Serbs Resign From Kosovo Council, Citing New Corps

Claiming that the Kosovo Protection Corps is nothing more than an ethnic Albanian army in a new guise, Serbian members resigned Wednesday from the multiethnic council that works with the United Nations and NATO to administer Kosovo.

The move was a blow to international efforts to promote reconciliation between ethnic Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo--a province of Serbia, the dominant republic of Yugoslavia--and heralds a new period of tension between the U.N. and NATO missions and leaders of the minority Serb community.

Serbian representatives submitted their resignations to U.N. mission chief Bernard Kouchner at the end of the weekly council meeting. The move came two days after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United Nations signed an agreement with Kosovo Liberation Army leaders to disband the group and transform it into a lightly armed, 5,000-member force led by former KLA commander Agim Ceku.

“The international community wants to solve Kosovo’s problems on an ethnic basis, and by forming this Kosovo Corps, it’s over with multiethnic Kosovo,” Serbian delegate Momcilo Trajkovic said after the meeting.

Trajkovic accused NATO and the United Nations of creating an “undefined formation” that will “most probably become the future army of Kosovo, or better said, an Albanian army.”

Father Sava Janjic, a representative of the Serbian Orthodox Church, said the creation of the corps signaled “that Kosovo is anything but a multiethnic community and anything but a democratic community.”

Kouchner tried to downplay the Serbian resignations, saying he hoped the representatives would reconsider and return to the council.

“They are our natural interlocutors, and they represent, in our opinion, the Serb community and not Belgrade [the seat of the Serbian and Yugoslav governments],” he said. Kouchner said informal contacts with the Kosovo Serb leadership would continue.

However, he disagreed vehemently with Serbian allegations that NATO and the United Nations were trying to establish a Kosovo for ethnic Albanians only.

Many ethnic Albanians share the Serbian belief that the Kosovo Protection Corps is a forerunner to a Kosovo army.

The corps “is the first [Kosovo] institution recognized by the international community because a military is what keeps a state standing,” Ceku told several thousand people at a rally Wednesday in the central town of Srbica, which ethnic Albanians call Skenderaj.

The rally was to commemorate the anniversary of the death of a local KLA commander, and the KLA received permission from French peacekeepers to wear their old uniforms despite the midnight Tuesday deadline for the army to disband.

The gathering took on a celebratory tone as hundreds of KLA fighters, almost all unarmed, marched into the local sports stadium in formation.