Defence Minister Willie O’Dea will today visit a famous battle site that sparked a decade of war and ethnic violence in the Balkans.

For Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians, Slobodan Milosevic came to personify the brutality and destruction that befell them in the 1990’s, during his campaign to rid the province of separatists.

NATO sent US and Italian reinforcements to Kosovo yesterday after fighting between Serbs and ethnic Albanians killed 22 people and wounded hundreds, the worst violence since the war five years ago.

Nato peacekeepers and UN police regrouped throughout Kosovo today to put down rioting and violence that left eight dead and hundreds injured in one of the bloodiest days since the end of the Kosovo war in 1999.