(Meanwhile):
Serbia proposes dividing Kosovo along ethnic lines
By Dan Bilefsky Published: March 24, 2008 / BRUSSELS:
The proposal, which UN officials said they were reviewing, was submitted to coincide with the ninth anniversary of the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia. According to The Associated Press, the document acknowledges UN jurisdiction over Kosovo, but calls for the Serbian majority to take charge of the border customs, judiciary and police services in the north of Kosovo, which accounts for 15 percent of Kosovo's overall territory.
Belgrade's aim of asserting its control over the northern part of Kosovo has contributed to violent confrontations in recent weeks, including a clash on March 17 in which a UN police officer was killed and dozens of others were wounded when peacekeepers seized a courthouse in the northern city of Mitrovica that was being occupied by Serbian protesters.
Serbs have burned customs and border posts and taken over rail lines. Belgrade also has sought to strengthen parallel institutional structures governing education and health care in the north of Kosovo while dozens of Serbian officers have abandoned Kosovo's multiethnic police force and pledged allegiance to Serbia.
Many Western analysts and leaders believe that Serbia lost its moral and legal right to govern Kosovo after Milosevic's ethnic-cleansing campaign against the territory's ethnic Albanians. But in Belgrade, Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica said the NATO bombing had been part of an attempt by the alliance to take control of Kosovo.
"Now it is more than clear that the merciless destruction of Serbia in the NATO bombing had only one goal, and that is to turn Kosovo into the first NATO state in the world," Kostunica said in a statement.
Kostunica, who helped lead the revolution that overthrew Milosevic in 2000, is determined not to go down in history as the Serbian leader who lost Kosovo. In recent weeks, he has adopted Milosevic's nationalist rhetoric.
He also has clashed with the Serbian president, Boris Tadic, a pro-Western moderate, who opposes Kosovo's independence but argues that Serbia should nevertheless strengthen ties with the European Union, even though a majority of its members have backed the new state.
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Missouri Guard on the way to Kosovo
Monday, March 24, 2008, 12:25 PM / By Jon Allison
Family and loved ones crowded the Hearnes Center in Columbia this weekend to say goodbye to one thousand Missouri National Guard soldiers from across the state heading to join a NATO peacekeeping operation in the now seceded Kosovo. The group, the largest single deployment of Missouri Guard men and women since World War One, is known as Kosovo Force Ten.
Originally thought to be the least dangerous deployment by far, the Missouri National Guard's year-long deployment in Kosovo no longer looks like a walk in the park. Backed by Russia, the Serbs have violently rejected the secession, initially rioting in the streets of Belgrade a month ago when they attempted to burn down the US embassy.
The guardsman had originally expressed relief that they were going to a far less dangerous situation in Kosovo, but the recent violence has put a new sense of urgency on their training. Kosovo saw its worst violence since the secession last Monday. U.N. and NATO forces were involved in fire-fights with the Serbs, who were armed with grenades, guns, and molotav cocktails. The clashes, which left at least 63 U.N. and NATO forces wounded, as well as 70 protestors, were ignited by an attempt by the U.N. to remove Serb protestors from a courthouse the protestors had occupied for three days in the divided northern town of Kosovska Mitrovica. Following the skirmishes North Kosovo was placed under NATO military law in an attempt to put a stopper on the growing influence of some unofficial Serb security structures in north Mitrovica.
The troops are now on their way to Camp Atterbury, Indiana, for mobilization training. The National Guard says the training will put the guardsmen in an environment closer to the reality in Kosovo. After Camp Atterbury, the guardsmen will train further in Hohenfels, Germany, before beginning their actual deployment in Kosovo. They are expected to return in late March 2009.
