Subject: Rocket attack on Pristina Serbian enclave: no casualties
Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2000 18:20:05 PDT
From: C-afp@... (AFP)
Organization: Copyright 2000 by Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet)
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PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, Oct 23 (AFP) - Unidentified attackers
fired a rocket-propelled grenade on Monday at the last Serbian
community remaining in the Kosovo capital Pristina , the NATO-led
peacekeeping force said.
British commandos at the scene said the RPG appeared to have
been fired across an area of waste ground by a block of apartments
occupied by Serbs. No-one was believed to have been injured, they
said.
A resident of the building told AFP that each apartment on the
targetted staircase was occupied by a Serbian family and that the
apartment hit belonged to a family with five children.
A police officer, either a member of Kosovo's multinational UN
force or a Serb officer from the Kosovo Police Service, is billeted
in each apartment to bolster security, he added.
A platoon of British marine commandos is also based on the
ground floor of the building. The troops sealed off the area around
the building within minutes of the attack at around 10:30 p.m. (2030
GMT).
Kosovo's UN administrator, Bernard Kouchner, arrived on the
scene within 40 minutes of the explosion and immediately went to
talk with families evacuated from the building and sheltering in a
nearby cafe.
"We asked the people about their conditions," Kouchner said, "We
have to improve their conditions, their freedom of movement and
security."
"I cannot understand this spirit of revenge, we have to fight
it," he said.
Kosovo's Serb minority have regularly been the target of ethnic
attacks since the arrival in the province of a NATO-led peacekeeping
force in June last year. Hundreds have been killed or injured and
around 170,000 have fled the province, according to the UN High
Commissioner for Refugees.
Around 40,000 Serbs left Pristina alone, leaving a few hundred
living mainly in the "YU project" an apartment block in the Ulpiana
district of central Pristina which was the target of Monday's
attack.
A bomb-disposal team and police forensic experts were to examine
the building, Royal Navy Lieutenant Allan Youp told reporters.
Kouchner was accompanied by the Belgrade-based human rights
lawyer Natasha Kandic, who said that despite the attack security for
Serbs living in Kosovo was improving.
"The people here don't want to leave," she said, "They want to
stay and show Serbs that this is their country so that others can
return".
But a resident of the building, whose flat was withing 20 metres
(yards) of where the grenade struck and who did not want to be
named, disagreed.
"I'm leaving. I'm going to Belgrade, it's a million times better
than here," he said.