Zeri reports that the discussion between UNMIK Deputy Chief Lawrence Rossin and Serbian Minister for Kosovo Slobodan Samaradzic on Sunday evening did not bring any assurances that Belgrade will respect UNMIK’s authority. Therefore, on Monday morning UNMIK Police, supported by NATO forces showed decisiveness to take the court house in the north and re-establish control.  

“The space for peaceful action has passed, therefore we have decided to go and arrest those who seized the court house,” said an international source for Zeri before UNMIK’s decision to intervene in the north was taken.  

The paper reports that immediately after Samardzic’s meeting with Rossin, UNMIK issued a press release saying that Belgrade should stop challenging UNMIK’s executive power in Kosovo. Rossin is reported to have told the Serbian Minister that these challenges represent a violation of promises Serbia has given to the United Nations Security Council.

Zeri’s publisher, Blerim Shala, writes that even though Kostunica and his Government are in the last days of their mandate, they have managed to gain ground in turning the security situation in Kosovo into chaos. “There is no doubt that the duo Kostunica-Samardzic are authors of total confrontational politics, using all means, including violence,” Shala writes. He notes that Kosovo stability has never been more threatened in the last four years than in these recent days, when Serb extremists used force to take over the courts in Mitrovica.

Koha Ditore reports that on Monday, according to international military and civilian sources, it was expected that the border line would eventually be set at the Iber River, and that a different reality dominates in the north of Kosovo. But UNMIK and KFOR showed another side and stopped the worst.

 

In an opinion piece for the paper, Flaka Surroi, editor-in-chief of Koha Ditore, says that events in Mitrovica came as no surprise to anyone and  that the violence which Serbs used to save only for Kosovars, they are now directing towards “those who spoiled them for years,” alluding at UNMIK and KFOR.

Surroi says Mitrovica is still, more or less, the one from 1999 where non-cooperation of the Serbs with the international administration in Kosovo was tolerated to the maximum and is also the one that Belgrade political officials can still visit because UNMIK allows them to cross the border with only an ID card “even one month after independence was declared.”