More than 220,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) from Kosovo share the fate of refugees and cannot return to their own homes, the Serbian government’s Office for Kosovo-Metohija (KiM) said in a release on Saturday.

The Office said on the occasion of International Refugee Day, marked on June 20, that no sustainable conditions for the return of IDPs to Kosovo had been created yet despite the fact that the majority of those people wanted to return to their homes.

Less than five per cent of the total number of IDPs has returned to the southern Serbian province, so that we still have the numbers of 203,000 IDPs living in other parts of Serbia and about 18,000 of them in Kosovo.

The main reason for such a situation lies primarily in an inconsistent implementation of the part of UN Security Council Resolution 1244 related to ensuring the safe return of all refugees and displaced persons to their homes in Kosovo, the release said.