Petkovic: An attack on Mts in Kosovo is an attack on the rights of the Serbs; we will not tolerate it

The Director of the Office for Kosovo and Metohija, Petar Petkovic, said today that Belgrade would not tolerate the violence and arbitrariness of Pristina in the attack on the rights of Mts D.O.O. in Kosovo, a subsidiary of Telekom, because it was not only a violation of the inviolable rights of a company to unhindered business but above all the attack on the rights of the Serbs.

"About the latest act of arbitrariness by Albin Kurti and his henchmen, as well as about our positions on this occasion, we informed all relevant foreign interlocutors, including the EU mediator in the dialogue and the Quint countries, through diplomatic means on the first day, demanding an immediate reaction, and our country will, as did since the very beginning, continue to protect valid agreements, law and justice together with Mts and Telekom Srbija and their management," Petkovic said in a statement.

He pointed out that legal mechanisms were available to the Mts company to overturn the senseless decision of the Kosovo Business Registration Agency, and that due to its unilateral acts, Pristina might suffer serious consequences in the field of telecommunications.

"And this time, as in all previous provocations and escalations, Kurti made the first move, and therefore the responsibility for all the consequences that could result from such demonstrations of force will be solely on him," Petkovic pointed out.

He stated that, at the time when Mts D.O.O. regulated its operations in Kosovo, in accordance with the agreements reached in Brussels and all regulations valid in Pristina, procedurally everything was fine, stating that "obviously nothing was fine to Kurti".

He reminds that the issue of the functioning of telecommunications in Serbian communities in Kosovo is regulated by a series of documents agreed upon in the dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina, with the mediation of the European Union.

He specified that on September 8, 2013, Belgrade and Pristina reached an Agreement in the field of telecommunications, which was elaborated in the later phase of negotiations through the provisions of the Action Plan initialed on August 25, 2015, the conclusions of the European mediator from November 13, 2016, and the statement issued by the EU mediator in support of the adoption of the Conclusions in order to specify the agreed provisions, and then on November 18, 2016, in Brussels, an amendment to the conclusions had been adopted.

"Behind these arrangements are hundreds of hours of negotiations, and capricious Albin Kurti destroys all this in an attack of arbitrariness, in order to once again demonstrate that he is not bound by anything agreed in the dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina so far," Petkovic said.

He also notes that Pristina, using a senseless administrative argument to prevent Mts from working, actually wanted to achieve a more far-reaching and dangerous goal than simply blocking the work of one business entity - to disable the mobile connections of the Serbs in Kosovo with the rest of Serbia and, by canceling the TV signal and the Internet completely informationally isolates the current users of Mts services.

"In this way, Kurti also, in the most primitive way, belittles the efforts made by the European Union and its mediators in the process of normalizing relations between Belgrade and Pristina. His determination to continue on the path of violating the Brussels agreements is another call for alarm, because if he is allowed to do so, we can in every sense go back to the period that preceded the beginning of the dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina, and from that point there is only one more small step left until the full escalation on the ground," Petkovic warned.