Kurti's personal war against Vucic

There is no longer any dilemma – Albin Kurti has turned the confrontation with the Serbs in Kosovo into his personal war against Aleksandar Vucic. Yes, the Albanian leader showed a strong fixation on the President of Serbia before, but now that he has published a list for the arrest of Serbs through one of his raiders from the Self-Determination Movement, where the long list of prominent people includes Vucic's son and brother, it is clear that we have reached an extreme stage of Kurti's obsession.

We know that the Prime Minister of Kosovo has seen Vucic as the main culprit for the problems and the stagnation in the achievement of two key goals - the violent transformation of Serbs into obedient "Kosovars" and the creation of a "Greater Albania" through the finalization of the "independent Kosovo" project. Truth be told, the terms mentioned in quotation marks have been carefully nurtured in some Western geopolitical laboratories for more than a century. Kurti has no copyright there and is only playing a contractor role, so this open picking on the Serbian President's family has a special weight.

Vucic "stepped on the toes" of many who were fiercely advocating for the implementation of the plan to secede Kosovo from Serbia and impose statehood for the area in the interest of Albanians. That's why Kurti hits him more and more recklessly, and he thinks that his international partners won't mind it. After all, in Pristina, they claim that they are doing everything in coordination with the Western allies. Mutual understanding is boundless, even when they do not entirely agree on some details.

Maybe that's why we haven't heard that Ambassador Rohde came forward to condemn the attack on Vucic's family. In fact, Germany demands that the "militant Serbs" immediately remove the barricades from the roads in the north. According to them, the peaceful protest of the Serbs is a problem and the cause of all danger. And the months-long siege by the special police in the Serb-majority municipalities, guns and bulletproof vests, arrests based on Kurti's lists without grounds and evidence, staged trials, fabricated indictments, kidnapping of people and holding them in unknown detention facilities, refusal to implement signed agreements, land grabbing, bullying, harassment, threats - these are the very peaks of European standards of the rule of law and democracy in Kosovo. The gentlemen from Berlin and Brussels tell us that. A terrifyingly bad joke.

And so Kurti continues. While threatening the Serbs, thinking that the announcement of new arrests will scare them enough to give up defending their rights, at the same time, he is attacking Vucic more and more. Kurti knows that the Serbs' main support is there. He needs people like Rada Trajkovic and Nenad Rasic; he would like to have such Serbs, not Rakic, Radoicic, Simic, and all those thousands of others who stand day and night at the barricades, crying for justice. He would arrest and expel them. It especially bothers him that the president of Serbia has such a reputation and respect among Serbs in Kosovo.

Frustration at the impasse Kurti has gotten himself into will only intensify with him in the coming days, and that's an added danger. On the other hand, the silence of Brussels and the open support of Berlin give him hope that he will have the opportunity to use weapons against the Serbs. He has wanted it for a long time. But he knows that his force, no matter how much he gathers, is not enough, which is why he expects the support of KFOR. And there are also representatives from some other countries. And it is fortunate that at least in KFOR they think soberly and keep the situation under control because we have all been on very thin ice for too long, and Kurti is jumping on it.

At a moment when the tension in the air from North Mitrovica to Brnjak and Jarinje is such that even a single firecracker or a misdirected glance can lead to unfathomable consequences, we read the Pristina's lists for the further persecution of Serbs and see the complete absence of the political West's willingness to remove the causes of this condition.

This cannot end with the Serbs saying "well, it doesn't matter, you don't have to release the arrested people, keep arresting us, send more police every day, enter our kindergartens and apartment buildings with guns, here, we will remove the barricades and we will return to Kosovo's institutions, we don't even need the CSM, we will respect everything we signed, and you can continue making fools of us".

That would never happen.

We will see what will be, the fight is yet to come.

Written by: Milos Garic, editor of the Kosovo Online portal