“Here we are at this facility financed by the Republic of Serbia, which invested 1.4 million euros. I hope the young people of Zubin Potok will know how to use it, and from what I see, it will also serve the Hydrometeorological Institute, the Red Cross…” – these were the first words President Aleksandar Vučić addressed to the cameras at Gazivode, exactly seven years ago today.
He was answering a question from a then–TV Prva journalist who asked him: “Do you know how much the people here rejoice at your arrival?”
Vučić was greeted that day by athletes from the Kickboxing Club “Mitrovica,” whose coach, Milun Milunović, would five years later end up in a Kosovo prison on terrorism charges, where he remains to this day.
The 2018 visit came in the year marked by the assassination of Oliver Ivanović. Vučić arrived in northern Kosovo accompanied by Health Minister Zlatibor Lončar, then-Director of the Security Information Agency Bratislav Gašić, and the head of the Kosovo Office, Marko Đurić.
“Without Gazivode, there is no survival, nor continuity of life for the people of Ibarski Kolašin and Zubin Potok,” he declared from the Gazivode dam.
Already then, Vučić underscored the symbolic weight of the lake. Gazing into its depths, he remarked: “Through the depth of Gazivode, you can see the depth of all our disputes and disagreements.”
Two years later, U.S. envoy Richard Grenell would brand it “Trump Lake” after the Washington Agreement, in which Israel recognized Kosovo.
Today, Gazivode paints a different picture. Kosovo special police units patrol its waters, boats of Kosovo’s “coast guard” set out from a pontoon near the villa of Milan Radoičić, while swimmers from the south dive from a nearby bridge—until tragedy struck when a young man from the diaspora drowned, his body later recovered by the Kosovo Security Forces and taken to the very Ecological Center that Vučić had inaugurated on that September day.
Just months ago, employees of the “Ibar-Lepenac” company, assisted by Kosovo police, entered that same facility and placed it under their control.
At the 2018 ceremony, Vučić announced that Serbia had invested 130 million euros in the Ecological Center, along with 60 million for the latest equipment. He also promised lakeside infrastructure worth 12 million euros, new youth resorts, and concrete economic development projects—from reactivating a Simpo plant, to small-scale fruit and vegetable processing facilities, and a fish processing plant.
None of these materialized. Neither the Simpo facility, nor the fish processing plant. Nor the “historic speech” he pledged to deliver the next day in Mitrovica.
And since that September 2018 visit, despite promises, Vučić has never set foot in Kosovo again.
Preuzimanje i objavljivanje tekstova sa portala KoSSev nije dozvoljeno bez navođenja izvora. Hvala na poštovanju etike novinarske profesije.
