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Pristina: Kosovo's prime minister denounced the violent protests in Belgrade as reminiscent of Slobodan Milosevic's wartime rule, saying Serbia must reject "the mentality of the past."
In an interview with The Associated Press, Hashim Thaci called Thursday night's storming of the US Embassy and attacks on other foreign compounds "terrible", and said it harkened back to the former Serbian leader's bloody 1998-99 crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo.
Thaci, a former guerrilla leader of the now-disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army, said "The pictures of yesterday in Belgrade were pictures of Milosevic's time."
He added, "What we saw were terrible things. It was a reaction against a democratic world."
But Thaci expressed confidence that NATO's peacekeeping force, and Kosovo's swift recognition by the US and key European powers, would ensure the new nation remains secure.
On Thursday, rioters stormed and set fire to the American Embassy in the Serbian capital during massive rioting that left one person dead and 150 injured.
Meanwhile, all but a few essential diplomats at the embassy are leaving Serbia as the United States piles up complaints about the Serbs' failure to protect US and other Western embassies from nationalist mobs.
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