NATO boosts troops as Kosovo ignites

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.

Attackers burned several Serb houses and an Orthodox Christian church on Thursday in Obilic, an ethnically mixed town west of Kosovo’s capital, Pristina. UN police and NATO troops evacuated dozens of Serbs.

The Kosovo clashes triggered fighting in the neighbouring province of Serbia, where nationalists burned mosques and threatened Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians with “slaughter” and “death”.

Bracing for more trouble, NATO sent in 350 soldiers, mostly from Bosnia and Italy, to back 18,500 international peacekeepers in Kosovo.

The troops from Bosnia include an American infantry unit of about 100 soldiers. Britain, which already has 280 soldiers in Kosovo, will send another 750 within days, its defence ministry said yesterday.

The unrest illustrated the failure of international efforts to set the province on the path of reconciliation after a 1999 NATO air campaign stopped a crackdown by Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic on Kosovo’s secessionist ethnic Albanian majority.

NATO played down the prospects of renewed conflict. “I don’t believe there is a possibility of a war. We will do what is necessary to restore and uphold law and order,” NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said yesterday.

Serbs see the UN-run province as their ancient homeland. Ethnic Albanians want independence from Serbia-Montenegro, the loose alliance of states left after the Balkan wars of the 1990s disintegrated Yugoslavia.

Clashes erupted on Wednesday in the ethnically divided city of Kosovska Mitrovica after ethnic Albanians blamed Serbs for the drowning of at least two children and began rampaging in revenge, including burning a Serbian Orthodox church.

Witnesses said arsonists entered the church even though French peacekeepers shot tear gas and rubber bullets at them.

NATO-led peacekeepers and Romanian police units moved in, firing tear gas, rubber bullets and stun grenades to stop ethnic Albanians from surging across a key bridge toward the Serb side of the city, where another crowd had gathered.

Melees broke out elsewhere in the UN-run province, including several enclaves where Serbs have eked out an existence since war’s end.

All the deaths came on Wednesday in gun battles, riots and street fighting. Smoke billowed from Serb houses in the ethnically mixed town of Kosovo Polje.

In the capital, burned cars smouldered in the street. UN police and NATO peacekeepers evacuated about 100 Serbs from their homes in Pristina and other communities.

Some of the Serbs’ apartments and cars had been torched.

Sixty-one UN police were injured, said Angela Joseph, a spokeswoman for force.