Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic have actually both gotten in touch with NATO’s Kosovo Force (KFOR) to take control of policing tasks in the Serb-booming north areas of Kosovo, after a dangerous shootout in between Kosovo cops and armed Serbs.

“KFOR must take control of the north of Kosovo,” Rama claimed at an interview in Tirana on Thursday. “It is a proposal that I have made before,” he proceeded, including that “even some voices have asked for it from the Serbian side.”

Rama declared that ought to KFOR fall short to step in currently, the Serb minority in north Kosovo will ultimately introduce a strike on Kosovo cops demanding a much bigger intervention by the NATO goal in future. 

Kosovo has actually been inhabited by about 5,000 NATO soldiers because 1999, when the Western bloc introduced an air battle versus Serbia in behalf of ethnic Albanian terrorists, that declare sovereignty over the historical Serbian district. Kosovo proclaimed freedom in 2008, a step that Serbia, in addition to Russia and around fifty percent of all UN states, do not acknowledge.

In Belgrade, Vucic provided a comparable get in touch with Tuesday after a conference with agents from the Quint team, which consists of the United States, the UK, France, Germany, and Italy. “I restated Serbia’s sights on the current occasions in Kosovo and Metohija and asked for that KFOR deal with all safety problems in the north of Kosovo as opposed to Kurti’s cops,” he wrote on Instagram, referring to Kosovo’s prime minister, Albin Kurti.

Both statements came after one of Kurti’s policemen and three Serbs were shot dead in the village of Banjska on Sunday. Vucic claims that a group of Serbs were setting up a barricade to fend off raids by Kurti’s forces when these forces provoked a shootout. Kurti claims that a group of 30 Serb gunmen fired first, killing the police officer before occupying a monastery for several hours and then retreating on foot.

Kurti called the gunmen “Serbian state-backed troops,” while Vucic denied any connection between the group and Belgrade. The Serbian leader stated that “Kurti is the only one to blame” for the fatal altercation, adding that “his only desire is to drag us into a war with NATO.”

Despite the long-standing animosity between Serbia and NATO, Vucic views KFOR as less threatening to Kosovo’s Serb minority than Kurti’s forces. Had KFOR encountered the Serb barricades on Sunday instead of Kosovo police, he argued on Sunday, “there would have been much fewer victims.” 

However, KFOR “gave Kurti a ‘carte blanche’, as they say, to deal with the terrorists and kill as many people as possible,” Vucic included.