Serb volunteers vow in church to "defend" Kosovo
By Ivana Sekularac
KRUSEVAC, Serbia, May 5 (Reuters) - More than 100 hardline Serb nationalists gathered in a church on Saturday to "christen" a force pledged to fight to keep Kosovo part of Serbia, despite Western plans to make the province independent in months.
The volunteers of the "Guard of Prince Lazar" met in Lazarica church in the central Serbian town of Krusevac and vowed to defend Kosovo, cradle of Serb culture, if the two million ethnic Albanians who now dominate it win independence.
"In the event that independence is proclaimed we are going to be ready," Zeljko Vasiljevic, president of the Serb Veterans' Movement, told the crowd.
"As of today your task will be to unite volunteers and prepare them for defence of Kosovo," he said. Vasiljevic said on Friday volunteers would not act outside state institutions and would put themselves at the disposal of Serbian army and police.
Organisers said 5,000 people, mostly former veterans, had signed up to join.
Kosovo is now 90 percent populated by ethnic Albanians. It has been run by the United Nations since 1999, when NATO expelled Serb forces accused of killing and expelling civilians while fighting Albanian separatist guerrillas.
The Serbian government opposes independence for Kosovo but has ruled out war, and the veterans' initiative has no backing from any political parties.
Serbian police said it had detained 27 men who arrived in Krusevac wearing T-shirts featuring a wolf's head with bared fangs, symbol of the notorious Red Beret paramilitaries whose members stand indicted for the killing of reformist Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic.
The men arrived from Kosovska Mitrovica, a town in the north of Kosovo divided between ethnic Albanians in the south and Serbs in the north.
Some of the volunteers standing in front of the church wore camouflage uniforms bearing symbols used by Chetniks -- Serb guerrillas who began World War Two fighting the Nazis, but then switched sides to battle against communists.
The symbols and rhetoric are reminiscent of the paramilitary groups that roamed Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo in the wars of the 1990s and were blamed for many atrocities.
"This gathering is the 'first shot fired' against those who think that they can take away Kosovo from us," Hadzi Andrej Milic, a commander of the Guard of Prince Lazar, named after the 14th century ruler who led the Serb defence against the Ottoman Turks in Kosovo and died there.
The Battle of Kosovo has lent the territory a mythical status for Serbs.
Forming paramilitary groups is illegal in Serbia. Saturday's gathering was watched by a handful of police who stood outside the courtyard of the church.
The U.N. Security Council is expected this month to consider a plan drafted by a U.N. envoy to give the territory independence, under an open-ended period of European Union supervision. The West backs the plan.
