Belgrade/Anatolia
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said on Tuesday they would continue to seek consensual solutions to maintain peace between his country and Kosovo.
He said this at a press conference, after the meeting with the Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church, “Porfiri” in the capital, Belgrade.
Vujicic criticized Kosovo’s conditions for allowing the patriarch to enter its territory.
He recalled the continuation of talks with the European Union’s special representative for the dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina, Miroslav Lajcak, and with the US special envoy for the Western Balkans, Gabriel Escobar.
“We are doing our best to keep the peace and will continue to seek compromise solutions,” added Vucic.
The Kosovo Foreign Ministry had established that the patriarch “condemned the practices of church members who support criminal groups in northern Kosovo and those responsible for the checkpoints erected there, and accepted the preconditions for allowing them to enter the country”.
And the Serbian Orthodox Church announced on Sunday that the Kosovar government has not allowed Patriarch Porfiry, who was planning to attend Christmas mass, to enter the country.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has ordered the army and police to raise their readiness level to a state of maximum alert, starting on the night of 27 December.
Recently, Kosovo began deploying more police units in the north of the country, two days after explosions and sirens were heard in northern Kosovo cities, ahead of early elections scheduled for December 18 in 4 municipalities, before to announce the postponement.
Serbian authorities criticized the move by the Kosovo government, calling it an “attempt to invade the northern regions of the country” inhabited by Kosovo Serbs.
On 10 December, Serb minority groups in northern Kosovo set up checkpoints with trucks to protest the arrest of a former security man of Serbian origin by the authorities in Pristina, which escalated tensions between Belgrade and Pristina .
Kosovo – Albanians make up the majority of its population – seceded from Serbia in 1999 and declared independence in 2008, but Belgrade still considers it part of its territory and supports a Serb minority there.
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