Today ends the deadline that was given to Kosovo and Serbia to send to Brussels their comments on a sequencing plan for the implementation of the agreement on the normalization of relations, which Prime Minister Albin Kurti and President Aleksandar Vučić agreed on last year.
Serbia seeks the Association, while Kosovo seeks ‘de facto’ recognition. The agreement has remained unimplemented, while the EU is trying to find a way to make this happen.
In the last meeting between chief negotiators Besnik Bislimi and Petar Petkovic on July 2, the European Union’s special envoy for the Kosovo-Serbia dialogue, Miroslav Lajcak, asked the parties to send their comments by July 18.
As it happens, the two states, Kosovo and Serbia, today have the deadline to take their ideas to Brussels.
Klisman Kadiu, adviser to Bislim, said on Tuesday that the Government will send the comments within the deadline.
“The Government of the Republic of Kosovo will submit its written comments on the document of the sequencing plan, within the stipulated time, i.e. July 18, according to the request of the emissary Lajçak”, he told Time.
Kadiu said that last year and this year, Kosovo “presented concrete proposals and comments for each point, of the versions of the sequencing plan, proving the constructiveness, as well as the readiness and will to implement the agreements”.
“In order for the agreements to be fully implemented, the same approach is needed from the other side, which has unfortunately been missing so far,” he said.
Based on the comments that will be sent by both parties, the European mediators will issue a new proposal for the implementation of the agreement, as Bislimi said on July 2.
That day, Bislimi and Petkovic stayed in Brussels until late. They had gone there to find a solution for how to implement the Basic Agreement.
The separate meetings with Lajcak and then the joint tripartite meeting did not produce any agreement.
For about seven hours, a number of issues were discussed, while Lajcak said that they had agreed “on a number of next steps”.
Bislimi said that the Serbian side was only interested in discussing the establishment of the Association of Serb-majority municipalities, while Petkovic admitted that he had insisted on that issue, which he called “essential for the survival of the Serbs and the normalization process.”
A week after that meeting, Lajcak wrote on Facebook that no progress had been made.
“Unfortunately, we failed to make progress on the big picture – the implementation of the Agreement on the Road to Normalization,” he wrote, although he reiterated that concrete steps had been agreed “on some practical issues.”
The meeting of the chief negotiators was preceded by a trip of the Prime Minister of Kosovo, Albin Kurti and the Serbian President, Aleksandar Vučić to Brussels.
On June 26, they returned to the European capital, and despite the EU warning that they would attend separate meetings with EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, followed by a tripartite meeting, the latter did not happen.
The EU organized the meetings with Kurti and Vucic to analyze, as it was said, what has been achieved in the dialogue under the leadership of Borrell and for the “way forward”.
Kurti and Vucic did not sit down in front of each other to discuss how to implement the agreement on the normalization of relations reached on February 27, 2023 and the annex to its implementation on March 18, 2023
