Maintaining Presence – Reporting from Kosovo

The Hungarian infantry company (Charlie Company) is the third company of the Portuguese-Hungarian joint battalion which is made up of three subunits.

Most soldiers serving with Charlie Coy have come from the 24th ‘Bornemissza Gergely’ Reconnaissance Battalion of the HDF 5th ‘Bocskai István’ Infantry Brigade (Debrecen), but the personnel of the company includes troops from other units as well.

“The team from the Bocskai brigade deployed to Pristina this February. Its members know each other well, having served together for several years", 1st Lt. József Bányai, the Deputy Commander of the company told us.

This team has soon integrated well into the Portuguese-led battalion.

The Hungarian company and the Portuguese–Hungarian KMT battalion have the core mission of crowd riot control (CRC) if there is a need for it and COMKFOR issues the relevant order. Aside from that, their most important task is to conduct presence patrolling. This means that through their presence, the soldiers demonstrate that KFOR “is keeping its eye" on the given area.

The soldiers of the company may go on presence patrolling over the whole territory of Kosovo, as the area of responsibility of the KMT covers the whole country. Last time they deployed to Mitrovica, Northern Kosovo to execute this task, because both the Albanian and Serbian citizens of Kosovo requested the NATO-led KFOR to conduct presence patrols in May around the divided town to ensure the calm during the parliamentary and presidential elections in Serbia. The operation was successful, since the two rounds of the election took place quite smoothly in the northern part of the country as well.

Needless to say, the troops of the Portuguese–Hungarian KMT battalion also participated in some “more serious" operations over the last three months. They were tasked with manning an observation post at a so-called “hotspot" in Northern Kosovo, between the areas populated by Serbians and Albanians, to facilitate the flow of passenger and vehicle traffic at the Jarinje border crossing (GATE-1 in KFOR jargon), which connects Serbia with Kosovo. The most serious incidents were reported to have taken place in last November, when the world press agencies covered the events in this area for the first time.

At present the KFOR checkpoint is being manned by Italian KFOR troops, but the Hungarian peacekeepers may be called out here any time. When they have no taskings, they stay in Camp Slim Lines in central Pristina, where they keep training for the next actions. As soon as they receive the order – “when the red button is pressed at the HQ", as they say – they are ready at an hour’s notice to deploy to any settlement in the country and perform their duty there, which is to ensure a safe and secure environment (SASE) and freedom of movement.