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BELGRADE (Reuters) - Serbian Information Minister Aleksandar Vucic lashed out at the United States and its Western allies Friday, accusing them of "media occupation" in Kosovo and elsewhere in the Balkan state.
"Those who have most advocated democracy, human rights and media freedoms have shown that they do not know what democracy is, that human rights and freedoms do not interest them and that they simply want to totally destroy the Serb people," Vucic told a news conference.
The southern Serbian province has been under U.N. control following NATO's air war against Yugoslavia to halt Belgrade's repression of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority.
Vucic accused Bernard Kouchner, head of the United Nations Kosovo mission, of trying to chase Serbs away from the province through the "expansion of terrorist and pro-terrorist media and total destruction of all Serb media."
About 200,000 Serbs and other non-Albanians, fearing revenge attacks, have fled Kosovo in the last four months.
Vucic said Western officials had expelled 1,000 mainly Serb staff from Radio Television Pristina and handed over Serb media equipment to ethnic Albanians.
"The aim of NATO forces, Americans and their Western allies is not only full media occupation of Kosovo, a part of the territory of the republic of Serbia, but also the theft and pillage of our property and its distribution to ethnic Albanian separatists and terrorists," he said.
The Serb-financed Panorama publishing house had virtually ceased to exist, and a 20-minute Serbian language radio program in Kosovo was censored, Vucic said.
He accused U.S. officials of seeking to extend their "media occupation" to all of Serbia, saying they planned to form a tight ring around it by broadcasting programs from neighboring countries and Montenegro, Serbia's Western-leaning sister republic in the Yugoslav federation.
Vucic, a member of the ultra-nationalist Radical party, also said the United States had earmarked funds to finance "so-called independent media" in Serbia.
"Those who destroyed this country are trying to portray Serbia as a place of darkness and themselves as a beacon of truth," he said.