New bomb attack on international organizations in Kosovo

Feb 26, 2007, 13:47 GMT

Pristina - A hand grenade was thrown on the OSCE car park in western Kosovo on Monday in the second attack on international organizations within a week.

The attack came amid tensions raised in anticipation of the endgame for the province's future.

Nobody was injured in the 3.30am explosion in Pec, 80 kilometres west of Pristina, police spokesman Avni Gjevukaj told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

'Seven OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) vehicles, along with two civilian vehicles, have been slightly damaged by the blast,' Gjevukaj said, adding that an unexploded hand grenade was also found on the scene.

The blast occurred ahead of the visit by the OSCE Chairman-in- Office, the Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos, who was due to arrive in Pristina from Belgrade Tuesday.

Last week a similar explosion damaged vehicles in a UN car park in Pristina. On Monday morning the UN administration in Kosovo ordered that all its vehicles might be left parked only in secured areas.

The first attack came in the wake of demonstrations called by the radically pro-independence Vetevendosja movement, which turned violent and in which two of the protesters were killed by police.

Though it distanced itself from the bomb blast in Pristina, Vetevendosja has scheduled more protests for March 3, again with the UN-mediated talks on the future of Kosovo in the background.

Kosovo has been governed by the UN since 1999, when NATO ousted Belgrade's security forces from what still nominally is Serbia's province. The majority Albanians now feel that it is high time for independence and expect it to come during the year.

Unlike mainstream Kosovo Albanian leaders, Vetevendosja rejects the negotiations fomented by the UN between Belgrade and Pristina and wants independence proclaimed immediately.

The final round of the year-long talks started on February 21 and was due to end on March 10. Following that, the UN envoy in the talks, Martti Ahtisaari, would submit his proposal for Kosovo's future status to the UN Security Council.

Ahtisaari's draft, revealed early in February, envisages internationally supervised independence for Kosovo. Most Albanian leaders have welcomed it, warning that any violence could damage the development they regard as favourable.

Within that context, they sharply criticized Vetevendosja over the violent protests and the bomb attack in Pristina last week. For that attack the responsibility was - unconvincingly - claimed by an email purporting to come from the disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army UCK.

With warfare, which Belgrade labelled as terrorism, the Kosovo Albanian UCK provoked an unmeasured response of security forces in 1998 and 1999, eventually leading to the NATO intervention against Yugoslavia a year later and the arrival of the UN mission.

On Monday, a few hours after the attack in Pec, a former UCK commander and Kosovo's prime minister Ramush Haradinaj returned to The Hague for his war-crimes trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Haradinaj was seen off by the former top UCK commander and the current premier of the province, Agim Ceku, who said that Haradinaj was not going to ICTY 'not to defend himself only ... but a just fight of the UCK for liberation.'

In the trial scheduled to resume on March 5, Haradinaj faces 17 counts of crimes against humanity and 20 counts of violations of laws and customs of war, according to the indictment of March 2005.

His alleged crimes include murder, torture and rape committed against Serbs, Roma and Albanians who remained loyal to Belgrade in the 1998-1999 conflict in the province. Haradinaj was one of the major commanders in the UCK, which rose against Belgrade's rule in 1998.

Haradinaj stepped down as Kosovo's prime minister, after serving a few months, when the indictment was revealed and turned himself in to the ICTY, which released him until the start of the trial.