KOSOVSKA MITROVICA, Serbia (Reuters) - French NATO forces in full combat gear clashed with ethnic Albanian protesters in a divided Kosovo town for the second day running on Sunday, witnesses said. The two sides traded punches and kicks after the French troops halted a group of some 150 ethnic Albanians trying to march on the Serbian-populated district of Kosovska Mitrovica. The town is a hot spot in tension between minority Serbs and ethnic Albanians seeking revenge for years of Serbian police repression. A rocket-propelled grenade was fired from the Albanian quarter of the town into the Serbian neighbourhood late on Saturday night, French military spokesman Captain Bertrand Bonneau said. There were no casualties or damage, he said. Ethnic Albanian residents accuse NATO of letting the Serbs partition Mitrovica and hold onto Albanian property. Yugoslav Serb security forces and paramilitary gangs smashed, looted and forcibly depopulated much of Mitrovica before NATO‘s March-to-June air war drove them out of Kosovo. On Saturday the French soldiers, apparently caught unawares, scuffled with about 1,000 ethnic Albanians who tried to force their way across a bridge towards where the Serbs are living. The French were better prepared on Sunday. Soldiers, backed by a row of a dozen armoured cars, stood shoulder-to-shoulder to stop the crowd surging over the bridge across the Ibar river. Fighting broke out when the troops tried to calm down a woman at the head of the protest. Some Albanians spat at the French and threw stones. „The French are terrorists,“ chanted the crowd, made up of mostly young men. „We will liberate Mitrovica.“ they shouted. French peacekeepers reject the ethnic Albanian accusations of collaboration with the nationalist Serbs. They argue that if they had not set up checkpoints on either side of the bridge where pedestrians and cars are searched for weapons and known troublemakers turned back, no one would ever have crossed to shop or visit family and friends as they have over the past six weeks. But the travellers have been almost exclusively women, children and the elderly. Men of military age cannot cross on their own without risking their lives. About half of Kosovo‘s 160,000-odd minority Serbs fled in the wake of the withdrawing military for fear of Albanian reprisal. But others are holding on in scattered enclaves, the biggest of which is north Mitrovica. A small group of Serbians gathered at the north end of the bridge on Sunday to try to watch events on the other side. Albanian chants were drowned out by Serbian nationalist music blaring from a cafe in the north named „Dolce Vita“. Bajram Rexhepi, an ethnic Albanian named mayor of Mitrovica by a self-styled Kosovo „provisional government“ formed by the Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas, said he had presented a plan to U.N. administrators to overcome the explosive impasse. „The U.N. has made promises to repatriate our people before but I really hope now that the situation is very tense, the international community will honour its obligations. If within a week there are no concrete results, then we feel we will have no more obligation (to cooperate with) the international community and we will use other methods to solve this problem, similar to today‘s,“ he said. Although NATO‘s KFOR peace force has been seizing all assault and heavy weapons it can find, nationalist paramilitaries almost certainly remain in north Mitrovica, as do ethnic Albanian guerrillas in the south, albeit all in civilian guise.