Belgrade - Some 200,000 Serbs gathered in Belgrade Thursday
to rally against Kosovo's independence and the supportive West, with
the demonstration turning into an orgy of vandalism and robbery.
Several groups numbering in the hundreds - described locally as
hooligans - set the United States embassy ablaze, after penetrating
it and defacing it. The few police on the scene initially withdrew
from the mob.
Riot police appeared too late to chase the crowd away, firing
teargas as the retreating mob overturned garbage containers and
concrete flowerbeds. Witnesses said that several men lay face-down on
the pavement, hands cuffed behind their backs.
Upon arrival at the scene, firefighters had first doused a burning
booth in front of the smashed consular section of the embassy, which
spreads over several buildings along half a block. Firemen eventually
also quenched the blaze on the ground and first floor.
The Croatian embassy was also ransacked, reports said, while
Turkish, Bosnian, German and Canadian missions, all lined up or near
Kneza Milosa, one of the longest Belgrade streets, were pelted with
rocks, their windows smashed.
Across the Sava River, in the sprawling New Belgrade, a cordon of
riot police protected the mega-store of the Slovenian retailer
Mercator and the nearby B92 media building
In the posh downtown Kneza Mihajla and Terazije streets, the mob
smashed storefronts and emptied Benetton, Bata, Levi's and other
stores. McDonald's restaurants were attacked for the third time since
Monday.
Violence exploded while the majority of the people who attended
the rally listened to Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica's appeal for
calm or walked to a nearby church for prayer.
But he also whipped up emotions with an accusation that the West
had tried to trick Serbia into accepting the secession of Kosovo by
offering it EU membership.
'Kosovo belongs to Serbia,' the usually reserved Kostunica
screamed. 'It has always been so and it will be so forever.'
'No force, no threats or promises can change that,' he said.
Kostunica had frozen Serbia's approach to EU membership in protest
against Western support of Kosovo, branding the presumed exchange of
Kosovo for membership of the EU an 'indecent proposal.'
The ultra-nationalist opposition leader Tomislav Nikolic compared
the West of the present to wartime Germany: 'Hitler could not take
Kosovo and neither will these of today.'
Also under siege was the B92 media house, which has been critical
of Serbia's path of confrontation with the West over Kosovo.
Earlier, one of the speakers of the rally, the acclaimed film
director Emir Kusturica, referred to opposition media as 'domestic
mice' working for 'handouts.'
USA
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