Djuric: We want NATO to take over authority in northern Kosovo

Serbia's Ambassador to Washington, Marko Djuric, stated during an appearance on the US television channel Newsmax that the only way forward for Serbia was for NATO forces to take control of northern Kosovo.

"The only path we see forward, although it may sound strange coming from the Serbian Ambassador, is to ask NATO to take jurisdiction in northern Kosovo instead of Kurti's Special Forces. We also demand an independent international investigation into what happened because a Serbian monastery was attacked, three local Serbs died, as well as a Kosovar policeman who, according to existing agreements, should not have been there," Djuric said.

Djuric added that Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti, by sending his Special Forces to northern Kosovo, had violated existing agreements.

"I don't want to speculate about who is behind the incident and the attack; I just want to say that unfortunately, three Kosovo Serbs are dead as a result of that attack. They were local people, not as the Pristina Minister of Foreign Affairs says. None of this happened until the current Prime Minister of Kosovo, Albin Kurti, came to power," Djuric said.

According to him, Kurti has literally destroyed everything the international community achieved in two decades in Kosovo in just 20 months.

"He has scraped the leadership of the United States and the EU from every agreement, replaced the existing police structure in northern Kosovo with his one-ethnic Albanian special police, and turned on the Serbs in northern Kosovo. As a result, we have sadly seen destabilization and a space for dangerous influences that want to exploit it," Djuric said.

He also added that Kurti's unilateral actions had coincided with the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine.

"Unfortunately, in the last 20 months, as the situation in Eastern Europe escalated, Kurti's Government began taking unilateral measures. These were condemned by both the United States and the EU, but they did not take concrete actions to prevent him. We may have had the opportunity to see in the mirror what happened to Albanians in the early 1990s in Kosovo now happening to the Serbs," Djuric said.