By Ellie Tzortzi

BELGRADE, April 30 (Reuters) - Two little-known nationalist Serb groups say they are forming a volunteer guard this week that would take up arms if Serbia's breakaway Kosovo province gets independence.

The move, reminiscent of the paramilitary gangs that blackened Serbia's name during the 1990s wars in Croatia and Bosnia, was condemned by all Serb political parties.

The Serbian Veterans' Movement and the United Serbian People's Movement say they are setting up the group to defend Kosovo, the religious heartland of Serbia where a 90-percent ethnic Muslim Albanian majority wants to break away.

Zeljko Vasiljevic, head of the Veterans' Movement, said "the first company of the Christian militia in uniform, made up of experienced war veterans from about 30 Serbian towns," would be sworn in a church service in the town of Krusevac on May 5.

About 100 volunteers would attend the service, Vasiljevic told Danas newspaper, but 5,000 had signed up to join the "Guard of Prince Lazar", named after a 14th century Serb ruler.

An Interior Ministry spokeswoman told Reuters holding a church service was not illegal, but forming an armed group was.

Kosovo has been run by the United Nations since 1999, when NATO expelled Serb forces accused of killing civilians while fighting a separatist war. The U.N. is mulling a plan to give Kosovo independence under European Union supervision.

Danas warned the initiative should not be dismissed.

"If Serbia had no prior experience of the Serb Volunteer Guard, Arkan's Tigers, the Scorpions, the Yellow Wasps, the White Eagles and similar groups.. one could shrug it off and say it was only boasting..."

There are thousands of Serbs with combat experience and weapons.

The newspaper said any armed Serb group would be "chased out like rabbits" by the 16,000-strong NATO force in the province, with "disastrous" consequences for Serbia.

Vasiljevic is a member of parliament allied to the Socialist Party of the late Slobodan Milosevic, whose nationalist policies led Serbia into one war after another in the 1990s.

Serb or Serbian-backed paramilitaries were blamed for most of the atrocities during the conflicts and dozens are on trial in local courts and the Hague war crimes tribunal.

Dragan Todorovic of the ultranationalist Radical party told Kurir daily the idea of a armed militia "could backfire".

"I understand the intention of every Serb patriot to do all in his power to prevent the theft of our province but we must take care because such actions can be damaging," Todorovic said.

Srdjan Milivojevic of the pro-Western Democratic Party said: "Forming paramilitary units out of the control of the state is very dangerous, and illegal."

(Additional reporting by Beti Bilandzic)

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