The EU dignitaries came today to Kosovo Polje, small township not far from Pristina, Kosovo administrative centre, to see the debris of a school and a hospital the rioters had put to fire. They also visited a makeshift shelter where 150 Serb refugees are putting up.
"Schools and houses of prayer lie in ruins. The cruelty of it horrifies. Serbs are a brave lot. They are to stay on here, and raise their homes from the ruins. We shall help them," said a stunned Mr. Solana.
"Did any Albanians try to protect Serbs in the riots?" he asked Milan Djekic, township elder.
"My house was put to fire though the Kosovo Defence Corps commander lives next door," was the reply.
Knocked up by international peacekeepers from among Kosovo Liberation Army fighters, the Defence Corps was to take up local civil defence. The Liberation Army was an outlawed conglomeration of ethnic Albanian armed units. It had close on a half of Kosovo in control throughout the latter half of the 1990s to oust ethnic Serbs, and so give Slobodan Milosevic, then Yugoslav president, a pretext to bring federal troops in. Their pullout was principal demand of NATO as it started air raids of Yugoslavia five years ago, sharp-March 24, 1999, solely to protect ethnic Albanians, as the alliance announced. Armed action powerfully encouraged Albanian insurgents in their militant separatism and violent hatred of Serbs.
Javier Solana was NATO Secretary General at the time. He sees now with his own eyes the gory fruit of NATO desire to see Kosovo a peaceable multiethnic community.
