Kosovo Serb Rioters Clash With UN and NATO Forces

By Dan Bilefsky

Serb rioters fired weapons and threw grenades Monday at international peacekeepers in the northern Kosovo city of Mitrovica, wounding dozens of police officers and NATO troops. The clash was the worst violence since Kosovo declared independence from Serbia on Feb. 17.

The incident began at dawn when UN police officers raided a UN courthouse that had been seized by Serbs on Friday and arrested 53 people. Captain Veton Elshani, a spokesman for the Kosovo Police Service, said in an interview by telephone from Pristina that several hundred Serbs had responded by shooting at the police and throwing rocks and grenades, forcing officers to respond with stun guns and tear gas.

The clashes, on the anniversary of violence four years ago that left 19 people dead, were part of a campaign by Serbs to make Pristina’s administration of northern Kosovo untenable and to force the de facto partition of the territory.

Elshani said the rioters had freed 21 Serbs detained in the raid, stopping the UN cars that were carrying them. At least four UN and NATO vehicles were burned, he said, and the police were eventually forced to pull out of northern Mitrovica, leaving NATO troops to face the rioters.

The escalation of violence in the Serb-dominated northern part of Kosovo has become a test of the international community’s resolve to hold the new state together. It also poses a quandary for NATO and its 16,000 troops in Kosovo, which have a mandate to assure the security of the province, but which are wary of spilling blood and becoming mired in a conflict that invariably trips over politics.

A senior NATO official in Brussels, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because that person is not authorized to speak about the issue to journalists, said military might could not be used to prevent every attempt by Serbs to impose partition on Kosovo.

“There is a slippery slope between what is a political issue and what is a security issue,” the official said.

Mitrovica is divided between Albanians who live south of the Ibar River and Serbs who live to the north. The city has long been a flash point for violence in Kosovo, which has been under UN administration since 1999 after NATO intervened to halt Slobodan Milosevic’s repression of ethnic Albanians, who make up 95 percent of the territory’s population.

The northern part of Kosovo already has parallel Serb institutional structures governing health and education policy and a majority of Serbs do not recognize the authority of the new government in Pristina. Over the past few weeks, Serb protesters have tried to undermine Pristina’s authority in the north by burning UN border posts, disrupting rail lines, attacking EU and UN judicial and administrative offices, and preventing ethnic Albanian judges and lawyers from entering their offices in northern Mitrovica.

NATO and the UN issued a joint statement in Pristina, condemning the “lethal violence, including direct fire by a mob.” NATO officials said that the wounded included 22 Poles and 15 Ukrainians belonging to the UN police and 9 French members of the NATO force. At least 70 Serb demonstrators, including one struck in the eye by a bullet, were also wounded, the Associated Press reported.

The raid to take back the court had added resonance because it occurred March 17, the anniversary of bloody riots in 2004 after three Albanian boys in northern Kosovo died under mysterious circumstances. Nineteen Serbs and Albanians were killed during the rioting, which caught NATO off guard and became a cautionary example of how a lack of readiness for violence could undermine international efforts to keep Kosovo’s precarious peace.

Four years later, NATO officials say the alliance has learned from its past mistakes and that its 16,000-strong peacekeeping force is ready to assure Kosovo’s security. Yet NATO officials say that Serbia’s attempt to force partition of the territory presents a difficult challenge since the alliance has a mandate to maintain order, but is not supposed to become entangled in political questions.

“Our mandate is to ensure a safe and secure environment and to assure the freedom of movement throughout all of Kosovo,” said James Appathurai, a NATO spokesman. “But NATO is not a police force or the lead political body in Kosovo, so let’s not ask of NATO what it cannot do.”

NATO officials say privately they are increasingly concerned that the United Nations, which will soon hand over administration of the territory to a European Union police and judicial mission, does not have adequate resources to deal with the partition threat.

Over the past few weeks, hundreds of Serb police officers have left Kosovo’s multiethnic police force and pledged their allegiance to Belgrade. This has made the UN more dependent than ever on NATO.

Peter Feith, head of the EU mission that will shortly take over administration of the province from the UN, said in an interview this month that the EU was determined not to allow partition to become a political reality and would work to ensure that Kosovo remained a multiethnic state in which both communities lived side by side.

But many senior EU officials admit privately that if Serbs continue to push for partition, there is little the EU can do to prevent it. Countries like Britain or France could protest formally at the UN Security Council. But such appeals would face resistance from Serbia’s ally Russia, which has a veto on the council and argues that Kosovo’s independence is a breach of international law.

In Belgrade, Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica condemned “the use of force against Serbs who are opposing the introduction of a false state on Serbia’s territory.”

Accusing NATO of “implementing a policy of force against Serbia,” he said he was consulting with Russia on how to jointly respond.

Serbian hard-liners are eager to invite Russian peacekeepers into northern Kosovo. But Western diplomats say such a move would undermine the EU, UN and NATO missions while further aggravating tensions.

The deputy prime minister of Kosovo, Hajredin Kuqi, on Monday called on NATO not to end its operations and defended the alliance’s actions. “There can be no compromise when it comes to the rule of law,” he said.

Originally published by The New York Times Media Group.

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