BELGRADE – Head of the Serbian government’s Office for Kosovo-Metohija (KiM) Marko Djuric said Monday that a task force composed of representatives of relevant local and international institutions would be set up to deal with the issue of returns of internally displaced persons (IDPs) to Serbia’s southern province.
Djuric discussed the problem of IDPs from KiM with representatives of the OSCE, UNHCR, the United Nations Office in Belgrade, Office of the Personal Representative of the High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy of the European Union, the Serbian Commissariat for Refugees and the Serbian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
We agreed to set up a task force that would meet regularly, jointly set objectives for IDPs’s return and monitor their progress,” Djuric told reporters.
The participants in the meeting agreed that the return of displaced persons to KiM had so far been only symbolic and real measures were needed to enable and encourage the return of displaced persons, he said.
Djuric said that 250,000 Serbs and Roma were displaced during the 1999 armed conflict in Kosovo-Metohija, and only 10 percent of them had returned to their homes.
“We have to join efforts because there is no other way we can ensure a large number of returns to Kosovo-Metohija,” said Djuric.
Head of the UNHCR Mission to Serbia Eduardo Arboleda welcomed the initiative to establish the task force and said that the organization itself was often dealing with the IDPs’ returns issue on its own.
It is necessary to get all the relevant actors involved in this process, primarily because returns to Kosovo require financial resources, political will and resolution of security issues, said Arboleda.
He expressed the hope that the task force would come up with a plan that would enable internally displaced persons to choose between returning to Kosovo and staying where they are displaced.
Dalibor Jevtic, representative from the provisional institutions of Pristina in charge of communities and returns said that today’s meeting was a big step towards resolving the issue of internally displaced persons.
“We have a lot of challenges, primarily in terms of economy, and also security. Recent attacks on returnees’ property, primarily in the region of the municipality of Klina in Metohija, are a cause for concern,” Jevtic said, stressing that attacks on property directly threaten the process of returns.
He pointed to an incident of unknown perpetrators wrote threatening graffiti messages on facilities of the Serbian Orthodox Decani monastery on Sunday and said it was particularly worrying.
A message, saying “ISIS – Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Caliphate is coming,” and acronyms KLA and ANA, standing for the former paramilitary ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army and the Albanian National Army, respectively, were discovered on some of the buildings inside the compound of this medieval monastery protected by UNESCO.
The graffiti were sprayed on buildings situated 300-500m away from the monastery church.
The messages are causing great concern in the Serb community in Kosovo, Jevtic said, cautioning that if nothing is done to prevent Islamist terrorism and radicalism from spreading, it could become a serious problem in Kosovo.
