A new attempt at consultation will take place Thursday in Brussels as part of the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue. Jens Stoltenberg called on the leaders of the two countries to be “constructive” but the latter expect “difficult discussions”.
Le Monde with AFP
Diplomatic tensions between Serbia and Kosovo do not go down. After the violence that broke out on the border at the end of July, a new attempt at consultation will take place Thursday in Brussels as part of the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue facilitated by the European Union since 2011. Before the meeting, the NATO chief, Jens Stoltenberg, called the Serbian and Kosovar leader to “prevent a new escalation”.
“I call on all parties to show restraint and avoid violence,” Stoltenberg told the press. He warned that the NATO peacekeeping force in Kosovo (KFOR) was “ready to intervene if stability was threatened”, in order to ensure “freedom of movement for all the inhabitants” of the old Serbian province.
The secretary general of the Alliance spoke with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, then with Prime Minister Kosovar, Albin Kurti, two weeks before the entry into force of new administrative and border rules imposed by Pristina .
Invoking a principle of “reciprocity”, Kosovo plans to impose temporary residence permits on people entering the country with a Serbian identity card, and demanding that the Serbs present in the country replace the plates Serbian registration of their vehicles by plates from the Republic of Kosovo. Under American pressure, Kosovo had agreed to postpone the implementation of these measures to 1 er September.
These new rules have led to a new episode of strong tensions at the end of July in northern Kosovo, where the Serbian minority describes them as vexators.
“Agree on practically no point”
On the eve of the new consultations, Jens Stoltenberg called on the two leaders “to be flexible and to be constructive”. Vucic, however, said to the press expect “difficult discussions”. “We do not agree on practically no point,” he warned.
“It does not depend on me (…). There is a new generation of young [Serbs] in Kosovo who will not tolerate this situation, who will not want to endure terror, who do not see Kosovo as a Independent State but as a territory of Serbia, in agreement with international law, “he argued.
Belgrade never recognized the independence proclaimed by Kosovo in 2008, a decade after a bloody war that killed 13,000, mostly Albanian Kosovars. Since then, the region has been the scene of episodic friction. The approximately 120,000 Kosovo Serbs, a third of which live in the north of the territory, do not recognize the authority of Pristina and remain faithful to Belgrade.
“The Serbian police and army have at no time crossed” the border with Kosovo during the July incidents, assured Aleksandar Vucic, accusing Pristina of “having lied to this point as on all the rest For one hundred and ninety days, by invoking an attack (…) which has and will never take place “.
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. Belgrade, who has good relations with Moscow, has fiercely denied, declaring himself “a militarily neutral country, aligning on any block”.
“Kosovars have every reason to be vigilant in the face of the destructive attitude of our neighbor,” said Albin Kurti at a separate press conference. “On the one hand, you have the Democratic State of Kosovo, with its professional police. On the other, illegal Serbian structures transformed into criminal gangs, which erect barricades” in the north of the country, denounced the Prime Minister Kosovar.