ZVECAN, Kosovo -- NATO-led KFOR troops on May 29 moved to disperse Serbian demonstrators who had ignored warnings to move away from the municipal headquarters in Zvecan as violent clashes broke out in the standoff between local ethnic Serbs and ethnic Albanian authorities, leading to dozens of injuries among troops and protesters.
"You are causing unrest. You are putting yourself and your community at risk. Leave the area and go home -- otherwise KFOR will be forced to intervene," an audio warning from the KFOR contingent blared out to protesters before plumes of smoke engulfed the area.
RFE/RL journalists on the scene reported that many in the crowd sat down as KFOR troops moved to push them away. Tear gas was spotted and shock bombs exploded, although video showed that at least some of them came from the demonstrators.
Protesters were also seen throwing stones and bottles at KFOR troops. NATO officials said about two dozen KFOR soldiers were injured in the unrest.
Your browser doesn’t support HTML5
Kosovo Serb Blockade Turns Violent, KFOR Troops Injured
"While countering the most active fringes of the crowd, several soldiers of the Italian and Hungarian KFOR contingent were the subject of unprovoked attacks and sustained trauma wounds with fractures and burns due to the explosion of incendiary devices," KFOR said.
Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said on Twitter that 11 Italian soldiers were injured, three seriously, and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni condemned the attacks on KFOR troops.
Hungary's Defense Minister said that more than 20 Hungarian soldiers were injured.
Zvecan, a town of some 16,500 people, is one of three hotspots in northern Kosovo where authorities from Pristina have attempted to install ethnic-Albanian mayors following boycotted elections that raised the ire of the local ethnic-Serb communities and neighboring Serbia.
Crowds of several hundred people had gathered outside municipal headquarters in Zvecan, Leposavic, and Zubin Potok, with alarm sirens sounding and pepper spray and bottles flying, as local and international pressure mounted for Kosovar officials to de-escalate the situation.
A powerful Serbian party leader demanded that the “illegal” Kosovar forces leave the municipal buildings to be replaced by troops from NATO's KFOR peacekeeping mission.
KFOR soldiers attempting to maintain cordons to keep the two sides apart in the three municipalities and to prevent the crowds from overrunning the buildings where the so-called "parallel" administrations backed by neighboring Serbia operate.
Kosovar Prime Minister Albin Kurti called on May 29 for calm and suggested that both Pristina and Belgrade need to get back to their commitments expressed in a three-month-old verbal agreement to travel on a "path to normalization" between the Balkan neighbors that reportedly included refraining from threats or the use of force.
Kurti tweeted that he and Italian Foreign Minister Tajani had agreed in a phone conversation "that the current time calls for the implementation of the Basic Agreement and the situation in the north to be calmed down."
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, whose country doesn't recognize Kosovo and who has put Serbia’s military on high alert, said in a national address late on May 29 that he would hold a meeting with representatives of the so-called Quint group early on May 30.
Vucic, who said that 41 protesters were injured in the clashes, complained that "despite the guarantees, KFOR troops failed to defend Serbs and failed to prevent the seizure of municipalities and violence."
Kosovar police last week escorted newly inaugurated mayors into those buildings despite objections from locals and warnings from Vucic, who has put Serbia's military on high alert.
Even though they pushed for the elections to be held, U.S. and EU envoys have condemned Kosovo's decision to forcibly install the mayors in northern Kosovo to try to calm the situation to avoid further turbulence in Europe at a time when Russia is waging war against Ukraine.
U.S. Ambassador to Kosovo Jeffrey Hovenier emerged from a meeting on May 29 with Kosovar President Vjosa Osmani citing a "shared concern of the prospect of violence and the need to de-escalate."
He said that "we're deeply concerned" and expressed a willingness to meet with Kurti "at his convenience."
Earlier, Hovenier met with two of the installed mayors -- Izmir Zeqiri of Zubin Potok and Ilir Peci of Zvecan, both from the opposition Democratic Party of Kosovo -- at the EU offices in the Kosovar capital before going to the building of the Kosovar Assembly, the national parliament.
The mayors of Leposavic, Lulzim Hetemi, and of North Mitrovica, Erden Atiq, who are both from Kurti's Vetevendosje party, reportedly were not at the meeting.
The mayors were all sworn in despite a turnout of under 3.5 percent in the April 23 by-elections in those four areas amid a boycott by ethnic Serbs.
The special elections were sparked by mass resignations by Kosovar Serb mayors, police, and judges in November as a cross-border dispute raged over vehicle registrations between Kosovo and Serbia.
Ethnic Serbs compose around 5 percent of Kosovo's 1.8 million residents but are a majority in the four northern regions.
Goran Rakic, the chairman of the dominant Serbian political party in northern Kosovo, the Belgrade-backed Serbian List (Srpska Lista), had warned against the new mayors turning up for work after the weekend.
Rakic was in Zvecan on May 29, where he spoke with international troops and local Serbs.
Riot police formed a security cordon while blue armored vehicles of special units of the Kosovar Police were positioned around the "parallel" administrative building in Zvecan.
Rakic said he had forwarded two demands to KFOR representatives and to foreign representatives in Pristina before the Serbian protesters would withdraw.
One is for the Kosovar "sheriffs," whom he described as "illegal," to return to their homes. The second condition, he said, was for "all the special units in the municipality building and around the municipality, withdraw to the south, because this is not a police station, it is the city hall."
At one point, Rakic was shouted down when he asked the crowd to allow two Kosovar police vehicles to pass. Shouts of "treason!" rang out and bottles landed nearby, according to an RFE/RL's Balkan Service correspondent at the scene.
Kosovar police at one point used chemical spray to repel the Serb crowd.
Rakic later added a demand that Kosovo police at the Zvecan town hall be replaced by KFOR troops.
In Leposavic, KFOR troops laid out metal barricades reinforced with concertina wire to keep a crowd of several hundred people away from the municipal headquarters.
Armored vehicles topped with guns and other KFOR-marked vehicles stood on guard outside the municipal building in Zubin Potok, where a crowd of several hundred people gathered and Serbian flags and political party messages hung from nearby homes.
Protesters in Zubin Potok
The embassies in Pristina of France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union on May 28 -- the so-called QUINT governments -- reiterated an earlier statement "condemning Kosovo's decision to force access into municipal buildings in the north of Kosovo despite our repeated calls for restraint."
They said they expected "no new measures to force access to the municipal buildings in Leposavic, Zubin Potok, and Zvecan" by Kosovo's government.
The town hall in North Mitrovica has its own building, rather than one controlled under the "parallel system" that is backed by Belgrade to administer to ethnic Serbs in northern Kosovo.
Moscow, which heavily backs heavily Orthodox Serbia defense and other ties, including its refusal to recognize Kosovo, ratcheted up the pressure on Pristina on May 29 while stoking anti-Western sentiment over NATO's 1999 intervention on behalf of ethnic Albanians against Serb forces, which effectively ended that conflict.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said during a visit to Kenya that "Serbs are fighting for their rights in northern Kosovo," according to AFP.
"A big explosion is looming in the heart of Europe, where NATO in 1999 carried out an aggression against Yugoslavia," he said.
Officials in neighboring Serbia have demanded as part of EU- and U.S.-mediated talks over the past decade that Pristina fulfill an agreement in 2013 to establish an association of Serbian municipalities to represent the Serb-majority communities.
Kurti came to power in 2020 and again in 2021 pledging to impose greater "reciprocal" measures on Serbia and accelerate efforts to achieve full international recognition for his country. He has resisted forming the association.
Kurti said via Facebook on May 27 that his country was "aware and understands the concerns" of Kosovo's international partners but the municipal buildings "belong to the Kosovar state and therefore were not taken yesterday and will not be taken any other day."
He urged "everyone, especially Serb citizens of Kosovo, to cooperate with the new mayors and their cabinets."
He defended the installation of the mayors and suggested that "any other option would be failure to meet our government's constitutional obligations to the new mayors; would be failure to fulfill the obligations and obligations of the new mayors to the citizens of the Republic; and would make it impossible to provide basic communal services to the citizens."
Local critics have also questioned Kurti's rush to use Kosovo's police forces to install the ethnic Albanian mayors in the mostly Serbian areas.
"This inspired Vucic, [Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica] Dacic, and Serbian List even more to continue their opposition, to remove the mayors and the presence of Kosovo Police at all costs," former Kosovar lawmaker Nuredinn Ibishi said.
Ibishi said the Serbs' response could have been expected, given Serbian List's warnings in the days before the swearing-in of the mayors.