The Serbian armed forces have been placed on the highest state of alert, Serbian Defense Minister Milos Vucevic said late Monday evening. He pointed to the increasing tensions between his country and neighboring Kosovo. According to him, it means that the army is now fully ready to use “armed force” if necessary.
Vucevic added that Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has also ordered the number of special forces to be scaled up from the current 1,500 to 5,000.
Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008. But the Serbian government in Belgrade refuses to recognize that independence. It encourages Kosovo’s 120,000 ethnic Serbs to defy the authority of the Kosovo administration in the city of Pristina. This is particularly catching on in the north of the country, where ethnic Serbs form a majority. Kosovo as a whole has approximately 1.8 million inhabitants, who are ethnically predominantly Albanian.
The Serbian army has been put on alert several times in recent years due to rising tensions with Kosovo. Unrest has grown again in recent weeks after hundreds of Serbian employees of Kosovo’s police and judiciary went on strike to protest a controversial decision to ban Serbs in Kosovo from using license plates issued in Belgrade on their cars. The policy was eventually scrapped, but the genie was already out of the bottle by then.
Pristina also wanted to organize local elections in mid-December in many municipalities where a majority of the inhabitants are ethnically Serb. However, those elections were postponed to April after the announcement of that plan also sparked widespread outrage and the main Serbian political party in Kosovo announced that it would boycott the elections.
Subsequently, a former police officer was arrested in Kosovo on 10 December for alleged involvement in attacks on ethnic Albanian police officers. That arrest sparked further anger among ethnic Serbs, who erected road barricades, paralyzing traffic around two border crossings.