By Besa Maliqi/

Pristina will supply school textbooks to Albanian communities in Serbia while Belgrade will do the same for Serbs in Kosovo, they agreed for the first time since the war in 1999./

Kosovo’s education minister Arsim Bajrami said on Thursday that his ministry had begun cooperation with its Belgrade counterpart to supply the Albanian community in Serbia with books for school pupils.

Bajrami said that Pristina and Belgrade education ministries reached an agreement that allows delivery of books to ethnic Albanian students living in Presevo, Bujanovac and Medvedja in the Presevo Valley area of southern Serbia, which has a large ethnic Albanian population.

Bajrami added that this is the first officially organised effort to send Albanian-language textbooks to schools in the Presevo valley since the end of the war in 1999.

“The textbooks have already been sent to Presevo and we ask the Serbian authorities that these textbooks be delivered to students and for them not to forbid any of the textbooks because the textbooks are based on new curricula and there is no absolutely hate speech and there is no ideological content either,” Bajrami said.

He said that his Serbian counterpart, Srdjan Verbic, agreed that Kosovo’s education ministry could send the books to the Presevo valley, while he had allowed books from Serbia to be sent to Kosovo.

“Since the Serbian government allowed the delivery to Presevo, I have taken a decision to allow Serbian textbooks enter Kosovo for the needs of Serbian students in Kosovo,” Bajrami added. (BIRN Foto: Kosovo minister education Arsim Bajrami)