A leaden, ominous silence reigns among the Serbs in the north of Kosovo. People are confused, desperate and angry. Fear can be felt. One hears a sentence spoken many times, but now with special weight: "We are left to ourselves." The Serbian population mostly talks about the dead - who was killed, will the Albanian media report that another body was found in the forest or will it be heard that someone succumbed to injuries in the hospital in Novi Pazar. It is not clear to them why all this happened, because they have the most damage.
"For months, they warned about repression coming from Pristina. And until a few days ago, the blame for the situation was on the Kosovo side, on Kurti, and now the Serbs in Kosovo have had all their arguments knocked out of their hands. Pristina got the proof they needed that everything they said in the previous months was true," explains Sanja Sovrlić, a journalist from N1, born and raised in Kosovo.
The members of the armed Serbian group who participated in the armed conflict with the Kosovo police were from the north of Kosovo - two of the dead were from Leposavic, one from Zvečani. Locals describe them mostly as family people, they are surprised that some of them were part of an armed group.
"What were they like? Well, like us", says one of the attendees. They point out that the dominant view is that these people were abused and manipulated.
"I'm thinking about those graffiti 'When the army returns to Kosovo', about how that narrative was nurtured from all sides," says Sovrlić and continues, "and that's why, first of all, the problem is not only those who believed in it, but in those who convinced them to believe in it, who persistently fueled their hopes, assured them that they were doing the right thing if they picked up their guns."
Indeed, who is behind the armed Serbian group in Banjska...?
Read on full text by Filip Švarm and Jelena Jorgacevic in the weekly "Vreme" from Thursday (September 28)
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