http://www.centraleurope.com/yugoslaviatoday/news.php3?id=230759&section=Kosovo

Three Serb Homes Destroyed as Kosovo Intimidation Continues

PRISTINA, Dec 15, 2000 -- (Agence France Presse) Three Serb homes were
destroyed by bombs in Kosovo, a UN spokeswoman said Friday, as attacks by
suspected ethnic Albanian extremists continued against the province's minority
populations.

Susan Manuel told reporters that two of the unoccupied homes were destroyed
Wednesday in an apparent attempt to deter displaced Serbs from returning to the
breakaway province, where independence-minded Albanians form a majority.

"Ironically or not it was a couple of hours after a round table discussion had
taken
place in Prizren on the subject of the return of displaced Serbs to the
abandoned
village of Sredska, so police are assuming that this was a direct reaction to
that
meeting," she said.

The two homes in Sredska, six miles (10 kilometers) west of Prizren in southwest
Kosovo, were completely destroyed by simultaneous explosions at 2:10 pm
Thursday, police said. No-one was hurt.

A third Serb-owned home was destroyed later in the day in the southeastern
Kosovo village of Klokot.

The explosions came a day after a Serb security guard employed by Kosovo's
UN administration, 60-year-old Miroslav Krstic, was shot dead by unknown
gunmen in the southeastern village of Vitina.

Kosovo has been a UN-run international protectorate since June 1999, when a
NATO-led peacekeeping force arrived in the province to bring to an end fighting
between Yugoslav security forces and ethnic Albanian separatist rebels.

Some 800,000 thousand ethnic Albanians, who had fled the fighting and
Belgrade's brutal campaign of murder and mass eviction, have since returned, but
another 210,000 non-Albanians, the majority of them Serbs, have fled since
NATO's arrival, as ethnic Albanian militants launched their own campaign of
ethnic violence.

Most of the 100,000 Serbs remaining in Kosovo live in enclaves under the
protection of NATO-led peacekeepers, but the attacks continue and attempts to
resettle displaced minority communities have had limited success.

Last month four Ashkaeli gypsies were shot dead just two days after they
returned to rebuild their destroyed homes in the Drenica valley area of central
Kosovo, a stronghold of ethnic Albanian separatism.