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Commentary: The Park (Vecernje Novosti)

As soon as Serbs removed the concrete barricades above the Ibar/Ibër River, three years after they erected them, and built the ‘Park of Peace’, Albanians have jumped into the ‘street war’ against the decorative conifers because they can’t remain indifferent toward such ‘provocation’. In a famous sketch of the Sarajevo’s ‘Surrealists’ (humorous program broadcasted in former Yugoslavia) in late eighties, the news anchor Dr. Karajlic dramatically reported that situation in the state is alarming since there is a huge danger from the eruption of peace. He warned watchers that there are people walking around armed with flowers and that police had already confiscated bigger amounts of roses, gerberas and carnations. That prophetic hyperbole was brought back to our memories by protests of Kosovo Albanians, who dressed in shirts of ‘the Kosovo Army’ and the KLA, with poles, rocks and flags of Albania stormed pots with planted firs at the bridge, which divides northern and southern Kosovska Mitrovica. Hence, on that very day, eyes of the bystanders in the north were burning the most. Serbs remember the March 1981, when Albanians’ protests erupted in students dormitories in Pristina due to alleged poor quality of food, which turned into the requests for Kosovo to become the republic. That was a symbolic prelude to the brake-up of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). Serbs remember the March 2004, when three Albanian boys have drowned in Ibar/Ibër River. The KLA movie directors used that situation to ethnically clean six towns, nine villages and destroy 35 Serbian shrines. What awaits Serbs after the surrealistic storm on the ‘Park of Peace’ and protests staged under the neo-Nazist’s slogan ‘Either you, or us’?

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