A deputy commander of NATO's peacekeeping mission in Kosovo says the alliance is "ready to act" and even prepared to increase troop numbers if trouble erupts amid a vehicle-licensing standoff between Kosovo and Serbia.
Brigadier General Luca Piperni told journalists at the Kosovo Force (KFOR) headquarters in the Kosovar capital, Pristina: "We are vigilant and ready to act...if we have an increase of tensions, but we can also draw on reserve forces...that we can call in at short notice."
Serbia doesn't recognize its former province Kosovo as an independent state, and 10 years of EU-mediated talks aimed at normalizing diplomatic and other mutual relations have so far failed.
Kosovo's government has set a date of October 31 for imposing "reciprocal" local-registration requirements on vehicles crossing the Kosovar-Serbian border similar to those already required by Serbian authorities.
SEE ALSO: Kosovo's Beleaguered Minorities: Three Degrees And Another On The Way, But Still No JobPiperni called the current situation calm but tense and said he could not exclude the risk of fresh unrest or violence in heavily Serb northern Kosovo as the deadline looms.
The vehicle-registration issue and refusal to respect mutual ID documents have long posed practical problems in northern Kosovo in particular, where ethnic Serbs are in the majority.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell announced a compromise deal on August 27 over the distribution of exit and entrance documents in which Serbia agreed to abolish entry and exit documents for Kosovo ID holders and Kosovo agreed not to introduce them for Serbian ID holders.
He welcomed it as a "European solution" to a stubborn problem in the Balkans, where ethnically fueled wars killed more than 130,000 during and after the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
Last weekend, a text circulated online that some suggested was a "new framework" for the EU-mediated talks on normalization between Serbia and Kosovo.
On September 19, Vucic said he'd rejected an EU envoy's effort to give him a document and suggested that his country faced problems whether or not it "accepted" Kosovo's membership in the United Nations.
"If the situation deteriorates, we are ready to intervene, we are ready to be in the middle between the protesters and the security organizations," Piperni said. "We have sufficient forces to deal with the situation.... With that amount of troops we can end any kind of increase of tensions."