Global Courant
Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti says Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has planned and ordered an attack in northern Kosovo “to destabilize the country” with the aim of starting a war.
About thirty heavily armed Serbs stormed the village of Banjska last Sunday, fought with Kosovo police in a gun battle and barricaded themselves in a Serbian Orthodox monastery. A Kosovo police officer and three Serb attackers were killed.
Hours later, police retook the monastery, where they found a large cache of weapons and ammunition. Six wounded members of the armed group were hospitalized in southern Serbia, while other attackers fled, Interior Minister Xhelal Svecla said.
Kurti told Al Jazeera that Serbian “paramilitary formations” were having equipment manufactured in Banjska, Serbia, that cannot be found on the open market.
While prosecutors and Kosovo police are still gathering information, “what we know is that we have seized five million euros ($5.3 million) worth of ammunition and weapons and that they were all manufactured in factories in Serbia,” he claimed. Kurti.
“Hand grenades, machine guns, everything we seized was produced in Serbia and cannot be found on the market. It is clear that the army of Serbia gave this to the paramilitary formations.”
Kurti said the ultimate goal of Sunday’s attack was for Serbia to stage a scenario and increase tensions.
“They wanted our police to enter the Banjska Monastery so that they could then share photos worldwide showing bullets hitting the walls of the monastery. That didn’t happen because our police are very strong and very professional and (the attackers) escaped.”
“They just wanted the start of a war to happen on Sunday, September 24. (It is common knowledge) how the war in Sarajevo started. On March 1, 1992, an Orthodox Serbian priest was injured during a wedding. We were very careful that something similar wouldn’t happen. But I think they wanted to repeat the scenarios of the beginning of the war (in the former republics of Yugoslavia).”
Kurti said Milan Radoicic, a leading Kosovo Serb politician who admitted on Friday that he planned the attack, “received logistics, military equipment and preparation from Belgrade, and also received political orders from President Vucic,” noting their close ties.
Radoicic – vice president of the ‘Serbian List’, a Belgrade-backed Serb political party in Kosovo – resigned from his post on Friday, calling the attack a “defense operation” against Kosovo authorities. But he has denied any involvement or support from the Serbian government.
‘Serbian security institutions’
Dan Ilazi, head of research at the Kosovo Center for Security Studies, told Al Jazeera that German and US officials also acknowledged that the equipment involved would be difficult to obtain without high-quality compounds.
“For example, one of the grenade launchers they used can only be purchased with the permission of the government in Serbia. Moreover, according to the Kosovo police, some of the individuals involved in this attack are part of the security establishment in Serbia,” Ilazi said, adding that Radoicic’s “connections with the Serbian government are very transparent.”
“The extent to which the Serbian president himself was aware of this attack is questionable… The responsibility for this attack, the evidence presented so far, seems to clearly demonstrate the participation of Serbian security institutions.
“My personal suspicion is that this may also have been initiated, supported or encouraged by Russia, which maintains a strong presence in Serbian security institutions,” Ilazi said.
Vucic and his office did not respond to Al Jazeera on the allegations, but he denied any government involvement in Sunday’s attack.
He has Thursday told Reuters news agency reports that Serbia will investigate the origin of the seized weapons, including a stockpile of assault rifles, anti-tank rocket launchers, hand grenades, landmines and drones.
“Why would this be beneficial for Belgrade? What would the idea be? To destroy the position we have built for a year? To destroy this in one day? … Serbia does not want war,” Vucic said.
He said suspects will be investigated and Radoicic “will be summoned by the prosecutor.”
Vucic in turn accused Kurti of wanting to expel Serbs from Kosovo.
Kurti’s refusal to create an association of Serbian municipalities, as part of the 2013 agreement between Belgrade and Pristina that would give Kosovo’s Serbs greater autonomy, has fueled tensions that have led to violence in Banjska, he said.
Vucic told Serbian television that he has years-old information that Serbs in Kosovo are preparing for resistance, noting the barricades put up by Serbian residents more than a year ago.
“The situation is boiling… Kurti did this, he united the Serbs,” Vucic said.
About 50,000 Serbs living in northern Kosovo do not recognize Pristina’s institutions and consider Belgrade their capital. There have been repeated clashes with Kosovo police and NATO-led peacekeepers known as KFOR. But Sunday’s violence was the worst in years.
‘They came to attack’
Kurti wondered what a heavily armed Serbian paramilitary group was doing in a 14th-century monastery in Banjska.
‘Who are they defending there? They came to attack… (Vucic) likes war, he wishes war and he wants war because he wants a Republika Srpska in Kosovo,” Kurti told Al Jazeera, referring to the Serb-led entity formed in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Dayton War. peace agreement from 1995, which formally ended the war, but is today the source of much unrest.
“(Republika Srpska was formed) because there was war and genocide in Bosnia. And now he wants a war and another genocide in Kosovo so he can get a Republika Srpska (in Kosovo), but he won’t do that,” Kurti added.
Meanwhile, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters that the United States is calling on Serbia to withdraw its troops from the border after the country discovered an “unprecedented” Serbian military buildup — “a highly destabilizing development ”.
In a rack On Friday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he had spoken to Vucic to de-escalate tensions. He “welcomed KFOR’s increased presence and the North Atlantic Council’s decision to authorize additional forces.”
To prevent such attacks from happening again, Kurti told Al Jazeera that two things are urgently needed: security for Kosovo and sanctions for Serbia.
“All the time they conduct military exercises on our border… I think this is very dangerous. They will think you are scared or weak. That is why the international community – the European community, NATO, the US and Britain – must show and prove to Belgrade that a return to the 1990s will not be allowed.”
