SERBIA & MONTENEGRO: At least seven people were shot dead or blown up yesterday as Kosovo flashpoints erupted in the worst clashes between Serbs and Albanians in four years under United Nations protection.
A spokesman for the NATO-led KFOR peacekeeping mission reported 11 French soldiers injured, two of them seriously, and said KFOR was sending in reinforcements to the ethnically divided city of Mitrovica, scene of the worst violence.
But local media reported violence in several other places where the Serb minority live close to majority Albanians, such as Lipljan south of the Kosovo capital, Pristina, and Pec over to the west.
"This is a very dangerous situation. This is very large scale," said UN police spokesman Mr Derek Chappell. "We have five civilian deaths and a number of KFOR soldiers injured, probably by handgrenade. There's still fighting going on."
Shooting started and grenades were thrown in Mitrovica as UN police and NATO troops fired teargas and rubber bullets to prevent Albanians storming the Serbian half of the town.
Two red-and-white UN police jeeps burned fiercely and wreaths of teargas drifted over the area as troops moving block to block tried to clear a central security zone and ambulances wailed into the drab downtown area of Mitrovica. "It is a mad situation," a UN police official said. "It is going to be very bad." Reports spoke of three Albanians and two Serbs killed and over 150 injured. Hospitals appealed for blood donors.
Albanians had massed to vent their rage at Tuesday's drowning of two boys. A survivor was quoted as saying they had been hounded into a river by Serbs, who were exacting revenge for a teenager shot in the central village of Caglavica.
Irish UN soldiers found themselves surrounded by protesters on Tuesday. Yesterday, clashes also erupted in Caglavica, with Albanians reported breaking through a police cordon to set two Serb houses ablaze.
Fighting broke out and explosions were heard as KFOR helicopters circled overhead, the Serbian Beta agency said.
Kosovo has been under the rule of the UN and NATO peacekeepers since the Western alliance bombed Serbia during an Albanian guerrilla uprising, aiming to halt Serb repression of pro-independence Albanian civilians.
Almost five years later, parts of the Serbian province remain an ethnic tinderbox, with no hint of the reconciliation international agencies have sought to foster. Mitrovica's clashes were the worst since February 2000, when eight died.
Mr Chappell said every available officer was being deployed to try and control the situation. But local reports also spoke of violence in Kosovo Polje, just outside Pristina, where Albanians set fire to a Serb health centre.
A Serbian court sentenced a Serb ex-policeman to 20 years in jail for his part in the massacre of 14 Kosovo Albanian civilians during the 1999 NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.
Sasa Cvjetan (29), a former member of a special police unit called the Scorpions, was convicted of killing 14 civilians and wounding five, mostly women and children, in the northern Kosovo town of Podujevo, in March 1999.
Judge Biljana Sinanovic said yesterday he had committed "a really monstrous crime and the court has decided on the highest penalty". It was the stiffest war crimes sentence of half a dozen handed down by domestic courts so far. Anxious to show itself capable of trying war crimes cases at home, Serbia last year opened a special war crimes court which began its first trial this month with men accused in connection with the 1991 Vukovar massacre in the Croatian independence war.
The UN war crimes tribunal, which many Serbs see as biased against them, has agreed to pass on lower-level cases but insists on trying higher-level offenders in The Hague.
The Podujevo case broke new ground by having Albanian witnesses testify in Belgrade, which would have been unthinkable three or four years ago. Last July five Kosovo Albanian children who survived the 1999 massacre were flown to the Serbian capital to testify. - (Reuters)