While a new game of blame-shifting continues between Kurti and Vučić, Kosovo Serbs get the upper hand, as usual. The dynamite attack on the neuralgic point of Kosovo's water and electricity supply was so quickly harnessed into political games
On Friday around midnight, five o'clock after it broke, Prime Minister of Kosovo Albin Kurti he already knew who was to blame.
"According to our firm conviction, for the organization and orchestration of this attack, there can be no other address for responsibility and guilt than official Belgrade and their criminal structures, headed by Milan Radoičić, with the support of Serbian institutions and the President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić," Kurti said. .
On Saturday, wearing rubber boots, he showed up at the scene of the "terrorist attack" near the village of Varage kraj Zubin Potok, boasted about the arrests and repeated the accusations against Belgrade.
Behind him, at the place of the explosion, during the night the damaged canal was "bridged" with six pipes. That improvised solution did not last long as it leaked everywhere. Until the conclusion of this text, it is not clear whether the real rehabilitation of the canal has begun. Parts of Kosovo, including Northern Mitrovica and Zvečan, have no drinking water, and electricity was also cut off.
ŽILA KUCAVICA OF KOSOVO
At the point of impact, near Varag, the channel is on pillars because the village macadam road passes under it. It is the very beginning of the canal that carries tens of kilometers of water from the reservoir lake Gazivode to the north of Kosovo, but also all the way to Pristina.
The canal dug in the 1960s and 1970s branches off into countless smaller irrigation systems with a total length of about eight hundred kilometers. Besides watering and irrigating a third of Kosovo, it is crucial for cooling the thermal power plant "Obilić" - practically the only source of electricity for the whole of Kosovo.
Whoever carried out the sabotage, he aimed very well, informed sources of "Vremena" say. Because, elsewhere, the concrete channel is buried in the ground and the damage would not be so great, and it would be repaired faster. On the raised part of that concrete bed where the canal, like a bridge, stands above the ground, apparently fifteen to twenty kilograms of dynamite was enough. If Pristina officials are to be believed, someone placed dynamite in a bag in the canal itself, underwater, using waterproof fuses. It broke the concrete and reinforcement, opened a hole of several meters through which the water gushed, destroying a nearby house and carrying cows, before returning to the Ibar through a natural fall.
Everything happened barely ten kilometers as the crow flies from Banjska, where a skirmish with a similar political epilogue took place last year. It's just that then the cameras also recorded Milan Radoičić, a long-time god and club in the North of Kosovo, a close associate of Aleksandar Vučić, a businessman-criminal whose wealth is not easy to add up.
Kurti's landing in the North began even before Banjska, and gained full momentum afterwards. "Here, for two years they have been talking about cleaning up Serbian malignant elements, and that the North has been conquered... and then the worst attack that Kosovo remembers happened, a hundred times worse than Banjska," Milica Andrić Rakić from the New Social Initiative, a non-governmental organization from North Mitrovica, told us. .
Milica Andrić Rakić is from Zubin Potok. It grew with stories about the importance of Gazivode and the canal. He says that such a key infrastructure was not targeted either during the war or during the NATO bombing.
He worries that there may be no electricity or water, that the first attempts at temporary rehabilitation seem ignorant. "Ironically, Serbia can help here the best." "Only recently did a Kosovo company take over the management of the system," she says.
However, there is not a shred of chance that Kurti's government will seek Serbia's help in rehabilitation.
MEETING OF THE OLD PACERS
Kurti and Vučić immediately got involved blame game, the blame game. Like two old acquaintances at the chessboard, pacers for whom every opening and center are the same, so they repeat the moves routinely.
At an emergency press conference, Vučić rejected any possibility that Serbia was involved in sabotage. He openly said that Serbia has no need for such a thing - it could change the course of the Ibar if it wanted to leave Kosovo without water and electricity. Mystically, he added that he rejected such ideas, about redirecting the Ibar riverbed, even when he was prime minister.
Vučić did not directly accuse Kurti, but he spoke extensively about why the explosion was in favor of Kurti in order to raise his ratings before the elections, accuse Serbia and bully Serbs in Kosovo.
"We will not stop with the investigation. And then they won't care. "They will arrest whoever they can for two more days, and then after two days they will run away from that topic," said Vučić.
Side prompters do the same or similar. Some Western countries adopted the wording that it was a "terrorist attack", but few went so far as to point the finger at Belgrade. The games continued in Brussels, where Vučić and Kurti were on Tuesday.
Similar to the case after Banjska, two parallel investigations are allegedly underway, in Belgrade and Pristina. This second, Kosovo investigation, triumphantly released photos of some weapons and many confiscated uniforms and emblems. There were emblems of the Serbian Army and various "Russian" emblems, as well as some KLA emblems, which Kurti described as a cover-up.
The houses of Kosovo Serbs in the surrounding villages were raided, they were taken into custody and then released. As "Vreme" goes to press, Dragiša Vićentijević from the nearby village of Prevlake is in custody - for up to thirty days - on the charge that he mined the canal.
His lawyer said that Vicentijevic denies guilt and that at the time he was in another place with many witnesses. "The fact that wet and dirty boots and weapons were found in someone's house cannot be sufficient evidence to substantiate the well-founded suspicion of these serious crimes," said the lawyer.
The whole investigation seems "dilettantish" to Milica Andrić Rakić. "It was obvious that the Kosovo police had no idea what they were doing - they started from houses near the place, which is crazy. Who in the nearby village would know how to mine and then mine in the neighborhood? That's what raids look like to them, randomly, so they don't find anything. Or find some uniforms, hunting rifles. And the people here in uniform are roasting brandy. It's ridiculous to associate it with diversion."
There were also allegations of brutality. The testimony of the Roma family Jahirović from Mikronaselj in North Mitrovica is horrific. The police allegedly beat the Jahirović brothers, threatened them, insulted them as "Gypsies who should not live", and allegedly threatened the wives of the detained Gzim Jahirović with rape.
KURTI ALREADY PICKED UP THE GUILTY
According to Milica Andrić Rakić, on the night of the explosion, Kurti dictated who was to blame and where to look for the culprits. Only luckily, she says, there was no general violence against the Serbs that night. "Kurti contributed to the spread of panic and intolerance. And he was looking for political charm. Since Kurti's rating did drop, allegedly to only 35 percent, it was assumed that he would campaign in the North behind the backs of the Serbian community," says the "Vremena" interviewee.
Parliamentary elections will be held in Kosovo on February 9. The economic cataclysm reduced support for Kurti's Self-Determination, which four years ago achieved a spectacular victory with slightly more than fifty percent of the vote.
It's hard to believe, says Milica Andrić Rakić, but there are more radicals in Pristina than Kurti. Some are openly calling for "Storm" these days. Voices of criticism in Pristina are rare and mostly boil down to calling Kurti to account for the fact that the "terrorist plans" were not thwarted in advance.
In that state, says Milica Andrić Rakić, sabotaging the channel is politically useful for Kurti, at least at first. "Conventionally speaking, breaking the channel is the realization of his dream. That's why he blames Belgrade, he's experienced in that, that's the only thing he's been doing for the last three years."
Now the North of Kosovo is teeming with police. Mostly young people, they don't know or won't speak a word of Serbian. They have helmets, long pipes and small rucksacks because they are on duty for a long time. There are them in front of kindergartens and on the main promenade in North Mitrovica, in places where there have never been any problems.
Kfor confirmed that Pristina had requested permission to send the so-called Kosovo Security Force to the North, a surrogate army that has heavy weapons. However, they did not receive that permission from Kfor.
SERBS LEFT TO THEMSELVES
The presence of the police on every corner seems to many Serbs to be a "continuation of the occupation" of Serbian communities. There are no more Serbs in the uniforms of the Kosovo Police since, at the urging of Belgrade and the Serbian List, the Serbs left the Kosovo institutions two years ago.
But even if the Serbs were in uniform, that would not have stopped Kurti, says Milica Andrić Rakić. "For example, Serbian police officers previously refused to fine people for license plates. Then they sent Albanian colleagues as babysitters to Serbian police officers."
Although it is written in the Constitution of Kosovo and the Brussels Agreement that the police force must reflect the ethnicity of a certain environment, no one in Pristina cared about that even before leaving the institutions.
Marko Jakšić, a lawyer and activist from North Mitrovica, does not hide that he is bitter. And he openly claims that Pristina is behind the sabotage in order to continue harassing the Serbs.
"Because of the lukewarm response of the international community to Kurti's moves, a new Storm is hanging in the air. The fact that he wanted to send an army to the North testifies to those plans. That's why I think that the opening of the canal is the initial trigger that should end the existence of Serbs in Kosovo", says Jaksic for "Vreme".
Milica Andrić Rakić does not expect any significant reaction from Belgrade. "Vučić announced in March that he is changing his doctrine towards Kosovo. But it turns out that he barely talks about Kosovo anymore. The story of the Expo, peace, stability, its political legacy. There is no way that Serbia will do something more concrete, especially not while waiting for Trump, from whom it hopes for something."
Jakšić says that all the agreements from Brussels onward led to this point. He says that nobody understands the gravity of the situation of the Kosovo Serbs today - neither the regime in Belgrade, nor the opposition, nor the people of Serbia.
"The regime in Belgrade is paying for all its domestic inactions with Kosovo. Vučić does not worry too much about whether we will be there or not. They will talk at conferences that he is our greatest protector, but that's it," says Jakšić and adds: "I think the same about the opposition - they are waiting for Vučić to make a mistake on the subject of Kosovo, otherwise they play dead. And the people are tired of everything. And of course their pain is greater, some are obsessed with mass media under the control of the government and do not see the extent of our problems".
THIS IS NOT THE END?
Speaking of the well-known chess game, the Belgrade opposition reacted as it has done many times before - explaining everything with the alleged game play of Vučić and Kurti to divert attention from bigger problems at home.
The president of the Srbija Center party, Zdravko Ponoš, states that Belgrade must have known that Kurti was preparing actions in the North in order to demonstrate force against the Serbian population before the elections. "If they knew what I'm saying in Belgrade, and they had to know, the question is what they did. Obviously, Kurti relies on a little help from his friends this time as well," Ponoš wrote on Twitter.
Our interlocutors from the north of Kosovo, just like Ponoš, say that the international community is also to blame. Until now, they have always unmistakably put the "sovereignty and integrity" of Kosovo before the basic rights of the Serbs. This contributed to the poisoning of the atmosphere and the destruction of the little trust that was created with great difficulty after the war and the declaration of independence. How many last week, celebrating the Day of the Albanian flag, thousands of Albanians entered North Mitrovica. Others rumbled in Gračanica with loud provocations and incidents.
How could the ending of this game play out? It is speculated that Kurti could seek to ban the Serbian list as allegedly terrorist. That move would probably turn out to be fruitless because some other Serbian parties would easily take over the role of the Serbian List. Serbs are guaranteed ten seats in the parliament, as well as seats in the government. As Marko Jakšić says, people will continue to look towards Serbia because it is the only country they have even "even when it is a stepmother". He says he will vote even for a donkey if Vučić says so, because practically the entire Serbian community depends on income from Belgrade.
Milica Andrić Rakić is not sure that Kurti will be able to save political profits until the election. "If they don't know how to repair this, they could have supply problems, restrictions, burst pipes. There are problems here every winter anyway, electricity is imported."
"If the elections were tomorrow, there would certainly be political benefits for Kurti. But the elections are only after two months of icy winter and I am not sure about Kurti's rating in February", she continues.
Hence the fear that this is not the last incident until the election. "I'm worried," says Milica Andrić Rakić, "because whoever did this - Belgrade, Pristina or some of their factions, pro-Russian or more radical in Self-Determination, or some third party - had a lot of success and they won't stop there. Everything falls on fertile ground. The point is that for three years no one deals with the atmosphere that makes Kosovo vulnerable to such attacks".
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