Municipalities Bujanovac and Presevo, regardless of the ethnic Albanian population are not Crimea and any comparison of southern Serbia and new member of the Russian Federation is in the service of the Albanian aspirations to expand into new territories.
The statement of the Bujanovac Mayor, Jonuz Musliu was said with that aim. Recall, he advocated for the “drawing the parallel between events in the Crimea and the situation in Bujanovac and Presevo” and called on the Albanian referendum from 1992 when was voted for the merger of all municipalities to Kosovo and Metohija.
Office for Kosovo and Metohija was among the first to react to the initiative for the secession of the two southern Serbian municipalities: “Any of such statements may have devastating consequences on the whole territory of Serbia and opens up a host of other issues,” said Aleksandar Vulin, director of the office.
Responsibility for such outburst of Albanian politicians, who are particularly frequent in recent months, Vulin indirectly transferred to the informal group “Friends of the South Serbia,” consisting of the ambassadors of Western countries. Office for Kosovo and Metohija asked them to distance themselves from those statements and make clear who is behind the idea of disjunction Serbian state integrity.
Comparison of the Crimea and municipalities in Serbia where Albanians live is absolutely impossible, says foreign policy analyst Dusan Proroković. He perceived statement of Jonuz Musliu as a message to the Serbian authorities, in the context of positioning the Albanian issue in Bujanovac and Presevo. “These unnatural parallels should be viewed in the context of continuing talks on the future of municipalities in northern Kosovo and Metohija,” says he. Albanians are trying to over Bujanovac and Presevo absorb what will happen in the north, and what will not go in their favor.
Crimea, according to Proroković cannot be compared to Kosovo and Metohija, since these areas have completely different historical and formal- legal history. A new member of the Russian Federation may be compared only with the status which Constitution from 1974 gave to the republics of then SFRY (Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia), but not to the provinces.
