Foreign Desk Report
BRUSSLES: Serbia and Kosovo have reached an agreement to end a standoff at their shared border which was rooted in a dispute over vehicle licence plates, a European Union mediator has announced.
“We have a deal,” Miroslav Lajcek tweeted on Thursday. “After two days of intense negotiations, an agreement on de-escalation and the way forward has just been reached.” The breakthrough came after Kosovo’s government last week deployed special police forces to the shared border to impose a new rule of removing Serb licence plates from cars coming into the country, saying that a 10-year deal had expired.
Pristina said they were replicating what Serbia had done for the past decade following Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence. Protesting the new Kosovo rule, local Serbs blocked the border with trucks. Serbia meanwhile deployed armoured vehicles, military jets and helicopters close to the frontier in an apparent show of force.
Under the accord negotiated in Brussels, NATO troops will replace the Kosovar police units on the border.
