Kosovo crisis part of Milosevic's blueprint, say Kosovo politicians

Oct 10, 2011, 10:30 GMT

Pristina/Belgrade - Ethnic Serbs in the tense region of northern Kosovo are following a strategy of hostility drawn up by the late former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s and kept alive by Belgrade, Kosovo politicians said in statements published Monday.

'Northern Kosovo has retained the mentality and the strategy that has characterized Milosevic's regime,' Rada Trajkovic, a parliamentarian and one of the few ethnic Serbs taking part in Kosovo institutions, told Radio Free Europe.

Most Serbs in Kosovo are hostile to institutions in Pristina that are dominated by the ethnic Albanian majority. With the support of Belgrade, Serbs in Kosovo's northern enclave are resisting this authority.

'Milosevic's regime has failed and I am afraid that (the Serbs in the north) are also going to fail, but that should not be the case with those (Serbs) who do not follow that policy,' Trajkovic said.

Ethnic Albanians make up 90 per cent of Kosovo's around 2 million inhabitants.

Azem Vlassi, a high-ranking Kosovo official who clashed with Milosevic's regime in the final years of the former Yugoslavia, accused Belgrade of maintaining the same 'absurd and tragic' course as before.

Vlassi said 'Milosevic's policies were violent, harsh, without any thought and they led him to The Hague,' where he died in 2006 while on trial for war crimes at a United Nations tribunal.

'And still those in power in Serbia, when it comes to Kosovo, they still do not know what they are doing or what they are talking about,' he wrote in an editorial for the Serbian daily Dnevnik.

The European Union recently warned that it would not allow Serbia to move closer to membership as long as Belgrade continues meddling in northern Kosovo, where tensions have flared into violence several times since July.

Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008 and was immediately recognized by leading Western powers, but Belgrade continues to fight the secession of its former province.

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