Belgrade calls on Kosovo Serbs to remove barricades

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic met with representatives of the Kosovo Serbs on Wednesday and asked them to dismantle the roadblocks they had put up, Belgrade’s commissioner for Kosovo, Petar Petkovic, said at a press conference.

Ethnic Serbs in the north of the breakaway province had put up roadblocks three weeks ago, in protest over the arrest of several Serbs and the deployment of heavily armed ethnic Albanian police in their communities.

The EU and the US gave written guarantees that “participants in the peaceful protests against [ethnic Albanian PM Albin] Kurti’s terror will not be arrested,” Goran Rakic, a local Serb political leader, told Serbian channel TV Pink. Moreover, NATO’s peacekeeping force KFOR also issued new guarantees that “Kosovo Security Forces” won’t be deployed to the Serb-majority counties in the north of the province, he said.