Serbia warned France on Friday against "impunity" for Kosovo's ex-premier Ramush Haradinaj after he was released on bail by a French court following his arrest on suspicion of war crimes.
Haradinaj was detained on January 4 at the Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg airport in eastern France under an international arrest warrant issued by Serbia more than a decade ago.
Belgrade has requested the extradition of the former leader of the insurgent Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to try him for alleged atrocities committed against civilians during the 1998-99 conflict against Serbian forces.
On Thursday Haradinaj was released on bail, a move that Kosovo hailed as "a first step" towards getting him fully freed. But he must stay in France while the extradition request is examined, which could take months.
"Serbia does not accept a judicial system that infers impunity for those who have committed crimes against the civilian population," Marko Djuric, the Serbian minister who handles Kosovo affairs, told a press conference.
Serbian Justice Minister Nela Kuburovic said they would work on the "principle of reciprocity".
"If a person accused of war crimes is not extradited to Serbia, we will respond with the same measures to any requests from France," Kuburovic said, when asked hypothetically about extraditing suspected terrorists to France.
After the 1990s conflict in Kosovo, which killed 13,000 people, the predominantly ethnic Albanian province became a United Nations protectorate.
It unilaterally declared independence a decade later -- a move that has never been recognised by Serbia, which sees Kosovo as the cradle of its identity and religion.
Haradinaj has twice before been acquitted of war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.
He was elected Kosovo's premier in 2004 but resigned after 100 days in power to surrender to the United Nations judges.
Since his acquittals he has become a political opponent of Kosovo's powerful President Hashim Thaci and is resolutely opposed to a historic 2013 agreement, brokered by the European Union, to normalise relations between Kosovo and Serbia.
Ethnic Albanians have held protests across the region against Haradinaj's arrest.
