The new round of talks between the main negotiators of Belgrade and Pristina on Tuesday in Brussels is a new fiasco, but unlike the others, it was completely expected, media in the region write.
The meetings in Brussels followed last week’s separate meetings between Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti with Lajcak and the head of the European Union (EU) diplomacy Josep Borrell, when, however, no trilateral meeting took place.
Namely, Albin Kurti refused the tripartite meeting with Aleksandar Vucic and made the continuation of the dialogue conditional on three new demands.
For the chief negotiator of Belgrade, the director of the Office for Kosovo, Petar Petkovic, the round of dialogue on Tuesday is proof that Pristina fundamentally does not want the normalization of relations, and that the formation of the Union of Serbian Municipalities, an unequivocal condition of the United States (U.S.) and the EU, is the “last hole in the pipe”, reports Kosovo online.
“Pristina is killing dialogue,” Petkovic said after the meeting.
The key problem of the dialogue for Pristina’s chief negotiator, Deputy President of Kosovo Besnik Bislimi, is that Petkovicexclusively insisted on the adoption of the European draft of the Union of Serbian Municipalities.
“The only item on the agenda on which we had to make progress was the discussion on the finalization of the sequence plan. But Petkovic was only interested in one item, which implied the adoption of the European draft statute of the Community of Municipalities with a Serbian majority,” Bislimi said after the meeting.
The head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, summarizing not only last week but also his five-year mandate in the EU, said that courage, vision and political will are needed for the dialogue process between Belgrade and Pristina.
Last week, instead of the announced tripartite meeting between Albin Kurti and Aleksandar Vucic, at the end of the day he appeared in front of the journalists, stating that Kurti did not want that meeting, but he set three new conditions, the key of which is mutual recognition.
The spokesperson of the EU, Peter Stano, announcing the meeting of the chief negotiators of Belgrade and Pristina, Petar Petkovic and Besnik Bislimi, for Tuesday, explained that the priority and agenda of that meeting is determined by the “greatest urgency of the beginning of the implementation of the Agreement on the road to the normalization of relations between the two sides”.
“There is no recognition here, but, of course, the logical consequence of normalization would be recognition. But that is something much later in the process,” Stano also assessed in the announcement of the negotiations.
The main European negotiator, the EU’s special envoy for dialogue Miroslav Lajcak, on the other hand, said that “it is up to the parties to determine what normalization means”.
