Kosovo tensions rise after tit-for-tat killing
(Adds NATO comments; death toll for the
year; detail; grafs 1-5)
By Jovan Kovacic
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia
(Reuters) - Tensions rose in Serbia's volatile Kosovo Province
Friday after a local Serb politician was killed
in apparent retaliation for a police action 24
hours before in which an ethnic Albanian was
reported killed, Serbian media reported.
Kosovo, where ethnic
Albanians outnumber Serbs 9 to 1 and want to secede, is
considered as the powder keg which could ignite
the next Balkan war.
In the past two years,
since the failure of efforts to start a dialogue between the two
hostile communities, a wave of violence has claimed
45 lives in the impoverished
province.
This month alone, six
people, Serbs and Albanians, have been killed in Kosovo. With
the death rate rising, NATO sources are now voicing
increasing concern about the
worsening situation.
In Friday's incident,
Desko Vasic, a member of the district council of Zvecan, was
"literally riddled with bullets'' in his car
in broad daylight on the Klina-Srbica road, the
independent Belgrade news agency Beta reported,
quoting police sources.
A source in the district
court in Kosovska Mitrovica told Beta that the court was aware
that Vasic had been killed and that his car was
still parked near the village of Goirnja
Josanica but that no one from the court dared
to go out and investigate.
The area of Srbica is
a stronghold of Albanian nationalists. Sources in Kosovo say Serb
police control it only by day and the latest
midday killing would have dealt it a bitter
propaganda blow.
The murder of the Serb
comes one day after reports, which the police denied Friday,
that Serb police opened fire on ethnic Albanians
in nearby Donje Prekaze village killing
one man and wounding two women.
Hysen Mangjolli, aged
52 and father of seven, was killed after the police, equipped with
heavy weapons, surrounded a house in the village
of Prekaz and fired repeatedly at it,
Hidayet Hiseni, vice president of the leading
Albanian Democratic League of Kosovo Party
(LDK), told Reuters.
Serbian police issued
a denial of the report as "untrue and malicious,'' saying its forces
"were not engaged in any form of intervention''
in the village, the Yugoslav news agency
Tanjug said.
Police blamed the incident
on rival gang warfare and said the house belonged to a
family several members of which have been convicted
of crime and banditism.
Quoting reliable sources,
Tanjug had earlier reported that the police intervened in the
village after "an Albanian terrorist hijacked
and beat up a taxi driver.''
LDK leader Ibrahim Rugova
condemned the police raid on Donje Prekaze, calling it a
"barbarian act mean to provoke and step-up confrontation
in Kosovo.''
Speaking to reporters
in the Kosovo capital Pristina, Rugova said the Serbian army and
police were training to attack Kosovo "to the
end of systematically ethnically cleansing'' the
province.
His claims could not
be independently confirmed but tit-for-tat killings were bound to
inflame the atmosphere, already burdened with
hatred and mistrust.
The poor province of
Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians outnumber Serbs 9 to 1 and
want to secede, is considered as the next powder
keg which could ignite the Balkans.
A wave of violence has
struck the province over the past two years in which some 45
people have been killed after efforts to start
a dialogue between the two ethnic
communities failed.
The latest violence
follows a spate of recent killings by a clandestine ethnic Albanian
Kosovo Liberation Army.
Serbia, which considers
Kosovo the cradle of its culture, cracked down on the
province's autonomy in 1989 on the pretext of
preventing secession.
The United States has
made an improvement in Serbia's handling of Kosovo one of its
conditions for lifting the remaining financial
sanctions in force against Yugoslavia. It has
also told Albanians that secession is not an
option and warned both sides to refrain from
violence.
^REUTERS@
senden