BELGRADE – Belgrade and Pristina will meet in Brussels to resume their talks on the normalization of relations, now facilitated by the new European foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, for the first time after ten months on Monday.
The negotiating teams are now being headed by Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic and Isa Mustafa, prime minister in the Kosovo government.
The dialogue will begin after 6 p.m., as Prime Minister Vucic will first have talks with European Commissioner for European Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations Johannes Hahn.
The agenda of the dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina is set with consent from both parties, and according to earlier announcements, it is expected that the new round will focus on the implementation of the agreements reached so far and unresolved issues, such as judiciary integration, setting up a community of Serb municipalities and energy.
The Director of the Serbian government’s Office for Kosovo-Metohija (KiM) said that Belgrade would insist on the adoption of a charter prescribing the powers of the community of Serb municipalities and raise the question of Serbian property in KiM, including the Trepca mining complex.
Kosovo Minister for Dialogue with Belgrade Edita Tahiri said that Pristina was interested in setting up a basic court in the (Serb-majority) north of the province and in introducing a national dialing code for Kosovo.
The dialogue is resuming amid a deterioration of relations between the two sides, caused by Pristina’s recent decision to dismiss Kosovo Prime Minister for Communities and Return Aleksandar Jablanovic.
Prime Minister Mustafa dismissed Jablanovic on February 3 for his allegedly insulting “mothers of Djakovica” and “Kosovo citizens,” and this decision was made under the pressure of violent protests staged by the political opposition in Pristina.
During a meeting of representatives of Serbs from KiM and the Serbian Prime Minister in Belgrade on February 5, it was concluded that Jablanovic was not to blame as he had not offended the Kosovo Albanians, since he had only called “savages” a group of thugs who had been throwing stones at a bus carrying Serbs on their way to a church in the western Kosovo city of Djakovica on the Serbian Orthodox Christmas Eve (January 6).
The Serbs were not only prevented from reaching the church but also from visiting the property they had been displaced from and the graves of their loved ones.
The authorities in Belgrade have said that the unilateral move by Prime Minister Mustafa will make the dialogue more difficult, and representatives of the Srpska list that a decision about whether they will continue their participation in Kosovo institutions will depend on the assessment of the situation after the new round talks in Brussels.
The previous round of the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue took place on March 31, 2014, with the then EU high representative Catherine Ashton as the mediator. The talks then came to a temporary halt, as it took Pristina seven months to form a new government after the parliamentary elections.
The Brussels accord on the normalization of relations was signed on April 19, 2013, based on which several agreements were concluded, and then implemented – the agreement on holding local elections in Kosovo, establishment of the integrated management of administrative crossings and freedom of movement, integration of police and election of a Serb community member as regional police chief.
The two sides also reached agreements in principle on setting up the community of Serb municipalities, on integration of judiciary and on energy sector, and Belgrade claims that these have not yet been finalized because of Pristina’s obstructions and an institutional vacuum following the elections.
