Belgrade claims that Prime Minister Albin Kurti’s most recent crackdown poses an open-war threat.
On Wednesday, after the breakaway province closed the border to all Serbian vehicles and detained several prominent Serbs, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic accused the ethnic Albanian government in Pristina of attempting to start a war.
After three Kosovo police officers were taken into custody by Serbian security forces on Tuesday morning, Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti issued an order to close the border. According to him, the blockade will continue until the three men are freed.
Kurti asserted that Serbia engaged in “open acts of international aggression” when it “abducted” the group inside Kosovo. They were on the other side of the line of control, according to Vucic, who also claimed to have evidence.
They were detained 1.8 kilometers from the administrative line, Vucic said on Wednesday night to the state broadcaster RTS. “That’s quite a distance from the spot where they parked their car. They were 300 meters from the line, according to Kurti. He continued, referring to the NATO peacekeeping mission, “What were they doing 300 meters from the line, without telling KFOR?
According to Vucic, the blockade is an effort to starve the Serbs in Kosovo’s north and drive them from their homes.
Kurti “wants to start a war at all costs,” the president of Serbia continued. “The Rubicon has been crossed, and returning to normal will be challenging.”
Vucic also took issue with the arrests on Tuesday of two prominent Serbs, who the ethnic Albanian government had charged with planning the previous month’s “attack” on NATO peacekeepers. He asserted that the EU and NATO assured him that no arrests would be made, but did nothing to prevent Kurti.
Kurti received a letter from EU foreign policy commissioner Josep Borrell on Wednesday asking him to “de-escalate” the situation. Borrell wrote that Pristina needed to “take the opinions of EULEX and KFOR fully into account and treat them as partners, which also means coordinating with them in advance,” which was not the case on Tuesday. This was what amounted to unusually strong language from Brussels. The civilian mission of the European Union tasked with overseeing Kosovo is called EULEX.
Borrell warned: “Failure to de-escalate will have negative consequences, as 27 EU Member States have made very clear.”
The meeting between Kurti and the Albanian prime minister Edi Rama had already been postponed, with Rama citing the “hourly deterioration of Kosovo’s relations with the entire Euro-Atlantic community” as the reason.
However, Kurti’s purge has affected people other than just Serbs. The head of the Association of Journalists of Kosovo referred to the government’s decision to revoke the license of privately owned TV station “Klan Kosova” as “an unprecedented act aimed against media freedoms.”
Local media reported on Wednesday that Ramush Haradinaj, the head of the AAK opposition party and a former KLA commander, had said that Kurti was “threaten[ing] Kosovo’s alliance with the US and NATO” and had called for a vote of no-confidence in the prime minister.
In 1999, after a 78-day bombing campaign against Serbia, NATO sent troops into Kosovo. The independence declaration made by Pristina in 2008 was rejected by Belgrade.
