Europe

Serbia puts its army on “combat alert” and deploys troops to the border with Kosovo

Armed police officers walk past the warehouses where weapons were handed over to police in the first ten days of the arms amnesty after mass shootings in the country, near Smederevo, Serbia, on May 14, 2023.

The President of Serbia, Alexander Vucichas put the country’s army on “combat alert” and has ordered several of its units to approach the border with Kosovo this Friday, after the clashes between the police and several demonstrators in the Serb-majority Kosovar town of Zvecan.

“An urgent movement (of troops) to the Kosovo border has been ordered,” Defense Minister Milos Vucevic said in a live television broadcast collected by the news agency Reuters. “It is clear that terror against the Serb community in Kosovo is taking place,” she said.

Police and protesters clashed in the Kosovo town of Zvecan after a crowd gathered outside the City Hall to try to prevent a mayor from newly elected ethnic Albanian walk into his office. Police reportedly fired tear gas to disperse protesters during the protests, in which four people were injured, according to the news agency. Tanjug. In addition, several mission vehicles from NATO peacekeeping in Kosovo they reached the center of Zvecan.

[Comienza el juicio a Thaçi, líder de la independencia de Kosovo acusado por crímenes de guerra]

Armed police officers walk past the warehouses where weapons were handed over to police in the first ten days of the arms amnesty after mass shootings in the country, near Smederevo, Serbia, on May 14, 2023.

Reuters

an election boycott

On April 23, about 50,000 Serbs living in four municipalities in northern Kosovo, including Zvecan, rejected election results in protest for not having met their demands for more autonomy. This represents a new setback for the peace agreement that began to materialize in March between Kosovo and Serbian.

Voter turnout was 3.47% and local Serbs warned that they would not work with the new mayors of the four municipalities, all from ethnic Albanian parties. Previously, the police of the Kosovar capital from Pristina issued a statement saying that they were helping newly elected mayors to get into municipal offices in the four northern municipalities.

Serbs in the northern region of Kosovo do not accept Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence from Serbian, almost a decade after the end of a war there, and they still see Belgrade as their capital. ethnic albanians make up more than 90% of the population of Kosovoand Serbs only the majority in the northern region.

The Western-backed plan agreed orally by the governments of Kosovo and Serbian in March it aimed to defuse tensions by granting more autonomy to local Serbs, with the Pristina government retaining final authority.

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