Kosovo Parliament Speaker, Jakup Krasniqi, wrote a reaction for Die Presse following remarks made by Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic in an interview for the paper.
“In 1998, the United Nations Security Council, adopted several resolutions expressing concern over the risk of a humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo as a result of violence carried out by Yugoslav police and military troops. At the time, instead of meeting its international obligations, Serbia continued its war-inciting policy with the aim of executing its genocidal project. Tomislav Nikolic, now President of Serbia, was part of this notorious project. The Serbian President repeated on several occasions that destructions by the Belgrade regime in Kosovo were fabricated to justify NATO’s military intervention and that the killing of Albanian civilians in Recak was fabricated as an excuse to bomb Serbia. He [Nikolic] said that pits filled with Albanian corpses were used to show Serbs as criminals, that the intervention by European countries and the United States of America was in opposition with international law, that The Hague tribunal acquitted Albanians so that Serbs could remain the only culprits. These statements cannot be interpreted any differently than an attempt to keep alive lies fabricated in Slobodan Milosevic’s strategic staff. Mass killings, massacres, rapes, destructions, the demolition of Albanian settlements and expulsions were not fabrications to justify military intervention. On the contrary, it was a tragic reality for Kosovo Albanians which was ended by NATO’s military intervention. NATO’s intervention, whose aim was to stop the humanitarian catastrophe, and the declaration of Kosovo’s independence, are not in opposition with international law. The state of Serbia and promoters of the old mentality in this country got the response from the International Court of Justice. What is scandalous in Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic’s interview is the statement that ‘all Serb crimes committed during the war do not compare to what Albanians did to Serbs in one day in 2004 in Kosovo’. During the interethnic riots in March 2004, which were certainly the most serious and tragic after the war in Kosovo, 19 people lost their lives. 11 of them were Albanian and eight were Serb. In addition to the killings, around 800 houses and 36 Orthodox churches were destroyed. Comparing the destruction of property, cultural and religious sites with the consequences of institutional violence by the Serbian state against Albanians goes to show efforts by consequent regimes in Belgrade to manipulate public opinion. During the war in Kosovo, Serbian army and police killed 13,290 people, 1,450 of them are still missing. 1,392 were children and 1,739 were women. 20,400 women were subject to sexual violence,” Krasniqi wrote in his reaction.
