
The current situation in Kosovo is a phase that can be called a security crisis and it is coming to an end, Dusan Janjic, President of the Forum for Ethnic Relations, told FoNet. Janjic believes that the crisis has reached its peak and that the last politician has realised that armed clashes are possible.
Barricades were just one tool in the management conflict and the policy of reciprocity that both Belgrade and Pristina, as well as Vucic and Kurti, were “caught up” in, Janjic said.
The timing of their introduction was not appropriate, he stressed, and their counter-effect was also evident.
It is usual that behind the barricades of armed people there is always someone who organises them, and this is usually the political parties, Janjic recalled, assessing that in this case the state of Serbia joined in, “as it was in the 1990s”.
He stressed that barricades as a means of struggle require total control and pointed out that the current barricades do not have the general support of the citizens, which in such cases must exist not only in the north of Kosovo, but also in Serbia. .
According to him, the barricades were carried out and agreed “in a narrow circle” and are aimed at “uninformed citizens who have already been mistreated by the crisis”.
The problem is controlling those who would abuse the barricades, he said, noting that the biggest risk here is not people from the north of Kosovo and those controlled by Belgrade, but those who are not controlled by anyone, because of the context of the Ukrainian war.
“Nobody would be happier than Putin if we were playing and shooting in the north (of Kosovo). “There was shooting, but that was already the stage when we were negotiating what to do with the barricades,” said Janjić.
What the media interpreted as “a rattling of weapons, a story about special forces and howitzers”, he himself sees as “a mechanism of preparation for the removal of the barricades”.
In his view, there are “only negotiations ahead”, because the barricades were put up by a unilateral decision, in reciprocity for Pristina’s actions.
Those negotiations will first have to be about the consequences of the barricades, about the return of the Serbian list and the restoration of the legality and legitimacy of Kosovo’s institutions among the Serbs, and only then will the “famous talks” about the future and status in the United Nations follow, Janjić said.
He pointed out that the Kosovo crisis is specific, that it is a “spiral” and that its essence is status, but that this crisis is “spreading and rising”, which is why status cannot be reached./N1/