PanARMENIAN.Net

Serbs protest Kosovo independence
07.05.2007 14:04 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Serbian police have arrested 27 nationalist
demonstrators who said they were recruiting volunteer guards to fight
in Kosovo if the breakaway province tries to separate from Serbia.

Several hundred people, including military veterans and former
paramilitaries, gathered at a rally Saturday in the central Serbian
city of Krusevac to swear allegiance to the "Tsar Lazar Guard". The
group, which claims to have enlisted 5,000 volunteers, is named after
a medieval Serbian leader who died fighting the Ottoman Turks in the
1389 battle for Kosovo.

The detainees were wearing black T-shirts with the letters JSO, a
symbol of a banned paramilitary group from the 1990s. Authorities said
they will start legal procedures against them.

Kosovo is part of Serbia, but has been under United Nations
administration since 1999 when NATO air raids halted Belgrade’s deadly
crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists.

A UN-mediated plan for Kosovo envisions supervised independence for
the region, something many Serbs refuse to accept, because they
consider the region Serbia’s historical heartland. More than 90
percent of Kosovo’s population today is ethnic-Albanian, the Voice of
America reports.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress