BELGRADE — Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic’s new platform for Kosovo and Metohija should be presented to Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic “in two to three days.”
This is what the Belgrade-based daily Politika reported on Tuesday.
According to the paper, Nikolic will suggest to the government “to continue to treat northern Kosovo in accordance with the Constitution of Serbia,” while the territory outside the ZSO – a future community of Serb municipalities – “would have the treatment that (ethnic) Albanians had in the former Yugoslavia.”
The 1974 Constitution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ) gave ethnic Abanians in Kosovo and Metohija, Serbia’s southern province, the right of judicial self-government and the possibility to set up a constitutional court.
Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in 2008 unilaterally declared independence, but Serbia considers this a violation of its Constitution and territorial integrity.
The paper reports that Nikolic’s platform will “move within the framework allowed by the Constitution – but with the intention to achieve a lasting agreement with Albanians.” The idea is to give Kosovo broad autonomy, like that of a republic in a federal system, the article added.
The original Serbian platform for solving the problem of Kosovo and Metohija was published in late December 2012. After the signing of the Brussels agreement, reached during the EU-sponsored talks between Belgrade and Pristina the following year, Nikolic in late 2014 announced a new platform, but it has not yet been published.
The 2012 platform stated that Serbian authorities wanted “a high degree of territorial and political autonomy for Serb municipalities, modeled after Catalonia,” and for that autonomy “to be guaranteed by the highest legal acts of the province, and backed by officials of the international community involved in the negotiations.”
Presidential adviser Stanislav Pak-Stankovic said at the beginning of May that the drafting of the new platform was nearly done, and that Serbia will not recognize Kosovo.
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