Serbia: Serbia mulls sending troops to Kosovo as tensions escalate
Serbia’s prime minister said Friday the country’s leadership was close to demanding the deployment of their security troops to Kosovo, claiming lives of minority Serbs there were being threatened. The return of Belgrade’s troops to the former Serbian province could dramatically increase tensions in the Balkans.
Serbian officials claim a U.N. resolution that formally ended the country’s bloody crackdown against majority Kosovo Albanian separatists in 1999 allows for some 1,000 Serb troops to return to Kosovo. NATO bombed Serbia to end the war and push its troops out of Kosovo, which declared independence in 2008.
The NATO-led peacekeepers who have been working in Kosovo since the war would have to give a green light for Serb troops to go there, something that’s highly unlikely because it would de-facto mean handing over security of Kosovo’s Serb-populated northern regions to Serbian forces.
Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic accused the force of some 4,000 peacekeepers, known as KFOR, of failing to protect Serbs from alleged harassment by Kosovo’s security troops, and said 1,000 Serb officers should return to Kosovo.
She accused Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti of bringing the region “to the edge” of another war.
“We are close to requesting the return of our forces to Kosovo under Resolution 1244, because KFOR is not doing its job.”