Kosovo wants an army, Serbia warns of threat to peace.

On 18 October, ten years after it declared independence from Serbia, Kosovo started to implement the creation of an army. The parliament passed three bills laying the groundwork for transforming the Kosovo Security Force (KSF) — an emergency force trained to respond to disasters — into a 5,000-strong regular army with 3,000 reservists. The ethnic Serb minority and Serbia itself qualify this a clear threat to peace from the ethnic Albanian-led government.

Security force of Kosovo. Will it be transformed into a regular army ? (Picture source: Youtube)

More than 4,000 KFOR troops are currently deployed in the territory whose independence is recognised by more than 110 countries, but not by Serbia which still considers it to be its southern province. The move is aimed at avoiding the need for a constitutional change to legally establish armed forces, a move that would require a two-thirds majority of both ethnic Albanian and the 20 non-Albanian MPs, half of whom are ethnic Serbs. Serb MPs have blocked any such initiative in the past, as reported by Euractiv.

In Belgrade, Serbian Defence Minister Aleksandar Vulin warned that “There could be no other armed force in Kosovo except KFOR as long as the UN Security Council 1244 resolution (that ended the war in 1999) was in place,” Vulin said. NATO has made clear that it would prefer the KSF to be transformed into a regular army via constitutional changes.