Four members of the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo were injured yesterday when thousands of ethnic Albanians tried to storm a bridge into the Serb side of the town of Kosovska Mitrovica.
More than 20 ethnic Albanians were also reported hurt in the clashes in the divided town where the demonstrators were demanding increased freedom of movement. The town is divided by the Ibar river into Serb and Albanian areas.
Peacekeepers and riot police repeatedly fired stun grenades to keep the Albanian protesters back, preventing them from crossing the bridge in the northern town.
A tense stand-off at the bridge lasted for about two hours until members of the Kosovo Protection Corps, which was created last month out of the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), emerged and pushed the crowd back.
Albanian medical workers said 22 ethnic Albanians were also injured, including a 12-year-old boy with head wounds, but it was not immediately clear how this had happened.
They said about 100 ethnic Albanians needed treatment because of tear gas from the stun grenades.
Violence had erupted earlier when about 3,000 Albanian protesters rushed on to the bridge, which was blocked by barbed wire. Police and troops fired stun grenades when they appeared to break through a police line. Kfor soldiers fired into the air from armoured cars.
Around 1,000 Serbs were standing on the other side, chanting nationalistic slogans, but they were kept back from the bridge by peacekeepers.
AFP reports from Pristina:
President Suleyman Demirel of Turkey arrived in Kosovo yesterday for a highly symbolic one-day visit to meet the Turkish community and troops in the Prizren region in south-west Kosovo.
"The human tragedy in Kosovo has ended thanks to NATO's determined action," Mr Demirel said before leaving Ankara. "The success of the NATO operation, the acceptance of the peace plan and of the UN Security Council resolution have launched a new era in Kosovo. Now is the time to heal the wounds and win the peace."
During his tour of the southern Serbian province, which spent more than 500 years under Ottoman rule, Mr Demirel also visited Turkish humanitarian aid offices in Pristina and Prizren, a town once known to Kosovars as "Little Turkey".
Before returning to Ankara, Mr Demirel visited the funerary shrine in Pristina of the 14th-century Ottoman Sultan Murat I, which Turkey will help to restore.
Murat I died on the battlefield in the 1389 Kosovo War between the expanding Ottoman Empire and a Serbian-led Christian army when he was mortally stabbed by a wounded Serbian nobleman. The battle marked the beginning of the conquest of the Balkans by the Ottomans. The Ottoman Empire ceded the territory after the first Balkan War in 1912, and nearly all of its other Balkan holdings. When the Turkish Kfor contingent arrived in Kosovo in July, the Turkish media had hailed it as "The Return of Turkish Troops."