BELGRADE -- Serbia issued a veiled threat against international "verifiers" in Kosovo on Monday, saying it would be forced to launch a new offensive in the province if the West did not rein in ethnic Albanian guerrillas.
"If the peace process is established no one will be jeopardized, including the verifiers," Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Tomislav Nikolic was quoted as saying."But if Albanian terrorists are allowed to strut around, murder, kidnap we shall have to conduct the same action again as this summer, but this time we shall go to the end regardless of what others think," he said.
His comments, carried in Belgrade newspapers, coincided with the arrival in Macedonia of the first part of the main contingent of a NATO force designed to rescue the verifiers, who are unarmed, should they come under threat.
"If the West, the Americans, Germans, French, British think there should be peace in Kosovo and Metohija then they should not send their troops to Macedonia," Nikolic said.
Belgrade has protested the deployment of troops in Macedonia, a former Yugoslav republic bordering Kosovo where a conflict between ethnic Albanian guerrillas and Serbian security forces has killed around 1,500 people this year.
But NATO sources have said Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic agreed to the force during talks on Kosovo with U.S. Balkans envoy Richard Holbrooke in October that averted a threat of NATO airstrikes against Yugoslav military targets.
Milosevic subsequently withdrew the bulk of his forces from Kosovo, allowing some of an estimated quarter of a million refugees to return to homes shattered in a Serbian offensive in the summer.