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Under tight security, Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica visited Kosovo Wednesday to mark a centuries-old battle at the heart of Serbia's claim to the breakaway province.

Kostunica's convoy sped through the province, which has an ethnic Albanian majority, under UN police escort to the Serb monastery town of Gracanica, which was commemorating Saint Vitus' day or Vidovdan in the Serb Orthodox Julian calendar.

Soldiers of the 17,000-strong NATO-led peace force and local police secured the 40-kilometre route through the province, anxious to avoid incidents that could derail talks underway on the Kosovo Albanians' demand for independence from Serbia.

Riot police, mostly local Kosovo Albanians, scuffled with dozens of pro-independence activists at various points along the route, arresting about 70 people.

Though billed by the United Nations as a "private, religious visit," the timing could hardly be more sensitive.

The West is pushing for a decision in the next six months on Kosovo's final status, seven years after NATO bombs drove out Serb forces and the United Nations took over the province. Diplomats say it will likely be some form of independence.

In London on Tuesday, Kostunica said Serbia would declare any independence imposed by the major powers "worthless and legally invalid." He appealed for a trial period of "substantial autonomy," something the Albanians reject.

Kostunica has been in Kosovo only once since Serbia lost control in 1999, when NATO intervened to halt a two-year bloody fighting between Serb forces and separatist Albanian rebels.

The United Nations has called for Kostunica's visit not to be politicized. But for Serbs, June 28 is a date steeped in history.

The 1389 Serb defeat north of the capital Pristina ushered in 500 years of Ottoman Turk rule and holds almost mythic status for Serbs. It is central to Serbia's claim to Kosovo as the cradle of the nation, the place where Orthodox Christian Serbs fought in vain to halt the advancing Muslim Turks.

Exactly 17 years ago, late Serb President Slobodan Milosevic began riding the tiger of Serb nationalism with a speech to a crowd of 500,000 at the site of the battle.

He warned of battles to come, in an address laden with nationalist rhetoric. The decade that followed saw Yugoslavia torn apart by war in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.

Kosovo's Serbs have since left in droves. Around 100,000 remain, roughly half the pre-war Serb population. Targeted for revenge, they have turned in on themselves, cocooned in a Belgrade-financed world of parallel institutions.

(China Daily June 29, 2006)