Serbian Nationalists Disrupt Kosovo-Serbia Cultural Acceptance Festival

Kosovars protest Serbian forces during Kosovo’s war for independence. (Flickr)

A cultural festival in Kosovo on October 22 was marred by demonstrations of Serbian nationalists, the latest sign of a resurgence of Serbian nationalism threatening to destabilize the Balklan region.

The festival—called “Miredita, Dobar Dan!” which translates to “good day” in both Albanian and Serbian—was hosted in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. The purpose of the celebration was to facilitate cultural exchange and ease the contentious relations between Kosovo and Serbia.

Participants from Kosovo required a police escort, and the area was cordoned off by police in order to prevent several hundred protesters from disrupting the program. One protester managed to break through the cordon during the opening ceremony and briefly seize a microphone before he was removed by police.

In front of the police cordon, far-right protesters chanted “Kosovo is Serbia” and similar statements, including xenophobic threats such as “Kill, slaughter, so Shqiptars [a derogatory name for Albanians] cease to exist.” 

The protests were organized by several far-right organizations such as Srpska Desnica and Zavetnici. “Our message is that the [governing] Serbian Progressive Party is responsible for holding the Miredita festival,” said Milica Djurdjevic, the leader of Zavetnici, to a reporter. “This is not about artists from Kosovo, Miredita is a political project.” 

The annual festival was founded in 2014 by progressive youth organizations from both Serbia and Kosovo: the Youth Initiative for Human Rights, the Civic Initiative from Belgrade and the Kosovo-based Integra NGO. Its purpose is to present films, art and theater from Kosovo as well as debates on Serbia-Kosovo issues.

An organizer, Fioner Jelici of the Youth Initiative for Human Rights, said, “We want to be those who will send a message of peace into the world, by sitting at the same table with the youth from Kosovo and by exchanging thoughts and culture with them.

“Unfortunately, the years go by and the same scenario is repeated,” Jelici stated. “On the other side of the cordon that protects us, there are the fiercest opponents of reconciliation and normalization of relations.” 

Kosovo officially declared independence from Serbia in 2008 following mass persecution of ethnic minorities—particularly Albanians, which constitute the majority of Kosovars—by the Serbian administration in the late 1990s following the breakup of Yugoslavia. More than 100,000 people were killed during Kosovo’s wars for independence.

Serbia refuses to recognize Kosovo’s independence, and right-wing Serbian groups frequently disrupt liberal events such as this one. Their aim is genocide denialism in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo.

In fact, recently these sentiments have escalated from “genocide denialism” to “genocide triumphalism,” in the words of experts—especially in Serbia and Serbia-controlled Republika Srpska within Bosnia and Herzegovina. “When Bosnian Serb leaders aren’t downplaying or denying the casualty count of the Srebrenica genocide, they portray Serbs to be under siege from Muslims and that the atrocities of the early 1990s were carried out in national self-defense, a ‘glorious’ enterprise to rid the region of Muslim ‘terrorists’ and ‘invaders,’” summarizes Bosnia specialist CJ Werleman.

In recent weeks, multiple exhibitions of Kosovar-Serbian reconciliation have been vandalized, one by a political leader; the cast of a play about the Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Bosniak Muslims by Serbian paramilitary forces have received dozens of threats; mosques are continuously being demolished; and the president of Serbia has even threatened war against Bosnian Muslims.

“The situation in Bosnia is very tense. We are afraid of the new war and we know very well that if the war starts, we will be the victims again—Muslims, of course,” a Muslim citizen of Bosnia and Herzegovina testified, who asked to remain unnamed out of fear of retribution. 

This ominous trend has been encouraged by Serbia’s ally Russia, whose occupation of Republika Srpska is a barrier against NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe. Aside from encouraging xenophobic anti-Muslim sentiments, the Kremlin has reportedly supplied thousands of weapons to the Serbian state within Bosnia, ostensibly in the hopes of igniting conflict once again.

Still, to date, the U.S.-brokered treaty of 1995 maintains a tense peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, while a recent Serbia-Kosovo reconciliation agreement sponsored by the U.S. has momentarily dampened the flames of conflict in the region. However, the future of the deal is dependent on the results of the United States’ upcoming presidential election.

Meanwhile, while Serbia and Kosovo are both seeking acceptance to the EU, they are unlikely to receive it until relations between them are eased. 

Some contemporaries have advocated for “border correction”—the movements of all Serbs out of Kosovo into Serbia, and all Albanians out of Serbia into Kosovo—as a potential solution to the conflict. However, this is highly undesirable to Kosovar Serbs, who would lose access to many major Serbian Orthodox religious sites located in Kosovo, and this move would threaten to destabilize the Balkan region, calling the borders of Macedonia, Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro into question.

The only remaining option is to cut down on extremists and nationalists and encourage acceptance of minorities in both Kosovo and Serbia while keeping the borders as they are. However, the growing nationalism of Serbia’s politicians and the administration’s blind eye to the actions of far-right groups suggests this won’t be a reality anytime soon.