Celic: Albanian mayors in the north have not come for a week or two; they want to fulfill their full term

Professor of the Faculty of Law at the University of Pristina with a temporary seat in Kosovska Mitrovica, Dusko Celic, believes that the dilemma regarding the need to adopt a Referendum Law for the mayors in the four municipalities in the north to be dismissed has been imposed to delay their removal. He warns that the ultimate goal of Pristina is for Albanian mayors in the north to complete their full term and be a part of its quasi-institutional pressure, making life unbearable for the Serbs locally.

"I am convinced that Albanian mayors in the municipalities in northern Kosovo and Metohija did not come there for a week or two, a month, two, or three, but that they came to complete their mandate, as they were told from Pristina. That is why all of this, so to speak, soap opera, the saga about their dismissal and the adoption of the Administrative Instruction, serves. Now the question arises whether this is not a sufficient quasi-legal framework for their dismissal, so the question of the Referendum Law is raised and so on," Celic said for Kosovo Online.

He explains that the entire story, initially about the Administrative Instruction, was entirely unnecessary because Kosovo regulations within the Law on Local Self-Government contain a norm for what is necessary for dismissal, namely that 20 percent of registered voters need to vote for the initiative.

He adds that citizens of Serbian nationality submitted an initiative with a sufficient number of votes, and the procedure is then automatically handed over to the election administration, which should organize some form of citizen consultation for dismissal.

"No further actions are envisaged by their Law on Local Self-Government, and they now, with an instruction, a sub-legal act if we can put it that way, provide some new conditions - the verification of signatures, then the control of those signatures, and so on. The instruction sets some new material-legal conditions, which are not allowed," he pointed out.

He recalled that two weeks ago, the question of the constitutionality of the Administrative Instruction had been raised, noting that the whole situation "would be funny if it weren't so sad".

"The essence is, I am convinced of this, that these installed municipalities with a minor Albanian majority, therefore without any legitimacy of those mayors with the support of two to three percent of voters, want to fulfill a full term and be a part of that quasi-institutional pressure from Pristina that will further make life unbearable for the Serbs, who are the majority on this territory," Celic says.

He assesses that all measures taken since the beginning of the term of Albanian mayors in the four municipalities in northern Kosovo have been detrimental to the Serbs.

"All decisions and measures taken by the municipalities in northern Kosovo have been measures to the detriment of the Serbs, from the illegal construction of roads, plowing of cemeteries without expropriation, without determining the public interest, allocation of land for police bases... All these measures were calculated to further exert pressure on the Serbian population, rather than the local community serving the citizens, which is a fundamental thing everywhere in the world. Obviously, this is not the case in northern Kosovo," the professor concluded.