Serbs ready to fight again

Hundreds of former militiamen from the Balkan wars regrouped outside a church in central Serbia on Saturday, promising to fight together as a paramilitary unit once more if Kosovo breaks away from the government in Belgrade.

Authorities detained 27 people, all wearing T-shirts with symbols of the disbanded Unit for Special Operations. The former commander and several members of the unit are on trial for the 2003 assassination of Serbia’s reformist Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic.

“We will never give up Kosovo. We are ready to fight,” said one of the organizers, Andrej Milic.

Milic added that their unit would be available to the government if Serbia went to war, and called for a “new Serb uprising and a new battle for Kosovo.”

The event illustrated the mounting nationalism here over the Western-backed plan to allow the province of Kosovo to split from Serbia as demanded by its ethnic Albanian majority.

Many of those in the town of Krusevac on Saturday wore military uniforms with nationalist symbols typical of the notorious units accused of atrocities during the wars in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia in the 1990s. Some wore T-shirts with images of the fugitive former general Ratko Mladic, who is accused of war crimes.

Kosovo has been run by the United Nations since a 1998-99 war between Serbian forces and independence-seeking ethnic Albanians.

Talks on the formation of a new, pro-Western government in Serbia, meanwhile, remain deadlocked, triggering a political crisis that could pave the way for the return to power of the nationalists loyal to Slobodan Milosevic, the late former president of Yugoslavia and Serbia.

The United States and its allies favor internationally supervised independence for the province, as proposed in the U.N. plan, but Russia opposes it, signaling a possible showdown at the U.N. Security Council, which will have the final say.

Most Serbs consider Kosovo the heartland of their history and culture. The government has rejected the U.N. plan.

There was no reaction from the Serbian government to the veterans’ gathering in Krusevac, although creation of paramilitary units in Serbia is illegal.

The volunteer units were founded in the early 1990s, during the rule of Milosevic, who took Serbia to four wars during his decade-long rule.

The organizers said their unit would be named after Prince Lazar, who reportedly led the Serbian army in a crucial battle against Ottoman Turks in Kosovo in 1389. The Serbs lost the battle but cherish it as one of the most important in their history.