Kosovo authorities on Friday closed five parallel institutions working with the ethnic Serb minority, a move that was immediately criticised by the US and could further raise tensions with neighbouring Serbia.

Elbert Krasniqi, Kosovo’s minister of local administration, confirmed the closure of five so-called parallel institutions in the north – where most of the ethnic Serb minority lives – writing online that they “violate the Republic of Kosovo’s constitution and laws”.

The US embassy in Kosovo reiterated on Friday in a statement Washington’s “concern and disappointment with continuing uncoordinated actions … that continue to have a direct and negative effect on members of the ethnic Serb community and other minority communities in Kosovo.”

Serbia continues to assist the Serb minority since Kosovo’s 2008 proclamation of independence, which Belgrade does not recognise.

Kosovo was a Serbian province before a Nato bombing campaign in 1999 ended a war between Serbian government forces and ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo. Their war left about 13,000 people dead, mainly ethnic Albanians.

The Kosovo-Serbia relationship remains tense and the 13-year-long normalisation talks facilitated by the EU have failed to make progress. A shootout in September 2023 between masked Serb gunmen and Kosovo police left four people dead.

The EU and the US have pressed both sides to implement agreements that were reached in February and March 2023 between the Serbian president, Aleksandar Vucic, and the Kosovo prime minister, Albin Kurti, who leads the ethnic Albanian dominated government.

This month, Pristina said it would open the bridge on the Ibar River which divides Mitrovica into a Serb-dominated north and ethnic Albanian south. The bridge has been closed to passenger vehicle traffic for more than a decade, with minority ethnic Serbs erecting barricades since 2011 because they say “ethnic cleansing” would be carried out against them if ethnic Albanians could freely travel over the bridge into their part of the city.

Kurti has also been at odds with western powers over Kosovo’s unilateral closure of six branches of a Serbia-licensed bank in northern Kosovo this year.

Unrest in northern Mitrovica has increased since last year, when the Nato-led international peacekeepers force in Kosovo, known as KFor, stepped up its numbers and equipment along the Kosovo-Serbia border, including at the bridge in Mitrovica.

Kosovo will hold parliamentary elections on 9 February, a vote that is expected to be a test for Kurti, whose governing party won in a landslide in 2021.

With Associated Press