Petkovic: Pristina extremists base their ideology on the lie that Albanians did not commit crimes

Photo: Telegraf.rs

The nervousness in Pristina over the outcome of the recent meeting in Ohrid is escalating day by day and shows that political actors there are panicking, not because of the obligations facing Belgrade, but because of the obligations facing Pristina, which it has so far brazenly refused to fulfill, says the director of the Office for Kosovo and Metohija, Petar Petkovic.

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"One of those obligations is work on the formation of the Community of Serb Municipalities (ZSO), and the other, as demonstrated by today's (Wednesday's), to put it mildly, inappropriate statementmade by the president of the parliament of provisional institutions of self-government in Pristina, Glauk Konjufca, is finding out the fate of missing persons," the Office said in a statement.

"The Pristina extremists base their warped separatist ideology on the lie that Albanians did not commit any crimes or terrorist acts in Kosovo and Metohija, although indisputable facts say the exact opposite, and that is why the former leaders of the KLA are now the subject of criminal investigations and international court proceedings," the office said.

Belgrade, on the other hand, is aware of the fact that determining the fate of the missing is primarily a matter of acting humanely, not of daily politics, and we have shown absolute responsiveness and constructiveness and acted according to all the requests of the other side - which means that we investigated 23 locations in central Serbia in order to determine whether the remains of missing persons may be resting there.

Konjufca should know that, unlike Belgrade, Pristina investigated only one location, and that to this day we are waiting for our request to investigate nine more in Kosovo and Metohija to be fulfilled.

President of Serbia Aleksandar Vucic confirmed on several occasions in public messages, but also with concrete moves, that for us, finding out the fate of the missing is an important segment of the process of reconciliation and building better Serbian-Albanian relations, so all the insane accusations of Glauk Konjufca fall flat in the face of the facts.

Konjufca will prove his commitment to the process of stabilizing the situation in the region when he himself publicly calls and encourages investigations of locations that, according to well-founded suspicion, contain the remains of people killed by Albanian separatists."

As stated, Serbia's position continues to be that  determining the fate of the missing is one of the conditions for normalization of relations between Belgrade and Pristina.

"I don't want to respond to Konjufca using more explicit language, although he deserves it, because the issue of the missing is not something that decent people allow themselves to abuse for political purposes," Petkovic concluded.

(Telegraf.rs)