At the presentation of the report “Citizens in Politics” published by the Center for Affirmative Social Action, in cooperation with HMC, Miodrag Miki Marinkovic, director of CASA said that the Serbian community in Kosovo is facing existential challenges but they are denied opportunities and space for involvement in the decision-making decision process. The results of the report Citizens in Politics show that the citizens of the Serb community in Kosovo feel great distrust towards their political representatives, due to many years of malpractices in conducting politics. The distrust is present to such an extent that the entire profession of “politician” is discredited. According to Marinkovic, this means that the motive for engaging in politics in most cases is gaining one’s own benefit and not protecting the interests of citizens. He added that such privileges are defended with aggressive suppression of political pluralism and social criticism. This resulted in widespread fear of social actors (citizens, civil society, and the media) criticizing the government and their enactments harmful to the interests of citizens.
Commenting on the results of the study, panelist Slobodan Georgiev, journalist, and director of Newsmax Adria in Belgrade, said that Serbs in Kosovo are in a constant state of emergency and that it is very difficult to talk about any civic activism in a situation where there is not a shred of regular conditions to express a different opinion. Another panelist, Momcilo Trajkovic, president of the SNF and a longtime Kosovo politician, responsibility for such conditions see among political representatives rather than citizens, and claims they were elected in an irregular manner.
Panelists and authors of the report agreed that the only solution to this situation is broader social mobilization and solidarity of various actors in an attempt to stifle pluralism.
The report was prepared within the OPEN 2021 initiative supported by the Kosovo Open Society Foundation. You can find the entire report at this link: https://ngocasa.org/citizens-in-politics-publication/
