The Quiet Persecution of Serbs in Kosovo: Clinics Closed, Stations Seized, Directors Jailed, and No Help in Sight

While the public in Serbia busies itself with all manner of things, a quiet but systematic persecution of the Serb people is under way in Kosovo and Metohija. Ahead of the snap elections set for 7 June, Pristina has intensified its assault on everything that bears a Serbian name, on the clinics where people see a doctor, on schools, on railway stations, on daily life itself. And the state’s response amounts to statements, while in the media one can barely find a line about it.

First they took the dinar from the Serbs, then the licence plates, then the Post of Serbia, the municipal offices, the tax and social services, and over the past year the branches of the pension and health funds. When it seemed there was nothing left to take, they came for the clinics too. In late May, Kosovo police, with an inspection team from Pristina, sealed a Serb clinic in Obilic, supposedly because it operates without a permit from the Kosovo ministry. A few weeks earlier, on Good Friday itself, two Serb clinics in the villages of Banje and Suvo Grlo near Srbica were shut down, and signs reading Republic of Serbia were torn from the walls.

What did they take, and whom did they arrest?

The assault did not stop at health care. On the first day of the election campaign, Kosovo police with special units seized four Serbian Railways stations, in Zvecan, Leposavic, Lesak and Ibarska Slatina. Cyrillic signs were torn down and replaced with Kosovo flags and Latin-script labels. In mid-May, on orders from Pristina, several directors of Serb health centres and primary schools from Gracanica and Lipljan were arrested, between five and seven of them, on the invented charge of pressuring voters.

And then the worst of it, the beatings. In early May, at the health centre in Gusterica, a group of young men beat Miroslav Gudzic after he took refuge in the clinic, while a cleaner who tried to defend him was also injured. A few months earlier, in Leposavic, police beat an eighteen-year-old for half an hour simply because he wore a shirt saying that Kosovo is Serbia.

Where is the state, and why the silence?

The Office for Kosovo and Metohija called the raids a bandit attack, and the president said hard days await the Serbs but that the state will help them. These are all words. On the ground, a Serb left without a clinic, or waiting for his director to return from detention, has no one to turn to, because no concrete protection follows a condemnation on paper.

It hurts just as much that almost no one talks about this. Events that in any normal country would be front-page news pass here as a passing item, if they are mentioned at all. Kosovo’s Serbs are used to being left alone, and the hardest part of that solitude is the silence of those who ought to raise their voice. Before the last Serb institution in Kosovo is shut down, will anyone finally respond with something more than a statement?