Government Approves Property Exploitation Request in Hades, Shipule

Kosovo's outgoing Prime Minister, Isa Mustafa, has said that legal conditions could be created and the energy security crisis problem avoided.

I think that with these processes, legal conditions can be created to act on the ground and to avoid the problem of the crisis, which has been talked about as much as providing coals for electricity production”, Mustafa said in today's government gathering on the run.

Kosovo Energy Corporation officials already consider the decision appropriate, as they say, very soon the coal operation is expected to begin.

Arben Djukka, director of the Kosovo Energy Corporation, has called on all landowners in these areas to seize this opportunity and sign contracts.

Today's government decision to evacuate, Djukka shows, has to do with expropriation of 2. 2 acres, this area where KEK must immediately start searching for coal reserves, so there is no energy crisis.

KEK, on the other hand, is focused on expropriating 52 hectares in this village.

Today's outgoing government decision is 2. 2 acres, affects 17 owners with eight houses. We have reached 23 agreements until today. When we say 23 agreements, two are in the priority area of this decision, while 21 other agreements are for the 52 hectares area of”, Djuk says.

Otherwise, the process of expropriation and shift from the village of Hades and Shiptule has been under way since 2002. Initially, they were initiated by the then provisional institutions, and then continued by the Government of Kosovo in 2009.

This area, due to the myths that develop in search of coal reserves, was declared dangerous for residence several years ago, and has also been declared an area of particular economic interest.

Since, these areas are extended to the vicinity of surface coal mines, which are exploited by “Kosovo A” and “Kosovo B”.

The shift process has stalled due to the frustrations of residents on the terms they have been offered for relocation.

Abide Doctore, it's a village of Shiptule. It for Radio Free Europe has said it has not signed agreements with the Kosovo Energy Corporation, because it is unhappy with the assessment of compensation made to its lands and home.

If the state needs electricity for the whole of Kosovo, normally we get out of here, but they have to pay for it. If we get out of here, we live without conditions. We seek land, from which they take land from us, and seek our house to build and employ us. Here they're taking millions of us out with nothing... we have kids and we need money”, she says.

For more than a decade, residents living near KEK thermal power plants, whose production depends on coal, live in an environment contaminated by dust, industrial pollution, constant noise and problems with shift. But investments in construction facilities have continued and continue.