Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić placed the country’s army on full combat alert and ordered its units to move closer to the border with Kosovo on Friday, after protesters and police clashed in a majority Serb town in Kosovo.

Occupation: Serb official on installation of Albanian mayors in Kosovo

With the swearing-in of mayors of four municipalities in northern Kosovo, a ‘Priština occupation’ of those regions was formalized on Thursday,…

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“An urgent movement [of troops] to the Kosovo border has been ordered,” defense minister Miloš Vučević said in a live TV broadcast. “It is clear that the terror against the Serb community in Kosovo is happening,” he added.

Police and protesters clashed in the town of Zvečan in Kosovo after a crowd gathered in front of the municipality building, trying to prevent a newly-elected ethnic Albanian mayor from entering his office. Police fired teargas to disperse protestors.

The protests follow widely-boycotted local elections.

Some 50,000 Serbs living in four north Kosovo municipalities, including Zvečan, shunned the April 23 vote in protest that their demands for more autonomy had not been met – a new setback for a March peace deal between Kosovo and Serbia.

The election turnout was 3.47% and local Serbs said they would not work with the new mayors in the four municipalities – all from ethnic Albanian parties – because they do not represent them.

Earlier, police in Pristina issued a statement saying they were assisting the newly-elected mayors to enter municipal offices in the four northern municipalities.

Serbs in Kosovo’s northern region do not accept Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence from Serbia, almost a decade after the end of a war there, and still see Belgrade as their capital.

Ethnic Albanians form more than 90% of the population in Kosovo, with Serbs only the majority in the northern region.