Kosovo Yugoslavia

The fragile peace in Kosovo was shattered Wednesday when riots broke out across the province and in Belgrade, leaving at least 17 people dead in some of the worst clashes between Serbs and ethnic Albanians since the war ended in 1999. The Kosovo Health Ministry said 16 people were confirmed killed -- six in Kosovska Mitrovica, three in Lipljan, three in Caglavica, two in Urosevac, one in Pec and one in Gnjilane. A 17th victim was reported killed in the provincial capital, Pristina.

NATO sent more troops to Kosovo as violence flared Thursday for a second day and the United Nations struggled with the reality that five years of international intervention and billions of dollars in aid have not calmed the hatred between Serbs and ethnic Albanians. As 940 additional NATO soldiers were dispatched, ethnic Albanians in Kosovo set Serbian Orthodox churches ablaze and police rolled out razor wire and fired tear gas.

The turmoil in Kosovo eased Friday as NATO, determined to prevent nationalist strife from again destabilizing the Balkans, deployed more troops into villages jolted by gunfire and streaked with smoke rising from Serbian homes set ablaze by ethnic Albanian mobs. With its credibility in jeopardy after three days of violence, the alliance became more aggressive in quelling uprisings, especially in the ethnically divided city of Kosovska Mitrovica.

U.N. police officers Saturday took photographs, checked for booby traps and picked through the rubble of homes burned during days of rioting in Kosovo, searching for clues that might lead to the instigators of the violence. North Atlantic Treaty Organization reinforcements fanned out through Kosovo to prevent further violence in the province as tensions eased after appeals by ethnic Albanian leaders and a veterans organization to halt attacks.

Three men who are among the first ethnic Albanians indicted by a U.N. tribunal for war crimes in Kosovo were sent Tuesday to the international court after being arrested by NATO peacekeepers, prosecutor Carla Del Ponte said. The men sent to face charges in The Hague are widely seen as minor players.

Pale and drawn, Saranda Bogojevci spoke just above a whisper Thursday as she described how Serbian paramilitaries shouted and jeered before gunning down her family four years ago. "I just lay on the ground, my eyes shut, pretending to be dead," the ethnic Albanian teenager told a court in a landmark case expected to shed new light on one of the worst massacres of Kosovo's 1998-99 war.

Serbian and Kosovo Albanian leaders met Tuesday for their first face-to-face talks since the end of the 1998-99 war in what was intended to be a move toward improving relations but at times seemed only to highlight their mutual antagonism. "This is the first time that they have talked to each other. It is a very, very important step," Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy chief, said at a news conference.

Democratic presidential candidate Wesley K. Clark, who as supreme commander of NATO directed the alliance's 1999 bombing campaign against Slobodan Milosevic's forces in Kosovo, testified here Monday in the war crimes trial of the former Yugoslav president. Clark's testimony was held behind closed doors because the court has given the U.S. government permission to review the transcript for national security concerns before it is made public.

U.S. presidential hopeful and former NATO commander Wesley K. Clark testified that Slobodan Milosevic knew in advance about the Srebrenica massacre, handing U.N. prosecutors the most direct evidence yet linking the former Yugoslav leader to the genocide, transcripts showed Thursday. In an operation commanded by Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic, more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys were killed in July 1995 at the U.N.

Serbian forces shelled ethnic Albanian villages south and west of this provincial capital for most of the day Sunday, witnesses said. The attacks, which began in early morning and continued into the afternoon, sent hundreds of refugees stampeding to safety and sparked wind-whipped fires that burned farmhouses and fields. A Reuters Television crew filming south of the main Pristina-Pec highway near the town of Komorane saw villages pounded by fire from Serbian tanks and artillery.