Jovanovic: Albanians want to erase the Serbian ethnic, cultural, and religious character of Lake Gazivode

Luka Jovanovic, a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of North Mitrovica, says that Albanians are rewriting the history of Lake Gazivode, aiming to erase its Serbian ethnic, cultural, and religious character, as they have done with everything Serbian in Kosovo. He reminds Kosovo Online that Serbian villages and churches lie beneath the lake, that Serbia is still paying off the debt for its construction, and that despite this, Pristina has never lacked electricity or water.

Jovanovic points out that the entire geographical area of Ibarski Kolasin represents a unit that was historically inhabited exclusively by Serbs and that, both culturally and linguistically as well as historically, it exudes a purely Serbian character.

"Throughout history, we could see that on the 12 square kilometers that the lake Gazivode now covers, there used to be 14 exclusively Serbian villages that were resettled in the 1970s due to the construction of the reservoir. In that area, or rather beneath the lake, lie Serbian houses, Serbian villages, countless churches, and two Serbian monasteries," says the professor from North Mitrovica.

He reminds us that in the Middle Ages, Queen Helen of Anjou established her seat in the area of Ibarski Kolasin, from where she governed the state together with her sons Milutin and Dragutin.

In the later period, at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, when the entire Balkan region experienced tectonic ethnic shifts, the area of Ibarski Kolasin, he notes, retained a purely Serbian character.

"Even if we exclude Serbian sources, we can see this in foreign sources, such as the Viennese scholar Theodor Ippen, an Albanologist and one of the main creators of the Albanian nation in the modern sense, who worked from his base in Vienna and Sarajevo on the cultural affirmation of the Albanian nation. He specifically acknowledged that this area, this micro-region, was of a purely Serbian character," Jovanovic notes.

New ethnic disruptions occurred after the First and especially after the Second World War, precisely due to the construction of the Gazivode Lake. Our interlocutor emphasizes the fact that the lake was built by the government of the Socialist Republic of Serbia with a loan obtained from the World Bank, which is still being repaid to this day.

After the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, the republics divided the assets and the debts for infrastructure projects located on their territories. Thus, Serbia took on the debt of the then 70 million dollars, which is incomparable to today's 70 million dollars.

"When Kosovo declared independence in 2008, it did not take on the state debts, which it should have done in accordance with the territory it encompasses and the infrastructure projects located on its territory for which debts are still being paid today. Kosovo never took on the debt for Lake Gazivode, never paid even one euro towards that debt," says Jovanovic.

He points out that today the supply of water and electricity to Pristina and its wider surroundings depends solely on Lake Gazivode, which fills Lake Gracanica and cools the Obilic thermal power plant, but Serbia has never exploited this.

"I will just say that in the years after 1999, 2004, and 2008, even though Gazivode was in Serbian hands, Pristina never lacked electricity or water, while the Pristina authorities constantly looked for ways to, so to speak, cut off water and electricity to the residents of Mitrovica, Zvecan, and Kolasin. And then we once again showed our humane side and that we are bigger people than those who persecute us," our interlocutor emphasizes.

He notes that despite all this, as with everything else in the area of Kosovo, Albanians today are inventing the history and etymology of Gazivode, erasing its Serbian ethnic, cultural, and religious character.

"These statements that Albanians' ancestors left them the lake Ujman, as they call it, can only allude to the fact that, knowing that 14 Serbian villages were displaced to build Gazivode, they are again following this irredentist line. They imply that anything related to the massive displacement of Serbs and the great pogroms of Serbs can be connected to Albanians and their ancestors," says Jovanovic.