Serbs tell America Hands off Kosovo

BELGRADE, Feb 27 (Reuters) Thousands of Serbs from Kosovo marched to the United States embassy in Belgrade today to denounce a Western-backed plan to give independence to the Albanian majority of the breakaway Serbian province.

Some carried banners urging ''Russia, Use Your Veto'' to block the proposal at the United Nations Security Council.

The rally is the second protest organised by hardline nationalists outside the downtown US mission in three months.

Serb civil servants in Kosovo, who answer to Belgrade, were given the day off and schools were closed so that all who wanted to could travel to the capital for the protest. Organisers spoke of ''80 busloads'' making the eight-hour round trip.

Serbia's ultranationalist Radical Party also called on its supporters to join the rally. The Radicals brought more than 20,000 demonstrators out on the street on December 2 to demand Washington free their leader Vojislav Seselj from the United Nations war crimes court in The Hague.

The Kosovo demonstration takes place a day after the International Court of Justice ruled in a landmark case that Serbia was not guilty of genocide in the 1992-95 Bosnia war.

The verdict threw a spotlight on the deep divisions in Serbia about its behaviour in the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, in which Serb forces under the late President Slobodan Milosevic committed most of the atrocities.

Many Serbs deny this, and the prospects of Serbia's pro-Western parties being able to persuade parliament that it is time to acknowledge them were dimmed by today's court ruling.

The sense of vindication claimed by nationalist parties who say Serb forces behaved no worse than their wartime adversaries is likely to reinforce their determination to oppose a United Nations proposal to grant Kosovo virtual independence.

Today's rally was also backed not only by Milosevic's unreconstructed Socialist Party but also by the party of Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, the Western-favoured reformist who toppled Milosevic in 2000 but who is now overtly nationalist.

The UN and NATO have run Serbia's cherished southern province since 1999, when Western allies bombed Serbia for 11 weeks to force it to withdraw its troops and police who killed some 10,000 civilians and expelled nearly 1 million in their crackdown on an Albanian guerrilla uprising.

The province's 90 per cent Albanian majority say they will never accept Serb rule again, and the West says there is no viable alternative to granting them self-determination.

But Belgrade and the 100,000 Serbs still living in Kosovo oppose the plan and there is no guarantee the province will not be plunged once more into violence before its status is settled.

Reuters SY DB2125