Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti said, commenting on the Serbian government’s decision to allow free movement for vehicles with Republic of Kosovo (RKS) license plates, that Pristina will react reciprocally “as soon as the border police documents and proves that Serbia implements its decision fully and without obstacles.”
At the beginning of this week, the Government of Serbia announced a decision allowing entry into Serbia and freedom of movement for vehicles with RKS plates from January 1. The director of the Serbian government’s office for Kosovo, Petar Petković, explained that the decision results from an agreement between the two parties from 2011, with the mediation of the European Union.
“We have not crossed the red lines in preserving national integrity and sovereignty,” Petković asserted.
He added that “registration plates are not a symbol of statehood”, which Serbia does not recognize and refuses to agree to Kosovo’s entry into international institutions, including the United Nations.
Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti assessed the Serbian government’s decision as an “attempt to diminish the criticism of the international community after irregularities and fraud” in the recent elections.
“The decision on free movement through Serbia with RKS license plates comes after more than 10 years of non-implementation of previous agreements,” was the statement of Kurti, which was reported by the Belgrade media tonight.
Kurti asserted that Belgrade made the decision on the RKS plates to cover “the official rejection of the fundamental agreements from Brussels on the way to stabilize relations”, and to “disguise the failure” of the armed action in the village of Banjska on September 24. Reactions of Serbs from the north of Kosovo are divided, while the right-wing opposition in Belgrade accuses the government of continuing to betray national and state interests.
Brussels welcomed Belgrade’s decision, and its spokesperson Peter Stano evaluated it as “a positive step in the implementation of the Agreement on the Road to Normalization, as well as previous obligations from the dialogue related to freedom of movement.”
In October last year, the government of Kosovo started the process of re-registration of vehicles with Serbian plates for cities in Kosovo on RKS plates, to which Belgrade reacted by withdrawing representatives of Serbs from Kosovo institutions, including the police.
A series of crises and tensions in the north followed, and the culmination was the action of a paramilitary group of Serbs and a conflict with the Kosovo police in the northern Kosovo village of Banjska, when one Kosovo policeman and three members of a group of armed Serbs were killed.
The European Union, with the support of the USA, is the mediator in the dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina, and currently on the table is the so-called Brussels normalization plan from February this year and the annex to that agreement, which both sides accepted in Ohrid in March.
According to the data of the Kosovo police, only from November 1 to December 14, 3,405 citizens in the north of Kosovo replaced plates with Serbian markings, and so far a total of 4,210 cars have been re-registered. The majority of the north of Kosovo consists of the Serbian community with about 90 percent of the population, and in the last local elections there were about 45,000 registered voters, Hina writes.
