KFOR warns Kosovo Serb hardliners

27/03/2008

A KFOR spokesman warned on Wednesday that any violence against international peacekeepers in Kosovo would prompt an appropriate response.

(Reuters, AKI, Balkan Insight, B92, New Kosova Report, Makfax - 26/03/08)

A policeman watches a protest by Serb students near the main bridge in Mitrovica. NATO peacekeepers say they have hard evidence that the March 17th riots there were orchestrated by Belgrade. [Getty Images]

Those who use deadly weapons against KFOR troops should be prepared to face an appropriate response, a spokesman for the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo warned on Wednesday (March 26th).

"We are not a police force. We don't have the same rules," Colonel Jean-Luc Cotard said at a news conference in Pristina. "Don't expect KFOR to send flowers when we are being shot at."

The warning came in the wake of the March 17th clashes between hundreds of Serb rioters and international forces, involved in an operation to retake the UNMIK-controlled courthouse in the ethnically-divided town of Mitrovica. Up to 300 local Serb demonstrators had seized the building by force three days earlier, refusing to leave the premises.

The rioters used automatic weapons and threw grenades, Molotov cocktails and stones at the international forces during the clash, the worst since Kosovo's declaration of independence from Serbia on February 17th. A 25-year-old Ukrainian policeman was killed in the violence and more than 100 people from both sides were injured, among them a local Serb who has been in a coma for days.

Cotard, a French officer, says the hand grenades thrown by demonstrators during the Mitrovica clashes were M75s, made in the former Yugoslavia. They failed to explode, he said.

The grenades are "used to kill people during an assault", he said, describing peaceful protests and armed attacks against international forces as two entirely different things.

"I make a strict distinction between citizens and murderers," Cotard noted during Wednesday's joint press conference with UNMIK, adding that KFOR troops are entitled "to use all appropriate means" in response to violent attacks against them.

The international officials also told reporters they had hard evidence of involvement by Serbian Interior Ministry officials.

"UNMIK has the names of the members of the Serbian Interior Ministry who headed towards the courthouse in Mitrovica on March 17th," said UN administration in Kosovo spokesman Alexander Ivanko.

He expects the ongoing investigation into the case would reveal both the organisers and perpetrators of the violence.

Meanwhile, a report Wednesday by the Pristina-based daily Koha Ditore suggests that UNMIK intelligence officials have discovered ten offices of the Serbian Interior Ministry operating in Kosovo: eight in northern Kosovo, including three in Mitrovica. The other two are in central Kosovo.

The Serbian secret services and its Organised Crime Directorate "go about their business in one such station completely unhindered", according to the report.