Serb Looting Video Popular Hit On The Web

Several thousand Serbs chanting "Russia, Vladimir Putin!" and "Kosovo is Serbia!" protested peacefully Saturday in the ethnically divided town of Kosovska Mitrovica and a Serb enclave in the south, in a sixth day of demonstrations against Kosovo's independence.

In a sign that Serbia is fast drifting away from the West and toward Russia, which is backing its fierce resistance of Kosovo's secession, hardline Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica condemned anew the U.S. and other nations that have recognized Kosovo as an independent state.

"If the United States stick[s] to its present position that the fake state of Kosovo exists ... all responsibility in the future will be on the United States," Kostunica adviser Branislav Ristivojevic said in a statement.

"The United States is the main culprit ... for all those violent acts," Slobodan Samardzic, Serbia's minister for Kosovo, said earlier.

First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Putin's chosen successor and the man expected to easily win Russia's presidential election March 2, is scheduled to visit Belgrade on Monday.

In Kosovoska Mitrovica, long a flash point of ethnic tensions in Kosovo's troubled north, U.N. police in riot gear formed a cordon across the main bridge separating the Serb and ethnic Albanian sides as a few protesters hurled firecrackers. Demonstrators waved Serbian and Russian flags and chanted in support of Moscow's refusal to recognize Kosovo's independence.

A NATO helicopter hovered above the bridge to monitor the protest.

Meanwhile, the fallout of this week's rioting has led to some unusual demonstrations of patriotism.

Two women who took part in the Belgrade riots to protest Kosovo's independence seem to think the two go hand-in-hand.

A video clip now on the Internet - entitled "Kosovo for Sneakers" - shows two girls going from shop to shop with armfuls of looted items, skimmed during Belgrade riots protesting Kosovo's independence.

Goods drip from their overburdened arms. They drop a sweater, but pick up a box of chocolates - and on and on.

The mobile phone footage posted Friday on the videosharing Web site You Tube had more than 787,000 hits by Saturday afternoon and triggered dozens of comments on local blogs and forums.

The girls, surprised at sudden fame, contacted a local television to tell their side of the story.

"We came to Belgrade to defend Kosovo," one of the girls, her face blurred to protect identity and identified only as Maja, told B92 television. "We started looting when they all did."

The rioting in Belgrade broke out at the end of the gathering, which drew about 150,000 people. Groups of hooligans first targeted U.S. and other Western embassies, in an outburst of nationalist anger of the countries' recognition of Kosovo's self-proclaimed statehood.

Rioters set the U.S. Embassy on fire and smashed several other Western missions before police chased them away. But they moved on, destroying and looting shops in the capital city's shopping area.

The video shows the two going from shop to shop.

"We looted because we are poor, not because we are rich," Maja said.

Serbia's state prosecutor pledged Saturday to hunt down the hooligans and looters. The You Tube stars said, "we will bear the consequences if we have to."

"It was too much to issue a warrant for our arrest - as if we killed someone," Jovana told B92. "This state is in chaos."

Kosovo's minority Serbs have staged protests daily since the territory's ethnic Albanian leadership proclaimed independence from Serbia last week.

The Serbs, who represent about 10 percent of the region's 2 million people, have been displaying their anger by destroying U.N. and NATO property as well.

EU representative Pieter Feith said he recalled his staff from Kosovo's restive north. "We hope that conditions will soon allow us to resume our activities," he told reporters.

French Lt. Gen. Xavier Bout de Marnhac, the commander of NATO's 16,000-member peacekeeping force in Kosovo, visited a northern border post that Serb demonstrators set ablaze earlier this week in a bid to reassert control.

In the southern Serb enclave of Strpce, about 100 Serbs staged a peaceful march.

Carrying Serbia's blue, white and red flags, the protesters walked to a nearby church and rang the bells to sound their disapproval of Kosovo's statehood. Some carried posters reading "Kosovo is Serbia" and "Kosovo will never be Albania."

There, too, anger at Washington and solidarity with Moscow were on display.

"The whole nation is angry," said Sinisa Tasic, one of the protest organizers. "We are furious with the Americans. Wherever they go they create problems."

Added Radojko Kecic, 48: "For the first time ever, Serbia is not alone - it has Russia by its side. Sooner or later, Serbia will get Kosovo back."

There have been scattered protests against Kosovo's independence in other countries as well.

In Athens, Greece, about 2,000 pro-Communist demonstrators marched to the U.S. Embassy. And in Germany, about 1,200 people demonstrated in a square in downtown Stuttgart and 500 others protested in Frankfurt.

In the Serbian capital, Belgrade, authorities were hunting for participants in riots Thursday night that targeted the U.S. Embassy and other foreign compounds and Western commercial interests.

"We are collecting evidence and are identifying the culprits," chief state prosecutor Slobodan Radovanovic said in a statement.

Police said they arrested nearly 200 rioters Thursday, the worst anti-Western violence seen on Belgrade streets since the ouster of former strongman Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.

Rioters protesting international recognition of Kosovo's independence torched several offices of the U.S. Embassy's consular section and attacked the missions of Germany, Belgium, Turkey, Croatia and other countries. One person died and more than 150 were injured in the violence, in which nearly 100 stores were looted.

Authorities identified the victim as Zoran Vujovic, 21, of the northern Serbian city of Novi Sad. Serbian media said Vujovic was originally from the Kosovo town of Caglavica, but had fled to central Serbia in the wake of Kosovo's 1998-99 war between Serbian forces and ethnic Albanian separatists.

On Friday, the U.S. State Department ordered nonessential embassy employees and families of American diplomats in Belgrade to leave Serbia. "We are not sufficiently confident that they are safe here," U.S. Ambassador Cameron Munter said in an interview.

The decision to implement what is known as an "ordered departure" will affect some of 80-100 Americans who work at the embassy. It was not clear how many of their dependents would be affected.

The U.S. and the European Union have warned Serbia to boost protection of foreign diplomats and missions, and the U.N. Security Council has unanimously condemned the attacks.

Associated Press writers William J. Kole in Pristina; Nebi Qena in Strpce; Dusan Stojanovic in Kosovska Mitrovica; and Jovana Gec and Slobodan Lekic in Belgrade contributed to this report.