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March 30, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 3
talk of disunity amongst the Western allies. The announced expulsions will now go some way to resolving concerns that Moscow could have been encouraged by a lack of Western resolve in the face of Russian aggression.
Moscow unsurprisingly reacted angrily to the con- certed action by the broad group of European and North American states.
“We consider this as an unfriendly step that is not consistent with the goals and interests of estab-
Kosovo reignites Balkan tensions with arrest and beating of Serb official
The situation erupted after Djuric defied a ban on visiting the divided north Kosovan town of Mitrovica. Djuric was forcibly removed from a meeting in Mitrovica by balaclava clad members of the ROSU special forces in a violent raid that resulted in at least one journalist also being injured. Tear gas was fired into a crowd that gathered outside the meeting hall.
"They wanted to humiliate me thinking they can humiliate the Serbian people ... [they] took selfies with me and pulled me down to my knees, with
a gun pushed against me," Djuric told a news conference.
Northern Mitrovica, which has a majority Serb population, was extremely tense after Djuric's detention, sirens were heard in the city, and citizens were upset by the brutality of the arrest. Serbs in northern Kosovo also set up a blockade by parking trucks to block a key road that leads to capital Pristina. However, on March 27, Kosovan media reported that the situation in Mitrovica was calm following the events of the previous day.
lishing the underlying reasons and searching for the perpetrators of the incident that occurred in the town of Salisbury on March 4. The provoca- tive gesture of the so-called solidarity of these countries with London, which blindly followed
the British authorities in the so-called “Skripal case” and which never got around to sort out the circumstances of the incident, is a continuation of the confrontational policy to escalate the situa- tion,” the March 26 statement reads. It added that Russia will respond to these actions, but did not elaborate further.
The incident has repercussions for Kosovo’s domestic politics since the Serb List, which represents Kosovo’s ethnic Serb minority, has said it will leave Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj's government.
While Haradinaj still commands a narrow majority, having 63 MPs in the 120-seat parliament, his government risks a loss of legitimacy among the ethnic-Serb minority with their interests no longer represented by Serb List ministers, and faces a struggle to put together the two-thirds majority needed to pass some critical pieces of legislation.
There are also wider implications for Kosovo’s relations with Serbia, from which it unilaterally declared independence in 2008. Belgrade
and Pristina have been seeking to normalise relations, which is a precondition for their progress towards EU integration, but progress has been slow and unsteady, and is now seriously jeopardised.
Highlighting the seriousness of the situation, European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini has travelled to Belgrade to meet Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic in a bid to prevent a full-blown crisis from erupting.
Pristina’s failure to progress towards creating the planned Community of Serb Municipalities,