Milicevic: There will be no progress in the north until new elections are called

The executive director of the NGO "Aktiv," Miodrag Milicevic, says that the first year of the mandates of the Albanian mayors in northern Kosovo has been a very turbulent period that is still ongoing and that the "entire issue regarding the northern municipalities will only be resolved once new elections are called."

"What we will remember from the past year are not only the political disputes but also the inability of the municipal leadership and officials to perform their mandates in the manner prescribed by law and as it is done in other municipalities. The situation here is significantly different because we know how the mayors were elected and how the self-governments were constituted. There have been numerous calls from the international community, precisely due to the lack of legitimacy of the elected representatives, that in addition to North Mitrovica, in the other three municipalities, the mandate be carried out outside the municipal buildings. We even had calls for no key, fundamental decisions to be made during this period, however long it may last, which would further deteriorate the situation on the ground, but this was not the case," Milicevic tells Kosovo Online.

He recalls that at the very beginning of the new administration's mandate, the construction of the Student Center in the municipality of North Mitrovica was prohibited, followed by a series of decisions that at one point threatened to worsen the situation in the already complex socio-political context.

"It seems that there will be no progress until we reach the stage where extraordinary elections are called so that political dialogue can be returned to where it belongs, namely the local assembly and the central assembly of Kosovo. We have a complete absence of political dialogue," Milicevic assesses.

Dialogue, he notes, should not have an alternative in the form of unilateral actions and decisions made by the Kosovo government, and in this context, he mentions the decisions to ban the dinar and the import of Serbian goods.

"Only occasionally do we have more serious reactions that point to the necessity of changing such decisions by the Kosovo government, but so far without real effects," Milicevic concludes.