TIRANA, June 8 – A proposal sent to France’s President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for the statute of the Association of Serb-Majority Municipalities in Kosovo has not been received well in Kosovo.
The announcement on such a move was made by Albania’s Prime Minister Edi Rama in a press conference in Tirana on Thursday at a time when the situation in north of Kosovo has aggravated with Kosovo’s Serbs protesting against the start of the official works of the new elected mayors.
The first to react to Rama’s proposal was the ruling party Vetevendosje which expressed caution.
“There is an old saying that ‘the path to hell is paved with good intentions’. So I don’t see this proposal beyond this context,” Mimoza Kusari Lila, head of the Vetevendosje parliamentary group, told Kosovapress news agency.
“We don’t know how to assess it because we haven’t seen this draft statute. As Prime Minister Rama has stated himself, he has not been consulting (with the Kosovo authorities),” she announced.
Speaking on Thursday at a parliament session, Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti did not directly refer to Rama’s proposal but mentioned that beginning of this month he had presented his vision for the Association during a high-level meeting with Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic in Brussels.
Kurti said that there was no agreement on who should draft the statute for the Association, but that the text could be amended “when we agree in principle”.
Serbia and Kosovo agreed during talks in Brussels in 2013 to establish a semi-autonomous municipal association for the Serb minority, an agreement that was then ratified by the Kosovo parliament. But so far it has not been set up and pressure on the Kosovo government has been growing as the country’s Western backers push for its conclusion.
In the meantime Kosovo’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Meliza Haradinaj Stublla, criticised Rama’s plan on Thursday, comparing it to a previous mooted normalisation ‘solution’ involving an exchange of territories.
“So now, the ‘agents’ of the land swap idea have been set in motion [to work] for the implementation of the Association with executive powers. The aim remains the same: the partition of Kosovo,” Haradinaj Stublla wrote on Facebook.
Arben Gashi, head of opposition Democratic league of Kosovo, LDK, parliamentary group, also rebuffed Rama’s proposal.
“Let’s be clear and sharp: only the Kosovo government and no government of any other country is authorised to propose the statute of the Association,” Gashi said. /argumentum.al
