Vucic is targeted by Pristina: Why does Konjufca demand that the president of Serbia be prosecuted internationally?

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, representatives of the authorities in Kosovo very often try to accuse and disavow Serbia, and a particularly frequent target in the statements of Pristina officials is Aleksandar Vucic, who is compared to Putin and Milosevic, with constant accusations that he wants to provoke conflicts in the Balkans. We asked analysts in Belgrade, Vienna, and Pristina what was hidden behind these efforts of Albanian politicians.

After Kurti's numerous attacks on Vucic, the President of the Kosovo Assembly, Glauk Konjufca, went one step further in the past few days, who requested that the President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic, be "tried like Putin", for whom the International Criminal Court (ICC) recently issued an arrest warrant accusing him of war crimes.

"If the international community says that the President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic, does not know where they have disappeared, then he is lying, because Vucic knows where they are. The President of Serbia should be accused before an international court like Putin," Konjufca said.

In this kind of rhetoric, Milovan Drecun sees the continuation of Pristina's propaganda, with the intention of disavowing and weakening Serbia's position, and this is done with lies and in the most banal way.

"This is designed to carry out Pristina's propaganda about how the state of Serbia is allegedly responsible for crimes against Albanians and to support their claims that Serbia committed genocide against Albanians so that they can then claim war reparations," President of the Parliamentary Committee for Kosovo, Milovan Drecun, assessed for Kosovo Online.

He points out that things are exactly the other way around because Belgrade does not hide anything about the missing persons, unlike Pristina.

"We previously handed over all the documentation that was requested about the conflict to the so-called Hague Tribunal, so it is a lie that Belgrade is hiding something. The other side hides the data and does not allow access to it, claiming that the KLA archive does not exist. And, in it we would certainly find information about where the Serbs disappeared, as well as the Albanians kidnapped by the KLA," Drecun notes.

He also indicates that who is actually concealing the evidence is best shown by the fact that Pristina refuses to dig up the locations that Belgrade suspects of containing the bodies of the missing persons, which is at least 10 locations, while Belgrade has allowed them to be investigated in all the locations that Pristina suspected. 

"The truth cannot be revealed until the KLA archive is opened. Kurti first admitted that the archive existed, then he denied it and claimed that it was who knows where... We have information that there is an archive of the KLA in which everything is precisely managed. Konjufca should appeal to his so-called government and demand that the KLA archive be opened, in order to reveal the fate of the missing Albanians," Drecun said.

He reminds that there is an OSCE report that says that the KLA kidnapped nine Albanians in Racak, one of whom was later released, while the others are missing.

"Let Konjufca decide the fate of the eight missing Albanians based on that document, and not shift the responsibility to Belgrade and talk nonsense. After all, it has nothing to do with President Aleksandar Vucic. It is propaganda, which does not mean that it is not well thought out somewhere, with a specific goal," Drecun is convinced.

Austrian publicist Hannes Hofbauer says for Kosovo Online that, if such an idea were to pass, a complete loss of credibility of the International Court would follow and it would once again be shown that the court has a purely instrumental character, that it is an institution used only to impose interests.

"Until former French President Nicolas Sarkozy for the war in Libya, former American President George Bush for the war in Afghanistan or Iraq, or Bill Clinton for the aggression against Yugoslavia are brought before the International Court of Justice, it is visible that double standards are being applied," Hofbauer pointed out.

Hofbauer also assesses that the "warrant for the arrest" of Vladimir Putin is a bad idea.

"I think that this decision is terribly bad. Not because I don't think war crimes are happening, but because the argument is that they are accused, not of aggression, but of the deportation of children. That story is based on fiction because the reality is different from the story that Ukraine also exists in Donbas, where the children were moved from. Russia considers it its territory. I don't think there was an accusation of aggression, because the question would have been raised about the other wars. And none of them made it to court," Hofbauer states.

Dejan Miletic, from the Center for the Study of Globalization, notes that the Albanian side did not stop trying to disavow the Serbian position, in the most banal and brutal way - with untruths and labels, which were acceptable to the American administration and the European public in the 1990s.

"However, no evidence was provided, nor could it be proven what did not happen. But that inverse rhetoric, i.e. attempts to turn a lie repeated 100 times into the truth, is the method Kurti uses all the time, and it speaks of the desire to create a hostile atmosphere, and not to move towards coexistence and find compromise solutions,” Miletic told Kosovo Online.

That's why he says "nothing new and nothing creative" about Konjufca's statement, but he also sees it as an obvious message that Pristina will not calm down and is going for aggressive methods, a desire to provoke a reaction from the Serbs through aggression and probably draw the West into the conflict.

"The very fact of acting in this way supports this hostile agenda. In order to achieve their goals, they must try to label Serbia as an enemy of the West, and that is the methodology Kurti uses all the time. That we are the extended arm of Russia, and here it turns out that it is actually Kurti and his regime because they are going to destabilize the region and Europe in that way, and not Serbia, which is doing everything to preserve peace, stability, security and the future of the region," Miletic added.

Kosovo security expert Drizan Shala, however, sees Vucic as responsible for what Konjufca accuses him of.

"The President of Serbia held the highest government position, Minister of Information, during the war in Kosovo, 1998-1999, but before that, he was active from 1993 until today. But, considering the time Konjufca talks about, we can say that the burden and criminal responsibility belongs to Vucic, not as an orderer, but as a leader, who was actively part of the political entity, since the wars on the territory of the former SFRY," Shala said.

The main focus for him remains that Vucic held high positions in the Government of Serbia at that time.

"And that he never publicly announced the data and location of the mass graves and did not bring the commanders of the army and police to justice," Shala said.