Russia aims to crack down on Serb
attacks
Copyright © 2004 Nando Media
Copyright © 2004 AP
Online
The Associated
Press
MOSCOW (June 6, 3:41 am
ADT) - Russia's Foreign Ministry condemned the killing of a Serb teenager in
Kosovo and said Sunday the U.N.-run province should take tougher measures
against the organizers of attacks against ethnic Serbs.
The 16-year-old Serb was fatally shot in a drive-by shooting Saturday in a Serb enclave about eight miles east of Kosovo's capital, Pristina. U.N. police identified the suspects in the shooting as ethnic Albanians.
The attack was likely to further inflame already high tensions between the ethnic Albanian majority and the Serb minority.
"The incident is just another link in a chain of crimes aimed against the Serbian community in Kosovo," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Yakovenko.
He called on the U.N. mission and KFOR, NATO's peacekeeping mission in Kosovo, to "take urgent and effective measures to establish order."
"It is very important now to prevent this case from turning into a new spiral of interethnic tension in the region," he said.
Russia is sympathetic to the Serbs, sharing their Orthodox religion and Slavic roots.
Kosovo's Serbs have been targeted by ethnic Albanian extremists in revenge attacks since mid-1999, when the United Nations and NATO took control of the province after an alliance air war that ended a Serb crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists.
In early March, Serbs took to the streets to protest a similar shooting of a teenager blamed on ethnic Albanians. That incident led to two days of deadly ethnic clashes that spread throughout the province - Kosovo's worst violence since the war ended.
http://www.adn.com/24hour/world/story/1417229p-8729525c.html
