The quiet disappearance of Albanians from southern Serbia
nationalities. It is clearly a political tool used to change the demographic and ethnic structure of southern Serbia," said the report's main author and YIHR researcher Marko Milosavljevic at the presentation of the publication "Blocking of Albanian addresses in Presevo Valley as a discriminatory practice".
The YIHR researchers also found that citizens of Presevo, Bujanovac and Medvedi were not notified of the blocking of their addresses and learned about it when they went to the Interior Ministry to renew or obtain new documents. At that time, police officers verbally informed them that they could not obtain documents because they did not have a valid address. "Since they do not receive a written decision on the blocking, they cannot file a complaint. The police usually''advises them to stay at home for a few months and then check again if they are living at that address. Some of them stayed at this address for several months without traveling anywhere, often without leaving their villages. The police would either show up a few times or not at all during this time. However, the result was always the same - the addresses remained blocked for all these citizens," said Miloš Rašić, an ethnologist and co-author of the report.
Some of those who remained without an address filed lawsuits in the Administrative Court. "This procedure can take up to two years, and citizens abandon it and remain with blocked addresses," YIHR points out. According to the Law on the Residence and Stay of Citizens, the police can check whether someone resides at''to the declared address only if it has received a request from the court, organizations, legal entities and individuals. "If it is established that someone does not live at the declared address, the Interior Ministry issues a blocking decision, and the citizen has the right to file a complaint within eight days. That is, to ask the police to recheck whether he resides at that address. If he does not file a complaint, the police assign him a new address - for example, the address of a spouse, parent, etc. If citizens also file a complaint about this, the police are obliged to re-establish temporary residence at the declared address," Rasic explained.
Those who do not have a registered address are deprived of almost all rights: they cannot get an identity card, get a job, get married, get medical and social protection or voting rights. They cannot even move freely, YIHR points out. One of the biggest paradoxes is that some of the people the researchers interviewed do not officially have an address, even though they are the owners of''land or real estate and have proof of regular payment of taxes and other obligations. "The worst thing about this is that these people have no idea when or if they will receive addresses again," Milosavljevic says.
Although their basic rights have clearly been violated, officials in Serbia are in complete denial, and there is no exact data on the number of people who have had their addresses blocked. MP Shaip Kamberi of the Movement for Democratic Action in 2020 asked then-Interior Minister Aleksandar Vulin in the Serbian Parliament for information on the number of blocked citizens in Medved municipality from 2017 to 2020. Vulin responded that 1,751' were blocked in Medved municipality during this period'citizen. He added that none of them "had had their access to basic civil rights restricted (...) as they were still citizens of Serbia and had all the rights deriving from that status." When Kamberi asked him the same thing a few months later for the period from 2011 to 2017, Vulin replied that no such data existed.
The Youth Initiative for Human Rights asked police departments to provide data on the number of blocked citizens for all municipalities in Serbia from 2012 to June 2023, but the Interior Ministry did not provide them with data for the municipality of Medved for the period from 2020 to June 1, 2023. YIHR arrived at the number of 4,174 blocked citizens based on the data received from the municipality's chairman Preševo Šćiprim''Serbian officials allegedly caused additional fear among Albanians in southern Serbia. One of them is a statement Aleksandar Vučić made in 2019 during a visit to Medvedi, saying that this municipality "was and will remain Serbia," YIHR recalls. Target: reducing the number of voters The blocking of addresses leads to the exclusion of Albanians from the electoral rolls in southern Serbia. The Youth Initiative recalls the data from the European Association of Organizations for the Observation of the 2022 elections, according to which about 6,000 Albanians were excluded from the electoral rolls in the Presevo Valley. "Our interlocutors from Presevo Valley point out that the main problem is the political goal, namely changing the demographic structure of individual''municipalities, targeting the Albanian community in southern Serbia and excluding Albanians from these territories - in a quiet way,' concludes the Youth Initiative for Human Rights.
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