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PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (AP) - A string of reported revenge killings of Serbs, including an elderly woman found strangled in her bathtub, increased tensions in Kosovo and dimmed the province's slow progress toward normalcy.
Yugoslavia's state-run Tanjug news agency reported that a 90-year old Serb woman was found dead in her bathtub Monday in Pristina. The private Beta news agency reported three deaths, including a Serb in the Vitina area and two others killed in Prizren, a city in southwestern Kosovo.
Separately, peacekeepers confirmed that the bodies of two Serbs were found in the Kamenica area south of Pristina. That sparked new tensions, with Serb protesters on each end of Kamenica effectively trapping the town's ethnic Albanian population.
Ethnic Albanians staged their own sit-down protest at the site of a Russian roadblock set up in response to the building confrontation. There were no reports of violence.
Serb convoys left the region of Vitina, 40 km southeast of Pristina, Sunday and Monday, Beta said. Kosovo is a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia's dominant republic.
Most of the nearly 200,000 Serbs in Kosovo before the NATO bombings have left the province since the air campaign began in March, initially fearing NATO's bombing and later trying to escape revenge-motivated violence by ethnic Albanians.
Despite the presence of nearly 40,000 NATO peacekeepers, the province remains riven by ethnic hatreds. Returning Kosovo Albanians have sought revenge on remaining Serbs for the killings and mass expulsions committed by the Yugoslav army and Serb police before and during 78 days of NATO bombing.
In an effort to reduce the load on NATO, 350 international police officers have taken up beats across Kosovo, according to the United Nations.
The international officers will help police the province until a new local force can be recruited and trained. International organizations helping to build up Kosovo's police force already have begun evaluating applicants.
Both ethnic Albanian university staff and postal workers were purged by the Serbs starting a decade ago, at the onset of growing tensions that turned into more than a year of open warfare between the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army and Yugoslav forces.
The return of students and teachers to Pristina University on Monday was intended to reintroduce a semblance of normalcy in the province following the NATO air strikes that forced President Slobodan Milosevic to agree to NATO's peace terms for Kosovo.
When ethnic Albanian faculty and students left in 1989, they took their classes underground and the university was taken over by Serbs.
Speaking at Monday's ceremonial reopening of the institution to ethnic Albanians, KLA leader Hashim Thaci, now prime minister of Kosovo's provisional government, declared to the returning teachers and students: ``These buildings belong to you!''
Standing on the steps of the philosophy department, Thaci and Zenel Kelmendi, rector of the university, addressed a crowd of 5,000 students who will spend the month making up missed classes and exams to be ready for the official start of classes in September. All classes will be held in Albanian.
``A ghost once said that we will never step onto this university again,'' Kelmendi said, alluding to the Serbs who drove them out. ``But we are here now, and we are here to stay.''
At the same time, Kelmendi pledged to make the institution an ``open university for all who want to study here, it doesn't matter what background.''