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BELGRADE, August 2 (Itar-Tass) - The leadership of the Novo-Brdo municipality in Kosovo demanded a dispatch of Russian peacekeepers to local villages to protect the remaining Serb population.
A statement by chairman of the municipal committee Serboljub Maksimovic says that Serb population has lost confidence in other KFOR contingents which, according to the chairman, engineer deliberate actions of deterrence to force Serbs to leave their homes.
The detention by U.S. soldiers of over 20 local Serbs in the village of Zabelice on Sunday served as a pretext for the protest of the municipal leadership.The Americans did not like a checkpoint on a rural road, put up by local Serbs to prevent infiltration of Albanian gunmen into their village.
Americans spotted the barricade from helicopters and sent a military police squad to inspect the situation. This action ended with arrest of virtually all men in that Serb village and with their dispatch to an American commandant's office in Gnilana.
They were interrogated there and then released. However, this action of deterrence with an arrival of armoured personnel carriers and detention of all men at gun-point provoked indignation in the area.
"If Russians do not come to our area, all Serbs in the Novo-Brdo municipality will be forced to leave Kosovo," stresses the statement by the municipal leadership.