Kostunica said that recent outbreaks of violence were a warning that the situation in the province had not improved since the November elections when Belgrade agreed to urge Serbs to vote in return for guarantees from the UN mission.

"Kosovo Albanians must decide if they envisage a serious change of policy towards peace and stabilisation... or whether they intend to continue living within a context of violence," said the president.

In an interview with Belgrade daily Blic, Belgrade’s chief coordinator for the province said that the latest attack against the Serb minority shows that compromise is no longer an option in tackling terrorism but that a more energetic approach is needed.

Dragoljub Markovic was killed on Sunday, the eve of the Serbian Orthodox Christmas, when he tripped a wire stretched across the back entrance to his shop. The local Serb population protested on the streets of Kamenica until the man’s funeral yesterday.

Nebojsa Covic said the continued attacks against minority communities in Kosovo raise the question of whether one army is indeed enough for the province, as the international peacekeeping force recently insisted.

A statement issued yesterday by Covic’s Coordination Team and the Serbian Government noted that last year there were seventy terrorist attacks and four people murdered in the Kamenica area alone.

Deputy PM Covic told Blic today: “All this shows that ahead of us lies a great battle against terrorism, to be fought in cooperation with KFOR and UNMIK. There must be no compromise with terrorism.”