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You have been sent this message from [EMAIL PROTECTED] as a courtesy of the Washington Post - http://www.washingtonpost.com To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4191-2002Jul14.html Arrests Provoke Unrest in Kosovo By Nicholas Wood PRISTINA, Yugoslavia -- Nearly 1,000 demonstrators gathered here last week to protest the arrest by U.N. police of former ethnic Albanian guerrillas accused of abducting and torturing fellow Albanians at the end of the 1999 NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia. The demonstrators waved banners as they walked down the city's central boulevard and chanted "Down with UNMIK," the acronym for the U.N. mission that has run Kosovo since 1999. The march ended outside a theater, where speakers accused the United Nations of attempting to denigrate the Albanian struggle for liberation. The demonstration was triggered by the arrest of about a dozen former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), the guerrilla group that fought Serb security forces, for trial in local U.N. courts. Most of the men have been charged with crimes relating to the war. Many Albanians now fear that their capture will lead to indictments of other Albanians by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague. The tribunal already has called several several Serbs, including former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, to account for alleged war crimes in the 1998-99 Kosovo conflict. The protest, on Friday, was the second anti-U.N. demonstration last week in this solidly ethnic Albanian provincial capital. On Tuesday, crowds pelted police with stones. U.N. officials view the protests as the work of a small and voluble minority and so far have contained them. But they worry that much larger, potentially destabilizing protests will erupt if the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague takes the likely step of indicting ethnic Albanians. Senior U.N. aides say that by early fall, the tribunal will charge as many as three senior KLA commanders with war crimes. If that happens, U.N. authorities here say they will arrest them, but that the arrests could cause mayhem in the streets. "The support we have might turn to the contrary," said Michael Steiner, who heads the U.N. mission here. "Of course there could be unrest, but I don't have a choice. I think I have to accept the risk because we have to follow instructions from The Hague." NATO launched its bombing campaign to force Serb forces to halt a violent crackdown by the Yugoslav army and Serb security forces on the separatist KLA and Albanian civilians in Kosovo, a province of the main Yugoslav republic, Serbia. The war ended with the withdrawal of Yugoslav and Serb forces and the establishment of the U.N. administration, which set a policy of helping Albanians and Serbs live at peace with each other in Kosovo. But U.N. officials say that hundreds of Serbs in Kosovo were killed at the end of the war as ethnic Albanians took revenge for crimes committed by Serb security forces. There are also credible accounts of KLA attacks on civilian members of the province's Serb minority during the war. Politicians in Serbia, noting that they have handed over indicted Serbs, including Milosevic, have been pushing the tribunal to indict Albanians. The court's failure to do so three years after the war's end is widely seen in Serbia there as proof that it is biased. For the province's ethnic Albanian majority, the war is seen as a heroic struggle for independence from Serb oppression, and talk of war crimes trials is unpopular. Already, senior Kosovo Albanian politicians are speaking out against the United Nations. The prime minister of Kosovo's coalition government, Bajram Rexhepi, a former KLA doctor, said the recent arrests were politically motivated and calculated to damage political parties led by former KLA commanders before local elections are held in October. The ethnic Albanian media have also strongly criticized the U.N. police. The state television channel, Radio Television Kosova, showed pictures of a house where U.N. police recently staged a raid and arrested eight men over the killing of a former ethnic Albanian police officer, his wife, son and two others. The police officer had worked with the Serbian Interior Ministry police until 1999. The governments of Serbia and Croatia have ridden out similar cries of politically motivated war crimes cases with relative ease. But U.N. officials and local analysts say the same may not be possible in Kosovo, where the United Nations has spent the last three years building up such institutions as the judiciary and the police service from scratch. "Serbia has been a state since the 19th century, whereas the Kosovo government has been in place for just four months," said Ylber Hysa, the director of KACI, a Kosovo-based research group. The arrest of senior Kosovo Albanian politicians, he said, "would have serious consequences for institution-building in the province." Hysa said that while part of Kosovo's Albanian majority appears polarized over the war crimes indictments, the majority could still support them. He said it is critical, however, that any arrests not be seen as a balancing act designed to please the government of Serbia or foreign countries. "It will provoke a reaction from people, especially if it is viewed as an attempt to equate the guilt of the KLA with that of Serbia and Milosevic," he said. But U.N. officials said they were confident that most of Kosovo's Albanian population would go along with arrests. Some KLA members are believed to be involved with organized crime, an association that has hurt their popularity. "The Hague was, after all, the institution that led to the arrest of Milosevic," said Steiner. "I think that people know that. And even if they might not like it that one of their own ethnicity is arrested, I don't think that people will go so far that this will make them turn around 180 degrees." --------------------------- ANTI-NATO INFORMATION LIST ==^================================================================ This email was sent to: archive@jab.org EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.bacIlu Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
