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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
And Albanians and was certain they would work well together. “This country,” he told West, “is getting over its past nicely.” Stan Terg is the oldest mine in the huge Trepča industrial complex in northern Kosovo. Bridget Storrie, Author provided Nearly 90 years later, the ruins of the houses that delighted West still exist above the Stan Terg mine, but they are pitted with bullet holes. While the war between Serbia and Kosovo in the late 1990s was not (ostensibly) over natural resources, a strike by the Albanian mineworkers at Stan Terg in 1989 was part of the political upheaval that preceded the violent break-up of Yugoslavia and ultimately led to Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008. Now this part of Kosovo is uneasily divided. Four Serb-dominated municipalities close to the border are still de facto ruled by Belgrade. The town of Kosovska Mitrovica, once the bustling, multicultural, industrial heart of this region, has been bisected – Serbs largely to the north of the river Ibar with their language, dinar currency and orientation towards Belgrade; Kosovan Albanians to the south.But it is not just people who are divided here. Trepča’s smelter, flotation plant and three northernmost mines are also under Belgrade’s control. Settling the future of the complex is an explosive issue: a mining complex that once promised to bring people together is now pushing them apart – lending its geological heft to a conflict that has become intractable.Yet the Kosovan-Albanian workers at Stan Terg are still optimistic that their
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