BELGRADE -- Marko Djuric has rejected as false the claims that the government is considering "accepting the loss of Trepca in exchange for compensation."

The Belgrade-based daily Danas wrote, quoting anonymous sources and running the piece under the headline, "Serbia expects compensation for Trepca," that the dispute over the mining complex "will most likely be solved through compensation - money, or some other way."

"Serbia does not trade with assets on which depends the survival of Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija! The government of the Republic of Serbia painstakingly and successfully, despite all the difficulties, struggles to protect what is ours," said the head of the Office for Kosovo.

"I do not believe in coincidences, so I do not believe that the false claim that the Serbian government considered accepting losing Trepca in exchange for some sort of compensation is random, either," he said in a statement.

Djuric said that "the claims of anonymous sources - even if indeed made in Belgrade, rather than in Pristina - damage our position in the public and contribute to the confusion, in a situation that that is too serious for amateurism, superficiality and speculation."

"Instead fishing in troubled waters in cabinets in Belgrade and Pristina, someone should actually go to the north of Kosovo, to the tunnels of Crnac and Belo Brdo, to see 3,300 miners who every morning go down into the pits to make hard earned money to feed their families - and ask them who Trepca belongs to, and what they think about the planted the idea of ​​receiving compensation for what is our lifeblood in northern Kosovo," Djuric said in his reaction.