Avni Islami: Serbia continues to minimize war crimes in Kosovo

Avni Islami, a security analyst, has responded to the statement of what he calls the Office for Kosovo in the Serbian Government, accusing Belgrade of continuing efforts to relativize the crimes committed during the war in Kosovo.

In a Facebook post, Islami wrote that this so-called office commemorates Serbian civilians killed in the Rahovec area in 1999, but never mentions the Albanian civilians who were massacred by Serbia as a result of the genocidal campaign against Albanians that year.

He added that this statement comes just days after a minister of the Serbian Government openly declared that, had she been in power in 1998, she would have carried out ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo.

Islami stressed that in Serbia’s strategy, the main goal remains the relativization of crimes, ethnic cleansing, and the genocidal campaign carried out against Kosovo Albanians during the 1999 war and earlier. He recalled that although Serbia has a War Crimes Prosecutor’s Office and a War Crimes Department in the High Court in Belgrade, so far no person involved in these macabre crimes has been sentenced to serve time in Serbian prisons. According to him, this is another attempt by the Serbian regime to relativize the crimes that culminated in 1999.