22 11 2007 Belgrade _ Tsar Lazar’s Guard, a nationalist organization that advocates using force to keep Kosovo in Serbia, has delivered summons to MPs, telling them to fight for the independence-seeking territory.
After handing over the summons to the parliament’s registrar on Wednesday, the commander of the self-styled guard, Hadzi Andrej Milic, told reporters he did “not expect that a single deputy“ from the 250-strong parliament “will answer the call.“
Milic also announced that “unarmed guard members will set up a headquarters near Merdare“, the boundary crossing with Kosovo, by November 28.
He also said that “the guard has at least 5,000 members in every Serbian municipality and long-range weapons that allow us to target Pristina from a distance of 80 kilometres“.
Serbian security officials have previously dismissed the guard’s importance.
“They are not only unarmed; they are just a group of ludicrous and disillusioned drunkards. That organization is a ridiculous nonsense“, a state security official said on customary condition of anonymity.
Earlier this month, Milivoje Mihajlovic, the head of the government’s Bureau for Information, described Tsar Lazar’s Guard as a “fiction“. He also said that any such organization was only damaging Serbia’s reputation and its efforts to resolve the Kosovo crisis.
The final status of Kosovo, a UN protectorate since the end of the 1998-99 war there, is a matter for internationally-brokered talks between the Serbian government and Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian leaders who are demanding independence for the region. Serbia is offering Kosovo only broad autonomy.
The talks are largely deadlocked, and many ethnic Albanian leaders have pledged that the entity will unilaterally declare its independence after the current phase of talks ends on December 10. (Birn)
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