NATO won’t let Serbia redeploy its security units in Kosovo, turning down a request made last month amid soaring tensions between the local Serb minority and Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian authorities, Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic says.
(Bloomberg) —
NATO won’t let Serbia redeploy its security units in Kosovo, turning down a request made last month amid soaring tensions between the local Serb minority and Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian authorities, Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic says.
“We all knew and expected such response” from NATO’s Kosovo Force, or KFOR, Vucic said in interview on Sunday to Belgrade-based Pink TV. The NATO mission, deployed in Kosovo since 1999 when bombing by the military alliance ended a war between Serbs and ethnic Albanians, has notified the government in Belgrade that “there is no need” for Serb troops to return there, Vucic said.
Serbia, whose army was forced out from Kosovo by NATO more than two decades ago, asked last month to redeploy up to 1,000 of its security personnel to help protect its ethnic kin amid recurring incidents and confrontation with the government of Premier Albin Kurti, Kosovo’s top ethnic Albanian politician.
Mediation by US and European Union officials helped defuse road blockades and protests by ethnic Serbs in December, although the situation remains fragile, the EU said last week.
Tensions rose again on Friday as a Serb teenager and a 21 year-old youth were injured in a drive-by shooting in southern Kosovo on the Christian Orthodox Christmas Eve, celebrated on Jan 6. Kosovo police have arrested an ethnic Albanian as a suspect in the attack.
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