Calm returns to Kosovo after violence

NATO-led peacekeepers re-opened a major road in Kosovo yesterday in a sign of returning calm after three days of violence in which majority Albanians torched Serb houses and churches.

In Belgrade, the Serbia and Montenegro authorities accused the majority Albanians of trying to drive Kosovo's remaining 100,000 Serbs away and made a veiled threat to use military force to prevent that. And in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin denounced the Kosovo violence as "ethnic cleansing" of the region's Serb minority and said tough action was needed to defend them.

A spokesman for the KFOR stabilisation force in Kosovo said no major incidents took place overnight, with NATO-led peacekeepers patrolling the streets in the divided town of Mitrovica, the scene of worst clashes earlier in the week.

"Things are very calm in Kosovo right now," Lt-Colonel Jim Moran told Reuters in Pristina. "We had a quiet night basically everywhere," added a United Nations spokeswoman.

A Reuters reporter said NATO peacekeepers, the KFOR, re-opened an 80 km stretch of a main road linking Kosovo capital Pristina with Skopje in Macedonia. The road, which runs through some of the flashpoint areas, was sealed off on Tuesday when violence broke out and was now patrolled by KFOR. Pristina airport was re-opened to commercial flights as well.

Moran said 1,125 Serbs and other minorities had been evacuated from villages around Pristina and were now sheltered by NATO-led forces and the UN police.

Twenty-eight people, both Albanians and Serbs, were killed in the three days of clashes which saw ethnic Albanian mobs torching houses and churches in isolated Serb villages. Earlier NATO officials spoke of 31 dead. NATO said the level of co-ordination seen in the attacks verged on "ethnic cleansing".

Defence Minister Boris Tadic said late on Friday Serbia and Montenegro did not want to react "with violence to violence" but may have no choice.

"I told NATO representatives that Serbia and Montenegro will review policy if the military-technical agreement from Kumanovo is not respected," he said referring to an agreement in which Belgrade surrendered control of Kosovo to the United Nations. "If our vital interests are endangered we have to take over the responsibility," Tadic told Serbian state television RTS.

Serb forces were removed from the province after NATO's 1999 bombing campaign against Serbia, aimed to stop reprisals against Albanians.

Tadic's warning may be primarily intended for an angry domestic audience. Serbia's new coalition government knows that the Kosovo crisis could push more voters into the camp of the hardline nationalist Radical Party, which already seems well placed to win a presidential election due in May or June. The likelihood of any unilateral military intervention by Serbia, far less a confrontation with NATO forces, remained extremely small.

Putin called for a clear Russian position to be drafted on the issue by new Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and the longserving predecessor he replaced, Igor Ivanov, now Secretary of Russia's Security Council.

He also said he was sending Emergencies Minister Sergei Shoigu, who deals with Russia's recurring calamities, to Serbia to tackle difficulties caused by the violence.

"Russia cannot merely watch what is happening there," Putin told a weekly ministerial meeting discussing the violence in Kosovo. "There must be a corresponding tough reaction in this instance to defend Serbs."

NATO, which is responsible for keeping peace in the restive province since wresting it away from Serbian control in 1999, is sending some 2,000 extra troops to beef up the 18,000 strong force already inside Kosovo.

This week's violence dealt a blow to Western efforts to foster reconciliation between the majority Albanians and Serbs, seen as a necessary step towards resolving its final status. Serbia, which sees Kosovo as its integral part, warned the West it could step in unless NATO managed to bring the situation under control.