A brawl erupted in the Kosovo parliament on Thursday after an opposition lawmaker spilt water on Prime Minister Albin Kurti while he was speaking about government measures to defuse tensions with ethnic Serbs in the north of the country.
Some Kosovo opposition parties have criticized Kurti’s policies in the north that have strained relations with key Western allies.
Kurti has faced pressure from the US and European Union to help calm the situation which resulted in violence in May after police-backed ethnic Albanian mayors took office following an election that the ethnic Serb majority in the area widely had boycotted.
Dozens of people were injured in clashes between local Serbs and Kosovo police and NATO-led peacekeepers, fueling fears of a conflict similar to the one in 1998-99 that killed more than 10,000 people.
On Wednesday, Kurti announced he would reduce the number of special police officers stationed outside four municipal buildings in ethnic Serb-majority areas in northern Kosovo, and hold new mayoral elections in each of the towns.
This has angered the opposition who argued that Kurti had “experimented” for months and jeopardized Kosovo’s international position only to back down later on.
Lawmaker Mergim Lushtaku, from the Democratic Party of Kosovo, approached Kurti while he was speaking and threw water at him, which triggered the brawl. Local media say Kurti was escorted from the assembly hall during the chaos.
Kurti has said he was applying law and order in northern Kosovo with the deployment of police and new ethnic Albanian mayors.
The US and the EU had urged him to keep the mayors at different locations away from the north until the situation is resolved.
