Kosovo Acting Minister of Internal Affairs Xhelal Sveçla announced on Tuesday that he had signed the decision to permanently ban the Serbian Minister for Public Administration and Local Self-Government, Snezana Paunovic, from entering Kosovo or passing through its territory, after her statement that she “would have ethnically cleansed Kosovo” had she been in the place of Serbia’s strongman leader Slobodan Milosevic in 1999.

Sveçla said that Paunovic’s statement had “reaffirmed what Serbia has never abandoned, the project of ethnic cleansing of Albanians.”

“In our time, this was attempted by her former leader Slobodan Milosevic, also known as the butcher of the Balkans,” Sveçla wrote on Facebook.

He added that, “any attempt to revive ideologies of ethnic cleansing or to threaten the Republic of Kosovo will be met with a firm legal and institutional response.”

Paunovic, told the Belgrade-based Kurir on Monday that she would have “ethnically cleansed Kosovo” if she had been in the position of Serbia’s leader Slobodan Milosevic in 1999.

In another statement from Paunovic issued on her social media on Tuesday, she said she would not abandon the policies of the Socialist Party of Serbia, which she has been part of since 1992.

“I do not renounce the policies of the SPS. We are the party that led Serbia through indescribably difficult historical circumstances, the party that made great sacrifices, the party whose name was mentioned most often in The Hague,” she wrote on Instagram.

The minister is from the ranks of the government’s junior coalition partner, the Socialist Party of Serbia, the party Milosevic founded in 1990 and led until he died in a Hague detention centre in 2006, awaiting a war-crimes verdict.

Paunovic’s statement has been condemned by several EU officials.

An EU spokesperson condemned the comments and called on leaders on all sides “to act responsibly and refrain from any inflammatory rhetoric.”

“Our main position and key principle is that there should be no place, and there is no place in Europe, for rhetoric justifying and advocating for ethnic cleansing,” Anitta Hipper, an EU Spokesperson, told media in Brussels.

EU Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos also reacted, saying she was shocked by Minister Paunovic’s statement.

“There can only be zero tolerance for such statements. There is no place in Europe for rhetoric that justifies, promotes or glorifies ethnic cleansing. Personally, I am truly horrified that at this time we still have to talk about such things,” Kos said at a press conference on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, UK MP Alicia Kearns noted in a post on X that Paunovic’s “disgraceful support for ethnic cleansing in Kosovo is a stain on Serbia’s Government.”

“People in their thirties today remember the atrocities committed against them and their families by Milosevic’s forces.  No attempt to justify—or worse—glorify these crimes can make the world forget what happened in Kosovo,” she further wrote.