Kosovo’s border security will be tightened, Prime Minister Albin Kurti announced Thursday, accusing Serbia of kidnapping three Kosovo police officers.
Kurti also criticized international peacekeepers led by NATO for not giving an official statement about what happened to their three border police.
Kosovo’s prime minister has stated that the border agents were “kidnapped on Kosovo territory”, but Belgrade says they were detained on Serbian territory.
At a press conference, Kurti showed maps of where the incident took place, and said Serbia’s special police and army units had invaded Kosovo – a country with an ethnic Albanian majority and a Serb minority.
Following a meeting of Kosovo’s Security Council, the prime minister said border controls would increase and traffic from Serbia would be restricted, but added that these were not “commercial measures”, suggesting goods would continue to move freely across the border.
“What surprises us is the silence and tolerance of international bodies for Serbia’s actions. Serbia is constantly looking for pretexts to escalate and destabilize, and if there is no pretext, it is able to create one,” said Kurti.
In an interview with the AP last week, Kurti complained about the bias towards his country by the United States and the European Union (EU) and the tolerance of “Serbia’s authoritarian regime”.
Serbia put its troops on high alert at the border when a series of clashes recently took place in northern Kosovo, pitting the Serbian ethnic minority against Kosovo police and NATO-led peacekeepers.
A Kosovo official in Belgrade asked to visit the three officers. Kurti also contacted US authorities and asked them to put pressure on Serbia to release the Kosovo police.
The incident came a day after Kosovo police arrested in northern Mitrovica, an area inhabited mainly by the Serbian ethnic minority, an alleged organizer of Serbian protests – including a demonstration last month that left 30 NATO soldiers injured. . Three police officers were injured in the action.
Belgrade refuses to recognize Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence.
The latest violence near their common border has led to fears of a resurgence of the 1998-1999 conflict in Kosovo, which killed more than 10,000 people, most of them ethnic Albanians.
Source: DN
