By Fatos Bytyci

ORAHOVAC, Serbia, April 28 (Reuters) - U.N. ambassadors beat a hasty retreat on Saturday from a town in Kosovo as police held back several hundred Serbs angry at a Western drive to give the province independence from Serbia.

Police hurried the Security Council delegation, which was on a fact-finding mission to the Albanian-majority province, onto a U.N. bus to jeers from a growing crowd in the crumbling Serb quarter of the town of Orahovac.

The 15 envoys of the current Council member states had arrived in four French Puma helicopters on the final leg of a two-day tour of the province before deciding, possibly within weeks, on a U.N. plan to grant it independence.

"We live in a ghetto," said Serb Vera Radic. "If Kosovo becomes independent, we will leave. All the houses surrounding me have been destroyed."

The tour by the states that may soon decide Kosovo's fate is a concession by NATO powers, which favour independence, to Russia, which supports Serb insistence that Kosovo must forever remain part of Serbia.

Kosovo, where 90 percent of the 2 million people are ethnic Albanians, has been run by the United Nations since 1999, when NATO bombs drove Serb forces out to halt the slaughter of Albanians in a counter-insurgency war.

Up to 200,000 Serbs and other ethnic minorities fled after the war, and the 100,000 Serbs who remain rely on 16,500 NATO-led peacekeepers for protection.

The West believes it has enough support in the U.N. Security Council to endorse a plan drafted by U.N. mediator Martti Ahtisaari to give independence under European Union supervision, provided Moscow does not use its veto.

Washington's ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, said on Friday the issue would be settled "in weeks".

Western powers fear NATO peacekeepers will face unrest if Albanians are made to wait much longer.

Russia has backed a Serbian demand for more talks, but the West says the search for a compromise was exhausted through 13 months of Serb-Albanian dialogue which was mediated by Ahtisaari and which was called to a halt in March.

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