PRISTINA — Kosovo has closed two of its four border crossings with Serbia following protests on the Serbian side that have blocked cross-border traffic, the interior minister said on Saturday.
The Kosovo government shut the border at Brnjak and the larger Merdare crossing overnight from Friday to Saturday.
Both are in the troubled north of Kosovo, where ethnic Serbs are the majority in several districts, outnumbering the ethnic Albanians who overwhelmingly populate the rest of the Balkan country.
Justifying the move, Kosovar Interior Minister Xhelal Svecla said on Facebook “masked extremists” on the Serbian side of the border were “selectively stopping… citizens who want to transit through Serbia” to third countries.
“And all this in plain sight of the Serbian authorities,” he complained.
On Friday, dozens of demonstrators in Serbia blockaded the two border crossings to prevent traffic entering Serbia from Kosovo.
They said they were protesting against the closure of parallel administrations that ethnic Serbs in northern Kosovo had set up to rival the official ones.
The Serbian government in Belgrade — which has never recognized the independence of Kosovo, its former southern province — finances a parallel health, education and social security system in Kosovo for the latter’s ethnic Serb population.
The Serbian demonstrators told the media their border blockade would last until Kosovo police were “withdrawn from the north of Kosovo and the usurped institutions are returned to the Serbs.”
They also demanded that the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo (KFOR) “take over control in the north of Kosovo.”
The border blockade began a few days after police in northern Kosovo raided and then closed five administrative offices linked to the Belgrade government.
On Saturday, Kosovo’s foreign ministry urged people to avoid trying to transit through Serbia because of the protests on the Serbian side.
Foreign Minister Donika Gervalla told reporters on Friday the Serbian protests were “yet more proof” that Belgrade was trying to provoke and destabilize its southern neighbor.
Animosity has persisted between Serbia and Kosovo since a war in the 1990s between Serbian armed forces and Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian separatists.
Kosovo declared independence in 2008. But Serbia has refused to recognize the move and has encouraged ethnic Serbs living in Kosovo to remain loyal to Belgrade.
Tensions ratcheted up a notch earlier this year, when Kosovo made the euro the only legal currency, effectively outlawing the use of the Serbian dinar.
AN-AFP