Kosovo Flares Up Again
Fighting between peacekeepers and snipers, along with grenade attacks on ethnic Albanians, killed one person and reportedly wounded 19 Sunday in the bitterly divided city of Kosovska Mitrovica.
Two of the wounded were French soldiers, hit by ethnic Albanian snipers firing from the northern, Serb-controlled part of the city, NATO officials said.
"It was an attempt to kill our soldiers," French spokesman Lt. Col. Patrique Chanliau said. "We would like to believe it was an isolated incident of extremists, of terrorists."
One soldier was wounded in the stomach while on patrol in the Serb part of the city, Chanliau said. The second soldier was shot in the arm after NATO peacekeepers launched a counterattack, he said.
The counterattack killed one of the snipers and wounded five others. Grenade attacks on ethnic Albanian houses in the north wounded seven, NATO officials said. And an American with the U.N. police force was also injured by glass shards, after gunfire from outside broke the windows of a train he was riding on.
Yugoslavia's state-run news agency, Tanjug, said four more people, identified as Serbs, were wounded, at least some by snipers.
Seventeen people were detained by late Sunday, NATO said, but gave no details. Peacekeepers imposed a curfew from sunset to daybreak.
Bursts of semiautomatic gunfire could be heard from the northern side of the mostly Serb city located about 20 miles north of Pristina. Occasional explosions sounded over the gunfire, which died down by afternoon.
Some sniping continued, Chanliau said, but the peacekeepers had located the positions from where the snipers were firing.
Serb sources, who asked for anonymity, said the trouble began when several ethnic Albanians from the southern side crossed a bridge over the Ibar River leading to the Serb side and threw several hand grenades. A large number of Serbs gathered, they said, and NATO peacekeepers tried to control the crowd.
However, NATO said all the grenade attack victims were ethnic Albanians living in the north, suggesting Serbs were still trying to expel them from the neighborhood.
U.N. police rescued two ethnic Albanians, Hysen Xhersheku and his wife, Sofija, after one of their houses was damaged by a grenade and the other set ablaze.
"They beat us. They set our house on fire," Hysen Xhersheku said in the safety of a U.N. police building in the city's south. He said that as they were packing, about 10 Serbs entered their house and told them to leave in 10 minutes or die.
At least 10 French tanks rumbled over the Ibar bridge from the ethnic Albanian side. Civilians on the Albanian side were warned to take cover from possible sniper fire from the Serb section. The bridge the scene of previous confrontation was cordoned off with barbed wire.
An attempt by armed ethnic Albanians to ford the river and move into the Serb-controlled side was rebuffed by peacekeepers firing warning shots, Chanlau said.
Kosovo's most multiethnic city has been wracked by violence since Feb. 2, when a grenade attack on a U.N. bus killed two elderly Serbs. Serbs have been forcing ethnic Albanians to leave their homes in the northern part of the city, despite appeals by U.N. chief administrator Bernard Kouchner and others.
Kouchner announced new security measures Friday, including peacekeeping reinforcements. But the news did little to calm the situation.