Starovic: Decisive response from the international community is the way to prevent attacks on Serbs

Serbia’s Minister for European Integration Nemanja Starovic said today that the brutal beating of Nenad Raskovic in Zubin Potok is a reflection of how members of the Kosovo police have treated Serbs over the past several years, and stated that the only way to prevent such attacks is decisive action and a response from the international community, which, he said, has so far been absent, RTV reported.

Starovic said that “members of the special, militarized, mono-ethnic Albanian units of the so-called Kosovo police have been roaming northern Kosovo and Metohija for the past five years,” since, as he put it, “Albin Kurti consolidated his power within the provisional institutions of self-government.”

“What happened two days ago, with Nenad Raskovic being beaten in such a brutal manner, is one in a series of several hundred incidents of this kind, when it comes to brutal treatment, beatings, insults, sexual harassment and everything else, which has been very precisely and extensively documented, primarily through the work of the Office for Kosovo and Metohija,” Starovic said.

He stressed that the only way to put an end to such attacks is decisive action and a response from the international community, which has so far been absent.

Starovic said that, when it comes to the Western part of the international community, which, as he put it, sponsors the separatism of Kosovo Albanians, concrete action cannot be expected, but that there must be insistence on “restraining the campaign of fire and fury that Albin Kurti has been waging since the beginning of 2022.”

“So far, we have not seen a stronger response from the EU, even though such events should not be ignored. It would be inconceivable in any European country for any police force to behave in such a manner. That is why these images are so striking and so disturbing, the severe physical injuries that Nenad Raskovic suffered at the hands of a police force that anywhere in Europe should be providing security for the population, while here it poses a threat to their security,” Starovic said.

He added that the EU always issues only verbal condemnations, but that so far there has been no political will to activate more serious levers of influence, Tanjug reported.

Starovic recalled that in June 2023, the European Union issued a statement in the form of demands supported by all member states, calling on Belgrade and Pristina to de-escalate.

“Since Pristina did not comply with that very call for de-escalation, the EU introduced restrictive measures against the Pristina administration. We believed that those measures were mild, consisting of withholding significant financial funds from the Pristina administration and the absence of high-level meetings with Kurti,” Starovic said.

He said that those measures had had no effect and that the EU subsequently lifted them, adding that he places more hope in a response from the United States because, as he said, the previous years had shown that Washington, when there is political will, can activate more serious levers of influence.

As he said, this was demonstrated by the actions of Washington’s then-special envoy Richard Grenell in 2019 and 2020, as well as when Washington stopped the revocation of Telekom Srbija’s license.