Under U.N. guard, Serbs mark epic Kosovo battle

Reuters, Tue Jun 28, 2005 11:02 AM ET By Matthew Robinson

GAZIMESTAN, Serbia and Montenegro (Reuters) - Guarded by heavily-armed U.N. police, a few hundred Serbs gathered in central Kosovo on Tuesday to commemorate the 616-year-old battle at the heart of their claim to the mountain-ringed province.

The turnout was a far cry from that of 1989, when Slobodan Milosevic delivered a speech full of nationalist rhetoric to a crowd of 500,000, packed on to the sloping heath where the Serbs fell to the Turks in 1389.

The defeat on "The Field of the Blackbirds" opened the doors to centuries of Ottoman Turk rule. It remains the pivotal event in Serb history and central to the Serb claim to Kosovo as their Jerusalem.

"We have come to keep the tradition alive," said Ljubinka, a Serb pensioner who made the 350-km (218- mile) trip from Belgrade to see Patriarch Pavle, the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, hold the traditional St Vitus Day service for fallen Serbs.

This year, the sun-baked fields below the towering Gazimestan monument were almost empty.

Long grass bent in the breeze and a few ethnic Albanians watched from a distance as Polish and American police officers from the U.N. force escorted buses and cars carrying Serbs to the site, now ringed with razor-wire and guarded by NATO.

Kosovo's 90-percent ethnic Albanian majority hopes St Vitus Day 2005 will be the last in a Kosovo still formally part of Serbia but run by the United Nations since 1999.

In 1989, Milosevic exploited the mythic status of the 14th Century battle to launch his bid for control over Yugoslavia.

In words that would be read back to him as evidence at his war crimes trial, the former communist apparatchik warned Serbs they once again faced a fight. "There are not battles with arms, but such battles cannot be excluded," he said.

War engulfed Yugoslavia two years later and, by 1999, Serbia had lost control over Kosovo after a 78-day NATO bombing campaign to drive out Milosevic's forces, accused of killing 10,000 ethnic Albanian civilians and expelling 800,000.

An estimated 180,000 Serbs fled, fearing revenge attacks by ethnic Albanians bitter at years of repression. About 100,000 remain, many in enclaves watched closely by NATO peacekeepers.

Kosovo has been a de facto U.N. protectorate ever since.

In 2001, Serb reformers in Belgrade chose St Vitus Day to extradite Milosevic to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, where he is now standing trial.

The West plans to open negotiations later this year which the 90-percent Albanian majority hopes will bring formal independence. Serbia says independence is impossible.