Britain to send 600 soldiers to Kosovo

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain said on Tuesday it had agreed to a NATO request to send a 600-strong reserve battalion to bolster an alliance peacekeeping force in Kosovo.

Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority declared independence from Serbia on February 17 in a move that had Western backing but was rejected by Serbia and its ally Russia.

The decision stoked tensions with the ethnic Serb minority in northern Kosovo that erupted into riots last month in which a Ukrainian police officer serving with the United Nations was killed and dozens of U.N. police and NATO soldiers were injured.

"We are ... well prepared to meet NATO's request and I have agreed to deploy our Operational Reserve Force battalion until June 30, 2008," Defense Secretary Des Browne said in a written statement to parliament.

"The deployment will demonstrate our commitment to the security of the region and will provide NATO with extra flexibility in maintaining peace and stability for all communities within Kosovo," he said.

The soldiers from the 2nd Battalion, The Rifles, will spend about a month in Kosovo, from late May until the end of June, a Ministry of Defense spokesman said.

The battalion had been on standby since January to go to Kosovo, where they will supplement 16,000 NATO-led peacekeepers.

A former military commander and an opposition politician said sending more troops overseas left British forces severely stretched. Britain has about 4,000 troops in Iraq and has some 7,800 troops fighting Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan.

"It really is absolutely scraping the barrel with very harmful effects on the future of the British army, which is not big enough now to do all the tasks that the government wants it to do," former chief of defense staff Lord Bramall told the BBC.

STRETCHED TO THE LIMITS

Opposition Liberal Democrat defense spokesman Nick Harvey said the Kosovo mission would stretch the army to its limits.

"The government must ensure our European allies in NATO are aware of the burden that is being borne by the UK because of our operations in Afghanistan," he said in a statement.

Armed Forces Minister Bob Ainsworth has said that the deployment is for a limited time and that the government consults army commanders on what the military is capable of.

The British soldiers will be in Kosovo during what is likely to be a tense period following a Serbian election on May 11 and around the time Kosovo's new constitution comes into force on June 15.

That is when the United Nations mission that has run the former Serbian province since 1999 is due to hand over its remaining powers to Kosovo's ethnic Albanian leaders and its European Union-led overseers.

Questions remain over how the transition will proceed, after Russia blocked the adoption of a U.N. Security Council resolution endorsing the EU takeover and a U.N. plan for independence.

About 120,000 Serbs live in Kosovo among 2 million ethnic Albanians.

February's declaration of independence by Kosovo has been recognized by more than 30 countries, including the United States and most of the 27 EU member states.

(Additional reporting by Katherine Baldwin in London and Paul Taylor in Brussels; Editing by Dominic Evans)