Businessman Safet Demiri got a rude awakening when he went to renew the registration of his company cars in August 2019. An official in Demiri's hometown of Medvedja, in southern Serbia, told him that he was no longer listed in the population register.

"You could have knocked me down with a feather," he told DW.

Demiri commutes between Medvedja, where he runs a tourist resort and a telecommunications company, and Vienna, where he works as a building contractor.

But, since the summer of 2019, his name no longer appears in the population register of his hometown, where his family has lived for over 200 years.

Demiri said officials merely shrugged their shoulders when he asked how he was supposed to run his businesses in Medvedja without a registered address or cars. He had no choice but to register his cars in his father's name.

Court ruled that the removal was legal

To this day, his situation remains unchanged, and his rights are curtailed. He took legal action, but the Administrative Court in Nis ruled that his deletion from the register was legal because he lived abroad.

"Off the record, they told me that the instructions had come from above," said the 46-year-old.

Demiri is not alone in this respect. Thousands of others in the predominantly ethnic Albanian Presevo Valley in southern Serbia share his fate. A growing number of people there have been removed from the population register without warning.

The 'passivation' of addresses

The reason is their ethnicity, said Flora Ferati-Sachsenmaier, a lecturer at the University of Göttingen in Germany. She herself comes from the region and wrote a study on the subject in 2023 that was published by the Max-Planck-Institut in Göttingen.

Ferati-Sachsenmaier stumbled on the phenomenon by chance in 2016 while working on an entirely different project in the region. The more she researched, the more she realized that there was a method behind the deletions.

"Every second Albanian I spoke to told me that the authorities were deleting them from the population register," she told DW.

Serious repercussions

The Serbian authorities call it "passivation" (or "passivization"). If they discover that someone no longer lives at their registered address, he or she is deleted from the population register, said Ferati-Sachsenmaier.

But it is not just people who no longer live in the country who have been removed from the register; so have people who went on vacations or trips abroad. As a rule, once they have been removed from the register, they don't succeed in getting back on it again.

Passivation has serious repercussions for those affected, like making it impossible for them to get passports and access health insurance.

An attempt to reduce the size of the Albanian minority?

The objective is apparently to reduce the size of the ethnic Albanian population in southern Serbia.

"While about 10% of the population in the Presevo Valley has been affected, passivation cases in other regions of Serbia affect less than 1% of the relevant municipal population — if they occur at all," explained Ferati-Sachsenmaier. 

The situation is particularly problematic for ethnic Albanians who have been living and working in Kosovo since the war in 1999, said Enver Haziri, who runs an agency in Kosovo that deals with matters relating to ethnic Albanians from the Presevo Valley.

Most of this group were displaced from their native region when the war ended in June 1999, and the Albanian minority in southern Serbia bore the brunt of the anger of the retreating Serbian army.

While these displaced ethnic Albanians were taken in by Kosovo, they were never officially registered there. Passivation renders them practically stateless, which marginalizes them even more.

"While they are morally welcome, they are neither recognized as refugees nor are they granted Kosovar citizenship," said Haziri.

Under Prime Minister Albin Kurti, the government of Kosovo has tried to change the situation and give them residence permits.

Ethnic Albanians in southern Serbia — a marginalized minority

The Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia has referred in a report to the passivation of addresses as "a form of ethnic cleansing through administrative means."

About 60,000 ethnic Albanians live in the Presevo Valley, to which the municipalities of Medvedja, Bujanovac and Presevo belong. Although they make up the majority of the population there, and Serbia has signed the Council of Europe's Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, ethnic Albanians are systematically marginalized, said Shaip Kamberi, the only ethnic Albanian politician to be elected to the Serbian parliament.

As an EU accession candidate, Serbia has committed itself to improving the representation of its Albanian minority in public institutions.

"Passivation is just one of the discrimination measures," says Kamberi. "We are not integrated into public life, and potential foreign investors are often prevented from investing in our businesses. Moreover, the advancing militarization of the territory also makes life in the region difficult."

To back up this statement, Kamberi points to a map of 48 Serbian military bases on the border with Kosovo. Most of these bases are in the Presevo Valley.

Concern in Berlin

Kamberi recently visited Berlin to raise awareness of the issue within the government and parliament. The lawmakers he met with are concerned about the situation.

Knut Abraham of the center-right CDU/CSU told DW: "I call on the embassies of EU Member States in Belgrade to pay particular attention to the situation and to seek dialogue on this matter with representatives of the minority."

"The situation of the Albanian minority in Serbia deserves greater international attention," said Thomas Hacker of the liberatarian FDP. "At present, the focus on the dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina is too big, while other, equally important issues are regrettably being pushed into the background."

Hacker went on to say that the process of passivation is like a creeping deprivation of rights.

The German Foreign Office in Berlin has appealed to all sides to "ensure transparent and just dealings in line with obligations."

Serbian government denies discrimination

While the Serbian government and authorities do not deny that passivation exists, they do reject claims that it is motivated by discrimination against ethnic Albanians in Serbia.

In December 2023, Aleksandar Martinovic, minister for state administration and local self-government, told Serbian media that the "deactivation of domiciles" in Bujanovac, Presevo and Medvedja was in line with the law and was not discriminatory.

DW approached the Serbian government for comment but had not received any response before publication.

Businessman Safet Demiri and several other ethnic Albanians have lodged a complaint with the Constitutional Court in Belgrade. They are certain their case will be rejected and intend to take the matter to the European Court of Human Rights.

The likelihood of success is high. Nevertheless, it is questionable whether such a victory would impact Serbia's policy towards its Albanian minority.

This article was originally published in German.