The international community reacted on Tuesday to the outbreak of violence in Kosovo, the day after 30 NATO soldiers and 52 demonstrators were injured, in clashes over disagreements over the results of local elections. The Atlantic Organization announced that it would deploy more troops to Kosovo, following the latest escalation of tension. “The deployment of additional NATO forces in Kosovo is a prudent step to ensure that KFOR [NATO’s peacekeeping mission] has the capabilities it needs to maintain security in line with the mandate it has given us the United Nations Security Council,†Admiral Stuart B. Munsch said in a statement.
Also the high representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs, Josep Borrell, announced that he intended to organize an urgent high-level meeting to recover the dialogue in the former Serbian province. Borrell explained that his Deputy Secretary General for Defense Charles Fries is in Kosovo with the EU Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo to inform him “personally of the situation on the ground”.
Meanwhile, riots continue in Kosovo’s Serb-majority municipalities. Tensions flared over the weekend, when Kosovo Serb protesters tried to prevent newly elected mayors from entering municipal buildings to take office. The Serbian protesters alleged that the mayors were not legitimate because in the April 23 municipal elections, Serbian candidates did not stand in the elections as a form of protest, and the candidates who were victorious, ethnic Albanians, they were supported by around 1,500 voters out of the 45,000 registered, that is to say, with less than 3.5% of the electoral roll.
Speaking for La Vanguardia, Visar Ymeri, director of the Musine Kokalari Institute in Pristina, former vice-president of the Social Democratic Party of Kosovo and former president of Vetëvendosje! – the current ruling party – declares that “Kosovo should not have taken these measures” because “accepting that the municipalities are led by mayors who do not have the support of the population would be a mistake”. However, he also believes that “Serbia should stop interfering in the politics of Kosovo”.
Since the agreements signed between Pristina and Belgrade in 2013, the Serbian community in Kosovo insists on creating the Association of Serbian Municipalities, an organization that would grant Belgrade the ability to administer economic, educational and health issues of the Kosovo Serb population. But Kosovo fears that, with this institution, the north of the country will become an autonomous satellite region of Serbia. “The politicians of Kosovo see this association as a tool of Serbia to control Kosovo”, points out Ymeri. “This is reinforced by the fact that Serbia does not recognize Kosovo and has put all its efforts into one goal, that there be international sanctions against Kosovo”, he adds.
Jovana Radosavljevic, activist of New Social Initiative, an organization dedicated to promoting dialogue and the normalization of relations within the territory of Kosovo, assures that the escalation of tensions “is a consequence of the events prior” to Monday: “The decisions of the Government of Pristina have caused one crisis after another,” says Radosavljevic about the so-called license plate crisis, which erupted when Prime Minister Albin Kurti passed a law to remove Serbian license plates from the country. According to this activist member of the Serbian community, there is a deep feeling of “frustration with the institutions of Kosovo, but also with the Serbian leaders”.
The Serbs, who are the majority in northern Kosovo, have never come to terms with the 2008 declaration of independence and for now continue to consider Belgrade their capital, more than two decades after the Kosovar Albanian uprising against the repressive government serbian
In the wake of the Ukraine war, the EU rushed to facilitate negotiations between Pristina and Belgrade, fearing Russian influence in the region, but achieved nothing more than a verbal agreement between the parties with no concrete timelines for moving forward. which did not offer solutions for the Serbian minority in Kosovo.
