Serbian police and NATO troops reinforced checkpoints on both sides of the Kosovo border on Thursday to try to stop further ethnic violence after a frontier post was burned down and a policeman killed. “We will prevent extremists from Serbia going to Kosovo, we will aid international peackepeers there in any way we can,” Serbian police chief Milorad Veljovic told Reuters.
The border was quiet on Thursday after two days of violence in Kosovo’s Serbian-populated north in which one ethnic Albanian policeman died and a border crossing was set on fire by hardline Serbian nationalists. The troubles in Kosovo, which has a 90 percent ethnic Albanian majority, started after Pristina sent special police units on Monday to take control of northern border crossings and enforce a ban on imports from Serbia — in retaliation for its block on Kosovo’s exports. Kosovo declared independence in 2008 in a move not recognised by Serbia and the 60,000 Serbs who live in northern Kosovo still consider Belgrade their capital.
Serbs cherish Kosovo as the historic heartland of their Orthodox Christianity and most are bitterly opposed to its independence. On Thursday, the situation at the burned Jarinje border crossing was calm with U.S. troops from the NATO peacekeeping contingent in Kosovo in control, a Reuters correspondent said. Peacekeepers, who still patrol Kosovo more than a decade after a 1998-1999 war between ethnic Albanians fighting for independence and Serb security forces, were also in control of another key border checkpoint, a NATO spokesman said. SITUATION “NOT GOOD”: Jean-Francois Fitou, France’s ambassador in Pristina, said that “from the security point of view, the situation is not out of control but it is not good”. “In terms of diplomacy, for the next few days the most important thing is to call for calm and restraint and when we reach that, it is time to start peaceful dialogue between Serbia and Kosovo,” Fitou told Reuters.
