Thousands of Kosovo Serbs protested on Thursday to back demands for the country's Albanian-majority government to pull its police out of the country's north where its Serb minority is concentrated.
Since Dec. 10 local Serbs have erected nine roadblocks in the northern region and exchanged fire with police after the arrest of a former Serb policeman for allegedly assaulting serving police officers during a previous protest.
Thursday's protest rally was held in the village of Rudare, a few kilometres from the ethnically divided, flashpoint town of Mitrovica, with the main road still blocked by gravel-laden trucks and heavy machinery.
Ethnic Serb mayors in northern municipalities, along with local judges and some 600 police officers, resigned last month in protest over a Kosovo government decision to replace Serbian-issued car license plates with ones issued by Pristina.
Prime Minister Albin Kurti's government plans to replace the officers in the north but faces strong objection from Serbs who do not recognise Kosovo as a state and seek to rejoin Serbia, 14 years after Pristina declared independence from Belgrade.
"Maltreatment of the Serb people by Kurti’s special forces is the reason why we gathered today ..., to send a message to Pristina and their tutors that we are here, that we want peace but freedom as well, and that we will not surrender," Serb List party leader Goran Rakic told the crowd of protesters.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has said he fully supports Kosovo Serbs, who number around 50,000 in the north of Kosovo, and what he called their legitimate requests.
The protesters held up a 250-metre-(825-foot)-long Serbian flag, with Italian soldiers from the NATO peacekeeping mission monitoring the rally from a distance.
Serbia does not recognise the independence of its former breakaway province, where ethnic Albanians waged a guerrilla uprising against Belgrade in 1998-99, but has agreed under the European Union mediation to have talks on normalisation.
The EU has presented a plan but Western diplomats say unresolved tensions in the north could jeopardise any deal.
(Reporting by Fatos Bytyci in Pristina and Daria Sito Sucic in Sarajevo; editing by Mark Heinrich)
