Some 1,000 protesting Serbian army veterans clashed with the police in southern Serbia on Sunday, leaving nine people injured.
Three veterans were lightly injured, while four others were arrested. Six policemen, two of them Gendarmes, were also hurt, the Serbian news network B92 reported.
The incident took place on a bridge over the River Toplica as the veterans of the Kosovo war attempted to break through a police cordon at the Merdare border crossing with Kosovo, but were stopped by some 300 Gendarmes and riot police in full riot gear.
The veterans from some 20 towns staged the protest on the Nis-Pristina road near Kursumlija, demanding unpaid wages for fighting in Kosovo in 1999.
The former Yugoslav Army reserve soldiers, who were called up during the 1999 Kosovo War, planned to continue months of protests and draw the Serbian government's attention to their demands.
Dejan Milosevic, who heads one of the veterans' associations, said that they expect the government to adopt an urgent decree that will allow all veterans to receive the same amount of money.
"Everyone should get what some individuals have got through courts, and that is from 500,000 to 1 million dinars (8,290 to 16,580 U.S. dollars)," he said.
With an ethnic Albanian majority, Kosovo unilaterally declared independence in February despite strong opposition from Serbia and Kosovo's ethnic Serbs. Serbia still regards Kosovo as its province, but it has accepted the deployment of an EU mission in December after securing assurance that the mission will be neutral about Kosovo's status.
Source:Xinhua
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