Serbian soldiers have started to remove the roadblocks at the border with Kosovo. Serbian broadcaster RTS reports that traffic near the city of Merdare is back to normal. Kosovo actually wanted to oblige all its own citizens, including many Serbs, to use a Kosovar license plate from Monday. That decision was met with so much Serbian resistance that Kosovar Prime Minister Albin Kurti decided to postpone that obligation for a month at the request of the United States.
Kurti stipulated that the roadblocks at the border be lifted, where the local Serb population blocked the road with trucks and heavy machinery. Kurti hopes in this way to calm the rising tensions in the border region.
According to RTS, the roads were reopened almost everywhere on Monday morning. However, Serbian citizens would already be asked on Monday to fill in an extra document if they want to go to Kosovo. It is not clear whether this measure will be lifted once the blockades have been removed. Kosovars who want to travel to Serbia the other way around already need such a document.
After a brief war ended in 1999 by NATO bombing, Kosovo, which is largely ethnic Albanian inhabited, officially seceded from Serbia in 2008. That country does not recognize that independence, because of Kosovo’s important role in Serbian history and the presence of a Serb population in the north. Many countries, including China, Russia and Spain, do not recognize Kosovo’s independence either.