PRISTINA. Mar 2: Eager to keep the momentum of recent peace talks rolling, international officials were shuttling between ethnic Albanian and Serbian leaders, reports AP.
Norwegian Foreign Minister Knut Voliebaek. whose government heads the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, was expected to meet Tuesday with ethnic Albanian leaders in Kosovo.
On Monday, Voliebaek met with Yugoslav leaders in Belgrade. where sentiment had changed little since talks in Rambouillet. France, ended inconclusively last month.
Voliebaek told reporters after the meeting that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic had "flatly rejected" any possibility of sending a NATO peacekeeping force to Kosovo, which
is part a draft peace accord discussed in France.
Kosovo's conflict started a year ago when Milosevic sent troops to crush ethnic Albanian rebels seeking independence. Kosovo is a poor southern province of Serbia, the dominant republic in Yugoslavia.
More than 2.000 have died and hundreds of thousands of other — mostly Albanians — have been displaced in the fighting.
US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has asked former presidential candidate of Bob Dole to help push the Clinton administration's drive for a peaceful settlement in Kosovo.
Dole, who agreed to talk to the ethnic Albanians, may also go to Belgrade to try diplomacy on the Serbs.
On Monday. US envoy Christopher Hill met with top Kosovo Albanian political leaders who participated in the negotiations,
Hill said that the signs were positive that Albanian politicians would sign and stressed the need for an international peacekeeping force.
"There is no question that there are very serious problems on the ground," he said. "We feel the way to solve this is though the Rambouillet accords ... and this means the presence of a NATO-led force, which we feel is in everyone’s interest." _
To the southwest, in Oraho-vac. international monitors defused a standoff between government troops and Kosovo rebels by securing the release of one of two Serbs abducted by the rebels on Saturday.