[ALBSA-Info] Koha Ditore Surroi - All Losers in Mitrovica Crisis

[Iris Pilika]

 KOHA DITORE - Feb 10

SURROI: ALL LOSERS IN MITROVICA CRISIS

Koha Ditore on page three carried an editorial by Veton Surroi, the
paper's publisher, focused on the Mitrovica issue and challenges this
problem continues to pose to the  international community and Kosovars.
Surroi wrote inter alia: "This is how it is today, and if it keeps on
going like this, everybody will come out of this crisis as losers.
Albanians, because they will be victimized in northern Mitrovica; they
will be radicalized to find an answer to violence; they will lose from
their perspective other vital problems; they will face new realities in
Mitrovica at the time of defining Kosovo's status (and Mitrovica will be
one of the hostages of independence). All of these things will be
followed by diminishing sympathies of the international factor. As for
Serbs: their enclaves will pay the price of the negative symbol which
northern Mitrovica carries, especially the definition of legitimate
ethnic Serb rights, as rights derived from the presence of the Serb
state in Kosovo. The international community:  Mitrovica will be an
everyday reminder of the failure to implement resolution 1244, and how
Milosevic tried and managed to make a problem out of the international
administration despite the presence of an enemy with 50,000 soldiers of
the strongest political and military alliance in the history of mankind.
The hope of the international administration that Mitrovica would be
solved by itself (or "after my mandate") only postpones this issue,
therefore definitively linking it to discussions on the permanent status
of Kosovo.

Now maybe is the moment when the Mitrovica issue could be solved with
fewer victims and violence than at any time in the future. Of course,
the solution cannot be immediate, not even by using classic means of
establishing law. Let us say that KFOR puts Mitrovica in a military
ring, and this will happen if there is a request to arrest and remove
extremists and weapons from both sides of the town. The military
administration once again, even though in more convenient circumstances,
will face three other aspects to the Mitrovica problem; first, to
establish a civil administration with representatives from all segments
of the population; second, to establish an economic dynamics that would
move Mitrovica from the position in which it is stuck; and third--this
is characteristic for all of Kosovo--, the definition of rights of
minorities. Mitrovica, from this point of view, must remind us of the
long road that is still before us in order to enjoy the fragile freedom.
One that does not believe in fragility let him ask the Albanians of
northern Mitrovica".