Vikola Tomović has lived in his cottage near Gazivode since 2012. As of today, the excavators are at his door. „I have no other home,” the man says - and that's the whole story, gathered into four words.

The story comes from the shore of Lake Gazivode, near Zubin Potok, where the „Ibar-Lepenac” company began demolishing a dozen cottages owned by Serbs. Tomović received a demolition order on 3 July. Before that, he says, the police assured him verbally that his property wouldn't be torn down. Verbally - meaning not on paper, not with a signature, not with a guarantee worth anything the next day.

„I got a verbal assurance from Veton Elshani that they wouldn't demolish it,” Tomović recounts. He had no written document protecting the property. He claims the plot was previously owned by the state enterprise „Srbija šume” and that he holds documents granting the right to use the land - documents which, according to him, the authorities refuse to recognize.

„If I'm a usurper of three ares of land, then let them demolish. I'll stay here anyway. I have nowhere else to go. This is all I have,” he says. A man who is a refugee, who has already lost one home once, now watches the second one being torn down before his eyes. Who did he talk to about this? With the international representatives who passed through recently - the same ones who always „pass through,” while the demolition orders arrive all the same.

This isn't a story about geopolitics, about front lines and great powers. This is a story about three ares of land and one roof. But it's precisely such stories that draw the real relationship of institutions toward the people beneath them - whether the institution is called Pristina, Belgrade or Skopje. When the assurance is verbal and the demolition order is on paper, everyone in the Balkans knows which of the two weighs more.