A group of Italian soldiers who are part of a NATO contingent, the military alliance between Western countries, was injured during a protest in Zvecan, Kosovo. The protest was organized by ethnic Serbs against the local mayor, Ilir Peci, an ethnic Albanian, who, according to Serb residents, was illegitimately elected.
In a statement, NATO announced that during the demonstration in Zvecan some Italian and Hungarian soldiers “received unjustified attacks” and suffered “fractures and burns due to the explosion of incendiary bombs”. BBC News and ANSA write that 11 Italians are injured, 3 of whom are in serious condition. According to Repubblica, however, there are 14. The Defense Ministry let Corriere della Sera know that the wounded Italian soldiers are Alpine troops from the 9th L’Aquila regiment». The total wounded are instead 25.
The NATO mission in Kosovo is known by the abbreviation KFOR and is NATO’s largest mission, with nearly 4,000 active troops. Among them, the largest contingent is that of Italian soldiers, about 800. The commander of KFOR is also Italian: he is General Angelo Michele Ristuccia, of the Italian army.
The Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni he wrote on Twitter to be close “to the Italian soldiers wounded during the unrest in Kosovo”. Various images of clashes between demonstrators and soldiers of the NATO contingent circulate on social networks: some are quite strong, and show wounded soldiers on the ground, almost motionless.
Dramatic footage from the streets of Zvecan by @evropaelire. Kosovo police confirms five people were arrested, while at least 41 @NATO_KFOR soldiers were injured, most of them Italian and Hungarian troops. pic.twitter.com/GIM31Ue51y
— Marija Ristić (@Marien__R) May 29, 2023
For days now in Kosovo there have been demonstrations of protest against the inauguration of four mayors of Albanian ethnicity in as many cities of Kosovo with a Serb majority, including Zvecan. the administrative elections were held at the end of April but in various cities with a Serbian majority they were boycotted to ask for greater autonomy from the central state: in Zvecan, Zubin Potok, Leposavic and Northern Mitrovica, therefore, mayors of Albanian ethnicity were elected, voted by a very small part of the electorate, less than 4 percent.
Some Western allies have asked Kosovo not to recognize these mayors, elected with a very limited popular mandate: at the moment, however, the Kosovar government does not seem willing to accept the request. In addition to Zvecan, there were also protests in Leposavic, where some demonstrators threw eggs at the new mayor’s car.
Serbia, which has so far never recognized the independence of Kosovo, has criticized the position of the Kosovar government very harshly and has made it known that it has sent some army troops near the border with Kosovo: their eventual intervention would precipitate the situation , periodically very tense. By the end of 2022, a complex agreement had been found on the license plates to be used in Kosovo’s Serb-majority cities, an issue the two countries had been arguing over for months.
