LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Kosovo: Kosovo Police
built 115 days ago
The Serbian villages of central Kosovo that were spared, such as Priluzje (located a few miles north of Obilic), have... lost contact with the outside world. As of last Tuesday, the train connecting them with the town of Zvetcin to the northwest of Mitrovica had been suspended for 10 days. This train represented their only means of getting supplies from Serbia proper. Now, no one knows when the train will resume, but the villagers fear they cannot travel safely without UN police escorts. Some Greek police were present on the train for two years, villagers said, but recent NATO downsizing has meant the elimination of that program.
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Kosovo's formal autonomy, established under the 1945 Yugoslav constitution, initially meant relatively little in practice. Tito's secret police cracked down hard on nationalists. In 1956, a number of Albanians were put on trial in Kosovo on charges of espionage and subversion. The threat of separatism was in fact minimal, as the few underground groups aiming for union with Albania were politically insignificant. Their long-term impact was substantial, though, as some—particularly the Revolutionary Movement for Albanian Unity, founded by Adem Demaci—were much later to form the political core of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Demaci himself was imprisoned in 1964 along with many of his followers.
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Under the leadership of Ibrahim Rugova, the Albanians in Kosovo conducted a peaceful resistance to Serbian rule. In 1995, after the Dayton Agreement which ended the Bosnian War, many Albanians became disenchanted with Rugova's peaceful strategy. Consequently, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was formed in 1996 with the goal of attaining an independent Kosovo. Other KLA factions fought with the goal of uniting all the Albanian populated lands and some simply to defend Kosovo Albanians from Milosevic's regime, but they were joined together by the common objective of defeating what they saw as Serb oppressors. They employed guerilla-style tactics against Serbian police forces and paramilitaries. Violence escalated in a series of KLA attacks and Serbian reprisals into the year 1999, with increasing numbers of civilian victims.
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In 1974, Kosovo's political status was improved still further when a new Yugoslav constitution granted an expanded set of political rights. Along with Vojvodina, it was declared a province and gained many of the powers of a fully-fledged republic: a seat on the federal presidency and its own assembly, police force and national bank. Power was still exercised by the Communist Party, but it was now devolved mainly to ethnic Albanian communists.
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![[Flag of the Kodovo Police]](http://retrieverimages.lycos.com/images/k/o/s/kosovo/i/016.gif)
The flag of the Kosovo Police Service can be seen on the Kosovo Police website. The emblem on the flag is different from the Police emblem shown on the upper banner of the website.
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Serious clashes between demonstrators and security forces in the province of Kosovo, which borders on Albania, have triggered the first crisis in Yugoslavia since president Tito's death 11 months ago. The gathering unrest reached a climax yesterday when, according to official sources, several hundred people were injured as police firing tear gas broke up a march of at least 10,000 protesters through the provincial capital of Pristina.
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