Kosovo Protesters Demand Jobs In New Armed Force

The rejected protection corps members fear they will not find work in Kosovo`s struggling economy.

 A few hundred members of a disbanded Kosovan civil protection unit demonstrated in Pristina on Friday to demand jobs in a new armed force, hours after a grenade attack on a barracks.

The government intends the new Kosovo Security Force (KSF), inaugurated on Thursday, to grow into Kosovo's army, although so far without approval from the international community.

Most KSF recruits are former guerrillas who fought to prise Kosovo out of Serbian rule, but the KSF is accepting only 1,300 of more than 3,000 active members of the civil protection force, the Kosovo Protection Corps, also made up of ex-guerrillas.

The rejected protection corps members fear they will not find work in Kosovo's struggling economy.

"We want to stop the process of recruiting other civilian members until a solution is found for us," said Muhamet Gubetini, the head of a committee that organised the protest.

He urged all ex-members of the protection force to distance themselves from violent acts such as the grenade blast at a KSF barracks in the town of Pec on Thursday night.

No one was hurt in the blast, and it was not clear who was responsible.

Serbia still considers Kosovo, which declared independence in February 2008, part of its territory. It has said the KSF is an illegal paramilitary force and a security threat.

Kosovo's minority Serbs see it as a step towards further division between them and the majority ethnic Albanians.

The KSF will have 2,500 personnel and 800 reservists and will be fully operational in two to five years.

It will be trained and overseen by NATO, which bombed Serbian forces in 1998 to halt ethnic cleansing in a war against an ethnic Albanian separatist insurgency, and now has 15,000 peacekeepers in Kosovo.

Officials in Pristina have described the KSF as their army, but NATO has said the force will not undertake military tasks.