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Waving Serbian flags and chanting "Kosovo is Serbia," the peaceful crowd listened to impassioned speeches about their homeland and lit candles before marching up University Ave. to circle Queen's Park.

"It's your culture. It's your religion. You don't want to see your country falling apart," said Natasa Subotic, 17, who had the Serbian flag draped around her shoulders.
"It hurts, especially if you know people who are there," said Subotic, who has family in Lapovo, a village about an hour away from Belgrade.
The protesters also spoke out against U.S. support for the new status of Kosovo, which declared its independence last Sunday.
The U.S. and major powers in the European Union quickly recognized the legitimacy of the move by the ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo. Russia, China and Spain – struggling with their own separatist movements – were among the countries that did not.
Ottawa has not yet taken a stand because, it's widely believed, it doesn't want to stoke the separatist flames in Quebec.
Some protesters carried Canadian flags in the hopes that the federal government would soon refuse to recognize Kosovo as an independent state.
Police were out in full force – some on horseback and some with riot gear at the ready – but everything remained under control.
This was in stark contrast to events Thursday in Belgrade, where Serbs tried to torch the U.S. embassy, burned flags, looted stores and clashed with police.
The Toronto protest was also a departure from a 1999 rally where demonstrators threw rocks and eggs, and burned flags at the U.S. consulate soon after NATO began air strikes on the former Yugoslavia.
Those events were recalled in a notice on the U.S. consular website yesterday, which warned Americans to stay away from its offices in Toronto and Vancouver while demonstrations were happening.
Tatjana Vujic, 41, who was there with her 6-year-old son, said she was not worried about any violence yesterday. "We wouldn't bring the kids if we thought it was violent."
In Kosovo yesterday, Serbia's hard-line leaders called the United States "the main culprit" in the violence that has broken out since Kosovo declared independence.
Several thousand Serbs protested peacefully in the ethnically divided town of Kosovska Mitrovica, the sixth day of demonstrations against Kosovo's break with Serbia. Russia backs Serbia's fierce resistance to Kosovo's secession.
"The United States is the main culprit ... for all those violent acts," Serbia's minister for Kosovo, Slobodan Samardzic, said in Belgrade.
Other Serbian leaders have called for calm after the riots. But an aide to hard-line Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica said any future violence will be blamed on the U.S. "If the United States sticks to its present position that the fake state of Kosovo exists ... all responsibility in the future will be on the United States," Kostunica adviser Branislav Ristivojevic said.
The remarks were an indication Serbia is drifting further from the West and more toward ally Russia.
The vast majority of Kosovo's population is ethnic-Albanian and Serbs represent about 10 per cent of the region's 2 million people.
Kosovo's minority Serbs have staged protests daily since the territory's ethnic-Albanian leadership proclaimed independence. They have vented their anger by destroying UN and NATO property as well.
There have been scattered protests against Kosovo's independence in other countries as well. In Athens, about 2,000 pro-Communist demonstrators marched to the U.S. embassy yesterday. And in Germany, about 1,200 people demonstrated in a square in downtown Stuttgart and 500 others protested in Frankfurt.
http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/306410