Kosovo removes "mysterious" cameras in Serbian-majority municipalities

2023-12-28 16:52:00, Kosova & Bota CNA

In Kosovo's Serb-majority municipalities, the police began removing cameras that, as official Pristina believes, have been illegally installed in public places.

In just two of them in the north - North Mitrovica and Zubin Potok - more than 50 surveillance cameras were removed in the last few days.

In the territory of the city of North Mitrovica, which covers an area of ??about 11 square kilometers, 38 cameras were removed, while in Zubin Potok 13.

"The police had no knowledge of these cameras and therefore they were removed," said the deputy police director for the North Region, Veton Elshani, to Radio Free Europe.

He warned that the Kosovo authorities will install their own cameras, which will be controlled exclusively by the Kosovo Police.

The cameras that were removed are made in China, but Elshani could not specify what model it is.

According to the law in Kosovo, only the Kosovo Police has the right to install and control video surveillance in public spaces.

Kosovo removes "mysterious" cameras in Serbian-majority municipalities

In addition to the municipalities in the north, surveillance cameras "without owners" were also removed in Kllokot, Partesh and Ranillug - municipalities with a Serbian majority south of the Iber River.

In October of last year, Radio Free Europe wrote about these cameras and if you compare the photo of the video surveillance from Ranillugu and Parteshi with the one from Zubin Potoku that the Kosovo Police sent to REL now, it can be concluded that word for an almost identical model.

Who installed the video surveillance and why?

Elshani says that it has not yet been determined exactly who installed the video surveillance and for what purpose.

In July 2022, the Kosovo Police also confiscated surveillance cameras in Shtërpcë - a municipality with a Serbian majority south of Ibri - due to suspicions that they were installed by Serbian parallel structures.

Video surveillance in Serb-majority areas in Kosovo was also subject to an audit by the Kosovo Information and Privacy Agency in 2022.

This agency did not respond to Radio Free Europe's question whether it has been determined who installed the cameras and why.

Kosovo removes "mysterious" cameras in Serbian-majority municipalities

The agency, earlier, found that in some municipalities of Kosovo, including Pristina, Graçanica, Ranillug, Prizren, etc., video surveillance was procured and installed by local authorities, but it ordered that surveillance be left to police stations, as provided by law.

The Law on the Police in Kosovo states that "the police are authorized to carry out preventive surveillance of public places, with the use of video-acoustic recording equipment and photographic equipment for the surveillance of public places, where criminal offenses have often been committed in the past".

The police also have the right to monitor public areas if they have "reasonable grounds to believe that public surveillance reduces the risk of crime and improves public safety".

The collection of information about the video surveillance, for which it is not known who oversees it, was also started last year by the State Prosecutor's Office of Kosovo, but until the publication of this article, this institution did not answer the question of REL that what information he managed to get.

At the end of 2021, REL reported that Serbia, through its institutions in Kosovo, has purchased a video surveillance system of the Chinese company Dahua - which was under the sanctions of the United States - intended for schools in 12 municipalities of Kosovo .

Chinese video surveillance companies Dahua and HikVision have been blacklisted by the US for their links to the campaign to suppress the Uyghurs in China's Xinjiang province.

The Belgrade portal Insajder.net wrote in 2017 that the Office for Kosovo of the Government of Serbia, in 2012, approved and paid in advance for the installation of a video surveillance system in the Municipality of Zveçan.

Kosovo removes "mysterious" cameras in Serbian-majority municipalities

At that time, the head of the Office for Kosovo was Aleksandar Vulin, who later became the Minister of Defense of Serbia, Minister of Internal Affairs and then director of the Security Information Agency (BIA).

This purchase, for which around 900,000 euros have been allocated from the Serbian budget, has been marked as "strictly confidential".

Do citizens know who is watching them?

Bobani from North Mitrovica does not know who installed or controlled the surveillance cameras in his town, but he remembers that they became important after the murder of the Serbian opposition politician, Oliver Ivanovi?.

Ivanovic was killed in 2018 in front of his office premises in North Mitrovica, but surveillance cameras in that part of the city allegedly did not work or did not record the assassination.

Boban says that it is not good that the cameras existed in public places, because there are "doubts about who installed them and for what purposes they served".

"I can't help but remember how many thefts there were, how many fights there were, how many fires there were and no camera recorded them," he says.

He adds that he supports the police in removing the cameras, because, as he says, "they have not served the purpose that the cameras should have".

Predragu, on the other hand, is skeptical about the removal of surveillance cameras by the police, because he expects them to be installed again by the police.

In this way, according to him, the Kosovo authorities will be able to "abuse" the video surveillance "to exercise repression against the Serbs".

Kristina, also from North Mitrovica, believes that ordinary citizens have not benefited from the cameras, "regardless of who controlled them".

"Two private apartments were broken into in our building and we didn't know who to turn to to watch the video recording. While we see the camera, we see that it exists... If they removed it, it's good that they removed it if they had to, because it didn't serve anything", says Kristina./ REL