New violence erupts in ethnically volatile Kosovo

Members of Kosovo's Serbian ethnic minority set fire to a border crossing on Wednesday, prompting calls for international intervention. Kosovo seceded from Serbia in 2008, but neither its 60,000 Serbs nor Belgrade have recognised the move.

By Aurore Cloe DUPUIS (video)
News Wires (text)

REUTERS - A deadly flare-up of violence in Kosovo's Serbian-populated north has sent tensions with Belgrade soaring and prompted a stern intervention from the European Union.

Kosovo, which has a 90 percent ethnic Albanian majority, sent special police units on Monday to take control of northern border crossings and enforce a ban on imports from Serbia -- retaliation for its block on Kosovo's exports.

Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008 but Belgrade does not recognise the move and the 60,000 Serbs who live in northern Kosovo still consider Belgrade their capital.

One Kosovo police officer was shot in the head and died on Tuesday in a clash with local Serbs. On Wednesday, armed Serbs attacked and burned down the Jarinje border post and fired at members of NATO's KFOR peacekeeping force.

"It was confirmed that an act of arson was committed against that position... There have also been confirmed reports of shots fired at KFOR personnel in the vicinity," KFOR said in a statement.

It did not say whether anyone was injured in the attack or whether KFOR troops had returned fire, but said reinforcements had been sent to the border.

Kosovo's Prime Minister Hashim Thaci accused Belgrade of masterminding the violence. "We will not withdraw, there will be no return under any circumstances and at any price," he said.

He said Serbia was trying to carve out a piece of northern Kosovo, but this "will never happen".

Serbia's pro-European President Boris Tadic urged Kosovo Serbs to refrain from violence. "The hooligans who are sparking violence are not defending either the people or the Serb state," his office said in a statement.

"Restore calm immediately"

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said she spoke on Tuesday with Thaci and Tadic, urging them to restore calm immediately with a warning that violence would not be tolerated.

"I strongly condemn the violence that has taken place in northern Kosovo. These latest developments are unacceptable," she said in a statement.

"It is the responsibility of both Belgrade and Pristina to immediately defuse the tensions, and restore calm and security for everyone."

Belgrade wants to join the EU, but it must mend its ties with Kosovo to speed up its bid to join the bloc. Pristina and Belgrade have started EU-moderated talks aimed at improving trade, movement of people and issues like energy supplies, but negotiations have moved slowly.

Kosovo's police raids on Monday and Tuesday drew criticism from both the United States as the EU, which said the government should have consulted its Western backers.

A Serb eyewitness said on Wednesday that a group of masked men armed with wooden planks, axes and crowbars attacked and burned the Jarinje border post, which consisted of two-storey prefabricated buildings and a roofed passageway for cars.

"Later a bulldozer was brought to demolish the burned buildings," he said.

A cameraman and a sound engineer of Serbia's state-run Tanjug news agency were attacked by Serb hardline nationalists near Jarinje and seriously injured, the agency said.

In a separate incident earlier on Wednesday, an unidentified gunman fired shots at a NATO helicopter, a NATO spokesman said, but there were no injuries.

The U.N. Security Council accepted a Serbian request for an urgent meeting on tensions in Kosovo after Serbia sent a letter to the 15-nation council requesting an open meeting.

The call was supported by Serbia's ally Russia, which like Belgrade has refused to recognize Kosovo's February 2008 declaration of independence from Serbia.

The council opted for a compromise and scheduled closed-door consultations on Kosovo on Thursday, rather than a public meeting, the diplomats told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

Serbia lost its former province of Kosovo in 1999, when NATO waged a bombing campaign to stop Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic from killing ethnic Albanians and carrying out ethnic cleansing in a counter-insurgency war.

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Date created : 28/07/2011

Comments (2)

Serbia

by morgan (not verified) - 28/07/2011 - 15:01

I choosing to ignore the convoluted historical record of the post Ottoman Balkans, I feel it apt to point out, that for over twelve centuries, that region has been the bulwark against the incursion of Islam into the rest of Europe.

Yes, there may well be 'ethnic' disruption and division in present day Serbia, but we can thank the bleeding heart liberal governments since 1945, (I am not so naive as to lay the blame solely on left leaning regimes in stating that, all are and were to blame)for the open doors policies enacted over the last sixty odd years that has given access to OUR Europe to that horde the Balkan peoples so effectively kept out ever since the Islamic Ottoman Caliphate was thrust back across the Bospherus.

The average European, even though basically humanitarian in general outlook, has been expected to tolerate the renewed incursion of Islamic peoples into Europe, we were not given the chance to express any objection to it,in fact we were hyped into believing this immigration was beneficial.
Now, we are not only expected to pay the price of this mass movement of aliens into our territory, but will, soon enough, be forced onto the back foot, whilst their numbers increase exponentially, thereby subsuming our own. Unless we re-erect that bulwark so recently taken down.

It cannot be denied there is a very great potential for severe civil strife. Should legislative measures be put on the various statute books of the EU, I am afraid the Rubicon has been crossed and it will come down to a matter of bloodshed in order to re-establish OUR dominance over our own regions, and indigenous peoples destinies.

Occurrences in Kosovo, and the Balkans in general, are but a foretaste of what will be the lot of all European nations in the not too distant future.

I can see ONLY a civil breakdown as ethnic/religious pressures begin to head up the political arena, here in the UK it is likely to be far more severely attended to than even the Balkans, once the blood lust is up in the Briton, as is well known across the world, it will take much more than a new set of laws to cool matters down.

I have to say, that Norwegian killer heralds yet more of the kind of behaviour in the future, and although deprecated today, taking the pressures being placed before the public in most Euro regions by the Islamic immigrants and their radical leaderships, it is not beyond reason to visualise even worse atrocious activity in the years ahead.