Eurasia Press & News
The University of Pristina has gotten back thousands of documents that were removed by the Serbs during the conflict in the late 1990s, with the help an NGO.
SPARK NGO, a non-profit organisation that supports people in post-conflict regions by building the capacity of local economic and educational institutions, helped mediate a deal whereby the University of Pristina will receive 11,519 files belonging to Albanian students from the university in the north of Mitrovica, while Pristina’s university will send back approximately 5,125 documents to Serbian students in the north.
“This is technical cooperation. There was a need to get back the files of the Albanian students, because in their absence the probability for falsification is high,” said Enver Hasani, the rector of the University of Pristina.
The Serb University in the North has a temporal license from the international community in Kosovo, but has not been recognised by Kosovo’s institutions with the justification that they operate under a curricula from the Serbian Ministry of Education.
Mindful of the controversy that any hints of cooperation between the two universities could bring, Hasani says the exchange of documents was merely a technical matter that does not imply any sort of recognition.
