Serb fury at Kosovo’s plan to form full army

KOSOVO yesterday voted to form a fully-fledged army, angering neighbouring Serbia and ratcheting up tensions along one of the Balkans’ most fragile fault lines.

Kosovo’s parliament approved converting the country’s lightly armed security force, into a 5,000-strong standing army backed by 3,000 reservists.

Serbia is deeply opposed to the move, saying that it threatens peace in the region, and last week warned that it might take military action in response.

That is seen as unlikely because it would drag Serbia into a confrontation with 4,600 Nato-led peacekeepers in Kosovo, including 600 US troops.

But the vote deepened animosity between the two countries, 20 years after Kosovo’s Albanians rose up against Belgrade and a decade after Kosovo’s declaration of independence.

Serbia fears that the beefed-up military force could be used by Kosovo to reassert its control over the northern part of the country, inhabited by ethnic Serbs, who form five to eight per cent of Kosovo’s population. Belgrade also objects because it sees the formation of an army as a symbol of statehood by a nation it does not recognise.

“It’s been a long time coming but it’s very controversial. This is a huge move on the part of Kosovo, and Serbia has long resisted it,” James Ker-lindsay, a Balkans expert from the London School of Economics, told The Daily Telegraph.

Relations are so fraught between Kosovo and Serbia that last week Ana Brnabic, Serbia’s prime minister, warned of a potential military intervention, saying it was “currently one of the options on the table”.

That was largely meant for domestic consumption in order to assuage Serb nationalists, analysts said.

“Serbia would be nuts to act militarily. The results would be utterly catastrophic,” said Prof Ker-lindsay.

“But I’m more worried about relations between the two countries than I have been for a long time.”

Reacting to the vote, Jens Stoltenberg, Nato’s secretary-general, said the move was “ill-timed”.