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North Kosovo placed under NATO military law
NATO placed the Kosovo town of Mitrovica under de facto military law on Tuesday after riots by a hostile Serb population killed one U.N. policeman and forced the pullout of U.N. personnel.The NATO-led peacekeeping force KFOR and the United Nations mission ordered all local Kosovo Serb police officers to park their patrol cars and suspend normal duties. With U.N. police already withdrawn, the order left French, Belgian and Spanish troops in sole control of law and order in the northern slice of Kosovo, where Serbs opposed to its Feb 17 secession from Serbia dominate the population. ... A Ukrainian police officer serving with the United Nations died overnight of injuries sustained in the riots. A U.N. source said he died of shrapnel wounds. Polish, French and Ukrainian police were also injured, some seriously. ... The violence was sparked by a U.N. police operation to retake a U.N. court seized three days earlier by protesting Serbs and cast further doubt on the deployment in the north of a European Union rule-of-law mission in the coming two months. It left NATO holding the line. But the 16,000-strong peace force has ruled out policing the new state, a job the United Nations is supposed to hand over to the EU. "We will maintain our intention to deploy the mission throughout the territory of Kosovo," the EU's new Kosovo envoy, Pieter Feith, told a news conference. The EU last month withdrew a small advance team from north Mitrovica for security reasons. Posted by: ed 2008-03-18 |
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