The police arrested 27 persons at a rally that was attended by some 200 people. The arrested were wearing T-shirts with the insignia of the Serbian Interior Ministry's Unit for Special Purposes, the so-called Red Berets. The police said the arrests were made to prevent "possible acts of provocation".
The Red Berets were disbanded after the assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in March 2003. The unit's former commander, Milorad Ulemek Legija, was indicted for the assassination along with some other members of the unit, including Zvezdan Jovanovic, who gunned down the prime minister and wounded his bodyguard. The trial of Ulemek and others was recently completed at the Belgrade Court for Organised Crime and verdicts will be announced on May 23.
The Krusevac gathering had been announced last week by the leader of the Serbian Veterans Movement, Zeljko Vasiljevic, who reportedly fought on different battlefields in the 1990s wars and who sits in the Serbian parliament as a deputy of the Socialist Party of Serbia. Vasiljevic claimed that there were some 5,000 volunteers in Serbia willing to defend Kosovo with weapons if the province declared independence.
The Serbian Orthodox Church dismissed reports of its involvement in the organisation of the rally. The police in Krusevac last week confirmed that the organisers, the United Serb People's Movement, registered as a political party, and the Serbian Veterans Movement, had notified relevant authorities of their plan to hold the rally.