Defence Secretary Geoffrey Hoon has called for an international team to help restore war-torn areas such as Kosovo to normality.

He was speaking at the Munich conference on security policy which was examining the lessons of the Kosovo conflict.

He said the international community needed a collective crisis management team which would be ready to go into such areas once the fighting had finished.

His words came in the wake of renewed ethnic violence in Kosovo which has seen dozens of ethnic Albanians flee their homes in the Serb-dominated city of Mitrovica.

Mr Hoon emphasised winning the peace in Kosovo was as important for the international community as winning the actual conflict itself.

'Lessons to learn'

While the Ministry of Defence is drawing up the purely military lessons of the conflict, Mr Hoon stressed the same sort of collective action which saw Nato through its air campaign must now be applied to bringing some sort of normality to the Balkans.

The defence secretary noted civil and military organisations had a lot to learn from each other.

The current UN civil administration in Kosovo has been criticised by some experts for being thrown together at short notice from a variety of international agencies.

While there is a measure of self-congratulation at the conference for a conflict that is seen to to have gone well for NATO, two senior US senators roundly condemned Washington's partner for failing to come up with either promised funds or much-needed police units to help maintain order in Kosovo.

The recent violence there has shown the urgency of this task.