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On Sunday in four municipalities in the north of Kosovo – Zubin Potok, Severna Mitrovica (North Mitrovica), Zvecan and Leposavic – they will vote to decide whether to revoke the appointment of the mayors of the four municipalities, inhabited by a large majority of Serbs and where the majority of of the Serbian population of Kosovo. The fact is that these mayors are not Serbs, but Kosovar Albanians: they were elected in April last year in local elections, when the Serbian voters of these municipalities had boycotted the vote demanding greater autonomy for their community from the Kosovo government.
The Kosovar Albanian mayors had been elected with the votes of just 3.5 percent of those entitled to vote: a few hundred votes, in municipalities that have an estimated population of tens of thousands of people. When these mayors took office, Serbian residents protested and there were clashes between them and the Kosovar police, in which several people were injured. One of them, Lulzim Hetemi, mayor of Leposavic, he had been forced to sleep for months in his office for security reasons, with the protection of NATO soldiers and the Kosovar special police. In the following months, the situation led to further clashes, which culminated in the killing of a Kosovar policeman in the city of Banjska.
Members of the Kosovo Police Special Forces guard the municipal offices of Zvecan, after ethnic Serb protesters tried to prevent the newly elected ethnic Albanian mayor from entering the office, May 27, 2023 (REUTERS/Ognen Teofilovski)
Kosovo had been a province of Yugoslavia (and therefore of Serbia) before declaring independence in 2008. Serbia has never recognized Kosovo’s independence and has also always opposed its entry into international organizations. In recent weeks, for example, many European countries had expressed themselves in favor of Kosovo’s entry into the Council of Europe (the main organization for the defense of human rights in Europe, which has nothing to do with the European Union); the Serbian government had protested and threatened to leave the organization if Kosovo became a member state.
Kosovar Serbs make up about 10 percent of Kosovo’s population. They never wanted to integrate into the rest of the country and have always remained very tied to the Serbian government, even materially: public services (such as schools, post offices and hospitals) and subsidies for the communities of northern Kosovo are all paid for by Serbia . On the other hand, the Kosovo government has always refused the request to grant greater autonomy to the Serbian municipalities in the north, as well as to form an autonomous community that would guarantee it, for fear of no longer being able to exercise its full sovereignty over this territory.
Sunday’s vote came about because in January the Serbs of the four Kosovar municipalities had organized themselves to collect signatures and ask to vote to remove the mayors. In fact, Kosovar law provides that it is possible if at least 20 percent of registered voters request it.
The main Serbian party in northern Kosovo, Serbian List (Srpska Lista), had not officially organized the petition, but its most important members had supported it. The signature collection was a success: the petition had collected the necessary signatures in just two days. Lista Serbia is very influential in northern Kosovo – in the 2021 local elections the party obtained between 97 percent and 81 percent of the preferences in these municipalities – and such participation in the signature collection would not have been possible without its support.
Last April 7, however, Lista Serba suddenly changed its mind and announced that it would also boycott Sunday’s vote, making it particularly difficult to reach the quorum required by law and very likely that the four mayors will remain in their positions. The reasons are not clear but several hypotheses have been made.
For the vote to be considered valid, more than half of the registered voters must participate. According to Senad Šabović, a Kosovar political analyst who works for the European Institute for Peace, it is possible that the leaders of Lista Serbia thought that it was too difficult to achieve this result: the electoral lists are not updated, and in recent years many people who previously lived in these areas of Kosovo and emigrated.
The recent discussion on Kosovo’s entry into the Council of Europe may have had an influence. Serbian List is in fact supported by the Serbian government, and the refusal to participate in Sunday’s vote is probably also a way for Serbia to make more difficult the efforts made by the international community, in particular by some European countries, to improve relations between Serbia and Kosovo. Boycotting the vote will increase tension between the two communities, a strategy that the Serbian government has used several times in the past to increase its negotiating leverage with the European Union.
Lista Serbia also called on Kosovo Serbs to boycott the population census, which the government began in April.
Miodrag Miličević, Kosovar Serb and director of the non-governmental organization Aktiva of Mitrovica North, says that in the last three years “the situation of the Serbian community has worsened a lot and that is why many have chosen to emigrate”. Over the past year, Miličević explained, many incidents have deteriorated safety for residents. Not only had the installation of the four Kosovar Albanian mayors caused clashes and injuries, but in the spring of 2023 the Kosovar police had also increased their presence in northern Kosovo. In response, the president of Serbia, the nationalist Aleksandar Vučić, had mobilized the army to the border.
Kosovo Serb people protest against the ban on the use of dinar, Mitrovica, February 12, 2024 (AP Photo/Bojan Slavkovic)
In February the Kosovo government then decided to make the use of the euro mandatory throughout the entire Kosovar territory and therefore to ban the use of the Serbian dinar, which was used as the main currency in these municipalities. As a result, many people are having great difficulty earning their wages and buying the things they need.
Miličević says he is “100 percent certain” that Serbian residents will boycott the vote on Sunday. However, he also maintains that this crisis, however negative, is having some positive results on local political plurality: little by little it is in fact causing alternative Serbian parties to emerge from the Serbian List in the north.