Pristina’s chief negotiator Avni Arifi’s statement that his side never interrupted the dialogue with Belgrade and that Belgrade failed to fulfil the obligations assumed by the Brussels agreement cannot be called anything else than the untruth, says deputy director of the Office for Kosovo and Metohija, Dusan Kozarev in a statement delivered to media.
In a statement to the media, Kozarev recalled that in addition to several informal blockades, Pristina even officially decided by the decision of the parliamentary institution in Kosovo to temporary suspend the dialogue for several months, and that the government in March refused to enter the process of establishing the Community/Association of Serb Municipalities (ZSO).
This should be accompanied by a series of statements by Albanian political officials in Pristina that the establishment of the ZSO should be conditioned by the admission of a self-proclaimed Kosovo to the United Nations, and the rejection of participation in Brussels-based talks in which the ZSO was the primary topic.
“How can all this be called rather than blocking the dialogue,” Kozarev asked.
The ZSO, he said, is not only one of the elements of the First Brussels Agreement, because the first six of the fifteen points of that document refers to it, so that it is not the most important result of the dialogue only for Belgrade, objectively it is the most important.
As such, he says, it is and officially part of the European Union’s foreign policy as mediator in the dialogue and guarantor of the implementation of the agreed.
“Belgrade fulfilled all its obligations arising from the First Brussels Agreement, and any attempt of Pristina to condition the establishment of the Community of Serb Municipalities with something that is not an integral part of that agreement is the most violent arbitrariness and avoidance of obligations undertaken in the negotiation process,” Kozarev said.
