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Argument: An independent Kosovo would have to pay impossible debts to Serbia

Issue Report: Kosovo independence

Support and quotes

  • M. Bozinovichand. “Kosovo Independence: A Costly Supposition”. Servianna.com. April 10th, 2004 – “The tangible value that Kosovo Albanians have to pay to the Serb state in order to acquire the province for themselves may be prohibitively expensive for them and would be in addition to costs of running a state. First is the value of the physical property the Serbian government and Serbian Church own. To that property, compensation has to be made for property abandoned by non-Albanians forcefully removed from the province since 1945 as well as cost of providing shelter to them discounted at present value. Additionally, vast swaths of land confiscated from the Serbian Church after 1945 by communists, especially in Metohia region, must be accurately compensated to the Church then use those property boundaries to settle illegal squatting because vast number of villages, many of them Albanian, have illegally sprung up since 1945 on land that isn’t theirs. Furthermore, [an] independent Kosovo state must pay restitution for their war crimes during WWII because their predecessor state expelled 100,000 Serb families out of Kosovo during WWII and confiscated their land as well as monetary restitution to the next of kin whom that state has murdered or wounded because they were not ethnic Albanians. Moreover, present value compensation must be made for past Serb government investments into infrastructure of Kosovo, made since 1950s when the communists initiated a fund for rehabilitation of underdeveloped areas that Kosovo Albanian majority received from Serbian tax money. Furthermore, back taxes on property and income owed by Kosovo residents to Belgrade since entrance of NATO in March 1999 to the date of the recognition of independence of Kosovo assessed at, say, average levels of LIBOR for that period plus, say, 2% administrative cost, must be paid.”

Counter-arguments

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