Goran Rakic

Preliminary results from Sunday's snap elections in four municipalities in northern Kosovo show that candidates from the Belgrade-backed Srpska Lista party secured an expected landslide victory, with each of them taking over 90 per cent of the votes.

Srpska Lista's showing in elections is often taken as an indicator of the degree to which Kosovo Serbs support the Serbian government's policy towards the predominantly ethnic Albanian country.

On this day in 1992, the Assembly of the Serb People of Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) established the Serb Republic - which became one of the two entities in BiH after the end of the war there in 1995.

The president wants this to be the case "regardless of the further moves of Pristina."

This was stated by Serb List leader Goran Rakic.

Protesters rallied on Tuesday in the north of the divided town of Mitrovica, carrying placards with messages like "EU open your eyes", "All we are saying is give peace a chance", "They are beating and terrorising us", "We want peace - not new wars" and "Don't shut us in a ghetto".

The protest was attended by a large number of citizens of the northern part of the town, who were first addressed by the now former mayor, Goran Rakic, who, about an hour earlier, resigned along with other three Serb mayors in northern Kosovo.

The Serb mayor of North Mitrovica, Goran Rakic, told an extraordinary session of the local assembly in the northern Kosovo town on Tuesday that he is resigning because of Pristina's decision to increase import tariffs on Serbian goods and because of violations of the human rights of Serbs living in Kosovo. 

President Aleksandar Vucic has had extraordinary meetings with the army and police chiefs this morning.

Other security services, as well as commanders of special military and police units, also took part in these meetings.

Kosovo Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj has been criticised for again meeting  a controversial figure and power-broker in the Serb-run northern municipalities, Milan Radoicic.

The head of the Belgrade-backed Kosovo Serb party, Lista Srpska, Goran Rakic and Radoicic - who was recently elected as the deputy head - met Haradinaj at his office on Thursday.

After Serbian state-owned news agency Tanjug reported that a delegation from the main Kosovo Serb political party Srpska Lista (Serbian List) was in Washington to meet officials from the State Department, Congress and the Pentagon, the State Department said that it did not have any such meeting to announce.