BIRN Fact-Check: Have Serbian President’s Kosovo Warnings Ever Come True?

The deadline "means they [Kosovo authorities] are planning a general attack on northern Kosovo by October 1 at the latest," he told reporters a day later. It was all part of a plan to "expel" Serbs from the area, "a new Storm," he said, in reference to the 1995 Croatian military operation that swept away a rebel Serb statelet but left several hundred Serb civilians dead and put some 200,000 to flight.

The warning was seized on by pro-government tabloids, but it was far from unprecedented. Vucic, in fact, has a habit of forecasting armed conflict in Kosovo, but a BIRN fact check shows that each time the alarms proved false.

Neither Vucic's office nor the Kosovo government responded to requests for comment.

 'Serbia will react'

Vucic meets Kosovo Serbs in Raska, October 2021. Photo: Instagram/nebojsastefanovic

Many Serbs fled Kosovo with the end of the 1998-99 war, when NATO bombed for 11 weeks to drive out Serbian forces accused of killing and expelling Kosovo Albanian civilians during a brutal counter-insurgency campaign. Tens of thousands remained, some in a compact pocket of northern Kosovo abutting Serbia.

Refusing to accept its loss of control over Kosovo, Serbia continued to operate a parallel system of courts, police departments and municipality offices, relocated to Serbian towns outside of Kosovo. This included issuing Serbian vehicle plates with the markings of cities in Kosovo, to the growing frustration of Kosovo.

Efforts to resolve the issue have dragged on for years; in September last year, a Kosovo demand for such plates to be removed and replaced with temporary, Kosovo-issued plates triggered a Serb blockade of border crossings.

Calling the start of the blockades as ...

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