The Hindu : NATO troops for Kosovo amid pogrom fear

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Mar 20, 2004

International

International

NATO troops for Kosovo amid pogrom fear

ZAGREB, MARCH 19. NATO is rushing 1,000 extra peacekeepers to Kosovo yesterday amid fears that the worst day of ethnic violence between Albanians and Serbs since the 1999 war might lead to an explosion of pogroms and fights in the region.

Ethnic Albanian rioters maintained the terror against the dwindling Serbian minority yesterday, forcing the evacuation of Serbian civilians and torching their homes in the town of Obilic, near Pristina, and setting fire to a Serbian church in Mitrovica.

As it emerged that 22 people were killed and about 500 injured in gun battles and ethnic attacks in up to 10 towns in Kosovo, Serbs in Belgrade and other towns in Serbia also turned out in large numbers to demand counter-attacks against the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo.

International organisations reacted with alarm to the upsurge of ethnic hatred sparked by an emotive documentary film on Kosovo's Albanian television about a boy who survived after jumping into a river to escape pursuing Serbian youths. Three other boys with him drowned. But the swift attacks on Serbian homes and other targets in towns across Kosovo left U.N. officials convinced that the violence had been orchestrated by Albanian radicals and political leaders.

The U.N. and NATO peacekeepers were also the targets of the Albanian rioters, who are intensely frustrated at the lack of progress made towards their aim of Kosovo being independent, five years after the NATO war against the Serbs.

The 500 injured included 61 international policemen and 11 peacekeeping troops.

``It is very, very bad,'' said a U.N. official in Pristina. ``Certain politicians and [Albanian] media have laid the foundations for this. There's a mood of intolerance towards the Serbs and an (Albanian) feeling that `this land is our land'.''

Another international official said: ``There are hotspots everywhere.''

The Albanian violence against the Serbian minority was seen as an own goal, since Kosovo's Albanians are pushing for full independence but are likely to lose international support for that aim unless they guarantee human rights for ethnic minorities.

Belgrade, in turn, used the crisis to step up demands for the ethnic partition of Kosovo. The new nationalist government of the Prime Minister, Vojislav Kostounica, said that partition was the only way to guarantee the safety of the remaining Serbian community. Serbs, too, rioted in several towns, destroying Belgrade's 17th century mosque by fire in a response to attacks by the largely-Muslim Albanians on Serbian holy sites in Kosovo.

``This might be the decisive battle for Kosovo and the survival of Serbs in Kosovo and we must win this battle,'' said Nebojsa Covic, the Serbian government official responsible for Kosovo, on a visit to Serbs in Mitrovica. —

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