The leaders of Serbia and Kosovo continued a dialogue of the deaf in Brussels on Wednesday after the violence in late July, with NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg calling on them after separate talks for “restraint” and “good faith”, to “prevent further escalation”.
“I call on all parties to show restraint and avoid violence,” Jens Stoltenberg told reporters, warning that NATO’s peacekeeping force in Kosovo (Kfor) was “ready to intervene if stability threatened”, to guarantee “freedom of movement for all”. the inhabitants” of the former Serbian province.
The Secretary General of the Alliance spoke with the Serbian President, Aleksandar Vucic, and then with the Kosovar Prime Minister, Albin Kurti, two weeks before the entry into force of the new administrative and border regulations imposed by Pristina. The latter caused a new episode of strong tensions at the end of July in the north of Kosovo, where the Serb minority considers them humiliating.
“We disagree on almost no point”
Although this Thursday a new consultation attempt will take place in Brussels within the framework of the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue facilitated by the EU since 2011, Jens Stoltenberg called on them to “show flexibility and be constructive.”
Serbian Aleksandar Vucic told the press to expect “difficult discussions”. “We disagree on almost no point,” he warned.
“It’s not up to me (…) There is a new generation of (Serb) youth in Kosovo who will not tolerate this situation, who will not want to put up with terror, who do not see Kosovo as an independent state but as a territory of Serbia, of in accordance with international law,” he argued.
Belgrade has never recognized the independence proclaimed by Kosovo in 2008, a decade after a bloody war that left 13,000 dead, most of them Kosovar Albanians. Since then, the region has been the scene of episodic friction. The approximately 120,000 Kosovar Serbs, a third of whom live in the north of the territory, do not recognize Pristina’s authority and remain loyal to Belgrade.
“Illegal Serbian structures turned into criminal gangs”
Pristina said he was convinced that Serbia would take advantage of the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine to launch an offensive against Kosovo. “Kosovars have every reason to be vigilant about our neighbour’s destructive attitude,” Albin Kurti responded at a separate press conference.
“On one side, there is the democratic state of Kosovo, with its professional police. On the other, the illegal Serb structures transformed into criminal gangs, which erect barricades” in the north of the country, launched the Kosovar prime minister.
Invoking a principle of “reciprocity”, Pristina plans to impose temporary residence permits on people entering Kosovo with a Serbian identity card and to require Serbs present in the country to replace Serbian plates on their vehicles with plates from the Republic of Kosovo. from Kosova. Under US pressure, Kosovo had agreed to postpone the implementation of these measures until September 1.
Source: BFM TV
