DW: How Serbia Crushes Ethnic Albanians' Rights

Businessman Safet Demiri was given an unpleasant fact when he went to renew his company's car registration in August 2019. An official in Demiri's hometown, Medvedja, in southern Serbia, told him he was no longer registered in the population register.

You could have knocked me down with your feather”, he told DW.

Demiri travels between Medvedja, where he runs a resort and a telecommunications company, and Vienna, where he works as a construction contractor.

But since the summer of 2019, his name is no longer found in the home population register, where his family has lived for over 200 years.

Demiri said officials simply raised their shoulders when he asked how he should run his businesses in Medvedja without a registered address or cars. He had no choice but to register his cars in the name of his father.

The Court Decided Its Elimination Legal

Until today, his situation remains unchanged and his rights are limited. He has taken legal action, but the Administrative Court in Nis has ruled that its annulment from the registry is legitimate because he lived abroad.

I was officially told that the instructions had come from above”, 46-year-old said.

Demiri is not alone in this regard. Thousands more in the Presevo Valley with ethnic Albanian majority in southern Serbia share its destiny. A growing number of people there have been removed from the population register without warning.

“Pasing”

The reason is their ethnic affiliation, said Flora Ferati-Sachsenmeier, professor at the University of Gottingen in Germany. She herself came from the region and wrote a study on the subject in 2023, which was published by Max-Planck-Institut in Gottingen.

Ferati-Sachsenmeier faced the random phenomenon in 2016 while working on a whole other project in the region. The more he researched it, the more he realized that a method was behind the removal.

Every second Albanian I talked to told me that authorities were erasing them from the body register”, she told DW.

Serious Effects

Serbian authorities call it “Passevim” (or “psim”). If they discover that someone no longer lives at their registered address, he or she is hiding from the census, Ferati-Sachsenmeier said.

But it is not only people who no longer live in the country who were removed from the register; nor are people who have gone on vacation or travel abroad. As a rule, once they've been removed from the register, they can't go back to it.

Assimilation has serious consequences for the affected, such as making passport and health insurance impossible for them.

An effort to reduce the size of the Albanian minority?

The goal is apparently to reduce the number of ethnic Albanian population in southern Serbia.

“While about 10% of the population in the Presevo Valley has been affected, the cases of passiveisation in other regions of Serbia affect less than 1% of the respective municipal population if they occur at the bottom of”, Ferati-Sachsenmaier explained.

The situation is especially problematic for ethnic Albanians who have lived and worked in Kosovo since the 1999 war, said Enver Haziri, who heads an agency in Kosovo dealing with issues dealing with ethnic Albanians from Presevo Valley.

Most of this group was displaced from their eastern region when the war ended in June 1999, and the Albanian minority in southern Serbia bore the biggest burden of the Serbian Army's anger in retreat.

Since these displaced ethnic Albanians were taken from Kosovo, they were never officially registered there. Assimilation makes them practically unstated, which marginalizes them even more.

“While morally welcomed, they are neither recognised as refugees nor given Kosovo citizenship”, Haziri said.

At the time of Prime Minister Albin Kurti, the Kosovo government has tried to change the situation and give them residence permits.

Ethnic Albanians in southern Serbia a marginalised minority

The Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia in a report has referred to Passing addresses like “a form of ethnic cleansing through administrative means”.

In the Presevo Valley, which belongs to the municipalities of Medvedja, Bujanoc and Presevo, some 60,000 ethnic Albanians live. Although they make up the majority of the population there, and Serbia has signed the Council of Europe Framework Convention on the Protection of National Minorities, ethnic Albanians are systematically marginalised, said Shaip Kamberi, the only ethnic Albanian politician elected in the Serbian parliament.

As an EU membership candidate, Serbia has committed itself to improving representation of its Albanian minority in public institutions.

“Pasing is just one of the measures of discrimination”, Kamberi says. “We are not integrated into public life, and potential foreign investors are often prevented from investing in our businesses. Moreover, advancing territory militarism also makes life in the region difficult”.

To support this statement, Kamberi shows the map of 48 Serbian military bases on the border with Kosovo. Most of these bases are in the Presevo Valley.

Concern in Berlin

Kamberi recently visited Berlin to raise awareness of the issue within the government and parliament. The lawmakers he met are concerned about the situation.

Knut Abraham from CDU/ Center right CSU said about DW: “I call on embassies of EU member states in Belgrade to pay particular attention to the situation and to seek dialogue on the issue with minority representatives”.

“The Albanian minority situation in Serbia deserves greater international attention”, Thomas Hacker of Liberal FDP. “At the moment, the focus on dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina is very large, while other issues, equally important, are regrettably being pushed into the second”.

Hacker went on to say that the process of equipment is like a deprivation of rights.

The German Foreign Ministry in Berlin has called on all sides to secure transparent and fair agreements in line with” obligations.

Serbian government denies discrimination

As long as the Serbian government and authorities do not deny that there is failure, they reject claims that he is motivated by discrimination against ethnic Albanians in Serbia.

In December 2023, Aleksandar Martinovic, minister for state administration and local self-government in Serbia, told Serbian media that “the deactivation of settlements” in Bujanoc, Presevo and Medvedja was in accordance with the law and was not discriminated against.

DW addressed the Serbian government for comment, but had received no response before publication.

Businessman Safet Demiri and several other ethnic Albanians have filed a complaint at the Constitutional Court in Belgrade. They are certain that their case will be rejected and aim to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights.

The possibility of success is high. However, it is questionable whether such a victory would affect Serbia's policy towards its Albanian minority.