The international community has made mistakes in the Balkans but this will not be repeated with the establishment of the Association of Serb Municipalities in Kosovo, the EU’s special envoy to the Serbia-Kosovo dialogue, Miroslav Lajcak said on Thursday.
Lajcak dined with Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti and his deputy Besnik Bislimi on Wednesday evening and gave an overview to Klan Kosovo afterwards.
“I think that the international community has made these mistakes in the past in the Balkans, coming up with suggestions that were not tested in other countries. Not all have worked well in the Balkans,” he said.
“Let’s make sure that everything we propose is based on existing models that work well,” Lajcak said without directly referencing Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska – something Pristina says is a failure and fears with the proposed establishment of the association in Kosovo.
The agreement to create the association was signed in 2013 and Kurti has said he is not responsible for those decisions. Furthermore, the Constitutional Court ruled that establishing a parallel structure with executive powers would go against the Constitution.
Lajcak said he reassured Kurti that the details of the association would be “drafted by you and agreed on by you.”
“You won’t write something you don’t agree with. The second point is that there are existing models, functional European models. I have 15 minority protection analyses on my desk in Brussels. Some of these models you may not have heard of. None of them has caused non-functionality where applicable,” Lajcak continued.
He added that a lot of time is being wasted talking about something “that doesn’t exist and something that you are going to co-author.”
The international community insists Kurti honours the signed agreement, but the prime minister has dug his heels in. President Vjosa Osmani has said that an association is possible if it functions like an NGO and does not have executive powers.
(Alice Taylor | Exit.al)
Source: euractiv.com
