Kosovo Erupts in Clashes, at Least 14 Dead (remaining Serbs being burned out by Albanian mobs)

PRISTINA, Serbia and Montenegro (Reuters) - Kosovo Serbs and Albanians clashed on Wednesday in the worst violence since the U.N. took control in 1999, and up to 14 people were killed as NATO troops scrambled to quell the outbreak.

In a severe blow to international hopes of calm ahead of talks this year or next on Kosovo's future status, the explosion of ethnic hatred in a dozen locations proved that reconciliation of the two communities was still many years away.

Clashes were reported from Mitrovica in the north to Urosevac in the south and Pec in the west, with U.N. police and troops injured in several places.

Pleurat Sejdiu of the Kosovo Health Ministry said: "There are 14 people killed; six in Mitrovica, three in Lipljan, three in Caglavica, one in Pec and one in Urosevac."

The Serbian news agency Beta quoted local police as saying Albanian mobs in Lipljan were burning Serb houses as NATO soldiers worked to evacuate Serb civilians.

Kosovo has been under the control of the United Nations since NATO bombing drove Serb forces out in mid-1999, halting Serb repression of Albanian civilians but also granting victory to Albanian separatist guerrillas.

Fueling fears that Albanians might turn on their NATO and U.N. saviors if independence is delayed, mobs clashed on Wednesday with peacekeepers and police across the province.

United Nations Kosovo police veteran Derek Chappell called it "a very dangerous situation... very large scale." Kosovo Serb politician Momcilo Trajkovic said: "We are back in 1999."

In late evening, hundreds of angry Albanians surrounded a Serb enclave in the capital Pristina, setting U.N. vehicles on fire and stoning Kosovo police who responded by firing rubber bullets. U.S. troops were evacuating Serbs whose apartments were under attack.

Reporters were also evacuated from the U.N. headquarters building as 2,000 Albanians were reported marching to the site.

Serbia's Beta agency reported that U.S. troops in a convoy of 30 armored personnel carriers drove to the central village of Caglavica to evacuate 10 injured NATO peacekeepers after clashes with Albanians attacking the enclave of 1,000 Serbs.

In Belgrade, Serbia and Montenegro's Supreme Defense Council was meeting and an army source said it would discuss raising combat readiness and a possible movement of troops.

Belgrade taxi drivers went on strike and demonstrators gathered outside a government building. There were Serb demonstrations in the northern city of Novi Sad and a mosque was burned in the southern city of Nis, television report said.

But Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica earlier ruled out any military response inside Kosovo -- a move which would trigger a major confrontation with NATO.

The violence began when Albanians massed in Mitrovica to vent their rage at Tuesday's drowning of two boys. A survivor had said they were hounded into a river by Serbs, who were exacting revenge for a teenager wounded in a drive-by shooting.

Shooting broke out and grenades were thrown as police and troops fired teargas and rubber bullets to stop Albanians storming the Serbian half of the town.

Two red-and-white U.N. police jeeps burned fiercely and wreaths of tear gas drifted over Mitrovica as soldiers moved block to block to clear a security zone in the afternoon.

Serb homes were in flames in several villages and Serbs had to be evacuated by troops of the KFOR peacekeeping mission. A Serb post office, clinic, a school and 10 homes were burned down in Kosovo Polje, near Pristina.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called for an end to the violence, which he said jeopardized the stability of Kosovo and the State Department warned it could wreck the peace.

Everywhere Muslims are killing off whole Christian populations.............

I'll post it again:

This is NOT a religious clash, it's an ethnic clash -- the Slavic serbs and the Illurian Albanians.

from www.cia.gov

Religions:

Muslim 70%, Albanian Orthodox 20%, Roman Catholic 10%
note: all mosques and churches were closed in 1967 and religious observances prohibited; in November 1990, Albania began allowing private religious practice

Things aren't quite that cut and dried. Most Albanians are atheists and radically so. This is more an ethnic clash with the Albanians being the descendents of the Illurian tribes who were the original occuapants of the land. The only slamic radicals there and in Bosnia are imports sponsored by Saudi A or Iran.

The Ottoman Turks divided the Albanian-inhabited lands among a number of districts, or vilayets. The Ottoman authorities did not initially stress conversion to Islam. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, economic pressures and coercion produced the conversion of about two-thirds of the empire's Albanians.

The Ottoman Turks first focused their conversion campaigns on the Roman Catholic Albanians of the north and then on the Orthodox population of the south. For example, the authorities increased taxes, especially poll taxes, to make conversion economically attractive. During and after a Christian counteroffensive against the Ottoman Empire from 1687 to 1690, when Albanian Catholics revolted against their Muslim overlords, the Ottoman pasha of Pec, a town in the south of present-day Yugoslavia, retaliated by forcing entire Albanian villages to accept Islam. Albanian beys then moved from the northern mountains to the fertile lands of Kosovo, which had been abandoned by thousands of Orthodox Serbs fearing reprisals for their collaboration with the Christian forces.

Most of the conversion's to Islam took place in the lowlands of the Shkumbin River valley, where the Ottoman Turks could easily apply pressure because of the area's accessibility. Many Albanians, however, converted in name only and secretly continued to practice Christianity. Often one branch of a family became Muslim while another remained Christian, and many times these families celebrated their respective religious holidays together

The Balkans are a region of multiple ethnicities -- Slavic SErbs, croats, slovenes, Greeks, Macedonians and Illyrians (moern day Albanians). Trying to whitewash the problems as merely christian versus muslim is incorrect when you know that there are Muslim and Christian Albanians.

As early as the eighteenth century, a mystic Islamic sect, the Bektashi dervishes, spread into the empire's Albanian-populated lands. Probably founded in the late thirteenth century in Anatolia, Bektashism became the janissaries' official faith in the late sixteenth century. The Bektashi sect contains features of the Turks' pre-Islamic religion and emphasizes man as an individual. Women, unveiled, participate in Bektashi ceremonies on an equal basis, and the celebrants use wine despite the ban on alcohol in the Quran. The Bektashis became the largest religious group in southern Albania after the sultan disbanded the janissaries in 1826. Bektashi leaders played key roles in the Albanian nationalist movement of the late nineteenth century and were to a great degree responsible for the Albanians' traditional tolerance of religious differences.

How did this defenseless minority that is being brutally attacked and murdered became a defenseless minority?

Because Slobo's goons (and I won't insult the Serbs by considering that anything but a small minority supported Slobo's genocide) decided to kick out the ethnic Albanians from Kosovo and threw tanks and heavy artillery against a defenseless people, propelling a mass exodus into Albania.

Genocide against any ethnicity is WRONG, but let's not potray this as a religious clash, but more correctly as an ethnic one.

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