Peacekeepers Remove Serb Barricade in Kosovo Town

NATO-led peacekeepers in armored personnel carriers moved into Kosovo Polje in force just before dawn today and removed a barricade that recalcitrant Serbs had been manning on Kosovo’s main east-west highway.

Earlier, ethnic Albanians removed barricades they had erected in protest of the Serbian action.

A NATO spokesman, who declined to identify himself, said the soldiers encountered no resistance and would maintain an increased presence in the area to ensure that the barricades did not go back up.

“They’re doing it as we speak,” the NATO spokesman said about 6:30 a.m. local time today. “The barricades are down. No one was injured and no one was arrested.”

The action came less than 24 hours after Canadian Maj. Roland Lavoie, spokesman for the NATO-led troops, or KFOR, warned that peacekeepers had given the protesters ample time to resolve their problems and hinted that soldiers might remove the barricades themselves.

“KFOR fully accepts that peaceful protests are an integral part of democratic society,” Lavoie said. “However, we cannot let a minority continually disrupt the daily lives of the majority.

“If they persist in their disruptive behavior, KFOR will have to take appropriate action to restore freedom of movement throughout Kosovo,” he said.

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has a warehouse in the barricaded region, and a spokesman said Monday that the protest hindered the relief agency’s work in trying to winterize fire-gutted homes in advance of anticipated harsh weather.

The barricades first went up more than a week ago when Serbs protested a NATO raid on a vacant apartment that was being used to store weapons. Local Serbs said they needed the weapons to defend themselves against ethnic Albanians, who have waged a steady campaign of killing, threats and harassment to force Serbs from their homes since NATO’s 11-week air war on Yugoslavia drove out Serbian forces in June. Kosovo is a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s main republic.

NATO soldiers were forced to reroute motor vehicle traffic along a railroad service drive and a dirt path to keep people from approaching the barricades. But the detour has severely restricted the flow of goods and humanitarian aid between the provincial capital, Pristina, and the war-ravaged area around Pec, Kosovo’s second-largest city.

After peacekeepers promised to step up protection of Serbs in ethnically mixed Kosovo Polje, a few miles southwest of Pristina, Serbs removed the barricades last Tuesday. Within hours, though, two hand grenades were thrown into a Serbian open-air market, killing two people and injuring more than 40.

The barricades went back up, and local Albanians responded with their own barricades on the detour route, complaining that the Serbian blockade had marooned dozens of ethnic Albanian families. The Albanians also continue to block railroad tracks used mainly by NATO forces to shuttle supplies.

“What can we do when 25 families are not allowed to go to school and have no bread or water?” asked Demush Ahmetgjekaj, 47, who was among about 50 ethnic Albanians securing the barricade Monday afternoon.

The protests have escalated tensions in Kosovo Polje, a symbolically significant site. It was here in a 1987 speech that Slobodan Milosevic first embraced the tenets of Serbian nationalism that would lead him first to power, then to war.

Lavoie also delivered a lecture Monday aimed at Hashim Thaci, a former leader of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army and self-styled prime minister of one of Kosovo’s two unrecognized governments, about a political speech Thaci delivered over the weekend in the east of the province.

Thaci, who recently announced the formation of his own political party, told supporters that Serbs will never again be allowed to govern Kosovo. He also said the nascent Kosovo Protection Corps will be the nucleus of an eventual army for an independent Kosovo, complete with military training facilities.

Yugoslav and Russian government officials have condemned the transformation of the guerrilla force into the KPC, arguing that it does not meet the terms for demobilization under a United Nations-approved agreement that ended the war.

Lavoie said Thaci’s comments were “factually incorrect and could be construed as inflammatory. . . . The KPC is not and will not be an army.”

Under the terms of its creation--which Thaci himself signed--the 5,000-member KPC is to be apolitical and is to buttress the NATO-led peacekeepers in responding to natural disasters and humanitarian relief needs, Lavoie said.