, Kerem Lawton, was killed during a mortar attack March 29.
The source of that mortar attack is under investigation. Both ethnic Albanian insurgents and Macedonian government troops fighting each other in the area in March have denied responsibility.
Peacekeepers have stepped up patrols in the border area in recent weeks, netting arms caches and discovering what appeared to be a camp used by extremists. Peacekeepers sought to prevent ethnic Albanian guerrillas from using Kosovo as a staging ground to launch attacks in Macedonia, where the insurgents are fighting for more rights.
On Tuesday, NATO decided to allow Yugoslav forces into more of the 3-mile-wide buffer zone that separates Kosovo from the rest of Serbia to add to pressure on ethnic Albanian rebels. The authorization takes effect Thursday, NATO spokesman Yves Brodeur said in Brussels, Belgium.
The area is not one known for rebel activity but would put the Albanians into a three-sided squeeze. Russian and American troops patrol the area of Kosovo just to the west and Yugoslav troops were allowed into the southern part of the zone last month.
Just nine miles along the border to the north, peacekeepers cordoned off the wreckage of a British helicopter that crashed in heavy rain Monday. Two people died and five others were injured.
There was no indication of any hostile fire, said Maj. Fergus Smith, a spokesman for the British contingent serving in Kosovo.
Despite the unease along Kosovo's borders, Serbia – Yugoslavia's larger republic – is moving ahead on drafting a framework for self-government that should allow elections this year, a senior U.N. official said.
The announcement comes just days after Yugoslavia's President Vojislav Kostunica and Kosovo's U.N. Administrator Hans Haekkerup agreed that the Serbs should take part in the working group drafting the self-government framework.
Jean-Marie Guehenno, the undersecretary-general for peacekeeping, said the working group has already laid out the skeleton structure of a framework for self-government.
Yugoslavia's U.N. ambassador, Dejan Sahovic, also demanded security guarantees for the Kosovo Serb participants and demanded "guarantees concerning equal participation."
On Monday, Guehenno told an open U.N. Security Council meeting that "serious measures to tackle law and order are beginning to bear fruit," but that he did not hold out hope for a return of Serbs and allied ethnic minorities before the election.
U.N. administrators and NATO-led peacekeepers have been in charge of Kosovo since June 1999 after a 78-day NATO bombing campaign forced Yugoslav troops to withdraw and ended then-Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's attacks on separatist ethnic Albanians.
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