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.
https://www.reuters.com/world/kosovo-bans-serb-minister-over-ethnic-cleansing-remarks-2026-07-14