Petkovic: So-called Kosovo police have raided Serbian institutions in Strpce, Leposavic

BELGRADE - The head of the Serbian government Office for Kosovo-Metohija Petar Petkovic said on Wednesday the so-called Kosovo police had raided several Serbian buildings and institutions in Strpce and Leposavic earlier in the day, and noted that Pristina's PM Albin Kurti continued to illegally shut down the remaining Serbian institutions in Kosovo-Metohija.

In a statement, Petkovic said Pristina's police had first raided the office of a utility company in Strpce and then also the offices of the Serbian pension and disability insurance fund, the national employment service and the health insurance fund in Leposavic.

The employees were interrogated, and one of them fell sick as a result, Petkovic said.

"All this is going on in front of the eyes of the international community, which is silently watching the terror against the Serbs and the continued expulsion of our people," Petkovic noted.

He said thousands of recipients of various types of aid and benefits depended on those institutions and offices and that dozens of employees were in jeopardy as well.

"On the very anniversary of false elections for false mayors and occupiers in the north of Kosovo-Metohija, Kurti is carrying out new institutional violence and new unilateral escalatory moves," Petkovic said.

"The goal of actions such as those carried out today, as well as of groundless arrests of Serbs in the past few days, is to cover up Kurti's powerlessness to form institutions in Pristina, and for that reason, he is attacking the Serbs, using a tried and tested recipe," he said.

Petkovic noted that Belgrade expected an urgent and unequivocal reaction from the international community and, especially, from Brussels officials, and added that Kurti's moves were a direct threat to the Brussels dialogue and to any possibility of normalisation of relations.

With their passive attitude, representatives of the international community are becoming complicit in Pristina's institutional violence and disenfranchisement of the Serbs, Petkovic added.