Kosovo/Kosova As Seen, As Told other than his LDK opposed the holding of the poll at a time of crisis and escalating Serbian military action (see below). As before, the Serbian authorities denounced the elections as illegal. The intensification of armed conflict By the beginning of 1998, the nature of the Kosovo situation had changed. A new element had entered the equation in the form of the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK), and the Serbian authorities were responding with a huge increase in military force. The declared purpose of the UCK, a Kosovo Albanian paramilitary group which claimed its first actions in 1996, was to offer resistance to Serbian police and security forces in Kosovo and to pursue separatism by armed struggle. The UCK intensified its activity in 1997 and early 1998, with attacks on police stations, police officers, Serb civilians and Kosovo Albanians working for or with the authorities, but in the two years up to mid-January 1998 it had only claimed the killing of a total of 10 Serbian police and other officials, and 11 Kosovo Albanians. The Serbian authorities brought in special security forces in January 1998. They responded to clashes with the UCK by reprisal attacks on villages, using military helicopters and armoured personnel carriers, accompanied by brutal house-to-house raids and indiscriminate arrests. Two such attacks on villages in late February were followed by an assault on the village of Donji Prekaze/Prekazi i Poshtem (Srbica/ Skenderaj municipality) in early March, where at least 54 people were killed including a local UCK leader, most of his family and other women, children and elderly men. The reprisals continued with further attacks on villages in the central Drenica region, causing many villagers to flee their homes. In this downward spiral of violence, many Kosovo Albanians, including erstwhile supporters of the LDK's non-violent stance, became UCK members or active sympathizers. Limited international sanctions against Serbia, as threatened on 9 March 1998, were intended to back up calls by the six-country "Contact Group" (France, Germany, Italy, Russia, the United Kingdom and the USA) for negotiations on autonomy in place of the use of force. The deadline for compliance was postponed, but to no effect, and the sanctions were eventually introduced in late April. The UN Security Council also imposed an arms embargo under Resolution 1160 of 30 March. In Serbia, however, in a referendum in April 1998 Milosevic gained overwhelming support for his stance of rejecting any international mediation in the Kosovo conflict. Substantial additional Serbian military reinforcements were sent in to Kosovo in May 1998. Ignoring a "strong final warning" from European governments in June, Serb forces began concentrating their actions in the Drenica region and along the south-western border, using artillery to force villagers out of their homes and then going in to loot and burn them. Aid agencies estimated that some 200,000-300,000 Albanians were driven from their homes between April and September 1998. Western countries intensified their demands for a halt to this campaign in response to the evidence of a major Serbian offensive against the UCK, and the discovery of further massacres. The US ambassador to the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Christopher Hill, announced on 2 September that his http://www.osce.org/kosovo/documents/reports/hr/part1/ch1.htm (5 of 8)12/5/2003 11:48:35 AM