Safet Demiri was met with an unpleasant surprise when he tried to rebuild in August 2019 registration for business vehicles. "You're not registered here at all," the clerks told him in the municipality of Medveđa.
"I was dumbfounded," Demiri recalled in an interview with Deutsche Welle (D.W.).
As a businessman, he lives between his native Medveđa, where he has a tourist facility and a telecommunications company, and Vienna, where he runs a construction company.
But, since that summer five years ago, Demiri was suddenly no longer registered in the small town where his ancestors have lived for more than two centuries. And against his will.
According to Demiri, the municipal official just shrugged his shoulders when asked how to run the business in Medveđa now. Demiri then registered official cars in his father's name.
To date, his address has not been returned. The lawsuit before the Administrative Court in Niš did not help either. The decision states that his residence is abroad and that the deletion of the address in Medveđa was in accordance with the law.
"They unofficially told me that it was an order from above," says the 46-year-old.
Demiri is not the only one - he shares the fate of thousands of people from the so-called Preševo Valley in Serbia, which is mostly inhabited by Albanians. More and more of them complain that they were simply deleted.
The goal is to reduce the Albanian minority?
The reason is ethnicity, according to scientist Flora Ferrati-Sachsenmeier from the University of Göttingen. She herself comes from the region and early last year she wrote an analysis published by the Max Planck Institute.
She accidentally discovered the phenomenon in 2016 when she was in the region. "Every other Albanian I spoke to told me that the institutions were deleting him from the population register," Ferati told DW.
Research, he says, has shown that this is done systematically. Officially, in Serbia it is called "passivization" of the address. If it is determined that the person does not live where he was registered, then he is deleted.
But, says Ferratti, it also happens during raids - it also affects people who are on vacation or some other kind of trip. They mostly fail to recover their address. This has serious consequences in accessing public services, a new passport or health insurance.
In the study of this scientist, it is stated that the goal is to reduce the Albanian population in the south of Serbia. "While ten percent of the population is affected in the Preševo Valley, in other Serbian regions there is hardly any address passivation, and if there is, then it affects less than one percent of the residents of those municipalities."
It is especially problematic for Albanians who have been living and working in Kosovo since the 1999 war, says Enver Haziri, who heads the Kosovo office for people from the Preševo Valley.
Many such Albanians were expelled after the end of the war. They were accepted in Kosovo - but not officially registered. Many of them, having been deleted from the Serbian files, are now practically without any state and on the fringes of society.
"Although they are morally welcome, they are neither recognized as refugees nor given Kosovo citizenship," says Haziri. Only the authorities of Aljbin Kurti did something to get these people at least residence permits.
Kamberi: Just one form of discrimination
The Helsinki Committee for Human Rights called the passivation of addresses a type of "administrative ethnic cleansing."
About 60.000 Albanians live in that part of Serbia - in Presevo, Bujanovac and Medveđa.
Despite the fact that they are the majority in those municipalities and that Serbia has signed all conventions on the protection of minorities of the Council of Europe, Albanians are systematically marginalized, says Šaip Kamber, the only Albanian representative in the Serbian parliament.
He recalls that Belgrade has repeatedly committed itself to increasing the presence of the Albanian minority in the public sector and institutions.
"Passivization is just one form of discrimination," Kamberi says. "We are not integrated into public life, often potential foreign investors are prevented from investing in us." Life in that region is also made difficult by the growing militarization of the territory."
As evidence, this deputy shows a map of 48 military bases towards the border with Kosovo. Most of them are in the Presevo Valley.
Concern in Berlin
Kamberi was recently in Berlin to interest the German government and parliamentarians in this topic. The MPs he met with are worried.
When asked by DW, MP Knut Abraham said: "I demand from the EU member embassies in Belgrade to pay special attention to this situation and to conduct a dialogue with representatives of minorities."
Liberal MP Thomas Hacker also thinks that the situation of the Albanian minority in Serbia deserves more international attention. "At the moment, the focus is very much on the dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina. So, unfortunately, they fall into the trap of other, equally important topics." For Hacker, the passivation of addresses seems like a creeping disenfranchisement.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Berlin appeals to all parties to "ensure transparent and fair treatment in accordance with their obligations."
The Serbian authorities do not deny that the addresses are passivated, but exclude the possibility that it is discrimination against Albanians. At the end of last year, the then Minister for State Administration, Aleksandar Martinović, told the media that deregistering people from addresses is done in accordance with the law.
The Serbian Government did not respond to DW's inquiry until the publication of this text.
From the beginning of the story, Safet Demiri, like many other Albanians, filed a complaint with the Constitutional Court in Belgrade. They expect that it will not go well there either, and that they will go before the European Court of Human Rights.
They think they have a good chance there. But the question is whether that would also change Serbia's policy towards the Albanian minority.
