Kosovo government minister Dalibor Jevtic says Serbs and Albanians need to build trust - and that Kosovo Serb children should learn the Albanian language to ensure better communication for the future.

“The key word today in Kosovo is trust, which has to be built both between the two communities and towards [state] institutions,” Dalibor Jevtic, the Minister for Communities and Returns in the Kosovo government, told BIRN in an interview.

“Knowledge of Albanian is a necessity for the Serb community. Most of the middle-aged and older generation of Albanians know Serbian, which is not the case with the Serb population, and this has to change too,” said Jevtic.

A member of the presidency of the Kosovo Serb political party Srpska Lista (Serbian List), which is supported by Belgrade, Jevtic has served as a minister in three Kosovo governments, said that both his professional and personal experience has taught him to always put the lives of ordinary people before politics.

“This policy of life before politics hasproved itself to be very fruitful, as over the past several years we haven’t seen any incidents with a lethal outcome between the Albanian and Serb communities,” he said.

“And if we push some more in this direction, overcome stereotypes, and let go of the past in order to make the future better, life will triumph in Kosovo.”

‘Serbs were right to back Haradinaj’

Jevtic thinks that Srpska Lista’s decision to support the government led by Ramush Haradinaj - Kosovo’s new prime minister, a former Kosovo Liberation Army commander who was acquitted of war crimes by the Hague Tribunal in 2007 - has already shown itself to have been a good choice.

See more at: http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/kosovo-serb-minister-learning-albanian-is-necessary-12-14-2017