KOSOVO: SERBS FORCES & REBELS IN NEW CLASHES

(1 Mar 1999) Natural Sound
One year after the start of all-out fighting in Kosovo, Serb forces and rebels engaged in new clashes on Sunday that left a senior Serb police officer and two guerrillas dead.
The clashes caused at least two-thousand people to flee their homes.
International observers say the ethnic Albanian refugees have been barred from crossing into Macedonia by Serbian authorities.
The fighting, in two locations, follows an inconclusive round of peace talks in Rambouillet, France.
Special units of the Serb police, meanwhile, fanned out across the breakaway province in response to the kidnapping of four Serb civilians.
They were taken in the region surrounding Orahovac - two are still missing.
And, thousands of ethnic Albanians have gathered together to mark the first anniversary of the Serb crackdown that triggered their insurrection.
In a major escalation of tension in Kosovo, ethnic Albanian rebels ambushed a police convoy on Sunday near the Macedonian border, killing a station commander and wounding four other officers.
Angry Serb police on the scene said that the victims, including the 31-year-old station commander in Kacanik, were ambushed while responding to a "bogus" anonymous telephone call that some Serbs had been kidnapped in the area.
The ambush occurred in an area about five kilometres (three miles) north of the Macedonian border, where scattered clashes earlier on Sunday left at least one K-L-A fighter dead.
The latest clashes cast new doubt on prospects for success when Serb and ethnic Albanian negotiators resume peace talks in France on March 15th.
The first round ended inconclusively on Tuesday in Rambouillet, France.
Western officials have voiced fears of a complete breakdown of the informal truce reached on October 12th to end seven months of bloody fighting.
Serbian police units, meanwhile, spent the day patrolling the region of Orahovac - occasionally making bloody contact with K-L-A fighters.
They were searching for two Serb men still missing after four were kidnapped.
Their search produced few clues as to the whereabouts of the men.
O-S-C-E monitors pressed the Kosovo Liberation Army for information, despite the K-L-A's denials that it held them.
The two other kidnapped men were freed late Saturday after mediation by O-S-C-E officials.
They had been held in by in a barn in Siroko near Suva Reka.
O-S-C-E observers reported finding two bodies about 20 kilometres (12 miles) outside Orahovac, but it was not known if they were the missing men.
The renewed fighting has caused these families and thousands more to leave their homes.
However, their attempts to cross into the relative safety of Macedonia were thwarted.
The border police said they could not cross because they did not have the right documents.
Officials from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (U-N-H-C-R) were on hand but were unable to secure the refugees a right of passage.
The two to three-thousand people estimated to be gathering at the border come from the area around Kacanik where the fighting is taking place.
As the exodus of ethnic Albanians from their homes continued, soldiers and commanders of the K-L-A were joined by almost four-thousand ethnic Albanian civilians in a ceremony to mark the first anniversary of the Kosovo conflict.
Rebels stood to attention as the ceremony began, holding up their blood-red flag emblazoned with a black two-headed eagle.
Patriotic anthems blared out across the village of Cirez, and one after one, ethnic Albanian leaders took to the stage to address the crowd.

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