BELGRADE (Reuters) – Serbia has withdrawn some of its troops stationed near the border with Kosovo, after increasing them following a shooting in the north of the country that left four people dead, the country’s chief said on Monday. General Staff of the Serbian Armed Forces Milan Mojsilovic.
Tensions between Belgrade and Pristina have skyrocketed since September 24, when Kosovo police fought off around 30 armed Serb men near the village of Banjska in northern Kosovo who had barricaded themselves in a Serbian Orthodox monastery. Three attackers and a police officer were killed.
These clashes have revived international concerns about the stability of Kosovo, which has a majority Albanian population and declared its independence from Serbia in 2008, following a guerrilla war and a bombing campaign from NATO in 1999 who had chased out Serbian security forces.
“Serbia had deployed 8,350 troops near the border with Kosovo and has reduced them to 4,500 currently,” Milan Mojsilovic said.
He added that the army’s presence in the so-called land security zone, a 5 kilometer wide strip inside Serbia along the border with Kosovo, had “returned to normal”.
Serbia has not “officially raised the level of preparation” of its army of 22,500 men, added Milan Mojsilovic.
Kosovo on Saturday asked Serbia to withdraw its troops along the border, while the United States said on Friday it was monitoring the Serbian military deployment, calling it destabilizing.
Pristina has accused Serbia of providing financial and logistical support to the group that fought Kosovo police, which Belgrade has denied.
The approximately 50,000 Serbs who live in northern Kosovo do not recognize the institutions of Pristina and consider Belgrade their capital.
NATO, which still has 4,500 soldiers in Kosovo, declared on Friday that it had “authorized additional forces to deal with the current situation”.
(Reporting Ivana Sekularac and Aleksandar Vasovic, French version Stéphanie Hamel, editing by Kate Entringer)
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