rioters in the ethnically divided town of Kosovska Mitrovica
The UN Security Council, at the request of the government of Serbia and Montenegro, met in emergency session on Kosovo today after a second day of fierce ethnic attacks in the province.
The province was shaken in the past week by the worst ethnic clashes since NATO and the United Nations seized control of it from Serbia. Thousands of ethnic Albanians attacked NATO peacekeepers, UN police, Serb enclaves and churches, officials said. At least 31 people, from both the majority Albanian and minority Serb populations, were killed, and 500 injured.
The 15-nation UN council was expected to call on Kosovo's Albanian and Serb communities to immediately stop all acts of violence, refrain from inflammatory statements and quickly bring those responsible to justice.
"The establishment of a multi-ethnic, tolerant, democratic society in a stable Kosovo remains the fundamental objective of the international community," said a draft council statement.
Mr Goran Svilanovic, the Serbia and Montenegro foreign minister, rushed to New York to address the meeting.
Kosovo, a landlocked province of two million people, has been under UN administration since June 1999 after an 11-week NATO bombing campaign to halt Serb repression of its ethnic Albanians by then-Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. He is now on trial in The Hague on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. Most Serbs fled the province in 1999, fearing reprisals, and there has been sporadic violence against those who remain.
NATO troops in Kosovo fired teargas and rubber bullets at a large crowd of Albanians trying to march on a Serb village near Pristina today. It was the second intervention of the day by soldiers of the NATO force, assisted by UN police, against Kosovo Albanians. Earlier, peacekeepers used teargas on a crowd that set a Serb church on fire in the flashpoint city of Mitrovica.
This evening, Albanians hurled hand grenades at the Serb quarter of a central Kosovo town in a bid to take over a church protected by Finnish UN peacekeeping troops. Overnight in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia-Montenegro, demonstrators set a 17th century mosque - the city's sole place of worship for Muslims - on fire after clashing with police trying to guard the building.
Sixty-one police officers, including 40 members of the UN special police unit, have so far been injured during the clashes.
NATO said today it would be sending reinforcements to Kosova in an effort to quell the worst outbreak of ethnic violence there since the KFOR peacekeeping mission moved into the region in 1999.
Some 350 troops, including US and Italian soldiers serving in Bosnia, have already been moved into the area this morning to reinforce the peacekeeping mission. Britain said it is sending up to 750 extra troops following a NATO request while the US is to send another 250. Some 18,500 peacekeepers are currently serving with KFOR.