Congressman back from Kosovo

Scott Sonner

Tuesday, April 20, 1999 | 9:09 a.m.

RENO, Nev. - Kosovo ultimately will have to be divided with a demilitarized zone like North and South Korea, according to a congressman who traveled to the Balkans over the weekend.

Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., a former combat pilot in the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars, said Monday that he came away from a refugee camp in Macedonia with a greater appreciation for the generations of hatred between the Serbs and ethnic Albanians.

"If there is going to be resettlement of the area, my view is there is going to have to be separate and distinct parts of Kosovo separated by a demilitarized zone much like we have done in North and South Korea," Gibbons told The Associated Press.

"You would have ethnic Albanians in the southern half of Kosovo with Serbian cultures in the northern part, and that is the only way you are going to get them back into Kosovo," he said in a telephone interview from Washington.

Gibbons is scheduled to discuss his observations Tuesday in separate meetings with House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and Defense Secretary Richard Cohen.

A member of both the Armed Services and Intelligence committees, he was among a dozen lawmakers who visited NATO officers, U.S. troops and refugee camps in the Kosovo region over the weekend.

Gibbons said he watched refugees flow over the border into Camp Stankovac at Skopge, Macedonia, on the Kosovo border.

"The magnitude of that human tragedy is almost unspeakable in terms of just the sheer numbers of people. There were 55,000 people all fenced in to a small area," Gibbons said Monday.

"We saw children who have been literally taken from their homes and put in refuge camps standing in lines three to four hours waiting to be fed in mud up to their ankles," he said.

"When I talked to people, I found out how angry they were with the Serbs. How great their dislike is and how unwilling they were to go back there and have any Serb living near them," Gibbons said.

"It has been born from generation to generation and it is not going to go away at the end of this conflict or even a decade from now. It will take generations. And that's a very expensive prospect for a peace-keeping operation," he said.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Monday he was prepared to support a naval blockade of Yugoslavia if necessary to keep oil from the Serbs.

"I think we should stop the oil from coming in by water. We can do that by either bombing the ports or setting up a blockade," Reid said.

He said he wants to continue the air strikes before contemplating further military action.

"We need to do that before bringing in ground troops," he said.