Odalovic: Kurti is a serious threat to peace; he occupied the north and he is terrorizing the Serbs there

The President of the Commission for Missing Persons of the Government of Serbia, Veljko Odalovic, said that Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti was undermining the dialogue because he wanted to continue on the path he had set - to completely occupy the north of Kosovo institutionally and with "police force" and to terrorize the Serbs there.

After the collapse of the last round of dialogue, where he rejected the compromise proposal of the EU on the road to normalization, Kurti said that the Serb List would "suffer and pay". Minister of Interior Xhelal Svecla issued an open threat yesterday that Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic would be arrested if he came to the north without the permission of the Pristina institutions. Yesterday, there were new arrests of the Serbs both north and south of the Ibar.

Odalovic tells Kosovo Online that all this shows that "Kurti is a serious threat to peace and stability in this area and that the international community must stop him".

"We spent years of dialogue with him so that he would say what he said even before he had gone to Brussels for the first time - that he did not want any of this, that he was not interested in it, that he had his own path. And his path is best seen in his behavior towards the north of Kosovo and Metohija in the last year. He occupied the north institutionally and with a 'police force' and is now carrying out terror," Odalovic said.

He points out that Kurti does not only carry out terror in the north of Kosovo and recalls the beating of a young man in Gracanica, the burning of a house in Vucitrn, and other incidents.

"I think that Kurti is a serious threat to peace and stability in this area, what he is doing must be stopped - we cannot do that because there could be a continuation of the escalation, that must be done by the international community and I believe that it will have enough strength and reason to remove such a person from the position he holds," Odalovic says.

He also points out that there are serious criticisms against Kurti, not only in the last month but also for more than half a year, from the political leaders of the Kosovo Albanians who, as he states, are aware that what he is doing is directly against them and the position that is built in the West when it comes to Kosovo and the support it had.

Odalovic states that those opposition leaders are concerned about the support of the international community, as well as whether any punitive measures will be taken against Kosovo.

"I believe that he will because his behavior is like a finger in the eye of the entire international community and the USA and Brussels and Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron. If he has support for what he is doing, then we are all in a serious problem. I believe that he doesn’t have and that we will return to dialogue as a mechanism, with all the topics that we nominated, with all the obligations that we both assumed, that we will return to that Declaration on Missing Persons, which was also blocked by Kurti," he says.

He points out that the dialogue has no alternative, and that Kurti is playing the "card" to end this year like this, and to use the next year, which is an election year in both the USA and the EU, to "end the occupation of the north through the 'container mayors' and the decisions they make".

"And to simply make senseless the existence and functioning of the Serbs in Kosovo, especially in the north, which is currently being attacked very aggressively, but we must not forget that the south is not any better either, only that the north is currently in focus because that is where the escalation is the greatest," Odalovic says.

According to him, if the Community of Serb-majority Municipalities had been formed, it would not have been like that.
In this sense, he reminds that the CSM is a community of 10 municipalities with a Serb majority and that it is not only the municipalities located in the north - Mitrovica, Zubin Potok, Leposavic, and Zvecan, but also the other six in the south.

"Those collective rights that are planned to be provided to the Serbs, and they concern functioning in that area, is something that Kurti wants to prevent because the very decision of the 'container' mayors and the assembly, which are patched up in that way, that they want to join the Association of Kosovo Municipalities says that he does not intend to form the CSM at all," he points out.

However, as Odalovic emphasizes, the CSM will be created with or without Kurti.

"That's what he was told. What he is doing will harm the people living in Kosovo, primarily the Albanians, because when you look at the measures he is taking, such as the ban on Serbian goods, essentially 90 percent of those goods were used by the Albanians," Odalovic says.

He adds that other announcements by which he wants to carry out terror in various areas indicate that he does not want to have any contact with Serbia, neither economic nor political.

"It is a danger to those who live in Kosovo, they are the ones who suffer because of his terror. His last attempt is to cancel Mts - the last bulb from Brussels that still burns as a product of that dialogue. Because Mts is an obligation undertaken in Brussels and realized, it is a model of how it can function in energy and many other areas only if there is a will. I hope that this issue will be resolved positively and that he will be told that his will is not something that is unlimited," Odalovic points out.

When it comes to the dialogue process, Odalovic notes that the EU has invested a lot as a mediator.

"They put in a lot of effort, and someone entered their dialogue who has been 'stringing' them along for three years and in the end accuses them of being on Serbia's side. We don't need that kind of support, nor do we have it; we just want the commitments undertaken to be fulfilled. And let his behavior towards the EU be a matter that they will clarify with him," Odalovic concludes.