A Kosovo artist was prevented from bringing into Serbia photographs showing Kosovo Liberation Army symbols – images that were destined for an exhibition in Belgrade aimed at promoting better Kosovo-Serbia relations.
Kosovo artist Eliza Hoxha was prevented from bringing several photographs and an exhibition catalogue that show the flags of Kosovo and Albania and symbols of the Kosovo Liberation Army into Serbia on Wednesday.
Hoxha was among several Kosovo artists who were stopped for two hours at the border while travelling to Belgrade for this year’s ‘Miredita, Dobar Dan’ festival, which opens on Wednesday evening and aims to create a cultural exchange between artists from Kosovo and Serbia.
Kushtrim Koliqi, the director of Integra, one of the NGOs organising the festival, said that the incident at the border shows that the ongoing EU-mediated dialogue between Kosovo and Serbia in Brussels is a fiasco.
“Everyone who is sponsoring the dialogue should take this case as an example that nothing has changed, except for the fact that some bureaucratic politicians are meeting in Brussels and signing worthless documents,” Koliqi said.
“For a moment, I remembered the queues of Kosovo civilians during the war being mistreated by those who wear the same uniforms as these people today,” he added.
Hoxha, a well-known multi-media artist who worked as a photojournalist for a Kosovo newspaper in the 1990s, told journalists who were travelling with the artists that “these photographs are not made-up but a reality that we should face 20 years after [the war]”.
Sofija Todorovic from the Youth Initiative for Human Rights, one of the NGOs organising the festival, said that Serbian police “didn’t let three photos go to Belgrade because they show the flag of Kosovo”.
“[The photos] are an artistic exhibit that shows the reality of what goes on in Kosovo, they’re not a political document,” Todorovic told BIRN.
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