Serbian Official Comments on Kosovo’s Planned Gendarmerie Kosovo’s latest security gambit has opened a fresh front in the long-running battle over who gets to police the north – and under whose authority.

In mid-May, Kosovo’s Interior Minister Xhelal Sveçla announced he had signed a decision to create a working group tasked with designing a new gendarmerie force under Pristina’s Ministry of Internal Affairs. Its mission, according to his published decision, would be to strengthen capacities to “prevent, manage and neutralize threats” to Kosovo’s security.

Belgrade’s response was immediate and scathing. Petar Petković, head of the Serbian Government’s Office for Kosovo and Metohija, warned there is “no basis nor room” for Prime Minister Albin Kurti to set up “paramilitary and pseudopolice” formations outside existing agreements, “much less to deploy them in Serbian communities in the north.” He insisted that “KFOR is the only legal and legitimate armed force” in Kosovo, responsible for control and patrols along the administrative line.

Petković anchored his argument in the Brussels Agreement, stressing that Article 9 requires the Kosovo Police in the north to reflect the local ethnic makeup of the four Serb-majority municipalities, while the implementation plan “clearly states that no new police formation in the north can be created without the consent of the Working Group” including Belgrade, Pristina and the EU. Any unilateral gendarmerie, he argued, “cannot be formed” outside these rules and certainly not deployed into Serb areas.

From a pro‑government angle in Belgrade, Kurti’s move is dismissed as electoral theater: Petković calls the gendarmerie push “pre-election hallucinations and desperate moves” aimed at “cheap political points” because Kurti’s campaign “is obviously not going as he imagined.” The opposition‑leaning press, while quoting the same legal arguments, frames the clash as yet another reminder that on the ground, the central question remains unresolved: who actually holds the badge in northern Kosovo – NATO, Pristina, or a paper promise signed in Brussels?