Serbian Entity That West Wants To Impose On Kosovo Represents Existential Threat To Republic And To Regional Peace – OpEd
On the night between February 3 and 4, 2000, in the north of Mitrovica, the so-called “Bridge Guards”, killed 10 Albanians, among whom there were children, women and old people; injured 25 others, while evicting around 12,000 Albanian residents, who were forced to move to the south of the city, leaving behind their houses and apartments in flames.
This is the paragraph of a chronicle of the newspaper Prizren Post [1] in the note of one of the anniversaries of this massacre.
The 85-year-old man, Shaip Canhasi from Mitrovica, who has been living alone since his wife was killed, tells in that chronicle about the event of that night.
“Without waiting, without remembering, it happened to us… There were nine people, nine bullets, of which the wife had two… They broke the door, why aren’t you Albanians leaving here… I was with my wife and a policeman from Jordan , who lived on rent with me… They went, we took my wife and brought me inside, I collapsed, I fainted from sadness… It was a night of horror and we know for days that something will happen… It’s pretty difficult. I am lonely. Yes, I have to go to the doctor myself to take the burdens”, Canhasi told the KosovaPress journalist about the incident.
The head of the KMLDNJ in Mitrovica, Halit Barani, also confessed to this massacre, not without legal evidence.
In Kosovo, he had begun the confession, there were many massacres, but after the war this is the first and only one which was carried out in the presence of the French KFOR and the UNMIK police!
He mentions some of the names of the perpetrators of this massacre: Oliver Ivanovic, a former Serbian politician who was killed in an assassination attempt on January 16, 2018, for which a court process is currently ongoing, where the accused are people close to the president of the Serbian List , which is the extended hand of Aleksander Vučić, the Serbian president.
The other defendant is Dragan Delibashiq, another leader of the former “Bridge Guard” who in the meantime have created the “Northern Brigade” and are leading the actions to barricade the north of Kosovo.
“There have been many massacres in Kosovo, but after the war this is the first and only one which was carried out in the presence of the French KFOR and the UNMIK police… Criminals, Serbian Chetniks, killed 10 Albanians inside their homes and apartments theirs, not the streets…
The Regional Center in Mitrovica has filed criminal charges against 12 criminals in Mitrovica, but so far only 4 of them have been interrogated…” Mr. Beran.
The names of those who were killed on the night between February 3 and 4, 2000 are: Nezir Voca, Shqipe Voca, Niman Sejdiu, Bashkim Rrukeci, Sebiha Abrashi, Selime Berisha, Muharrem Sokoli, Nderim Ajeti, Nerimane Xhaka and Remzije Canhasi.
Genocide as a political act
On October 9, 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, according to which genocide is “a crime aimed at the destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnic, religious or racial group killing its members, causing serious physical or psychological injuries, placing the group in such living conditions as may lead to its destruction, imposing measures leading to the prevention of births in the group or taking them by force children in another. Group. “
From the relevant UN definition, it is clear that the massacre in Mitrovica has all the characteristics of genocide, although the international community only defined the massacre in Srebrenica, where more than 8,000 Bosnian civilians and soldiers were killed in a few days in July 1995, as genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Serbian president who ordered hundreds of other massacres in Kosovo during the war (1997-1999) died in The Hague Prison before being tried and receiving the well-deserved sentence, while the massacres were closed without receiving the appropriate assessment, as Srebrenica had received.
A lot is known about the genocide in Srebrenica, about the massacre in Prekaz, Meja, Reçak… during the war, but about this one in Mitrovica that happened after the war had ended (on the night of February 3 before dawn, February 4, 2000) can be taken as a more specific example, not so well known in western journalistic and diplomatic circles, but this is a classic case of the model of how the ground was prepared for the division of the city of Mitrovica and how it is claimed to impose the Association of Municipalities with a Serbian majority in Kosovo, modeled after the Republic of Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The division of the city was made through systematic war crimes, but also the massacre of February 3 and 4, 2000.
Precisely systematic war crimes and genocide along with this massacre can be cited as the first argument for the repeal of the Brussels Agreement of April 19, 2013.
Crimes like the one in post-war Mitrovica were the modus operandi of the Serbian authorities in Kosovo not only during the war, but also in “peace and freedom” circumstances, since the invasion of Kosovo in October 2012. In the first months of the invasion of Kosovo, Belgrade would focus on the depopulation of specific areas of geostrategic interest. On the list were the settlements around the Sharr Mountains, which were considered a possible breeding ground for the insurgents. It was followed by the villages around the Trepca Mine and the entire area of Mirovica, which was connected to Sanxhak of Novipazar. Afterwards, the project of settlement of Serbian settlers continued in the areas around Pristina, Prizren, Peja and other urban centers. The Albanian population was deported to Turkey.
Violence – Unaddressed massacres
During these two post-war decades, I have met many former fighters of the KLA, from those of the early days, some of whom I even met as a student and became very close to them. I learn many untold things about the KLA from childhood, their high morale and dedication to war.
Twenty-two years after the end of the war, in a very friendly meeting, with a citizen from Prizren, I will also learn about one of the worst massacres committed in Kosovo, which KFOR has completely kept silent about!
My friend RK, during the war period (1997-1999) was part of the KLA logistics for the Prizren region, while after the war he was in the unit that collected data on Serbian crimes in the region. In his confession on December 16, 2022], he revealed to me some of the most special memories from the period of the war and its aftermath. As if he wanted to confess a lot that he knew.
One of the most shocking accounts of the sexual abuse of more than 200 of our sisters and mothers from this district, whom the Serbian army and police had stationed in Struzhë village, where they would sexually abuse them for two consecutive weeks and finally mutilated their bodies in the most macabre way possible before putting a bullet in the head, he had confessed to me as an eyewitness, but one who knew much of that massacre.
“Our unit, a few days after the end of the war, mourned in Struzhë after the information we received from a citizen that there are bodies of Albanian dead there. We mourned early in the morning. We surrounded the house and a unit of three or four soldiers went inside. We found just an old woman over 90. She was in her languishing bed on the ground floor.
The house was littered with bloody rags and women’s breasts cut off, buttocks and thighs torn from their bodies. There were over 200 bodies. After us came the German KFOR. They continued with the corpses and the examination of the scene. We left, considering that we had done our duty. It has not occurred to me that this massacre has been written about, or that someone has been condemned for that kind of massacre.
It was one of the most gut-wrenching accounts I had ever heard of Serbian violence against our people, especially against our sisters and mothers.
This story brought me back to July 1999, when I was accompanying a DRS (CH) TV team and we were doing a report on Trepca. We had descended to the 10th horizon with the engineers who had returned to the mine. The 11th horizon was covered in water. The engineers were telling us about the brutal way their Serbian colleagues had exploited them. It seems that they were aware that they would be forced to release the mine soon, which is why they bit this horizon so ferociously, as if they were their prey.
However, the traces of the “cakeys” in the Trepça Mine will also be found in the mine’s restaurant. Everywhere traces of blood on the floor and walls, on spits thrown everywhere and women’s underwear. We were verifying what was rumored in the city about the massive rapes committed by the Serbian soldiers and policemen here in the premises of the Trepca Mine.
The Brussels Agreement (2013) should be annulled
Through the Dayton Agreement, Republika Srpska had been imposed on the Western Balkans – a ticking time bomb.
Through the “Night of St. Bartholomew” on February 4, 2000, France, by mobilizing its units within KFOR, had committed the overturning of the demographic reality in the city of Mitrovica…; meanwhile, making maximum use of his puppets that he had already catapulted to the head of the Republic, with the Brussels Agreement (2013), he will impose on Kosovo the legal act that paves the way for the inauguration of the time bomb. Consequently, it must be annulled.
The most important argument why the creation of the Association of Municipalities with a Serbian majority should not be allowed should be precisely this fact.
Two time bombs in this narrow space would undermine security in the region whenever Russian interests would require it.
The justification of the act of erecting the barricades in the north, even by denying the demands that may have legitimacy, now and at this time, is surrender to the secession project of the north of Kosovo.
More than once, Dodik and other high officials of the RS have repeated that the purpose of the existence of this political entity was the dissolution of Bosnia-Herzegovina and its annexation to Serbia.
In the beginning, when the Brussels Agreement (2013) was reached, this was also confirmed by high officials of Serbia for ZAJEDNICA.
Currently, the geopolitical situation in this part of Europe is under the control of NATO and the EU, therefore the secession of the north is impossible, therefore Belgrade stages the riots and is preparing the ground for the imposition of regional autonomy, as a prelude to the annexation of the north.
And, if currently Belgrade has taken the first steps for the annexation of Republika Srpska in Bosnia, it thinks that it can quickly impose this on the north of Kosovo as well.
The President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, meanwhile removes his mask, positioning himself as the spokesperson of the “Northern Brigade” operating in Kosovo. He made it clear that the barricades are part of his strategy for separating the north from Serbia.
“First the Association of Municipalities, then we will remove the barricades”, Vucic told journalists in Azerbaijan, reports Beta.[2] news agency.
Meanwhile, in a speech held in the Assembly of Serbia, the Serbian Prime Minister, Ana Brnabic, in unison with the military language of her boss, said unequivocally: “We are on the verge of an armed conflict”. [3]
The reaction of the Chairperson of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, Sonja Biserko, was immediate. For the situation created in the north of Kosovo, it expressly makes Belgrade responsible. “The situation on the border with Kosovo is much more complicated due to the presence of the Russian paramilitary unit “Wagner” and “Night Wolves” as well as Serbian extremist groups, which do everything to provoke a conflict and then find justification for it. conquered the north.” [4]
That is why the Serbian entity, based in the North of Mitrovica, the city with the most strategic position in the region, which they want to impose on a neighborhood of Western diplomats on the government of Kosovo, threatening that if the government is not ready for this, they have no “partner alternative”, represents an existential threat to the Republic of Kosovo, but also to peace in the region.
This is the Serbian trap that Western diplomacy should not fall into.
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1. https://prizrenpost.com/al/masakra-e-3-dhe-4-shkurtit-e-vitit-2000-ne-veri-te-mitrovices/
2. https://www.evropaelire.org/a/aleksandar-vucic-barrikada-asociacioni-/32187649.html
If an EU sponsored agreement is annulled because one of the agreeing party’s does not like it, how would the other party trust the EU and the annulling party in the remaining and future agreements?
The Brussels Agreement must and shall be implemented as agreed and with the intention the parties had when it was agreed. There is no way around it. The EU cannot sacrifice its global credibility for the sake of a party that changed its mind.