Kosovo to Penalise Denial of Serbian War Crimes

The meeting of the Kosovo government on Thursday. Photo: The office of Kosovo PM

Hoxhaj said that Kosovo Serbian political representatives in the Belgrade-backed Srpska Lista party, as well as state officials in Serbia, had long hidden the truth and denied proven crimes committed by Serbia in its former province.

"From the political and moral aspect this is a double crime, so I think we should undertake a legal initiative and take concrete steps to punish such statements, positions and individuals that deny Serbia's crimes and genocide in Kosovo," Hoxhaj told the government meeting.

He added that most Western countries treat denials of crimes and genocide as a crime and as an insult to the victims, their families and the nation that was subjected to such crimes.

The decision comes after Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj fired the ethnic Serb Minister of Local Government, Ivan Teodosijevic, for describing Kosovo Albanians as terrorists and fabricators of massacres.

On Friday, he appointed the head of the North Mitrovica Municipal Administration Adriana Hodzic as Teodosijevic's replacement.

Dismissing the "so-called humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo" of the late-1990s, he called the infamous Recak massacre of 1999 "fabricated", and said: "Albanian terrorists are the ones who made all this up and committed the biggest crimes in Kosovo".

Serbian officials strongly backed the sacked minister and repeated the same allegation.

"These Albanian politicians should be arrested for the crimes they committed during 1990- 2004 and answer questions about why they expelled 247,000 Serbs from Kosovo," Marko Djuric, head of the Serbian government office for Kosovo, told Serbia's public broadcaster, RTS on Monday.

"When they arrest...