Serbia lowers its army’s state of readiness. International news agencies report this on Thursday. The Serbian government raised its state of alert to the highest possible level on Monday amid ongoing tensions with neighboring Kosovo, and threatened armed conflict last week.
Relations between Serbia and Kosovo are consistently tense, but the threat of violence has risen sharply since mid-December. On the border with Kosovo, a former province of Serbia, roadblocks were set up by armed and masked Serbian nationalists. Kosovo then closed its main border crossing with Serbia. Some of the roadblocks are currently being removed by the Nationalists.
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The most immediate cause of the slowly cooling tension is the release of a former Kosovo Serb police officer who was arrested on 10 December on suspicion of terrorism. The man is said to have attacked a Kosovo police officer during an earlier protest. The former agent is under house arrest, but is no longer held in jail.
The protests broke out because the Kosovo government wanted to require all residents, including the more than 100,000 ethnic Serbs living in the country, to use Kosovan number plates. Part of the Kosovo Serb population saw this as a provocation and was supported by the Serbian government. The license plate plan was withdrawn last month.