World News | Three Kosovo police officers injured in arrest of alleged Serb protest organizer

Pristina (Kosovo), June 14 (AP) – Three Kosovo police officers were wounded by an alleged organizer of a Serb protest in the north of the country, Kosovo’s interior minister said Tuesday, including Including 30 NATO-led peacekeepers were injured.

Interior Minister Xhelal Svecla said a head of Civil Defense, a group operating in the Serb-majority northern part of Kosovo, was arrested in the city of Mitrovica.

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Kosovo’s government accused the group of criminal activity that “terrorized our citizens for many years”.

The minister identified the person arrested as Milun Milenkovic-Llune. After his detention, a small group of Serbs gathered in Mitrovica and threw objects at police, according to Kosovar media reports.

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Petar Petkovic, head of the Serbian government’s Kosovo and Metohija office, condemned the arrest of “an outstanding fighter for Serbia’s national interests and the rights of Serbs” while he was “surrounded by eight Kosovo police armored vehicles”.

In May, Serbs clashed with Kosovo police and later with members of the Kosovo International Peacekeeping Force in the northern Kosovo city of Zvejan. Thirty soldiers and more than 50 Serbs were wounded.

NATO has maintained a peacekeeping force in Kosovo since the end of the war between Serbia and Kosovo separatists in 1999, sending another 700 troops after the incident in May.

The clashes stemmed from earlier confrontations after an ethnic Albanian candidate declared the winner of local elections in northern Kosovo entered a municipal building to take office and was stopped by Serbs. Serbs overwhelmingly boycotted the vote.

Elections in April were held in four Serb-dominated cities after local Serb representatives left office last year. They resigned in protest of the Kosovo authorities’ refusal to allow inter-community associations to coordinate education, health care, land planning and economic development at the local level.

Serbia and Kosovo agreed in 2013 to plans to create such a Serb association. But Kosovo’s Constitutional Court declared the proposal unconstitutional because it did not include other ethnic groups and because the association would likely need to use executive powers to enforce the law.

As Kosovo’s Serbs demand autonomy, Kosovar Albanians fear the association could become a small self-governing state like Bosnia’s Republika Srpska. The unrest has raised fears of a renewed bloody conflict over the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

The European Union has asked Kosovo to withdraw special police units from northern Kosovo, where the Balkan country’s majority Serb minority lives, and to hold new municipal elections there.

Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti sent a letter to EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell on Tuesday, saying his government would reduce the number of special police officers once the alleged Serb-led criminal group leaves the country and Call new elections or be sued in four cities.

Serbia and its former province Kosovo have been at odds for decades, with Belgrade refusing to recognize Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence. Violence near their shared border has stoked fears of a renewed 1998-99 war in Kosovo that claimed more than 10,000 lives and led to a peacekeeping mission by KFOR.

Kosovo and Serbia reached an agreement this year to normalize relations, facilitated by the European Union. An 11-point implementation plan remains the focus of talks mediated by Washington and Brussels envoys.

Kurti said he was ready to meet with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic this week to continue the dialogue.

In a statement on Tuesday, NATO said it “continues to support the EU-facilitated dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina as the only way to achieve lasting peace and security in Kosovo and stability in the entire region”.

The prime minister of Albania, which shares a border with Kosovo and is part of NATO, said a joint cabinet meeting of the two countries’ cabinets scheduled for Wednesday in Kosovo had been called off because of ongoing tensions there. Prime Minister Edi Rama said Kurti did not agree to hold a smaller meeting of foreign ministers and defense ministers.

Rama said he was concerned that Kosovo was “entering a course of intense conflict with the Euro-Atlantic community” and said the country could face “restrictive measures” if the government did not heed recommendations to ease tensions. (Associated Press)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the body of content may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)