Kosovo officials have begun conducting the country's first census in over a decade, as the country's main Serbian political party vowed to boycott the count.
Officials from the Kosovo Statistics Agency said on April 5 that they hoped to complete the count in six weeks and they expected Kosovo's ethnic Serbs to take part.
The agency “has provided training for Serb supervisors and enumerators as it did for the other communities," census official Hazbije Qeriqi said.
Serb List, which is the dominant Serbian political party in Kosovo, said it would not participate, and sought to send a message to Prime Minister Albin Kurti.
“We want to send a clear message…that the Serbian people will not participate in the upcoming false registration in his organization, with which he wants to confirm his shameful success in expelling the Serbs,” the party said in a statement.
The party also accused the government of denying Kosovar Serbs important social benefits and persecuting the Serb community.
Tensions run high between ethnic Serbs and the majority Kosovars, particularly in the north of the country. The most recent spark came after the Central Bank banned the use of the Serbian currency, the dinar, for cash payments, and ordered the euro to be the only official currency in the country.
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Kosovo Serbs Struggle To Access Cash Amid Foreign Currency Ban
Serbia, which finances a parallel welfare and education system for Serbs, uses the dinar to pay salaries of Kosovo Serbs who work in Serbian institutions.
The last census, conducted in 2011, put Kosovo's population at 1.8 million people. It was also boycotted by the Serb community, which officially numbered 25,000 at the time.
More current public sector estimates put the number at around 100,000, many of whom live in the north of the country.
For the first time, this year’s count asks people to declare any damages they may have suffered during the country’s separatist war with Serbia in 1999. Kosovo later declared independence from Belgrade in 2008, a move that Serbia along with its allies Russia and China have refused to acknowledge.
Under Kosovo law, people can be fined for refusing to provide information requested by census takers.