Irene Savio
Journalist
In suit and tie, a parliamentarian observes with disapproval a colleague from the governmental Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK) and then turns his eyes to look a fellow party member. Watching the scene closely, nothing makes one foretell unexpected events; it looks like a modest political meeting, on a day to discuss matters that ignite the spirit. However, suddenly, the parliamentarian chamber is filled with a thick greyish smoke and the alarm goes off to evacuate the building, while about ten photographers wearing gas masks click their cameras with euphoria and the rest run towards the exit doors. The smoke is tear gas and this is not the first time. Quite the opposite. This is the everyday life in Kosovo’s Parliament, the one of tear gases.
The tear gas has been thrown, as a protest, by representatives of the United Opposition, the coalition under which three non-governmental parties have been acting, since December 2014. These parties are: the biggest party of the opposition, Vetevendosje (self-determination, in English), the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo (AAK) and Initiative for Kosovo (Nisma). This is the tenth time that this scene takes place since their singular protest started halfway through September. In some case, they also threw eggs, pepper spray and bottles of water while a choir was expressing their rage with piercing metal whistles. Street protests were more serious at the end of November in Pristina, the capital, and the police responded arresting ten politicians from the opposition accusing them of throwing tear gases. Meanwhile, on 7 December, a dark shooting took place in a village of Serbian majority, Gorazdevac, and a monument in memory of the Serbian victims of the conflict of 1998-99, was damaged according to the OSCE.
Therefore, many have started wondering something both simple and complex: What is happening in Kosovo?
The official version of the Government says that the reason for these protests is the fact that the United Opposition, against Kosovo’s Prime Minister, Isa Mustafa –also member of the PDK and the one who succeeded the more controversial Hashin Thaci in 2014-, refuses, because of its pan-Albanian ideology, to normalize the relationship between Serbia and Kosovo. And that it does it through illegal measures and in an attempt to capitalize, with electoral purposes, the bad mood of the Albanian majority that lives in Kosovo. However, according to members of the opposition, the protest is indeed particular and extreme, but this is due to the fact that the opposition “has no alternatives” to stop the Government’s plans, who tries to normalize its relationship with Serbia “at all costs”, according to Arber Zaimi, one of the advisors of the deputy Albin Kurti, founder of Vetevendosje. That is the reason why the opposition has chosen the tear gas strategy to prevent Parliament from working and the reason why it has promoted a petition for -1.8 million inhabitants, according to the last census- new elections to be held or for a referendum on the matter to take place, which was finally signed by 250,000 people, but which had no effect.
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The process to normalize the relations between Pristina and Belgrade unleashes tension in Parliament
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Three agreements have been the cause of the scandal. These have been forced by the European Union (EU) and signed by Kosovo and Serbia on 25 August: agreements on energy, telecommunications and to establish a community of Serbian municipalities in the north of Kosovo. The latter is what, in particular, has provoked the anger of Kosovo’s opposition; this, despite the euphoria felt by Federica Mogherini, the head of the European diplomacy, who, in August, considered the agreements to be “a milestone” in the Serbian-Kosovan normalization process, which started in 2013 with the first historic agreement to reconcile the relationship between Serbia and Kosovo.
This is “a turning point in the agenda of dialogue”, a significantly optimistic Mogherini affirmed, which was followed by the approval of a fourth agreement establishing the freedom of circulation in the bridge of the divided Mitrovica, a city in the north of Kosovo, of Serbian majority and considered to be one of the last strongholds of ethnic tension in the Balkans. There, where just in June 2014, new violent confrontations took place and several people were injured.
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