Patriarch Pavle was also expected to meet Zoran Djindjic and Vuk Draskovic, leaders of two opposition political parties.. The largest number remain in the northern part of Kosovska Mitrovica (20,000), the southeastern Gnjilane area (10,000), in a Serbian ghetto in the southwestern Kosovo city of Orahovac (3,000), and in Pristina (1,000).In the Serbian capital, Belgrade, the Yugoslav President, Slobodan Milosevic, warned against Serbian traitors destroying the country, while urging Serbian diaspora members to invest in the reconstruction of their homeland.”It would be sad if the long hand of the evil inflicted by Nato on our country were a hand of our citizens,” he told those gathered for the three- day Diaspora ‘99 meeting.While Mr Milosevic tried to gain support and funds from the diaspora, the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church embarked on an ambitious schedule of meetings with the political opposition.Yesterday Patriarch Pavle was due to meet Mladjan Dinkic, the co-ordinator of the Group of 17, which has proposed that Mr Milosevic step down, to be replaced by a provisional government made up of technocrats, economists, and other experts. British K-For troops in Pristina are reported to have started a “granny patrol” intended to help to stop the spate of attacks against elderly Serbian women in Kosovo.Fewer than 50,000 Serbs remain in Kosovo, whose pre-war Serb population was estimated to be 200,000. Zlatoje Gligorijevic was taken to a Pristina hospital with injuries to his kidneys, spleen and stomach. They are allowing small groups of women, children and the elderly to cross from either side, but men of military age cross at their peril.Violence continues to be directed at Kosovo’s dwindling Serbian community. The last Serbian paediatrician said to be working in Pristina was shot while treating patients in his town-centre clinic, and is reported to be critically injured.

Ethnic Albanians are angry that the French troops are blocking their march across the bridge, which now partitions the city’s Albanian and Serb communities. The Albanians accuse the French of sympathising with Mitrovica’s Serbs, among whom, the Albanians say, are paramilitaries guilty of war crimes. In addition, the Albanians say the French are preventing them from reclaiming property on the less heavily destroyed northern side of the city, which is divided by the River Ibar.The spokesman for the French troops in Mitrovica, Captain Bertrand Bonneau, says if the French soldiers allowed the Albanians to march en masse into the Serb side someone would be likely to get killed. A bomb threat against Pristina’s Grand Hotel, popular with international officials and journalists, was made to K-For, the Nato-led peace-keepers, in the Serbian language, but no bomb was found. The hotel was until recently under Serbian management, but is now run by the brother of the Kosovo Liberation Army commander Agim Ceku.
Meanwhile, ethnic Albanians and French peace-keepers clashed for the third day running yesterday in the ethnically divided northern city of Kosovska Mitrovica.

Separate grenade attacks on Serb-run bars in the capital, Pristina, and the nearby town of Obiliq injured 10 people late on Saturday night, while a bomb exploded on Sunday night in a travel agency close to the Pristina headquarters of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. A NEW spate of violence is erupting in Kosovo, including grenade attacks, bombings, shootings, and civil unrest. Unprecedented pressure is building on Ankara to recognise the rights of its Kurdish minority, including representations from its staunchest ally, the United States.If the PKK can fulfil its promise to end the violence, it may have dealt Turkish policy a far more effective blow than any of its bombs.. The PKK has several established bases there and yesterday announced it would end its hostilities against the Iraqi Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which has allied itself to Turkey in an effort to rid its territory of the PKK.Ironically, Turkey may have won the war with the PKK only to have the cup dashed from its lips. “We will grab them by the ear and bring them back.”The guerrillas’ most likely destination is the wild mountains of northern Iraq, a Kurdish enclave outside the control of Baghdad. The PKK echoed Osman Ocalan in an official statement, announcing it would hold a congress to decide the details of its political identity.”The force which gains weight and persistence is political struggle,” said the statement “Even some forces which resist this process … will have to be part of it soon.”That is a clear reference to the Turkish authorities, which contemptuously dismissed Abdullah Ocalan’s offer from the dock to negotiate peace if his life was spared.

Since the rebels announced their new-found commitment to peace last week, Ankara has given no sign that it is any more inclined to negotiate with an enemy it says is on the brink of defeat.The rebels may have announced that they will lay down their arms and withdraw from Turkey by 1 September, but Ankara has no intention of being so conciliatory.”Putting down their arms and moving abroad will not save the PKK,” Husnu Yusuf Gokalp, a hardline nationalist minister, said on Sunday. “An armed struggle is not seen as vital any more.”Mr Ocalan is a leading member of the PKK and the brother of its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, who is under sentence of death on a Turkish prison island. Even as Turkey made clear it would give the retreating guerrillas no quarter, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) announced plans yesterday to follow in the footsteps of the PLO and the IRA, and recast itself as a political organisation.
“Political struggle is seen as necessary to make way for a democratic development,” Osman Ocalan told a Pro- Kurdish newspaper in Turkey. THEY MAY be about to lay down their arms and end 15 years of bloodshed, but Turkey’s Kurdish rebels insist their struggle is far from over. A KCTU spokesman said a delegation from North Korea was due to go to South Korea next year to hold a similar match in Seoul.Meanwhile, five South Korean student and dissident leaders arrived in Pyongyang on Saturday on an unauthorised trip to take part in reunification festivities sponsored by North Korea.