BANJSKA, Kosovo – The newest country in Europe is in a geopolitical crisis.
The worst violence Kosovo has seen in over a decade drew grave accusations from Prime Minister Albin Kurti of a Serbian government plot to destabilise the long contentious northern part of the country. Here, a generous estimate of 50,000 Serbs outnumber the Kosovar Albanians, along the tense, rural and mountainous border with Serbia. Belgrade’s response of vaguely distancing itself from an attack upon police and a resulting siege in a monastery, while at the same declaring the three dead gunmen as martyrs and allowing treatment for the wounded in Serbian military hospitals, has unnerved much of the country, but none more than the Serbs of the divided city of Mitrovica.
Videos by VICE
“We are in the middle between Belgrade and the Albanians and will be the ones who suffer from violence,” a waiter told me as I waited for a taxi at a cafe to take me to Banjska, the scene of the attack, about 10 miles away.
The waiter kept his voice low as he spoke to avoid anyone hearing even gentle criticism of the Serbian hardline position. Mitrovica, the largest city here, and the rest of the majority Serb north have never integrated with the rest of Kosovo since it broke away from Serbia in 1999. With no real ties to the government in Pristina, North Mitrovica survives from subsidies and jobs distributed by the government in Belgrade or their local proxies and enforcers. And political criticism of Serbian nationalism is considered dangerous with regular threats of physical attacks, burned cars, job losses or even assassination.
Kosovo has identified a local politician and a US sanctioned gangster considered Belgrade’s political enforcer in Kosovo, Milan Radoičic, as being behind much of the harassment and now, the attack on the monastery.
Radoičić has long been considered responsible for keeping Mitrovica and the Serbs of the north in line for Belgrade. Considered a close political associate of Serbia’s strongman president Aleksandar Vučić, he runs construction companies, contractors, mines and was once accused of stealing tons of gravel to sell back to the government for a road project. He’s also been sanctioned by the US for racketeering operations and remains under indictment in Pristina, accused of orchestrating the murder of a Kosovar-Serb opposition politician, Oliver Ivanovic.
Radoičić’s involvement, Belgrade’s refusal to appear sorry and Kosovar reports – confirmed two days later by the American National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby – of a Serbian military build-up along the border had rattled everyone.
That included Milan, the taxi driver who after expressing some reluctance, agreed to take me the 10 or so miles to Banjska. Rail-thin and chain smoking, Milan said he’d barely slept since the attack for fear of escalation. He couldn’t decide if he was more scared of a Serb military invasion or retaliation from the Kosovo authorities, which he called “the Albanians.” After a 15-minute drive, where he explained his contempt for Belgrade, fears of Albanian jihadists and organ smuggling rings and smoked three cigarettes, we reached the turn off the main road to Banjska. Until a few hours earlier, the turn had been a checkpoint as the village was cleared of weapons and evidence collected but now only a single armoured vehicle and three Kosovo police special forces remained.
The sight of armed “Albanians” was too much for Milan, who didn’t want to give his surname. The Kosovo police paramilitary special forces – Kosovo doesn’t have an army – have often been portrayed in Serbian media as brutal occupiers of the north: Belgrade’s first statement specifically blamed the unit for causing the uprising. And although they were just sitting in the truck, Milan politely but in a near panic threw me out of the car 100 metres away from the turn.
“The road’s open,” said one bemused Kosovar cop. “Did he just drop you there because of us? It’s two miles to Banjska, are you going to walk?”
After about 200 metres down the road, which cuts through Kosovo’s mountains and a handful of Serb-owned farms, the armoured vehicle suddenly reappeared.
“The village is safe now but be careful when you go up to the monastery, there still could be [unexploded ordnance],” said the Kosovar operator, his head sticking out of the door. “We just spent two days collecting weapons and bombs up there.”
At about 3:00 am on Sunday, September 24, a routine patrol of Kosovo police passed the small bridge at the entrance of Banjska, a tiny Serbian mountain village of just a few hundred people and a Serbian Orthodox monastery. Set into the side of a low mountain, Banjska’s isolation and proximity to the nearby Serbian border was known to be used by smugglers, but was – up until this point – considered quiet.
But that morning the bridge was blocked by two heavy trucks amid significant activity in the village, including more than a dozen SUVs and armed men. So the patrol reported a problem. Within a few minutes, according to Kosovo police officials who spoke with VICE News on background, two additional police units had responded and all three came under heavy attack at the bridge.
Video released by the Kosovo police on Monday showed a police car being struck by a launched grenade. The blast killed one police officer and badly wounded two others as between 20 to 30 gunmen exchanged fire with arriving Kosovo police and well-equipped special forces units that quickly arrived at the scene.
“We suspect the Serbs were not prepared for a random police patrol followed by an extremely rapid response by the police special forces,” one official said. Faced with armoured vehicles and heavy machine guns, the Serbs were driven off the blocked-off bridge and several hundred metres up the side of the mountain, where they stormed the locked monastery by ramming the gate with an SUV.
After a siege at the monastery lasting several days, three Serb gunmen were dead, and the rest had fled into Serbia. No one officially claimed responsibility for the attack but Serbia’s government declared three days of mourning for the dead gunmen, outraging Pristina.
The NATO peacekeeping and training mission in Kosovo, called KFOR, took the threat of an escalation seriously. Although an estimated 4,500 soldiers from two dozen countries participate in the mission – which began in 1999 as majority Albanian Kosovo broke away from Serbia with the collapse of Yugoslavia – they’re mostly from logistical and headquarters units with some police trainers. Fearing a potential incursion by the Serbian military, NATO immediately put about 600 British infantry undergoing regional
training under KFOR command.
Three days after the attack, the bridge at the entrance to Banjska still held the now destroyed trucks and spent shell casings from the first clash. Windows and walls in adjacent buildings had been struck but further up the mountain there was almost no damage to the monastery complex except for where the gunmen had rammed the front gate with an SUV.
“We did not engage with the terrorists after they withdrew to the monastery, there were monks and pilgrims, maybe 30, inside the buildings, so we set a cordon and observed them with a drone,” said a special forces police officer, equipped in the latest NATO tactical gear.
I asked the officer if deciding not to attack the monastery was a political decision, an attempt to avoid the optics of Kosovar police storming an Orthodox church.
“I think they wanted us to attack and our commanders smelled the plan,” he said.
In a statement last week, Kurti, Kosovo’s Prime Minister, detailed the plan as his government saw it.
“There are countless photos of Milan Radoičic and Vučić at various meetings in Belgrade, and I have no doubt that Radoičic was only the executor,” he told local reporters. “The one who planned and ordered this terrorist, criminal attack on our state, in order to violate our territorial integrity, national safety and state security, is none other than President Vučić.” said Kurti.
“They wanted our police to enter the Banjska monastery, and then share photos around the world of bullets in the monastery walls. That didn’t happen, because our police are very strong and very professional, and they fled. Three terrorists were killed by our police, several of them are in prison, and we want those who escaped to be extradited because they are now in Serbia, some are in hospitals, and some are maybe free citizens,” Kurti added.
Back at the scene in Banjska, the police who fought the engagement agreed. One guarding the scene explained that the attackers seemed to have paused after the initial clash and waited in the monastery until darkness fell.
“They cut the fence here,” said the cop, pointing to a large hole in the chain link fence surrounding the monastery, which was littered with empty water bottles and energy drink cans, yoghurt containers and boxes of mortar ammunition.
“If you climb over the mountain, you’re almost to Serbia,” he said. “They fought their way out at night and escaped but we wounded several.”
Belgrade media later reported at least six of the attackers were being treated in Serbian military hospitals.
Huge arms caches, said multiple officials, were scattered around the village and monastery itself and continued to be found almost a week later, according to the Kosovo Interior Ministry.
“These attackers were part of something bigger, we know this from the amount of equipment,” said one police officer standing over wooden boxes marked as mortar ammunition. “They had all these mortar shells but no mortar. Who was supposed to bring them the mortar?”
The attackers did have an automatic grenade launcher, which was used in the deadly attack on the police car. By the end of the week, Kosovar authorities would link the serial number on the weapon to the Serbian national arms manufacturer and the Serbian army.
After a week of confusion over the attack’s objectives, Kosovo and NATO continued to build evidence of high-level Serb involvement in the operation, culminating with Kosovo releasing drone footage of the attackers training in a nearby Serb military base prior to the attack.
And late Friday came Kirby’s bombshell that US intelligence had watched a Serbian military build up along the Kosovo border.
The implication was clear.
Kirby said there was evidence of an “unprecedented staging” of advanced artillery and tanks,” by the Serbian military… “We believe this is a very destabilising development.”
Vučić quickly responded with a vague denial of a build-up but also agreed to move some units off the border. But the question remained of whether Serbia planned an operation in the wake of the paramilitary assault on Banjska.
“Our government and agencies uncovered an operation to seize Banjska as an operational base to conduct dozens of attacks on Kosovo security forces in the north,” said a Kosovar official, who spoke on background in support of the government’s public statements.
A NATO intelligence official in Brussels, who lacks permission to speak to the media, said as more evidence became clear, the story had actually become more confusing for analysts.
“Last week I said Russia was laughing but now I am not so sure,” said the official. “The Kosovo government’s accusations, while fair and accurate, seem more neat and tidy than the current state of Serbia government control.”
The official said that while light weapons are easy enough to find in the Balkans, heavy weapons invariably involve military stockpiles.
“Finding AKs and even some [rocket propelled grenades] is easy in the Balkans,” they said, “but dozens of mortar rounds, an automatic grenade launcher, silenced sniper rifles, dozens of [night vision units]… these required Serbian government stockpiles.”
The crisis did not explode overnight in Banjska: For almost a year Kurti and Vučić have been in conflict over the presence of the Pristina government in the north, with mass resignations of the Serbian List Party – of which Radoičić is vice president – and clashes as Pristina-nominated officials tried to take office in the municipal government. Cars have been torched for replacing Serbian licence plates with Kosovo-issued tags, KFOR peacekeepers and journalists have been attacked and a series of direct talks between Serbia and Kosovo with significant pressure from the EU repeatedly failed to calm tensions.
“Radoičić was hit by sanctions in 2021 [by the US] and he’s clearly been unhappy that Vučić failed to support him diplomatically but the possible chaos factor might have been the [US] designation of [Serbian intelligence chief Aleksandar] Vulin in July,” said the NATO official.
These moves, along with pressure from Russian intelligence to cause tensions, might have internally destablised Vučić’s control over aspects of Kosovo policies, said the official.
“[Maybe] Vučić wasn’t exactly supportive and that some rogue actors pushed a plan they hoped would force Vučić into supporting them,” added the official. “Or Vučić was behind it all along and abandoned Radoičić at the last moment.”
“Either way the turmoil in Serbia doesn’t benefit Russia or Belgrade like turmoil in North Kosovo would have,” said the NATO official. “I doubt anyone is laughing now.”
NATO and Kosovar officials expressed disbelief that Vučić wouldn’t have known about the plan but admit privately it’s not clear if he was completely directing or supportive of the operation, a view a Serbian opposition politician endorsed in a local media interview.
The former president of the Serbian Democratic Party, Bojan Pajtić, told a local website that the outcome alone was terrible for Vučić’s authority in Serbia and suggested a version of a “coup.”
“[The Banjska attack] is certainly not in the interest of Aleksandar Vučić, because in the eyes of the West, in relation to Kurti, he still looked like a constructive partner,” he said, stressing that Vučić cherishes Serbia’s role as neutral between NATO and Russia, and thus able to benefit economically and politically from both sides.
But Vučić’s role in developing Radoičić as an enforcer in the north now leaves him vulnerable to internal and external criticism, in Pajtic’s view.
“He nurtured (Milan) Radoičić and his criminal structures, treated them as an integral part of his party, provided them with the protection of the state and undisputed power over the Serbian community in the north of Kosovo,” said Pajtić.
And with Radoičić and intelligence boss Vulin under massive US sanctions, Pajtic argues the stage might have been set for an attempt to force Vučić’s hand.
“[Vulin], who normally knows who drank coffee with whom yesterday in Zvečan [a town in North Kosovo], suddenly ‘fails’ to notice that an action is being prepared by a heavily armed formation consisting of dozens of people,” he said. “Coincidentally, [Vulin] is another one who is under US sanctions for corruption and organised crime,” he added.
For its part, the Serbian judiciary has taken tepid actions against Radoičić – who eventually admitted “sole” responsibility for the failed monastery operation – as he’s under investigation but not arrest for illegally transporting weapons. The prosecutors claim the weapons were procured in Tuzla, a city in Bosnia known for a robust blackmarket in weapons and drugs.
Vučić, for his part, continues to blame Kurti for oppressing the Serbs of Kosovo and causing the violence, while also denying any intent to enter Kosovo militarily or directly confront NATO.
