In Serbia's Kosovo province last March, 19 people were killed, 4,100 were left homeless, and at least 550 homes and 27 Orthodox Christian churches were set to the torch as a result of riots stoked by the terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). A report issued in late July by Human Rights Watch accused UN and NATO peacekeepers, stationed in Kosovo for the supposed purpose of maintaining order, of passively abetting the murderous rampage. "The report, based on interviews with officials and victims, describes how, time after time, heavily armed soldiers of the NATOled K-For [the UN's Kosovo Force] stayed in their barracks as Serb homes were burnt and looted," summarized the July 27 London Independent. "Relief, when it did arrive, was often too little too late, leading to a new status quo in which displaced communities found it impossible to return home."

[PHOTO BOX: Kosovo aflame: A Serbian Orthodox church burns in Kosovo, one of dozens put to the torch during a March rampage abetted by the Kosovo Liberation Army, a Marxist terrorist group.]

"In the village of Svinjare, a mob of armed Albanians marched past the main French K-For base before burning all of the 137 Serb homes," continued the press account. "The NATO troops stayed in their barracks watching buildings just a few hundred meters from their base go up in flames. In nearby Vicitrn, French K-For soldiers failed to intervene while Albanian gangs set fire to 69 Ashkali [Albanian-speaking Gypsies] homes, just 10 minutes' drive from the military base. At Prizren, in the southeast, German K-For troops failed to protect the Serb population and the historic Orthodox churches and monasteries despite repeated and frantic calls for assistance from German UN police in the town. The entire village of BeIo Polje was burnt to the ground by the mob. This time it was Italian K-For troops who locked the gates of an adjacent base." When Serb civilians came under sniper fire from Albanian thugs in Pristina, Kosovo's capital, "it took K-For and UN police more than six hours to come to their aid."

The riots were fueled by rumors - demonstrated to be utterly false - that a gang of Serbs with dogs had driven three Albanian boys into a river, where they drowned. But the actual precipitating event, notes the Independent, was "a march by veterans of the disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army protesting at the arrest of former KLA leaders on war crimes charges."

The KLA, as previously documented in these pages (see "Diving into the Kosovo Quagmire" in our March 15,1999 issue), was a heroin-peddling terrorist group organized by Maoist Albanian radicals and supported by Osama bin Laden. Following NATO's 78-day bombing of Serbia in 1999, the UN occupied Kosovo and appointed numerous KLA veterans to its government. While the KLA was "disbanded," its cadres formed the nucleus of the Kosovo Protection Corps, the UN-appointed police force.

SOURCE: The New American, Aug 23, 2004, Vol.20, Iss. 17; pg. 9.