By Ljilja Cvekic

BELGRADE, Dec 2 (Reuters) - Serbia's army chief called on Tuesday for the lifting of restrictions on military movements inside a buffer zone along the Kosovo border created in a 1999 agreement that ended NATO bombing of Serbia.

In June 1999, Serbia signed an agreement with NATO under which it withdrew all its police and army forces from Kosovo. The deal ended 78 days of air strikes aimed at stopping Serb forces from killing Albanians in the province.

The agreement, signed in the Macedonian town of Kumanovo, ordered Serb forces also to withdraw from a five-km (3-mile) ground buffer zone and created a no-fly zone 25-km into Serbia proper.

"It was not a sustainable solution and the army command has just waited for the right political moment to raise the issue," General Zdravko Ponos said on B92 radio.

Defence Minister Dragan Sutanovac told Vecernje Novosti daily that ending restrictions would serve civilian purposes as well.

"We expect a benefit for our civilian air traffic as well -- it would allow us to set up radar control systems," he said.

Ethnic Albanians fear Serbia's request is the first step ahead of the return of Serb forces to the former Serbian province that declared independence in February.

"I cannot stop them from dreaming, but their dream is dead for Kosovo," Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci said on Saturday.

Serbian army chief Ponos said Kosovo's plans to set up its own security forces -- which Belgrade opposes -- and the start of a European peace and justice mission scheduled for the coming days prompted Serbia to make the request to NATO now.

An immediate NATO decision is not expected.

"Under normal circumstances, it certainly would be time to lift that restriction," said William Nash, a retired U.S. army general who in 2000 was the U.N. administrator for the flashpoint Kosovo town of Mitrovica.

"However, because of the unresolved issues between Kosovo and Serbia it may be one of those things that needs to be discussed and clarified as opposed to being immediately accepted."

"The air restrictions probably are the most debilitating for the Serbian military and pose actually the least threat to Kosovo.

"The ground one would have to be measured and it may be possible to do a phased reduction of that by limiting the amount of military force that could enter at any given time," Nash added. (Additional reporting by Adam Tanner in Belgrade and Fatos Bytyci in Pristina; editing by Ivana Sekularac and Michael Roddy)

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