Tense Standoff In Kosovo
For the third straight day, troops from KFOR -- the UN peacekeeping force -- forcefully battled back rock-throwing Kosovar Albanians bent on revenge against Serbs who live across a bridge on the other side of Mitrovica.
About 500 ethnic Albanian youths stormed the bridge but were met by 40 French members of KFOR, reports CBS News Correspondent Bill Plante. The French, backed by armored personnel carriers, then erected a barbed wire barricade across the span.
Monday's confrontation was a repeat of Saturday and Sunday's attempts by ethnic Albanians to cross the bridge over the Ibar River to see homes left behind in the other side of town. About 150 ethnic Albanians were held off by the French on Sunday, while on Saturday, a crowd of 1,000 tried to force their way across.
Tafil Jusufi, one of those on the bridge Monday, accused the French peacekeepers of "creating a new border" to keep ethnic Albanians out of the Serb-dominated part of Kosovska Mitrovica, 20 miles north of the provincial capital, Pristina. Kosovo is a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia's dominant republic.
"They are killing Albanians on the other side, and the French are sleeping," he said. "We come here because we want to go to our houses. We haven't been there for three months."
Another man had a bleeding wound on his face. He said soldiers pushing at them with their rifles injured him and several others.
 An angry ethnic Albanian demonstrator shouts to a French soldier. |
This is exactly what the U.S. and its NATO allies hoped UN forces in Kosovo would prevent in the wake of a bitter war.
The peacekeepers' mission is to help Kosovo's Albanians and Serbs rebuild as a multi-ethnic society. But on the ground, all politics is local. The big picture is not the first concern of ethnic Albanians who just want to return home.
Senior U.N. official Mary Patt Silveira suggested there was the potential for serious violence if the Albanians were allowed to cross. "We understand people want to go home. We believe they have a right to go home,"she said. "Our only concern is that it proceeds in orderly and safe manner so that there's no more death in Mitrovica."
In war-ravaged Kosovo, officials fear that the tensions of Mitrovica will be duplicated in any of the places where Serbs have remained. The wounds are too fresh, the damage too great for reconciliation to be easy. It will take, said one official, an environment in which people feel they have a stake in keeping the peace.
A senior White House official tells CBS News that in Kosovo, the next month is critical. If the international community doesn't contain the situation, it could easily spiral out of control -- and the ideal of a multi-ethnic Kosovo that NATO fought to preserve may never become a reality.
Yuoslav President Slobodan Milosevic withdrew army and police forces from Kosovo in June in exchange for the end of NATO's bombing campaign. Since then, minority Serbs have increasingly become the targets of hate crimes committed by ethnic Albanians seeking revenge for atrocities committed by Serbian forces before and during the airstrikes.