Christian Jennings: Barricades at Serb border raising tension in Balkans

Thirteen years ago in the freezing Balkans winter of 1999, the then Secretary-General of Nato, Baron George Robertson of Port Ellen, stood in a crowded auditorium in the Kosovo capital, Pristina, and addressed an audience of soldiers, diplomats and reporters.

Nato’s pilots, he said, did not launch airstrikes against Kosovo only to see their tactical successes “washed down the River Ibar”, which flows through the centre of the ethnically divided city of Mitrovica in northern Kosovo.

Thirteen years later, tensions and violence between Kosovo Serbs, Albanians, K-FOR peacekeepers and international organisations are starting to flare again north of the Ibar.

Nato’s operation against Libya ended formally on 31 October, and Nato’s current secretary-general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, has said that it “was a huge success, with 25,000 flights and 10,000 strikes.”.

As the Libya deployment ends, and Nato assesses its other deployments, one of them is starting to ring alarm bells: Kosovo. Last week Mr Rasmussen gave a word of warning: “K-FOR troops, headed by Germany, have helped turn one of Europe’s hotbeds into a largely peaceful place. And we will not allow for recent tensions to turn back time.”

Northern Kosovo, which borders Serbia, has been a thorn in the side of Nato ever since the military alliance deployed some 50,000 troops into the former southern Serbian province in June 1999, after a 78-day Nato bombing campaign forced the atrocity-prone soldiers and policemen of the regime of then-Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic out of Kosovo.

The population of northern Kosovo, almost 100 per cent Serbian, is virulently opposed to Kosovo’s independence declared in Pristina in 2008, has no truck with K-FOR, which now has some 5,500 troops remaining in Kosovo, nor with international organisations such as EULEX, the EU’s rule of law mission which deploys 1,044 international police officers.

For nearly four months furious Kosovo Serbs have effectively been trying to prevent both Nato and the EULEX mission in northern Kosovo from fulfilling their operational mandates, by erecting, and violently defending, a series of ad hoc roadblocks along border crossing points into Serbia proper.

From Kosovo’s independence in 2008 until mid-July this year, the two main northern border gates were controlled exclusively by EULEX. But on 25 July the Kosovo government deployed special police to these two checkpoints to enforce a recent trade ban on goods entering the country from Serbia.

In July, Serbs attacked customs posts along the northern border, burned one of them and then erected roadblocks of huge piles of tree trunks, vehicles and rocks.

This weekend, Northern Kosovo Serbs set up a new barricade on the road from the town of Zubin Potok, which leads to the Brnjak administrative crossing into Serbia. It was erected in retaliation after K-FOR troops pushed off the road trucks that had been blocking it until Friday.

The EU enlargement commissioner, Stefan Fule, recently urged Belgrade to improve its relations with Pristina in order to begin EU accession talks, noting that the area north of the Ibar river remained part of Kosovo.

Nato, keenly aware of the potential for more violence, is desperate to avoid further bloodshed in a corner of Europe which has, since 1992, seen conflicts in Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia and Kosovo, and the aerial bombing of Serbia.

“A prerequisite for improving rule of law is that roadblocks should be removed. Freedom of movement should be re-established. Those who put up the roadblocks should bring them down. Freedom of movement has the essential importance for improving the rule of law that will benefit ordinary people,” EULEX spokesperson Françoise Lambert told The Scotsman.

But the estimated 50,000 Serbs living north of the River Ibar, towards the Serbian border, are adamant that they will not budge, and it could just be a matter of time before more clashes erupt.