Kosovo votes to create an army, defying Serbia and NATO

PRISTINA, Kosovo — Kosovo’s Parliament overwhelmingly approved legislation on Friday to form an army, prompting criticism from NATO and European Union officials and angering neighboring Serbia, which said it was prepared to use its own army to protect ethnic Serbs in Kosovo.

All 107 lawmakers present in Kosovo’s 120-seat Parliament, which is dominated by ethnic Albanian parties, voted to back the government’s plan to transform the 3,000-strong, lightly armed Kosovo Security Force into an army that would grow to 5,000 active troops and 3,000 reservists in the next decade.

Kosovo Serb lawmakers did not attend the session.

Aleksandar Vucic, Serbia’s president, said in the town of Trstenik in central Serbia on the eve of the vote, “Not a single act in the international law gives them the right to form an army.”

“Everything that Pristina does — and evidently it does it all with support of the U.S. and Britain — is against the law,” Vucic added.

Serbia’s foreign minister, Ivica Dacic, said that Belgrade would request an emergency United Nations Security Council session over what he said was “the grossest violation” of the resolution governing such a formation.

“It is the most direct threat to peace and stability in the region,” Dacic said, according to Serbia’s state-run Tanjug news agency.

Serbia’s prime minister, Ana Brnabic, said the formation of a Kosovo army ran counter to efforts at stability in the volatile Balkans, according to the Associated Press. She added that she hoped Belgrade would not have to use any of its 28,000 troops to protect the Serbian minority in Kosovo, although “this is currently one of the options on the table.”

Officials in Kosovo had sought to defuse anger ahead of the vote. “Our army comes in peace,” Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj said in an interview on Thursday. He accused officials in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, of spreading false allegations through the government-controlled news media that a Kosovo army would be a threat to Serbs and its neighbors.

“The narrative that Kosovo would use its military forces against Kosovo Serbs and its neighbors is an unfounded narrative,” Haradinaj said. “It’s a modern, multiethnic army that has grown up together with NATO and KFOR, their soldiers and officers in our country.”

KFOR is the name of the NATO peacekeeping mission in Kosovo. There are about 5,000 such troops in Kosovo, including some 600 U.S. soldiers.

According to Kosovo’s Constitution, drafted in 1999, NATO is the only armed force allowed to operate in the country.