• COVID-19: Nine new cases, one death (media)
• Kurti: Those who deny Srebrenica genocide have to face their past (media)
• Kurti, Vucic to meet in Brussels on third week of July (media)
• Kosovo, Serbia exchange accusations for failure to respect obligations (Koha)
• No dialogue with Kosovo Serbs before negotiations in Brussels (Koha)
• Kosovo ex-minister indicted for hiring firm to promote border changes (BIRN)
• Deputy Defence Minister: We’ll try to repeal Thaci-KFOR agreement (Klan)
• Demiri: Looking forward to strengthening Kosovo – Israel relations (media)
• In Serbia and Montenegro, Srebrenica is still politically toxic (BIRN)

COVID-19: Nine new cases, one death (media)

Nine new cases of COVID-19 were recorded in Kosovo in the last 24 hours and one death. Eight persons recovered from the virus during this time. There are 152 active cases of COVID-19 in Kosovo. 5,251 vaccine doses have been administered in the last 24 hours. To date, a total of 236,035 vaccines have been administered in Kosovo. 57,994 persons have received both doses of the vaccine.

Kurti: Those who deny Srebrenica genocide have to face their past (media)

Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti said on Wednesday that those who deny the Srebrenica genocide have to face their past. “Today our parliament adopted a resolution recognizing and condemning Serb genocide in Srebrenica. Denying the Srebrenica genocide is a hateful act. Those who deny it have still to face their past, take responsibility for their actions, offer apology and show remorse,” Kurti wrote in a Twitter post.

Kurti, Vucic to meet in Brussels on third week of July (media)

The heads of negotiating teams in the dialogue between Kosovo and Serbia confirmed on Wednesday that the next meeting between Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic will be held on the third week of July.

Kosovo, Serbia exchange accusations for failure to respect obligations (Koha)

Kosovo’s delegation in the dialogue with Serbia, led by Deputy Prime Minister Besnik Bislimi, for two days in Brussels presented its opinions about the current state of the dialogue and on what the head of the delegation called Serbia’s failure to meet some of the obligations in the process. The Kosovo delegation first presented its analysis to the team of the EU Special Representative for the dialogue, Miroslav Lajcak, on Tuesday, and then on Wednesday participated in a meeting with the Serbian delegation, facilitated by the European Union.

After the meetings, as has happened before the during the ten-year process of dialogue, the delegations had different versions about what happened in the meeting and accused the other party of failing to meet the obligations.

“We presented remarks about the agreements and Serbia’s steps so far, for example the agreement on integrated border management, the recognition of diplomas, freedom of movement, the agreement on the footnote, as we have seen that the Serbian side has not delivered on its obligations,” Bislimi said after the meeting.

Petar Petkovic, head of the Serbian delegation, repeated Serbia’s accusations that Kosovo is failing to form the Association of Serb-majority municipalities. “We told them that the Association is the top condition if we want to move forward. The Association implies the realization of all rights of Serb citizens, because the numerous incidents we are seeing prove how necessary it is to form the Association,” he said. He also argued that “the Serbian side has implemented almost all agreements reached in the dialogue and that the complaints of the Kosovo delegation were mainly about technical issues of implementation”.

EU Special Representative Miroslav Lajcak, in a post on social networks which has become his preferred way of communication, said that the meetings were substantial.

“We all agreed that there is a lot of work still to be done and we will continue. Just concluded two days of extensive and in-depth discussions with the two Chief negotiators and their teams on the full range of Dialogue elements – past agreements, current issues, and next steps in the normalisation of relations between Kosovo and Serbia,” Lajcak tweeted after the meetings.

No dialogue with Kosovo Serbs before negotiations in Brussels (Koha)

The daily reports on its front page that the Kosovo government has yet to say if it will engage in dialogue with the Kosovo Serbs, which was supposed to take place before the negotiations with Serbia in Brussels. Prime Minister Kurti has not said if he plans to visit the northern part of Kosovo which is mainly inhabited by Serbs, while the government program notes that the main orientation of the dialogue with Serbia should be to the benefit of the people. On the dialogue, political commentators in Prishtina argue that the state needs to intervene and stop Belgrade’s pressure on Kosovo Serbs so that they can have adequate representation in the institutions.

Kosovo ex-minister indicted for hiring firm to promote border changes (BIRN)

Former European Integration Minister Dhurata Hoxha faces charges of abuse of office over a contract signed with a French PR company which, BIRN discovered last year, was hired to promote territorial exchanges as a solution to the dispute with Serbia.

Kosovo’s Special Prosecution has filed an indictment against former Minister for European Integration Dhurata Hoxha and four current and former officials of the ministry over a contract that saw budget money spent on a Paris-based PR company that promoted Kosovo’s “territorial modification” as a way to solve the Kosovo- Serbia dispute two years ago.

In a press release issued on Wednesday, the prosecution did not provide details of the indictment but specified that Hoxha and four others are suspected of abuse of office.

In a statement to BIRN, Dhurata Hoxha said she was not informed about the indictment.

“I am not aware, I am not informed. I do not feel guilty for anything, I am not informed,” Hoxha said in a comment immediately after the indictment.

In May 2020, BIRN discovered that the Ministry of European Integration allocated 168,000 euros on hiring French company Majorelle PR & Events in a contract first signed and negotiated in 2018 by Hoxha, then Kosovo’s European Integration Minister, from the Democratic Party of Kosovo, PDK, in the PAN coalition government led by Ramush Haradinaj. It was extended in March 2019.

The company did not reply to BIRN’s request for comment at that time.

The documents obtained by BIRN showed that the company was tasked among other things with shaping European opinion in favour of Kosovo’s “territorial modification” as a means to achieve a Kosovo-Serbia peace deal.

The deal would have seen some Serb-majority areas in the north of Kosovo joining Serbia, with Albanian-majority areas in southern Serbia going the other way.

The border change option – which triggered sharp reactions both inside and outside Kosovo – was first raised by former Kosovo President Hashim Thaci, who is now is in the Hague waiting trial after the Specialist Prosecution filed an indictment against him and three other former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, for war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed during Kosovo’s 1998-99 war.

Deputy Defence Minister: We’ll try to repeal Thaci-KFOR agreement (Klan)

Kosovo’s Deputy Minister of Defence, Shemsi Syla, said in an interview with the TV station on Wednesday that one of the main objectives of the ministry is to make the Kosovo Security Force (KSF) an operational force capable of protecting Kosovo’s territorial integrity.

Asked to comment on the 2013 agreement between then Kosovo President Hashim Thaci and KFOR according to which the KSF cannot go to the northern part of the country, Syla said that the Kurti government will respect the agreement as long as it is valid and that it will maintain continuous contact with KFOR.

“It is an agreement between KFOR and former President Thaci which says that the KSF is not allowed to go the north for some time. But we are in talks – Prime Minister Albin Kurti had a conversation with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg,” Syla said. He also added that the government will try to review the decision so that one day the KSF can operate throughout Kosovo’s territory.

Demiri: Looking forward to strengthening Kosovo – Israel relations (media)

Kosovo’s Charge d’Affairs to Israel, Ines Demiri, said in a Twitter post today that she was “honored to attend the swearing-in ceremony for Israel’s 11th President @Isaac_Herzog in the Knesset”. “Looking forward to the further strengthening of relations between Kosovo and Israel during his presidency. I thank @PresidentRuvi Rivlin for the sympathy he showed for Kosovo in all our meetings,” Demiri tweeted.

In Serbia and Montenegro, Srebrenica is still politically toxic (BIRN)

Serb political leaders in both Serbia and Montenegro continue to deny that the 1995 Srebrenica massacres were genocide, reject international courts’ verdicts and accuse them of anti-Serb bias, and oppose attempts to come to terms with the past.

“Srebrenica is not genocide!” chanted a group of around 20 young men in central Belgrade centre on Saturday evening as they protested against the opening of a photographic exhibition related to the Srebrenica genocide.

The protesters’ slogan actually reflects the official stance of Serbia, which is to deny that the killings of more than 7,000 Bosniak men and boys from Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995 and the expulsions of some 4,000 women, children and elderly people was genocide.

This year’s anniversary commemoration of the massacres on July 11 comes a month after the Hague war crimes court upheld the conviction of Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic for the Srebrenica genocide and other crimes.

The verdict caused Serbian politicians to reiterate their usual allegation that the Hague court is ‘anti-Serb’, while Serbian newspapers, both pro-government tabloids and ‘serious’ press, hailed Mladic as a ‘hero’ who had been subjected to an ‘injustice’.

Jovana Kolaric, a researcher at the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Centre, argued that glorifying Mladic is another way to deny the crimes for which he was held responsible.

“Calling Mladic a hero is another strategy of denial that serves to avoid talking about the crimes that were committed, following the logic that if someone is a hero, then he certainly did not commit crimes, and so the crimes did not exist,” Kolaric said.

Politicians and the tabloid media also used Mladic as a symbol of the alleged victimisation of Serbs.

“The defence of Mladic becomes the defence of national identity, and it is always a significant resource for the homogenisation and political mobilisation of society on an everyday political level,” Kolaric explained.

Serbian historian Marijana Toma said that a “state policy of denial” of the Srebrenica genocide was instituted under previous governments, but “gained in strength with [Aleksandar] Vucic and [Ivica] Dacic’s arrival in power together” in 2012.

Toma said that the Serbian public was briefly unsettled by a video of Serbian fighters from the Scorpions unit executing Bosniaks from Srebrenica that was shown in 2005 at Slobodan Milosevic’s trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY, but then the authorities’ denial effort entered another phase.

“The short-lived shock of the footage of the shooting of six Bosniak men and boys by a Serbian unit, the Scorpions, was followed by a period of interpretive denial, which focused Serbia’s entire institutional mechanism on just two issues – challenging Srebrenica’s legal qualification as genocide, despite the growing number of verdicts that began to come from the ICTY, but also breaking the link between Serbia and the genocide in Srebrenica,” she explained.

Serbian officials have often repeated that Srebrenica was a “serious crime” but not genocide.

The Scorpions case was tried in a Serbian court as a war crime, not genocide. Another case that is currently ongoing in Belgrade – the much-delayed trial of eight Bosnian Serb ex-policemen accused of involvement in the massacre of 1,313 Bosniaks from Srebrenica – is also being tried as a war crime.

Kolaric explained that officials “consciously avoid the use of the word genocide when talking about Srebrenica”, seeing it as an attack on the nation and “an attempt to make Serbs [look like] a genocidal people”.

The issue remains highly problematic in Serbia “precisely because there is no readiness to face up to the responsibility of our own society for what happened, not only with the genocide in Srebrenica, but also with other crimes committed during the wars”, she argued.

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