Serbia runs ethnic vaccination campaign in Kosovo despite fury from Pristina

People receive doses of the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine during country's mass vaccination

Serbia has launched an unofficial Covid vaccination programme in its former province of Kosovo, creating a political headache in the divided and impoverished Balkan nation.

Serbia, which still claims Kosovo as its own, is running Europe’s most successful vaccination programme after the UK, relying heavily China’s Sinopharm vaccine and Russia’s Sputnik V.

Aleksandar Vucic, the Serbian president, in December announced that his country would vaccinate ethnic Serbs in Kosovo to the fury of Kosovo’s leaders.  Avdullah Hoti, then Kosovo’s prime minister, said the campaign was illegal, and Armend Zemaj, the health minister, ordered an inquiry.

Ethnic Serb and Albanian communities in Kosovo are often still highly divided, particularly in the north near the border with Serbia.  

The outrage from Pristina over the covert vaccination programme prompted Serbia to stop vaccinating Serbs in Kosovar territory.

Instead, it has started taking ethnic Serbs across the border to receive the jab, bussing people daily to three vaccination locations in Serbia, some traveling for hundreds of kilometres. The buses leave at around 6am, and about 300 people are vaccinated daily. 

Meanwhile no one in the rest of Kosovo has been vaccinated yet – not even medical workers on the frontline of the pandemic. The Ministry of Health has announced it will receive a 360,000 strong donation from Covax “in the spring,” and that at risk populations will be prioritised.

People rest after being given their second dose of the Sinopharm Covid-19 vaccine in Belgrade

Credit: Oliver Bunic/Bloomberg

When Kosovo launched the inquiry into Serbian vaccines being administered in its territory, doctors and medical practitioners in the Serb-majority north of Kosovo were quizzed about the provenance of the vaccines. Many objected to being placed in the middle of a political battle during a healthcare crisis.

Rumors started circulating that the vaccines would be seized and possibly destroyed,  prompting Serbian government to withdraw its shipment to towns right across the disputed border.

Serbs in Kosovo say they are constantly forced to pick between siding with Pristina and Belgrade.

“An issue that should be seen as a positive development is once again used to make the local population feel vulnerable and uncertain,” says Milica Andric Rakic, 29, a researcher at a non-governmental organisation based in North Mitrovica, the main Kosovo Serb town.

Kosovo and Serbia coexist uneasily. While hostilities and escalations between the two have long ceased, the two governments have no high-level political relations and Serbia’s refusal to recognise Kosovo has severely hampered Pristina’s ability to participate in international processes.

Serbs in the country live in ethnically homogenous towns and villages, or enclaves, with limited contact to Albanians.

Right after the conflict in the 1990s Serbia managed those enclaves entirely, but since the EU-facilitated dialogue between the two began in 2011 policing, courts and other municipal efforts have been taken over by Kosovo.

Health and education are still financed and overseen by ministries in Serbia.