NATO leaders and international officials are warning that further outbreaks of ethnic violence in Serbia and Kosovo are being planned and instigated both by the Belgrade government of President Slobodan Milosevic and by Albanian rebel fighters. This follows large-scale rioting and violence in the ethnically-divided Kosovan town of Mitrovica.
"The problems here in Mitrovica comes from Belgrade," the US Ambassador to the UN, Mr Richard Holbrooke, said last night in New York. "This is not a simple question of local Serbs who are all stirred up north of the bridge. This is being stirred up by the MUP (Serbian Interior Ministry Police), by the Yugoslav authorities, and the Yugoslav leadership is directly responsible for this."
A heavily-reinforced NATO presence of several hundred US, British, French, Canadian and German troops, along with armoured vehicles, patrolled the area around Mitrovica's western bridge as night fell yesterday.
Meanwhile, NATO officials have confirmed that a contingent of over 400 Yugoslav Special Police have been dispatched to the Presevo and Bujanovac area of southern Serbia, on the eastern Kosovan boundary.
International officials have confirmed that inside Kosovo anti-tank and anti-personnel mines have been found deployed in Serb-dominated areas, compounding fears of upcoming clashes between Serbs and Albanians on both sides of the Kosovo-Serbia boundary.
British military intelligence sources confirmed this month that NATO troops, including British Special Forces, have been deployed on several occasions since December across the Kosovan boundary into Serbia, in clear contravention of international agreements made between NATO, the UN and Belgrade.
The deployments are intended to short-circuit insurgency missions in Kosovo and Serbia being carried out by both Serbs and rebel Albanian fighters.
NATO's senior military commander, Gen Wesley Clark of the US, held meetings on Monday in Tirana, Albania and in the Macedonian capital, Skopje, in which he expressed fears of ethnic violence in southern Serbia.