At midnight on June 19, 1999, Nusret Ajdezi was woken up by a loud knocking on his door. Four armed people entered his home in a central Pristina neighbourhood and said that he and his family had until morning to flee the house or be killed.
“They were armed civilians. They said that they were [Kosovo Liberation Army] commanders. My wife, children and I did not sleep that night at all. We didn’t know where to go,” Ajdezi recalls.
The next morning, Ajdezi talked with his Roma fellow neighbours and found that they had experienced the same thing. Within three days, the majority of Pristina’s Roma inhabitants had fled to Serbia.
At the end of 2001, Ajdezi came back to his home but found that it had been turned into a brothel. Someone there told him that he had bought the house, and drove him away by hitting him with an iron bar.
Like Ajdezi, thousands of Albanians, Serbs, Roma and others whose homes have been unlawfully occupied have not been able to get them back since the war ended in Kosovo in June 1999.
This has had a negative impact on inter-ethnic relations in the country and made the return of refugees and people displaced by the war more difficult. “Property issues, especially usurpations, have curbed the return of displaced persons,” Narasimha Rao, the head of the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR office in Kosovo, told BIRN.
For almost two decades now, Ajdezi has been living in a refugee camp in the northern Serbian town of Novi Sad, locked in a permanent battle with poverty and his ever-worsening health.
“I built that house with my work for 27 years at a butcher’s that was owned by an Albanian, and they snatched it only because I am Roma,” he said.
During his time in the refugee camp, he has appealed to UN Habitat, a United Nations agency dealing with human settlements, calling on it to address the home seizures and other property-related issues that emerged after the conflict.
Up to 2007, the former Kosovo Property Agency, which has now been renamed the Agency for Comparison and Verification of Property, AKKVP, had registered 42,749 seized properties in Kosovo.
Year by year, the number of seized properties has decreased because some of them have been sold, often under pressure, while others have been returned to their original owners.
“Currently there are 12,823 properties under AKKVP administration. Most of them are agricultural land, then business and residential properties,” said AKKVP spokesperson Arian Krasniqi.
The figure does not include forest land, which remains unregistered.
The majority of properties that were seized belong to Serbs and Roma who fled Kosovo just after the war in June 1999.
For more read the full of article at The Balkaninsight
