Eurasia Press & News
Serb health workers have started leaving Kosovo after Serbia decided to halve the so-called ‘Kosovo allowance’ part of their monthly pay, a controversial benefit amounting to a de facto double wage for those who worked in the civil service and recognised Belgrade, not Pristina as their capital.
Belgrade has vowed to never recognise Kosovo’s secession in February last year and is keeping a firm hold on pockets of Serb minority communities in Kosovo, setting up a network of parallel health, education and social security structures that have effected a ‘soft partition’ of Kosovo between a mainly-Albanian south and mainly-Serb north. Until December, Serb civil servants working in those services received higher salaries than their colleagues in equivalent positions in Serbia proper.
Deputy director of the medical centre in Mitrovica, Milan Ivanovic, told state news agency Tanjug that four doctors had left the hospital in the last month.
“For now we can manage to provide an adequate treatment to our patients with the personnel we have,” he said.
Serbian Minister for Kosovo Goran Bogdanovic said recently the government’s decision to reduce allowances for employees in public services in Kosovo did not mean that Serbia has given up Kosovo.
The government has earmarked about 500 million euros for Kosovo in the budget, he said, but Serbs and other non-Albanians in Kosovo who get their wages from Serbia had to share the burden as all other citizens.
“I think it might be even good those people left, those who worked only for money and were coming here from other places because of that. We need people who will live in Kosovo and who want to stay here, those who love this area and want their children to remain here,” Bogdanovic said in a recent visit to Mitrovica.
