NATO peacekeepers were on duty Wednesday in front of the town hall in northern Kosovo, where hundreds of Serb demonstrators gathered again after violent clashes that were widely condemned by Western powers. KFOR, a NATO-led multinational force in the former Belgrade area, after clashes in which 30 of their soldiers were injured.
Hundreds of demonstrators gathered again yesterday morning in front of the Zvikan municipality, in the immediate vicinity of which Kchetwehr forces deployed enhanced security forces.
According to an AFP correspondent, Kfour forces have stepped up security around City Hall, installing barbed wire and a metal barrier.
The demonstrators, who have so far remained calm, also unfurled a huge Serbian flag over 200 meters long between the city center and the city hall perimeter. They also displayed Serbian flags on a metal fence erected by KFOR.
For several days the situation in the region was tense, crises succeeded each other for years.
Many members of the Serb majority in the four northern cities do not recognize Pristina’s authority and are loyal to Belgrade.
And the Serbs boycotted the April municipal elections in those regions in defiance of Pristina, resulting in Albanian mayors being elected with a turnout of less than 3.5%.
Their inauguration last week by the Kosovo government triggered a new crisis.
Three armored vehicles of the Kosovo Police Special Forces stood in front of the municipality, the presence of which still causes outrage among many Serbs.
The demonstrators demanded the departure of the Albanian mayors, who were considered “illegitimate”, as well as the departure of the Kosovo police. On Monday, 30 soldiers from Kafur were injured in clashes with Serb demonstrators, during which Molotov cocktails and stones were thrown.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg denounced the “unacceptable” attacks on Tuesday in Oslo and announced the dispatch of reinforcements accordingly.
“We have decided to deploy an additional 700 troops from the Operational Reserve to the Western Balkans and put another battalion of the Reserve Forces on high alert,” he said.
“The violence is setting Kosovo and the entire region back and threatening Euro-Atlantic aspirations,” he said at a press conference.
Serbia, backed by its Russian and Chinese allies, has never recognized the independence declared by its former province in 2008 after a decade of bloody war between Serbian forces and separatist Albanian rebels.
The European Union, which has been mediating between the two former adversaries for a decade, called on both sides to “defuse tensions immediately and unconditionally.”
The United States blamed the crisis on Kosovo’s historic ally and defender of its independence, Kosovar Prime Minister Albin Kurti.
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said his decision to appoint mayors “led to a significant and unnecessary increase in tensions.”
Washington also removed Kosovo from the multinational military training program as a first punishment for Pristina.
The war ended in Kosovo, home to 1.8 million people, the vast majority of whom are Albanians, in 1999 with US-led NATO bombing.
The number of representatives of the Serbian minority is 120 thousand people, a third of them in northern Kosovo.
Belgrade is demanding the implementation of the 2013 agreement providing for a federation of ten Serb-majority municipalities.
But many Kosovar Albanians fear the formation of a Serbian-controlled parallel government.