NO LET-UP IN ETHNIC VIOLENCE
By Alison Freebairn

March 18, 2004 – (IWPR News) Serb church and homes torched in enclave town of Obilic, as Serbian and Kosovo capitals are quiet after overnight rioting.

Ethnic violence is continuing in Kosovo, after a day and night of rioting which left 22 people dead and more than 500 wounded.

An Orthodox church and several houses belonging to the Serb minority are reportedly on fire in the north-western town of Obilic. There is a tense standoff in the centre of the town, with NATO peacekeepers and Kosovo police blockading the centre in front of a large crowd of Albanians.

As a result of the violence, NATO has announced that it is sending reinforcements from its SFOR troops in Bosnia to boost the 17,000 KFOR personnel currently deployed in Kosovo.

A spokesperson told the media that two further units were standing by and would be sent to the United Nations protectorate if the unrest escalated.

The attacks in Obilic came a day after violence erupted in the ethnically-divided town of Mitrovica. The riots ?reportedly sparked by a rumour that the deaths by drowning of three young Albanian boys were caused by a gang of Serbs who chased them into the Ibar river ? were the most serious in the five years that Kosovo has been under United Nations administration.

As a result of the rioting in Mitrovica and Pristina, KFOR evacuated hundreds of Serbs from a number of other enclaves last night, and eyewitnesses say that Albanians promptly moved in to attack and destroy the property they left behind.

Today, an eerie calm has settled on both capitals and the town of Mitrovica. KFOR troops are not visible on the streets of Pristina, while shops and businesses have opened as usual.

The mood in the Serbian capital Belgrade is also described as being ?normal?, after a night of violence in the city. Hundreds of people took to the streets last night to protest against what they see as the international community?s inability to protect the Serb minority in Kosovo. The demonstrations turned violent in the early hours of the morning, with the news that a mosque had been destroyed in the southern Serbian city of Nis.

Around a hundred young men, believed to be fans of the football teams Red Star and Partizan, broke through a police cordon protecting the 17th century Bajrakli mosque on Gospodar Jevremova Street, in the center of Belgrade.

Eyewitnesses described how the gang of drunken young men began to chant ?Death to Albanians? and ?Serbia has risen?, before breaking through a line of ill-equipped police officers to set fire to the building.
Having done so, the gang then moved across the city centre to where the majority of foreign embassies are located, and were involved in a series of clashes until 3am.

After a senior Orthodox church leader Metropolitan Amfilohije of Montenegro, pleaded with the crowd around the mosque, firefighters stepped in and were able to save the main mosque building, the F18 News service reported.

IWPR reporters at the scene are preparing an in-depth package on the crisis, including eyewitness accounts of the riots in Kosovo and Serbia, and analysis of what sparked the violence.

Alison Freebairn is an IWPR editor in London.

From: http://www.iwpr.net/index.pl?archive/bcr3/bcr3_200403_486_1_eng.txt