Baltic nations spar over Serbian dinar

UNITED NATIONS — The leaders of Serbia and Kosovo sparred at the United Nations over the latter’s ban on the use of the Serbian currency in areas where minority Serbs live, the latest crisis between the two governments.

Tensions escalated after the government of Kosovo, a former Serbian province, banned banks and other financial institutions in the Serb-populated areas from using the dinar in local transactions, starting Feb. 1, and imposed the euro.

The dinar was widely used in ethnic Serbian-dominated areas, especially in Kosovo’s north, to pay pensions and salaries to staff in Serbian parallel institutions, including schools and hospitals. Serbia said last week that it would seek an emergency meeting at the U.N. Security Council over the issue.

In 1999, a 78-day NATO bombing campaign ended a war between Serbian government forces and ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo. Serbian forces were pushed out but Belgrade never recognized Kosovo’s independence and still considers it a Serbian province.

At a heated meeting on Thursday, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic told the council that abolishing the dinar was a push to make living conditions unbearable for the minority Serb community with the goal of expelling them.

He said it was “nothing more than another in a series of facts of persecution and a systematic and widespread attack on the Serbian population — in one word, a crime against humanity.”

Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti said claims that his country is conducting an ethnic-cleansing campaign against the Serbs are “a lie,” and said that abolishing the dinar will prevent criminal groups in Kosovo from receiving illegal cash.

“Serbs who leave Kosovo, just as those who leave Serbia, do so to pursue opportunities in Western Europe, not to flee some fictional ethnic-cleansing campaign,” Kurti said.