U.N. fears Kosovo refugee crisis

Ethnic Albanian rebels used the buffer zone as a safe haven

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia -- The United Nations refugee agency fears that up to 20,000 ethnic Albanians could flee a Kosovo buffer zone once Yugoslav troops return.

More than 3,000 have already fled the Presevo Valley in southern Serbia for Kosovo amid fighting last week.

The agency, UNHCR, has warned that an exodus will grow if the return of Yugoslav forces to the sensitive area next to the Kosovo border is botched.

Eric Morris, the agency's Special Envoy in the Balkans, told Reuters he doubted whether enough measures had been taken to reassure the local ethnic Albanian population and calm their fear of Yugoslav state security forces.

Belgrade's forces are scheduled to move on Thursday into "Sector B" of a NATO-ordained buffer zone around the outside of Kosovo's border with Yugoslavia as part of an effort to end an ethnic Albanian insurgency in the area.

"If it is not handled carefully, we will have conflict and if we do have armed conflict, we will have Albanians moving out and becoming displaced persons in Kosovo," Morris said.

"If there is any significant armed conflict... we can expect 15-20,000 people coming," he said.

Morris said a central issue among Albanians in the Presevo Valley area was their fear of Serb forces.

Those forces acquired a reputation for brutality and atrocities among their enemies in Croatia and Bosnia and in ethnic Albanian-dominated Kosovo during the rule of Slobodan Milosevic.

NATO, however, has been anxious to bolster the reformers who ousted Milosevic as Yugoslav president in October last year and has been handing back parts of the five km (three mile) wide buffer zone to Yugoslav forces in the past few months.

Now only "Sector B" remains, a strip of land of land around 35 km long. It is currently held by a local ethnic Albanian "liberation army" which emerged at the start of last year.

Yugoslav forces have pledged to show restraint when they go in.

Morris welcomed efforts to address Albanian grievances, such as an agreement to establish a multi-ethnic local police force, but said he feared those steps might not yet be far enough advanced to reassure local people.

He said the UNHCR believed that at present "the confidence-building measures have not been sufficiently implemented."

"What we have said to a number of the people we see in Belgrade is do not underestimate the total mistrust that the Albanian civilian population has for your security forces," Morris added.

Even low-level fighting when Yugoslav forces enter the zone could trigger enough fear to set off an exodus, he said.

The UNHCR has spent much of the past two years dealing with ethnic Albanians who fled Kosovo.

In addition, more than 18,000 people have sought shelter in Kosovo from a similar conflict in Macedonia.