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In the last four years alone, Serbian authorities
have purged more than 4,000 Albanians from the Civil Registry in the
municipality of Medvegja in southern Serbia. Planned by the highest
political circles and executed by the Serbian Ministry of Interior
(MUP), the removal of Albanians from the Civil Registry is
precipitating a major humanitarian and political crisis in the
Presevo Valley, a predominantly Albanian region along the border
with Kosovo.
This removal is systematic, politically motivated,
and accomplished by abusing the Law on the Residence of Citizens,
which Serbia adopted in 2011. Known also as the “passivization of
residential addresses,” this discriminatory measure is
disproportionally applied against the Albanian minority in Serbia,
particularly in the three municipalities where Albanians vastly
outnumber ethnic Serbs.
All the data and facts on the ground suggest that
this discriminatory measure is motivated by a Serbian political
desire to establish ethnic homogeneity within their borders. By
claiming to “check” the validity of the permanent residences of
Albanian citizens, Serbian state authorities are effectively
deactivating their permanent addresses. In so doing, they strip them
of their basic civic rights of citizenship and turn them into
stateless people. This is an unheard form of discrimination in
Europe today.
When an Albanian’s permanent residential address
is “passivized” and removed from the Civil Registry in Serbia, that
person has de facto ceased to exist. They cannot renew an expired ID
card or passport, register a car, access medical services or social
assistance, buy or sell property, or vote in local or general
elections.
These are the personal stories of the more than
4,000 Albanians from Medvegja and the 1,000 Albanians from Bujanoc
whose lives have been paralyzed through the practice of
“passivization of addresses.”
But why would Serbia “passivize” residential
addresses of the Albanians in the Presevo Valley en masse in recent
years? And why have Tirana and Pristina yet to officially condemn
Serbia’s campaign directed against Albanians in the Presevo Valley?
The Case of Medvegja: The Visions of
Ethnically Pure Territories Still Popular in Serbia
Located only 65 kilometers northeast of Pristina,
the capital city of Kosovo, Medvegja is not a municipality that
often comes up in the context of Albanian-Serbian relations. Before
the idea of a ‘land swap’ and the announcement of ‘painful
compromises,’ which the incumbent president of Kosovo made in 2018,
the situation of Albanians in Serbia had been strikingly below the
radar of the Western Balkan politics over the past 20 years.
However, in order to understand how little Belgrade’s policies have
changed towards Albanians – that is, how little Vucic’s Serbia of
the 1990s differs from Vucic’s Serbia in 2020 – policymakers and
human rights activists only have to look at the municipality of
Medvegja.
At the end of the war in Kosovo, there were still
over 100,000 Albanians that remained in Serbia (outside Kosovo). As
one of the largest autochthonous minorities in Serbia, the Albanians
of Medvegja, Bujanoc, and Presheva had endured years of
discrimination and political persecution at the hands of the
Government of Serbia and Yugoslavia. With the cessation of the armed
hostilities in Kosovo, however, the violence and systemic
discrimination against ethnic Albanians soared at an unprecedented
rate. In 1999, anger over the loss of Kosovo was pronounced in
Serbia, and Albanian citizens living in the Presevo Valley were
frequently targeted for revenge. Several human rights organizations
in Serbia have shown that most of these Albanian citizens were never
able to testify about the grave human rights violations and
political repression directed against them. Courts at all levels in
Serbia often closed these cases before reviewing them, and Serbian
politicians and media outlets openly perpetuated anti-Albanian
sentiments.
While the position of Albanians of Medvegja has
always been difficult, life has become almost impossible in recent
years. The reason is the discriminatory practice called
“passivization of residential addresses.”
How is Serbia Depopulating Albanians in
Medvegja?
In November 2011, Serbia adopted the Law on
Residence of the Citizens. Serbian political circles as well as
international diplomats in Belgrade welcomed the passage of this
law, stressing that, among other things, the law would help to clean
up the voter lists. They enthusiastically insisted that the law
would prevent vote rigging and Serbian democracy would be
strengthened. Little did these international diplomats know that
this very law would be turned into a mechanism to remove the
Albanians from the Presevo Valley.
According to the Law on Residence of the Citizens
in Serbia, Article 18 gives legal grounds to the Serbian Ministry of
Interior to perform checks on whether a citizen lives at an
officially given address as a permanent residence. The law is
somewhat vague about the justification for performing checks on
permanent residence, but it is absolutely clear about the
consequences if the citizen fails to prove that he or she lives at
the registered address. The police officers’ visits to verify the
residential addresses are typically unannounced, and if they
conclude upon such visits that the citizen no longer lives there,
they automatically “passivize” that address.
As an Albanian citizen, you can be undergoing
treatment at a hospital somewhere in Serbia, or studying at a
university in Kosovo, or you may simply happen to be picking up your
child from school— all these facts do not carry weight for the
Serbian Ministry of Interior. If the citizen is not “encountered” at
the address (which is the official term and counts as a fact), the
decision is reached that the Albanian citizen no longer lives at the
given permanent address.
Once the permanent address is “passivized,” this
information is then transmitted to the Civil Registry which marks
“passivized” Albanian citizens as no longer living in Serbia. The
Civil Registry then passes on this information to the Electoral
Commission of the Republic of Serbia, an institution that is
responsible for generating electoral lists, which finally purges all
“passivized Albanians” from the electoral lists. With this step, the
process of turning native Albanian citizens into de facto foreign
citizens in their own hometowns is completed. Serbian state
authorities disenfranchised over 4,000 Albanians in Medvegja between
2015 and 2019 using this method, even though these Albanians were in
possession of valid personal IDs and could prove that they were
living in Medvegja.
How is Serbia Getting Away with Depopulating
Albanians from the Presevo Valley?
The cardinal problem with the “passivization of
permanent addresses” is that no written decision is issued to prove
that an Albanian’s address has been deactivated. In most cases,
especially in the past four years, this information is only given
orally to the Albanian citizens in Medvegja, Bujanoc, and
increasingly in Presheva. According to the citizens’ accounts, they
are no longer able to appeal against the decision, nor are they
being issued personal IDs or passports. When they approach the
Serbian Ministry of Interior for answers, the reply is often “we do
not feel obliged to give you any information” and “these are orders
from above.”
According to some Albanian citizens, in several
cases the Serbian Ministry of Interior did not even perform checks
to verify the validity of their permanent addresses. In other words,
the authorities “passivized” their permanent addresses without due
process of law and by fabricating facts. The results of a recent
survey conducted with Albanians from the municipality of Medvegja
confirm this. Many of them stated that they learned that they were
“passivized” without warning, usually when they went to the doctor,
when they went to renew their expired personal ID or passport, or
when they went to pay property taxes.
The non-issuance of written decisions documenting
the “passivization” of permanent addresses is not a coincidence. It
intends to prevent Albanians from initiating legal proceedings
against Serbia for gross violations of their rights and systematic
discrimination against them on ethnic grounds. It is well known that
the courts in Serbia have a consistent record in cases where
minority communities sue the Serbian state: they almost always favor
Serbian official state policy, and the most common reason they give
for ruling against minority groups is a lack of sufficient evidence.
This desperate situation has pushed Albanians in the Presevo Valley
to take up temporary residence in Belgrade or Novi Sad just to be
able to register their car or get a new passport. Unlike the
municipalities where they were born, in Novi Sad and Belgrade they
receive new personal and travel documents without any problems. This
all indicates that “passivization” of permanent addresses is
widespread and limited to the three municipalities where Albanians
constitute an overwhelming majority population.
One standard answer that Serbian state authorities
like to give is that “passivization” of Albanians is justified as
most of them no longer live in Medvegja. They have moved to Kosovo,
they conveniently maintain, without providing further details.
However, this is hardly an argument and details are everything.
First, Albanians in Medvegja have to spend part of their time in
Kosovo because they can only obtain primary and secondary education
in Albanian language in their home municipality. If they have to
choose between studying in Belgrade or Pristina, many of them will
naturally gravitate towards Pristina. This is a matter of language
as much as a need to study in a safe environment. Are they being
punished for the right to pursue higher education in Kosovo?
Second, Serbian state authorities like to maintain
that some Albanians moved to work abroad and their addresses have
been therefore “passivized.” But aren’t the Serbs of Medvegja also
working on a temporary basis across Europe? Why aren’t their
permanent addresses being deactivated? The voter list clearly
reveals this double standard: Serbs from Medvegja studying elsewhere
in Serbia or working abroad do not get their permanent addresses
“passivized,” nor are they being deleted from the voter lists – but
Albanians are, en masse.
Political Consequences of the Depopulation
of Albanians from Presevo Valley?
Discrimination through the “passivization” of
permanent residential addresses has been fatal for the Albanian
community in Medvegja and is causing a deep humanitarian and
political crisis. More and more “passivized” people with health
conditions such as cancer are being denied treatment at health
facilities even though they have valid IDs and health insurance.
Furthermore, citizens whose ID cards or passports expire are no
longer able to renew them. The sense of personal insecurity is felt
in all realms of life.
Since September 2019, Albanians in Medvegja are no
longer part of the local government due to the “passivization” of
their permanent residential addresses. In the last local elections,
they won only three seats in the municipal assembly as the direct
result of “passiviation” policies.
In terms of political representation, the vision
to establish an ethnically pure Serbian municipality in Medvegje
materialized in September 2019. Even in the previous municipal
elections four years earlier, some prominent Serbian politicians
spoke about such visions without reservation. For instance,
following the 2015 election results, Nebojsa Stefanovic, Serbia’s
Minister of Interior and the deputy leader of Aleksandar Vucic’s
party (The Serbian Progressive Party), declared triumphantly: “This
election result proves that Medvegja is a Serbian municipality” and
“efforts to bring Albanians with buses and without valid documents
from Kosovo to vote in Medvegja were stopped.” The truth was that
Albanian citizens had valid documents but their right to vote was
taken away through the “passivization” of their permanent addresses.
Despite this systematic discrimination of
Albanians in Medvegja and the Presevo Valley, neither Pristina nor
Tirana have issued official statements about the ongoing
discrimination directed against Albanians in the region.
Under the condition of anonymity, some
well-informed international diplomats have stated that this may be
part of the plan for a “land swap” between Kosovo and Serbia, where
parts of the Presevo Valley join Kosovo and parts of northern Kosovo
join Serbia. They maintain that Medvegja was never part of the
secret plan for “land swap” even though the incumbent President of
Kosovo and his political allies in Albania have been championing the
idea in general. Though they have been trying to convince the public
that the entire Presevo Valley would join Kosovo, the facts on the
ground show just the opposite. In any case, the incumbent President
of Kosovo and the Prime Minister of Albania have been silent about
the removal of Albanians from the region through the practice of
“passivization.”
However, they may not be silent for much longer.
The coming months and years will prove that the depopulation of the
Albanians in the Presevo Valley has been a mechanism to undermine
the statehood of Kosovo. All of this will become clear when Belgrade
and Pristina sit down to talk about property issues in the framework
of Chapter 35, the most important chapter in the negotiation for
Serbian membership in the EU, and which deals with the normalization
of relations between Kosovo and Serbia. In the meantime, the
Albanians and Serbs of Medvegja who traditionally had rather
harmonious relations, partly because they depended on each other for
economic survival, are living in an apartheid-like reality.
Dr. Flora Ferati-Sachsenmaier is a Research
Fellow at the Max Plank Institute
for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.
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