NewsMax.com
Monday, Dec. 18, 2000

According to the Associated Press:

A joint American-Russian patrol was shot at Sunday while trying to seal off the boundary between Kosovo and southern Serbia where Albanian rebels have been challenging Yugoslav forces.

There were no casualties, and the troops who came under the small-arms attack fired back.

The Americans and Russians working together had just set off a series of explosive charges to destroy a section of road believed used by the ethnic-Albanian militants when the shooting began.

They were attempting to seal the boundary near the village of Gornje Karacevo about 30 miles southeast of Pristina.

Only the day before, Serb militants, infuriated over the arrest of a motorist, set fire to a police station in northwestern Kosovo, stoned vehicles and took seven Belgian soldiers hostage.

Two Serbs involved in the incident in the town of Leposavic were killed, another wounded.

Last month, rebels killed four Yugoslav policemen and seized several positions in the three-mile-wide buffer zone along the Yugoslav side of the boundary with Kosovo.

The new democratic government of Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica has been urging the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's occupation forces in Kosovo to get tougher with the ethnic-Albanian extremists.

These are the same rebels that the government of former President Slobodan Milosevic had attacked, bringing on the NATO bombing and invasion of Yugoslavia.

Milosevic has now accused Kostunica of failing to defend Serb interests. His Serbian Radical Party said the deaths in Leposavic "are an example of the fate that awaits all Serbs" under Kostunica's rule and demanded his forces "put an end to the crimes against Serbs."

It is in the middle of this continuation of Yugoslavia's lingering civil war by other means that American troops in the NATO command now find themselves.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Kosovo/Yugoslavia