ČTK 3 April 2014
Belgrade, April 2 (CTK) – The idea to build up the independent Kosovo armed forces would mean to again arm the members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) that committed terrorist acts, Czech President Zeman said during his visit to Serbia Wednesday.
Some countries do not recognise Kosovo’s independence which this Serbian province declared unilaterally in February 2008.
Zeman has long been opposed to Kosovo’s independence.
The commitment to dissolve the UCK was included in the peace treaties after the end of the conflict between Serbs and Albanians, Zeman recalled.
The government in Pristina announced the plan to create an independent miliary in early March. It should consist of 5000 soldiers in active service and 3000 reservists. Serbia disagrees with it.
“With regard for the Kosovo Liberation Army committing a number of terrorist acts during the Yugoslav war, I would rather fear an independent Kosovo army that would be nothing but the armed UCK,” Zeman told Czech reporters.
The UCK was fighting for Kosovo’s independence from Serbia in 1998-1999. It was dissolved later after the U.N. Security Council’s resolution 1244 was approved in 1999.
“Let us realise that the UCK’s dissolution was part of the respective peace treaties. And now you would actually restore it,” Zeman said.
Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic, whom Zeman met on Tuesday, said his Czech counterpart had understanding for Belgrade’s resistance to the formation of an army in the country with which Serbs were at war at at the end of the 1990s and whose independence they do not recognise.
“In my opinion, Kosovo, which many countries have not recognised, is a very strange country, to put it mildly. A country with a strong influence of drug mafias,” Zeman said.
He expressed his negative stance on Kosovo by not appointing a Czech ambassador to it, similar to his predecessor in the post, Vaclav Klaus.
In reaction to the plan to form the Kosovo military, Serbia demanded that a U.N. Security Council’s meeting be convoked. Belgrade claims that the plan is at variance with the U.N. resolution.
The Koha ditore Kosovo paper has written that the Kosovo military should consist of the existing security forces and be fully operable by 2019.
Zeman also reminded of a suspicion of human organ trafficking that the UCK allegedly committed. This accusation surfaced in 2008.
Investigator Dick Marty highlighted it in his report for the Council of Europe (EC) in 2010 in which he accused the UCK of taking organs from Serbian captives as well as Kosovo Albanians who disagreed with the UCK’s practices, during the war.
Kosovo PM Hashim Thaci was allegedly entangled in the organ thefts.
