Serbian minister says she would have ethnically cleansed Kosovo
A Serbian minister's public endorsement of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo exposes the deep intractability of the Western Balkans normalization process that Europe has spent years trying to resolve.
Snežana Paunović, Serbia’s minister for public administration and local self-government, has stated that she would have “ethnically cleansed” Kosovo in 1998 if she had been in Slobodan Milošević’s position. The remarks, made during a television interview, have drawn immediate condemnation from Kosovan officials.
“And now to our mistakes and our stupidity: if I had been Slobodan Milošević, in 1998 I would have ethnically cleansed Kosovo,” Paunović said. “It is probably the harshest statement I have ever made in my life.” Such rhetoric highlights a worsening deadlock in Belgrade-Pristina relations that poses a persistent challenge for European foreign policy.
Statements about Serbia and Kosovo remain extraordinarily sensitive across the continent following the brutal wars of the 1990s. Paunović, a senior figure in the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) who was born in the Kosovan town of Peć in 1975, subsequently attempted to clarify her comments.
She stated she did not mean killing all Albanians, but rather expelling those who did not feel like citizens of the then Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. “Anyone who feels less of a citizen of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia should leave it and go to their mother country,” she said.
She added that those who opted for "terrorist acts" should have been "eliminated in the way terrorists are normally dealt with today." She was referring to the Kosovo Liberation Army, which Serbia classified as a terrorist organisation at the time.
The political lineage of the SPS makes these remarks particularly jarring. The party was founded by Milošević in 1990 and he led it until his death in 2006 while in detention in The Hague, awaiting a verdict for war crimes related to the Kosovo war. During the late 1990s uprising, more than 13,000 people were killed, the vast majority of them ethnic Albanians.
For European policymakers, the incident exposes the deep intractability of a region the EU has spent decades trying to stabilise. Despite sustained Western efforts to broker a normalization agreement, relations between the two sides have reached an impasse. Many observers no longer believe there is a way out of the current diplomatic freeze.
The backlash in Pristina has been swift. Kosovo’s interior minister announced that Paunović is now a permanently unwelcome person in the country. Social affairs minister Andin Hoti accused her of promoting the exact same ideas “as those promoted by your ideological father.” The episode feeds into a broader pattern of hostile rhetoric, including unsubstantiated Serbian government claims that Kosovo is currently trying to ethnically cleanse its remaining Serb population.
