Kosovo's parliament approved on Wednesday the establishment of an international court to deal with alleged crimes committed by ethnic Albanian guerrillas during the 1998-1999 war with Serbia.

The vote came amid a mounting pressure on Pristina to back an EU call to create a special court to address the allegations detailed in a 2011 Council of Europe report on crimes committed by pro-independence ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).

The European Union said on Saturday it plans to set up an international court in Kosovo to deal with alleged crimes committed by ethnic-Albanian guerrillas during the war with Serbia.

"The EU is not proposing to establish a tribunal, but rather a specialist court within the Kosovo court system," the bloc's Pristina office said in a statement sent to Agence France Presse.

Kosovo on Monday celebrated six years of independence marked by a historic improvement of ties with former foe Serbia, which was coaxed along by an EU-brokered deal last year.

Prime Minister Hashim Thaci told a special parliamentary session that "our vision of an independent Kosovo is one of a democratic country... ready to find its place within the family of free nations."

Serbia's war crimes court on Tuesday sentenced nine Serbian members of a paramilitary force to up to 20 years in prison for killing at least 109 ethnic Albanians during the 1998-99 Kosovo conflict.

The nine "committed murders, rapes and robberies in an extremely brutal way, with the main goal to spread fear among Albanian civilians in order to force them to leave their homes and flee to Albania", judge Snezana Nikolic Garotic said in her verdict.

Dozens of people were injured in Kosovo Friday as riot police clashed with students demanding the resignation of a university dean accused of faking research.

Police used tear gas and batons to prevent hundreds of student protesters from entering the university compound in Pristina, an Agence France Presse reporter witnessed.

Five policemen and about a dozen students were injured in Pristina on Thursday when anti-riot police used pepper spray and batons to disperse protesters demanding the resignation of the dean of the Kosovo capital's university.

Student prevented by police from entering the university building threw rocks and stones at anti-riot units cordoning off the main gates of the compound, an Agence France Presse reporter at the scene said.

A top Serb politician was arrested on Tuesday on suspicion of war crimes allegedly committed during the 1990s war, his lawyer said.

Oliver Ivanovic, 60, was ordered detained for a month over crimes "which occurred in 1999 and in 2000 against Albanian victims", his lawyer Nebojsa Vlajic told Agence France Presse.

As the EU readied to open its door to Serbia in reward for easing ties with Kosovo, the bloc's chief diplomat Catherine Ashton on Thursday hailed the premiers of both sides for a peace drive that could foster regional stability.

After 200 hours of talks at 20 meetings in Ashton's sixth-storey Brussels office, the work done by the prime ministers of Kosovo and Serbia, Hashim Thaci and Ivica Dacic, "gives a certainty to the future" in the Balkans, she said.

Hardline nationalists took top posts in Kosovo's capital as well as the main Serb-populated town in the breakaway territory in local elections, preliminary results showed Monday.

The electoral commission said the capital Pristina was won by Shpend Ahmeti of the nationalist Self Determination movement, which opposes the presence of the European Union and NATO in Kosovo as well as any talks with Serbia.

Kosovo voters cast ballots under a heavy police presence Sunday in round two of local elections seen as a test of stability in the troubled, Serb-majority north of the territory.

The election is part of a historic deal brokered by the EU to normalize ties between Serbia and Kosovo after the breakaway territory proclaimed independence in 2008.