Celic: Usurpation of Rajska Banja part of strategy to leave the CSM without economic power and resources

Professor Dusko Celic from the Law Faculty of the University of Pristina with a temporary seat in Kosovska Mitrovica tells Kosovo Online that the recent actions of the Pristina authorities, during which the Rajska Banja complex in Banjska was usurped by the Kosovo Privatization Agency and leased to the Kosovo Police, are a way to render the Community of Serb Municipalities meaningless and reduce it to a shell without any authority, economic power, or resources.

Celic notes that the usurpation of the Rajska Banja complex has shown that Pristina is clearly acting with a long-term strategy that has a property and legal component.

"When we talk about this long-term strategy, it is evident that someone had in mind to further render the CSM, which was supposed to be established according to the Brussels Agreement of 2013, meaningless by taking away its economic resources, aiming to make its existence pointless, and making it a mere shell without any authority, economic power, or resources," Celic says.

He adds that this strategy involves the permanent destabilization and change of the ethnic structure of the population that has been living compactly in this territory for a long historical period.

"These things are prohibited in international legal frameworks. I want to remind you that, even if the Serbian people were treated as a minority, which legally is not and cannot be the case in Kosovo and Metohija, public authorities are obliged to refrain from measures that would aim to change the ethnic structure where a certain ethnic community lives compactly in a specific territory," he notes.

Celic adds that this is a classic example of violating Article 16 of the European Convention on Minority Rights and a concrete violation of the European Convention on Human Rights, Article 1 of the protocol.

Our interlocutor believes that it is very difficult at the moment to talk about the law when everything coming from Pristina to the Serbs is politics.

"Of course, as a lawyer, I want to believe that it is possible to use all possible legal means within the quasi-legal system of Pristina, but what I doubt is the effectiveness of these means. I think it is more important to turn on all the lights at this moment and to sound all the alarms. This should not happen in the dark, neither to the scientific nor the professional community, nor to the general public, nor to the international public. It is necessary to alert the international community, the actors who play a crucial role in making various decisions in Pristina, to simply reason with these public authorities in Pristina. They behave as if they are the owners of human rights and not citizens, as if they are not limited in restricting human rights; they do so completely unrestricted. There are completely unbridled legal norms in this regard and the way they are implemented," Celic says.

 He says that what is happening in Kosovo, in the heart of Europe, is unprecedented anywhere in the world.