BELGRADE – The meetings of the working groups in the dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina will be continued next week, and for now it is crucial to form the community of Serb municipalities (ZSO) and to pass its statute, Serbian Prime Minister Ivica Dacic said.
“You see that there are problems with the constitution of the municipal assemblies, the ZSO should be established, the statute should be drafted, now we are slowly reaching the core of the problem, the ZSO is becoming the main issue,” Dacic told reporters during his visit to a retirement home in Belgrade on Thursday.
He said that he does not know the date when the dialogue with Pristina will be resumed, adding that EU High Representatives Catherine Ashton has told him that she would love them to meet in January.
“We have not agreed on January 17 as the date for the continuation of the talks because I was not willing to accept the date as I believed that this would only be an additional pressure, and we should not work under pressure, we should find the best possible solutions,” the prime minister said.
We are yet to see whether the talks will take place on January 17 or not, and it is certain that the political criteria for Serbia’s talks with the EU will remain unchanged requiring progress in the dialogue with Pristina, he said.
“Probably there will still be different pressures,” Dacic said, adding that the administration in Brussels is on holiday at the moment so there have not been any contacts in the previous seven days, but they will be continued on Friday or Monday.
Dacic underlined that it is certain that on January 21 Serbian First Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr Vucic and him will go to Brussels to attend the first intergovernmental conference between Serbia and the EU, which will officially mark the start of the country’s EU accession talks.
http://www.tanjug.rs/news/111829/dacic–zso-formation-crucial.htm
