Kosovo bans Serb minister over ethnic cleansing remarks

PRISTINA, July 14 - Kosovo’s interior minister said on Tuesday it had declared a Serb minister a permanent persona non grata over her remarks, made a day earlier, that if she had been a leader during the Kosovo war she would have ethnically cleansed Kosovo.

More than 13,000 people, the majority of them Kosovo Albanians, are believed to have died during the late 1990s insurgency, when Kosovo was still a province of Serbia under then-nationalist strongman President Slobodan Milosevic, whose troops violently cracked down on ethnic Albanians.

The comments by Snezana Paunovic, Serbia’s minister for state administration and local self-governance, sparked anger in Kosovo and were condemned by European Union officials.

"If I were Slobodan Milosevic, I would have ethnically cleansed Kosovo in 1998 and this is the harshest qualification I have ever said," Paunovic said during a TV interview on Monday with a Belgrade-based channel.

Milosevic died in 2006 while on trial at The Hague for war crimes including genocide during the breakup of socialist Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

"I issued a decision declaring Snezana Paunovic persona non grata, permanently banning her from entering or transiting through the Republic of Kosovo," Kosovo’s interior minister, Xhelal Svecla, said in a statement.

Fighting in Kosovo between Serb forces and ethnic Albanian guerrillas ended in June 1999 after NATO launched a 78-day air campaign against Serbian military and police targets.

Kosovo declared independence in 2008 and is recognised by more than 110 countries, but not by Serbia. More than 90% of Kosovo’s population is ethnic Albanian, with about 5% ethnic Serbs. Paunovic was herself born in Kosovo.

The EU enlargement commissioner, Marta Kos, condemned the remarks. "There is no place in Europe for rhetoric that justifies, advocates and glorifies ethnic cleansing," she said. REUTERS