NATO Expanding Kosovo Forces to Combat Violence

Thursday, March 18, 2004
By Nicholas Wood

New York Times Writer

As they drove down the road, groups of Albanian youths gathered by the side of the road and stared. Nearby, smoke rose from the remains of six houses that had been set alight the night before. The scenes were reminiscent of the evacuation of Serbian refugees at the end of the Kosovo war, in 1999, when about 100,000 fled the province.

Albanian protesters in Kosovo trying to make their way to Caglavica, a Serbian village, found the road blocked by Swedish peacekeepers, top right.

Image Credit: Andrew Testa -- for NYT

PRISTINA, Kosovo -- NYT
NATO ordered reinforcements to Kosovo on Thursday as peacekeepers struggled to stem a wave of ethnic violence across the province, in southern Serbia.

The additional 1,000 troops, which will bring the overall NATO force to 19,000, began arriving Thursday evening, at the end of a second day of violence between ethnic Albanians and Serbs in which at least 31 people have been killed and hundreds injured, according to United Nations officials. Most of the dead were Serbs.

Security forces appeared at a loss as to how to reassert their control over the predominantly Albanian province as crowds attacked Serbian neighborhoods for a second night.

Throughout the day, scores of Serbian houses were set on fire, and according to a spokesman for the Serbian Orthodox Church, at least 20 churches were burned.

"There is a pattern emerging," said the Rev. Sava Janjic, speaking by phone from Decani monastery in western Kosovo. "The U.N. evacuates Serbs, and immediately afterwards Albanians come in and burn" houses and religious sites. Most Albanians are Muslim.

(More: NYTimes.com / International)

2004 © The New York Times Company.

Dan