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Wreckage of a burned-out U.N car in the Kosovo capital Pristina that was set on fire by ethnic Albanian protestors. (AP Photo) |
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Serb-ethnic Albanian clashes leave at 22 dead in Kosovo, hundreds injured
By Associated Press
Thursday, March 18, 2004PRISTINA, Serbia-Montenegro - NATO sent reinforcements to Kosovo on Thursday after 22 people were killed and hundreds injured in fighting between Serbs and ethnic Albanians in the worst violence since the province's 1999 war.
Arsonists torched several Serb houses in Obilic, an ethnically mixed town west of the provincial capital of Pristina, on Thursday, forcing U.N. police and NATO troops to evacuate dozens of Serbs.
All the deaths came in gunbattles, riots and streetbattles on Wednesday. Evidence of the violence the day before was still visible a day later - smoke billowed from Serb houses set ablaze in the mixed town of Kosovo Polje and burned out cars littered the streets of the capital.
The clashes started Wednesday in the ethnically divided city of Kosovska Mitrovica after ethnic Albanians blamed Serbs for the drowning of two of their children and began rampaging in revenge.
Melees broke out elsewhere in the U.N.-run province, including several enclaves where Serbs have eked out a sheltered existence since the end of the war. NATO-led peacekeepers and Romanian police units moved in, firing tear gas, rubber bullets and stun grenades to stop ethnic Albanians from surging across the bridge toward the Serb side of the city, where another crowd had gathered.
The breakdown in order illustrated the failure of U.N. and NATO efforts to snuff out ethnic hatreds and set the province on the path of reconciliation.
Bracing for more trouble, NATO mobilized extra units Thursday, sending about 350 troops to the province, mostly from Bosnia and Italy to beef up the 18,500 NATO-led peacekeepers now in Kosovo.
The new tally of casualties Thursday was given by Angela Joseph, a spokeswoman for the U.N. police. Sixty-one police officers, including 40 members of the U.N. special police unit, were injured during the clashes, she said.
Separately, Lt. Col. Jim Moran, spokesman for the NATO-led peacekeepers, said that 17 peacekeepers were injured.
Some hundred Serbs were evacuated from their buildings in the center of Pristina and other communities by police and NATO-led peacekeepers, officials said.
``We took them ... under a police umbrella,'' said Malcolm Ashby, another U.N. police spokesman, without disclosing their new location. Some of the apartments evacuated by the Serbs and the cars they left behind were torched by arsonists.
The overnight rioting appeared to have stopped in the early hours Thursday. NATO-led peacekeepers were blocking a key road with Macedonia leading through a Serb enclave of Caglavica, which had been the scene of street fighting.
Commercial flights to Kosovo's only civilian airport were suspended on NATO orders, airport officials and a spokesman for the peacekeepers said.
Senior international officials appealed for calm.
``I urge all ethnic communities in Kosovska Mitrovica and in the rest of Kosovo to avoid further escalation, to act with calm and to refrain from demonstrations and roadblocks,'' NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said.
The unrest spilled beyond Kosovo's borders.
In Belgrade, the capital of Serbia-Montenegro, demonstrators set the city's 17th century mosque on fire after clashing with police trying to guard the building - one of the oldest in the city. Demonstrators demanded that the government act to protect their Orthodox Christian kin in Kosovo from attacks by the province's predominantly Muslim ethnic Albanians.
Trouble began amid reports that Serbs in a village near this ethnically divided city set a dog on a group of ethnic Albanian boys, sending three - the oldest 12 - fleeing into an icy river.
After authorities recovered two bodies - and searched for a third - ethnic Albanians and Serbs gathered near a key bridge over the Ibar River that divides Kosovska Mitrovica, long the flashpoint of tensions in this U.N.-run province. The two sides traded insults, threw rocks and charged at each other before gunfire rang out.
Serbs see Kosovo as their ancient homeland. Ethnic Albanians want independence from Serbia-Montenegro. Hatreds between the two sides continue to boil over into violence.
The province itself is U.N.-administered but remains part of Serbia-Montenegro, the successor state to Yugoslavia, with its final status to be decided by the United Nations. But the lack of movement on the status question has left postwar tensions boiling.
The Kosovo war ended in mid-1999 after a NATO air campaign drove Serb-dominated troops loyal to former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic out of the province and stopped a crackdown on the independence-minded Kosovo Albanian majority.
( © Copyright 2004 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. )
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