{"id":25570,"date":"2018-12-14T14:23:54","date_gmt":"2018-12-14T14:23:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=25570"},"modified":"2018-12-14T14:23:54","modified_gmt":"2018-12-14T14:23:54","slug":"kosovo-approves-new-army-despite-serbia-opposition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=25570","title":{"rendered":"Kosovo approves new army despite Serbia opposition"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Kosovo’s parliament overwhelmingly approved the formation of an army on Friday, a move that has angered Serbia who says it would threaten peace<\/a> in the war-scarred region.<\/p>\n

All 107 politicians present in the 120-seat parliament voted in favour of passing three draft laws to turn the existing 4,000-strong Kosovo<\/a> Security Force into a regular, lightly armed army.<\/p>\n

Ethnic Serb politicians boycotted the vote.<\/p>\n

Speaker Kadri Veseli hailed the vote as the start of a new epoch for Kosovo.<\/p>\n

“Kosovo’s parliament has adopted the law on the Kosovo Security Force! Congratulations!” the speaker said.<\/p>\n

The vote will delight many Kosovo Albanians, who are ready to celebrate the army as a new pillar of their independence, which was declared in 2008.<\/p>\n

“Now we can say that we are a state, there is no a state without an army,” Skender Arifi, a 37-year-old hairdresser in Pristina, told AFP news agency ahead of the vote.<\/p>\n

Hamze Mehmeti, a 67-year-old pensioner, added, “It is a great joy for the citizens of Kosovo.”<\/p>\n

Serbia<\/a>, which does not recognise Kosovo’s independence, fears the move’s main purpose is to ethnically cleanse Kosovo’s Serbian-dominated north, something strongly denied by Pristina.<\/p>\n

In a sign of defiance, Serbs in the north displayed Serbian flags on streets and balconies while NATO-led peacekeepers deployed on a bridge in the ethnically-divided northern town of Mitrovica.<\/p>\n

\n
\n\n\n\n\n
<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Serb communities in Kosovo opposed the plan to form an army [Darko Vojinovic\/ AP]<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Those Serb communities are loyal to Belgrade and also broadly against the army plan.<\/p>\n

“We do not want a Kosovo army here,” said Marko Djusic, a Serb resident of Dren village near the border.<\/p>\n

“I hope that even if Albanians make some moves [against] us, the state of Serbia will do something to protect us,” he added.<\/p>\n

NATO, which has four members that do not recognise Kosovo, had warned the army move was “ill-timed” amid already strained ties between Pristina and Belgrade.<\/p>\n

But the US – Kosovo’s pre-eminent ally – voiced public support, as did the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n

Many Kosovo roads were adorned with American flags on Thursday in a sign of gratitude.<\/p>\n

Serbian opposition<\/h2>\n

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic is set to visit Serbian troops on the border with Kosovo in an apparent saber-rattling move.<\/p>\n

Ana Brnabic, Serbia’s prime minister, said on Friday that the formation of Kosovo’s army goes against at stability in the Balkans.<\/p>\n

“Serbia will try to continue on the path of peace and stability, the road of prosperity,” Brnabic said, adding that “we should sit down and talk about building a better future”.<\/p>\n

“Today is not the day that contributes to cooperation and stability in the region.”<\/p>\n

Serbian officials said they will seek an urgent session of the UN Security Council over the decision.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Kosovo and Serbia have struggled to make progress in faltering EU-led talks to normalise their ties – a condition for either to eventually join the bloc.<\/p>\n

Their relationship took a serious plunge last month after Kosovo slapped a 100-percent tariff on Serbian goods in revenge for Belgrade’s attempts to undermine it on the world stage.<\/p>\n

Serbia has blocked Kosovo from various international organisations, including the UN, and also lobbied foreign governments to revoke their recognition of its statehood.<\/p>\n

\n
\n\n\n\n\n
<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\nMany Kosovo roads were adorned with American flags\u00a0<\/span>[Armend Nimani\/ AFP]<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Philip S Kosnett, US Ambassador in Pristina, met on Thursday with the KSF commander “to underscore the US<\/a> Government’s commitment to the KSF’s evolution as a defensive force serving all of Kosovo’s communities and reflective of the country’s multi-ethnic character”.<\/p>\n

“Let’s remember that a country’s security depends on the quality of its security relationships – and peaceful, mutually beneficial relations with its neighbors – as much as on the strength and professionalism of its armed forces,” he tweeted Friday.<\/p>\n

The new army will preserve its former name: the Kosovo Security Force. But now, it will have a new mandate. In about a decade the army will have 5,000 troops and 3,000 reservists, essentially operating as a security force handling crisis response and civil protection operations.<\/p>\n

Kosovo’s 1998-1999 war ended with a 78-day NATO air campaign in June 1999 that stopped a Serbian crackdown against ethnic Albanian separatists.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kosovo’s parliament overwhelmingly approved the formation of an army on Friday, a move that has angered Serbia who says it would threaten peace in the war-scarred region. All 107 politicians present in the 120-seat parliament voted in favour of passing three draft laws to turn the existing 4,000-strong Kosovo Security Force into a regular, lightly…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":25571,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25570\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/25571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}