UNMIK/PR/810
PRISTINA- Acting SRSG Charles Brayshaw today visited the site of the Mobile Cultural Container project and the new bridge construction leading to it, in Mitrovica.
The Mobile Cultural Container project, which is intended to unite young people from north and south of the Ibar river in creative activities, will be inaugurated on Saturday evening at 8 p.m. by SRSG Michael Steiner.
UNMIK has constructed an extension of the main bridge linking the northern and southern sides of Mitrovica, so that participants in the container project will have to walk from either side of the river and approach the project together.
Engineers were completing the site today and installing some of the 16 containers when Mr. Brayshaw and Mitrovica Municipal Assembly president Faruk Spahija visited today to check progress. The containers will be united by a large domed tent, in front of the Cultural Center on the south bank of the river. It will be open to young people from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. through 4 October.
“This is an opportunity for young people on both sides of the river to get together in these activities and to start to rebuild some of the relations disrupted over the past several years,” Mr. Brayshaw said. “The international community is strongly committed to Mitrovica and we hope people will respond…It’s up to people to take the opportunity and up to us to created the best circumstances for them to do that.”
The Mobile Container project is is a project of the Fund in Defence of our Future, founded by Freimut Duve, OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media.
Later Mr. Brayshaw visited a new clinic in the the mixed community at Miner’s Hill in the north part of Mitrovica, still awaiting reconstruction of several Kosovo Albanian homes. He also stopped to view industrial space in part of the Trepca complex where workers in the southern part of Mitrovica have restored machinery that once made heavy equipment and are awaiting investment to put it to use.
