Bosnian-American, Albanian-American and Montenegrin-American organisations addressed senior US officials with an open letter, warning about “Belgrade's threats to the security of the Western Balkans" and urging for the return of the US leadership in the region.

The letter was sent to the members of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, the members of the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs, State Secretary Antony Blinken, and Assistant President for National Security Affairs Jake Sullivan.

“Over the course of September 2021, we have seen an alarming and escalating sequence of threats to regional security and stability by the Belgrade-based government of Aleksandar Vucic,” the organisations warned, expressing a “grave concern and alarm” regarding the “growing militancy of the government of Serbia towards Kosovo but also “increasingly, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro.”

“We believe that this is a matter of utmost concern to the U.S. because it directly imperils the peace and stability of the Western Balkans region and with that peace in Europe as a whole,” the note added.

They stressed that the most alarming scenes were seen in Kosovo, where Serbian armoured vehicles were deployed in close proximity of Kosovo border.

The letter also mentioned a “major security crisis in Montenegro” prompted by the enthronement of the new Montenegrin Metropolitan of the Serbian Orthodox Church.

In the part concerning Bosnia, the letter warned about the activities of the Serb member of Bosnia’s Presidency.

“During this same time, Vucic’s closest regional collaborator, the Serb member of the Bosnian state presidency Milorad Dodik, has maintained a months-long boycott and obstruction campaign of Bosnia’s state institutions following the imposition of a genocide denial law by the international community’s High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina in response to more than a decade of explicit and vulgar denial of the Srebrenica Genocide and the broader Bosnian Genocide by Dodik and his associates. Dodik has also repeatedly and overtly threatened to initiate the secession of the Republika Srpska entity (RS) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, even threatening to reform the so-called “Army of the Republika Srpska” to accomplish this goal, whose leadership orchestrated the Srebrenica Genocide,” the organisations stressed.

They warned that each of these instances are only manifestations of what has become the “now stated policy of the government in Belgrade to undermine the regional security order.”

“The Serbian government calls its new policy “the Serbian World” (Srpski svet), which aspires, according to the country’s Minister of the Interior, towards the formal political and institutional “unification” of all ethnic Serbs in the Western Balkans, with Aleksandar Vucic as their leader. This is no more than a reboot of the Milosevic-era “Greater Serbia” project which led to the worst violence and the worst atrocities in Europe since the Second World War,” the letter added.

Finally, the organisations said that the US was “instrumental” in securing the sovereignty of Kosovo and bringing peace through the implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement in Bosnia, and has for decades been primary guarantor of regional security and stability.

“As the prospect for EU enlargement have all but disappeared, a return to US leadership in the Western Balkans is urgently needed,” the note added.

It also called for the reinvigorating the NATO enlargement as apriority for the region, particularly concerning Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo.