“Our family, whose Hotel ‘Jezero’ on the shore of the artificial reservoir Gazivode, with the assistance of the Kosovo Police, was demolished by the public enterprise ‘Ibar-Lepenac’, will await the court hearing scheduled for August 12 to establish property rights and ownership, in order to see what legal remedies we can use to fight further. We do not plan to move, we are staying here on the property of our great-grandfathers,” states Aleksandar Jakšić, son of Jordan Jakšić, owner of the demolished family hotel, for Danas.
He was present at the moment when members of the KPS with long barrels raided the hotel early Thursday morning, demanding that they leave it, without the possibility to take anything with them.
“We would never build on someone else’s property. The hotel was built on the estate of my great-grandfather, and all of us invested in it for decades, primarily my parents, but also my sister and I as much as we could. The largest investments were between 2003 and 2008, when there was a bit more freedom, and later the statement of the President of Serbia that he ‘will not give Gazivode’ encouraged us to work, because we hoped that no one would touch Serbian property. Our family invested 800 thousand euros in the hotel, through loans and through labor,” explains Aleksandar Jakšić for Danas.
According to him, the enterprise “Ibar – Lepenac” notified the Jakšić family 15 days before the demolition that the hotel was illegally built on land in their ownership and that they should move out, only for them to come to demolish on the 16th day, even though the court had informed them of the hearing scheduled for August 12.
In the meantime, the lawyer of the Jakšić family, Predrag Arsić, filed a criminal complaint against the executive director of the enterprise “Ibar-Lepenac”, Faruk Mujka, due to suspicion of threats, harassment, and arbitrary exercise of rights, and initiated a possessory lawsuit before the Basic Court with a proposal to determine a temporary measure that would prohibit demolition or any change of the existing state until the end of the dispute.
“The hotel had ten fully equipped rooms with bathrooms, a restaurant for 150 guests where birthdays, New Years, and other holidays were celebrated. Children and athletes came there for preparations. Everything was destroyed. Great damage was caused not only to us, but also to all other families on Gazivode who have been living in this area for centuries, and now their property is being taken away and demolished,” notes Aleksandar Jakšić, a doctor in the northern part of Kosovska Mitrovica, currently on specialization in Belgrade.
To the question of whether and what the international missions in KiM have taken against the demolition of the hotel, since the EU, after the recent demolition of 11 cottages, warned the authorities in Pristina about the illegality of the process, Danas’s interviewee answers that they were “observers” the whole time.
“International representatives came several times before the demolition of the hotel, but they told us that they were there only as observers. They also came on Thursday on the day of the demolition, but they stayed in their vehicles, from which they could not even see well what was happening. They told me that they were there only as observers and did not contact members of the Kosovo Police either,” says Aleksandar Jakšić, whose family lives on the family estate in a house that his grandfather built in a nearby village, which, like the lake, is called Gazivode.
The case of Hotel “Jezero” is part of a months-long action that “Ibar-Lepenac” is conducting in the area of the artificial reservoir Gazivode. After the demolition of cottages and other structures in Čečevo, the removal of another 11 cottages followed, and in the meantime new requests to vacate structures were delivered to other owners along the shore of the lake, while residents of the village of Rezala, located above Gazivode, were given a deadline of seven days to submit documentation on property ownership.
Fitore Pacolli, Kosovo Minister of Environment in technical mandate, announced that after the demolition of 17 structures in the Gazivode area, the action will continue without compromise.
The Office for KiM of the Government of Serbia announced regarding the case of Hotel “Jezero” that the action of the KPS is “a breakdown of both law and justice for Serbs in the area of KiM, because it was carried out without a final court decision.”
“According to the same unlawful and illegal principle, private cottages of several Serbian families on Lake Gazivode were recently demolished, which even representatives of the international community assessed as a unilateral action contrary even to the regulations of the institutions in Pristina. It is clear that Kurti is bothered by all Serbian traces in the area of KiM and that his goal is an ethnically clean KiM, and that everything he does, he does with the goal of expelling our people from their centuries-old hearths,” it was announced from the Office for KiM.
Although the majority of owners of the mentioned demolished Serbian cottages have purchase agreements with “Srbija šume”, the Office for KiM did not state how official Belgrade protects the property of the state of Serbia under UN protectorate in KiM and what was taken against the illegal actions of the enterprise Ibar-Lepenac, which took over its alleged property from “Kosovo šume”, as well as whether what is happening on the ground now is the result of agreements between Belgrade and Pristina unknown to the public, with and without mediators in Brussels and Washington.
“The demolition of structures on Gazivode is proof of how much Serbs from the north of Kosovo, as well as Serbs living in Kosovo in general, are in a way ‘sold out’. This clearly shows what the attitude of the authorities in Belgrade is towards Serbs in Kosovo, towards their elementary living conditions. Some of the demolished houses are older than Lake Gazivode. All those cottages are under court dispute and should not be demolished. They should not be allowed to demolish them. We have an announcement that cottages around Lake Badovac, near Gračanica, will also be demolished. In orderly systems it would be easy for everything that was built illegally to be demolished, but in Kosovo there are 325 thousand illegal structures owned by both Serbs and Albanians,” Milovije Mihajlović, an expert on KiM, stated for Insajder.
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Source: Nova.rs; Photo: Nova.rs