Border posts ablaze as irate Serbs pour into Kosovo

THE smoke from the blazing border crossing point between Kosovo and southern Serbia could be seen from two miles away, minutes after a team of French Nato soldiers intervened to rescue 12 Kosovo police and customs officers under attack from a mob of angry Serbs.

Minutes later, a second border crossing, at Zubin Potok, was in flames, too.

Hundreds of Serbs, furious at Kosovo's weekend declaration of independence, poured into northern Kosovo in cars, buses and 4x4s yesterday, heading for the ethnically-divided flashpoint town of Mitrovica.

On the way, they ransacked and burned down two border crossing points at Jarinje, some 20 miles north of Mitrovica, and at Zubin Potok.

Ten French soldiers braved the Serb mob to install a protective cordon around the Jarinje post, while a Nato Puma helicopter evacuated the police and customs officers.

Police had taken shelter in a tunnel there as more than 1,000 protesters tried to tear it down.

Meanwhile, further down the road, other French soldiers from Nato's K-For peacekeeping mission tried vainly to stop Serbs by erecting a barrier of gravel and earth across the main road leading south from the border to Mitrovica. But the Serbs had come prepared with their own digger and, despite French troops firing warning shots in the air, they breached the barrier and drove south, where they joined fellow Serbs serving as police officers in the Kosovo police service in Mitrovica.

As Nato and the UN mission in Kosovo, or UNMIK, struggled to maintain order and control over northern Kosovo, the attacks highlighted the challenge facing a European Union law enforcement mission preparing to deploy in the Albanian-majority territory which has been under UN administration for nearly nine years.

"We are inches from partition," said a western official, referring to the de facto division of Kosovo along ethnic lines, with the border line being the river Ibar, which runs through Mitrovica, north of which is entirely Serb territory.

K-For will insist until it is blue in the face that it is in control of northern Kosovo, but, in reality, hardline Serbs, including plain-clothes officers from Serbia's interior ministry police, armed and unarmed, can circulate, throughout the north of the new country.

Some two million Albanians live in Kosovo, alongside about 120,000 remaining Serbs. Half of these are concentrated in an area running north from Mitrovica to the Serbian border, the rest in isolated enclaves further south.

A spokesman for the EU said there was no plan to withdraw a small advance team from north of Mitrovica. They would stay on and carry out their mandate.

Local Serbs, backed by the Serbian government and Russia, say the planned EU mission to Kosovo, which will deploy 2,000 police and justice officials, is illegitimate and warn that its authority will not be accepted.

Angry Serb demonstrations and two nights of vandalism and bomb attacks against vehicles and symbols of the international presence in Kosovo have thrown down a gauntlet to the incoming EU group. It will take over from the UN mission that has administered Kosovo since Nato intervened in 1999 after Serb atrocities left up to 11,000 ethnic Albanians dead.