Kosovo's prime minister rejects Serbia's request to deploy the Army as a "return to the past"

He assures that the Police are there to protect the Kosovar Serbs and rejects the use of nationalist symbols

MADRID, 18 Dic. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The Prime Minister of Kosovo, Albin Kurti, has criticized Serbia's request to NATO to request the deployment of the Serbian Army and Police in Kosovar territory, a decision that he has characterized as an attempt to "return to the past", and has guaranteed that the Kosovo Police is more than prepared to protect the population in the Kosovo Serb areas.

The Kosovo security forces now guard the border area and monitor the barricades that the Kosovo Serb population has erected in the north for nine days in protest against the authorities after the arrest of two agents from this community, former employees of the Kosovar Police, at the hands of those who were his companions.

Regarding the surveillance of the Kosovar Police, Kurti has assured that he is not aware of his police forces carrying, as a terror tactic and according to some reports, emblems of the former Kosovo Liberation Army (ELK), an infamous Kosovar Albanian armed group memory for the Serb population during the Kosovo war (1998-1999) but, if such a thing happens, "they will be investigated".

In any case, Kurti has insisted that the Special Police of Northern Kosovo is dedicated to "protecting citizens and arresting criminals", specifically "big shots of organized crime, in accordance with the instructions of the Prosecutor's Office".

"Since I have been in office, we have destroyed six drug laboratories and arrested almost a hundred criminals," Kurti assured in an interview with 'Der Spiegel'.

In his comments, Kurti considers that Kosovo has become, since the war in Ukraine, a kind of escape valve for Belgrade because "it is in a state of panic" because "the European Union and the United States are putting more and more pressure on their authorities" to choose between the West and Russia.

On the request of the Serbian president, Aleksandar Vucic, to the NATO mission, Kurti regretted that the leader seems "to want to return Serbia to the past" despite the fact that "the international legal status of Kosovo" as an independent republic "is already cleared up".

"The International Court of Justice ruled in favor of our Declaration of Independence and there is no higher court on the face of the Earth," Kurti stressed, referring to the opinion issued in 2010 by this court, which he did not see in the document of Kosovar independence any violation of international law.