Following an explosion on the Ibar-Lepenac canal, Kosovo police conducted a raid in predominantly Serb areas. Of the nine people arrested, all of whom were accused of alleged terrorism, only one person was detained, while the others were released. Sultana and Gzim Jahirovich shared their experiences and encounters with Kosovo police with Euronews Serbia.
“As soon as I opened the door, one of the police punched me in the eye and just said, ‘tie him up.’ Then they tied me up while my children watched. They threw me into the bathroom, three of them beat me. They didn’t say why, nothing. Nothing, nothing. They just started beating and saying that we Roma are a very bad people, that they would make a sausage out of me, why I live in the North, that they should change my name and surname,” said Gzim.
This is how Gzim Jahirovich’s day began, a physical worker from the northern part of Kosovska Mitrovica, on the first day of December. Six policemen in an action against him, his wife, and three minor children, without explaining why.
“They just started beating, searching for phones, laptops to check and torture me. They squeezed my jaw, my nose, my ribs, the children were watching, then they took the children to my brother for a while, they interrogated me and my wife there and beat me, they really beat me,” he added.
During three hours of harassment and insults on racial and national grounds, Sultana was forced to go outside to find the trash she had thrown away, suspecting that there was evidence against her husband there.
“They pushed me there into the branches. He says, ‘come on, go find what you threw away, I say I brought what I threw away. He says, ‘come on, go there now,’ and that policeman tells me, ‘you’re beautiful, you’re pretty, I would…’ he said all sorts of things. He said, ‘I would take your clothes off, rape you, and let you out, naked like this, so that the whole world could see what I did to you. I was scared and just looked like this. I was scared,” said Sultana.
The children, she says, were crying.
“How they would beat her, how they would rape her, how they would take her to Kukavica, this monument, they would tie her there. My children were crying there, screaming, they didn’t care,” Gzim added.
Soon after arresting him, due to a lack of any evidence, the police released Gzim, but with visible injuries.
“They gave me some drops because my eye is constantly watering and it’s foggy because it hurts. It’s not just my eye, my nose hurts, my jaw, my ribs hurt, my arms, my legs,” he said.
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Gujon: We are witnessing a model of “quiet Storm” in Kosovo
Speaking on Euronews Serbia, Arno Gujon, director of the Office for Public and Cultural Diplomacy, says it is clear that Pristina is trying to wage a hybrid war against Serbia, all with the aim of continuing to pressure Serbs in the north of Kosovo and Metohija.
“To carry out various aggressions against them and this leads to their gradual eviction.
bout 14% of Serbs from northern Kosovo have left that part of Kosovo in the past two years. This is a model of ‘quiet storm’. The goal is also to stop Serbia’s path to the EU and the economic development of our country,” Gujon explains.
He also states that Pristina’s goal is to declare the Serbian List a terrorist organization so that it cannot participate in the elections on February 9 next year.
“Albin Kurti, by all indications, will not have enough mandates and he will need various other candidates, or deputies, to have a majority and he would like to have his puppets. And the Serbian List is certainly not that. So that’s a way to further introduce his soldiers, or Kosovo security forces, into northern Kosovo and Metohija, so it all contributes to that,” adds our interlocutor.
Speaking about the latest developments in Zubin Potok, Gujon says that the current situation is beneficial to Pristina, and that there is also speculation that the whole incident was staged.
“Serbia is checking that, and the investigation will eventually reveal who is to blame for the explosion near Zubin Potok,” he says.
Gujon pointed out that 178 attacks on Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija were recorded last year, while this year that number has decreased to 113 attacks.
“That’s a huge number in itself. Before that, in 2022, there were 150 attacks. While in 2021, there were 128 attacks on Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija. So we see that the trend is actually towards an increase, the number of attacks on Serbs is increasing and this has been the case since Albin Kurti took power in so-called Kosovo,” says Gujon.
When it comes to the attackers, he notes that it creates additional difficulties that there is no judicial epilogue, which discourages residents from reporting attacks to the police.
“As the Office for Public and Cultural Diplomacy, we have published a map of these attacks in English and we have created a map of only physical attacks. And that’s from the beginning of the year, and I’m talking until October 27, when we took all that data, there were 81 physical attacks on Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija, of which 45 were committed by extremist civilians and 36 were committed by members of the so-called police. And that mostly in northern Kosovo.
According to him, this shows two things.
“This shows that that inflammatory rhetoric from Pristina heats up the atmosphere and extremists think that they can then attack Serbs. Those are the extremists. To begin with, it’s the police who are putting pressure on northern Kosovo, which leads to the exodus of Serbs from northern Kosovo and also instills mistrust among Serbs in everything that happens and then they don’t report those attacks,” concluded Gujon.
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Source: Euronews, Photo: Printscreen Euronews