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PRISTINA, Yugoslavia - Asserting that the Kosovo Protection Corps is nothing more than an ethnic Albanian army in a new guise, Serb members resigned yesterday from the multiethnic council that works with the United Nations and NATO to administer the province.
The move was a blow to international efforts to promote reconciliation between ethnic Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo. It also heralds a new period of tension between the UN and NATO missions and leaders of the minority Serb community.
Serb representatives submitted their resignation to the UN mission chief, Bernard Kouchner, at the end of the weekly council meeting. They quit two days after NATO and the United Nations signed an agreement with Kosovo Liberation Army leaders to disband the group and transform it into a lightly armed, 5,000-member force led by a former Kosovo Liberation Army commander, Agim Ceku.
''The international community wants to solve Kosovo's problems on an ethnic basis, and by forming this Kosovo Corps, it's over with multiethnic Kosovo,'' a Serb delegate, Momcilo Trajkovic, said after the meeting.
Trajkovic accused NATO and the United Nations of creating an ''undefined formation'' that will ''most probably become the future army of Kosovo, or better said, an Albanian army.''
The Rev. Sava Janjic, a representative of the Serbian Orthodox Church, said the creation of the corps had signaled ''that Kosovo is anything but a multiethnic community and anything but a democratic community.''
Kouchner tried to downplay the Serb resignation, saying he hoped the representatives would reconsider and return to the council.
''They are our natural interlocutors, and they represent, in our opinion, the Serb community and not Belgrade,'' he said. Kouchner said informal contacts with the Kosovo Serb leadership would continue.
However, he disagreed vehemently with Serb allegations that NATO and the United Nations were trying to establish a Kosovo for Albanians only.
''We are trying better than they were trying to give them a multiethnic Kosovo,'' Kouchner said. ''It will come if we give enough time to build confidence.''
Nevertheless, many ethnic Albanians share the Serb belief that the Kosovo Protection Corps is a forerunner to a Kosovo army.
The corps ''is the first'' Kosovo institution ''recognized by the international community because a military is what keeps a state standing,'' Ceku told several thousand people at a rally yesterday in the central town of Srbica, which ethnic Albanians call Skenderaj.
In Belgrade, the Yugoslav official who works with the UN mission in Kosovo, Stanimir Vukicevic, said that the formation of the corps was ''unacceptable'' and that the disarming of the KLA was an illusion.
''Despite the intent to portray them as some kind of civilian protection force, it's evident that we are dealing with an embryo of a future defense force,'' Vukicevic said.