http://www.centraleurope.com/yugoslaviatoday/news.php3?id=201904

Thaci Supporters Stone Serb Homes

PRISTINA, Sep 22, 2000 -- (Agence France Presse) Supporters of the former
political head of the Kosovo Liberation Army guerrilla group stoned Serb homes
Thursday and vandalized the offices of their main ethnic Albanian rival in
October elections, UN police said.

The violence broke out after supporters of Hashim Thaci's Democratic Party of
Kosovo (PDK) began to leave a rally in Lipljan, six miles (10 kilometers) south
of Pristina, just after midday (1000 GMT) Thursday, police spokesman Charley
Johnson said.

The damage to the homes was minor and only one person was slightly injured,
Johnson said.

But the violence is bound to heighten ethnic and political tension ahead of
Kosovo's first postwar municipal election on October 28.

Between four and five thousand supporters of the PDK, a party formed out of the
ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) after the end of Kosovo's 1998-1999
civil war, gathered in Lipljan early Thursday to hear Thaci speak, Johnson said.

A convoy of 60 to 70 vehicles toured the ethnically mixed town carrying a crowd
of PDK activists chanting slogans and singing, before pulling up in front of
Serb homes and throwing stones, he added.

Their next target was the local offices of Ibrahim Rugova's Democratic League of
Kosovo (LDK), the leading Kosovo Albanian party and the PDK's principal rival in
the October poll. Party members were intimidated and property damaged.

One political official was lightly injured, Johnson said, without being able to
say from which group he came.

Kosovo is a province of Yugoslavia which has been run by the United Nations
since the arrival of a NATO-led peacekeeping force in June last year brought an
end to a civil war between the ethnic Albanian separatist KLA and Yugoslav
forces.



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