• COVID-19: Eight new cases, two deaths (media)
• Kosovo, Serbia trade blame for logjam in dialogue (BIRN)
• Osmani: If Serbian army crosses the border it will be met by US troops (media)
• Kosovo Government has no timeline for reciprocity toward Serbia (KTV)
• Ker-Lindsay blames EU for setbacks in Kosovo-Serbia dialogue (Telegrafi)
• Kosovar city's first Serb returnee reopens wartime wounds (RFE)
• HLCK, YIHR support Serb returnee in Gjakova (Klan Kosova)
• UN: 2022 budget for UNMIK approved (Deutsche Welle)

COVID-19: Eight new cases, two deaths (media)

Eight new cases of COVID-19 and two deaths from the virus have been recorded in Kosovo in the last 24 hours. Seven persons recovered from the virus during this time. There are 151 active cases of COVID-19 in Kosovo. 5,271 vaccine doses have been administered in the last 24 hours. To date, a total of 243,428 vaccines have been administered in Kosovo.

Kosovo, Serbia trade blame for logjam in dialogue (BIRN)

After a meeting of the delegations of Kosovo and Serbia in Brussels on Wednesday produced little except mutual accusations, the EU envoy, Miroslav Lajcak, said there was 'a lot of work still to be done'.

Kosovo and Serbia delegations again exchanged familiar accusations of not fulfilling the obligations they have undertaken at the latest round of the EU-facilitated dialogue on normalization of relations between the two countries.

The two delegations met on Tuesday in Brussels convened by the EU’s envoy for the dialogue, Miroslav Lajcak.

After the meetings, as happened before the during the ten-year dialogue, the delegations had different versions about what happened in the meeting and accused the other party of failing to meet its obligations.

“We presented remarks about the agreements and Serbia’s steps so far, for example the agreement on integrated border management, the recognition of diplomas, freedom of movement, the agreement on the footnote [Regional representation Agreement], and we have seen that the Serbian side has not delivered on its obligations,” Kosovo’s Deputy PM, Besnik Bislimi, head of the Kosovo delegation, said after the meeting.

The head of Serbia’s delegation, the president of Serbia’s Office for Kosovo, Petar Petkovic, blamed the Kosovo delegation for the impasse, saying that “not a word was mentioned in the [Kosovo] presentation about missing persons [from the 1998-9 Kosovo war]”.

“We see yesterday and today, but also in previous days, how Pristina, [Kosovo] Albanian politicians are talking about some [war] crimes, the issue of missing persons [from the Kosovo war] and so on, but when they come to Brussels and when they need to answer specifically how to solve this issue, how to find all the missing, Pristina did not raise this issue with a single word, in its presentation.

“Our delegation is the one that raised the issue of the missing and everything related to that issue”, Petkovic insisted on Wednesday, after the meeting.

Kosovo media reported that the next meeting between Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti and Serbia’s President, Aleksandar Vucic, in Brussels, will be in the third week of July, but there has been no official confirmation yet.

“We expect it to happen by the end of July, as they have said before, but I would rather leave it to Mr Lajcak and his team,” Petrovic told the media, adding that the EU “are the ones leading the dialogue”.

EU Special Representative Lajcak announced the modest results of the meetings on Wednesday on Twitter. “We all agreed that there is a lot of work still to be done and we will continue,” Lajcak wrote.

The opposition in Kosovo routinely accuses the government of not properly managing the dialogue. Valentina Bunjaku-Rexhepi from the opposition Democratic League of Kosovo, LDK, on Wednesday told TV channel KTV said only “neglect” is to be expected in the negotiations, adding that earlier agreements, such as the 2020 “Washington deal” presided over by Donald Trump should be implemented.

Osmani: If Serbian army crosses the border it will be met by US troops (media)

Kosovo President Vjosa Osmani said on Thursday that if the Serbian army tries to cross the border into Kosovo they will be met by troops of the United States of America and other NATO member states.

“It is clear that the Serbian army sees Russia as its main ally in terms of military cooperation, but also political and economic cooperation. They are open about this. While countries in the region, such as Kosovo and Croatia, took part in the ‘Defender Europe 21’ together with NATO and the United States, Serbia organised a military drill with Russia at the same time,” Osmani said in an interview with Croatian media Express.hr. “Serbia was the only country in the region that did not take part in the US-led Defender Europe. Recently we can see Serbia organising military drills with Russia and Belorussia, which shows their orientation. I am not certain what they mean with their rhetoric but I know one thing for sure: if they cross the border with Kosovo they will be met with troops from the United States and other NATO member states. We are not alone and Serbia knows this very well! They tried to do this once in 1999. I don’t think they want to try that again.” Kosovo Government has no timeline for reciprocity toward Serbia (KTV)

Kosovo’s Minister of Industry and Trade, Rozeta Hajdari, said in an interview with the TV station on Thursday, that the Kosovo Government will decide on reciprocity measures toward Serbia when it is ready, implying that the government does not have a timeline on the issue. Hajdari said the Kurti-led government will not back away from its pledge for reciprocity, but that it will decide on the matter once all stakeholders are ready.

“Preparations are needed so that when Kosovo makes a decision, it does not back down. This will happen when Kosovo is ready. If our principle as a government is to protect our producers, manufacturers and exporters, we must not fall victim for a process that could be political and damage our economy. Monitoring the implementation of measures is very important. When a decision is made there needs to be strict monitoring. We need to wait for the others to be ready too. It is not wise to make quick decisions and then have setbacks in the implementation. We will act when we are ready as a government. We will not back away from the pledge for reciprocity,” Hajdari said.

Hajdari argued that the proposal for a Mini-Schengen in the Western Balkan is a trap and suggested that Kosovo should review its position in the regional mechanism for free trade - CEFTA. She said that even though Kosovo has met all requirements in the mechanism, the country still faces trade barriers mainly from Serbia.

“We’re coming to the conclusion that Kosovo is assuming responsibilities, but the question is how much it is benefiting from this cooperation. This doesn’t mean that other mechanisms will not function. The Berlin Process pushes forward the integration of the region in the European Union. We need to carefully review the process of Kosovo’s repositioning in CEFTA. We are cooperating with our partners and addressing the problems that Kosovo faces as a result of trade barriers with Serbia. Prime Minister Kurti mentioned the SEFTA mechanism, knowing that we are seven countries, including Moldavia, in CEFTA. But in the Berlin Process, we are six countries and Moldavia would not be in SEFTA,” Hajdari said when commenting on Kurti’s proposal for a new free trade mechanism in the Balkans.

Hajdari also said that SEFTA would give Kosovo an advantage and that it would be treated as an equal country and that this is not possible at this point given UNMIK’s presence in CEFTA.

Ker-Lindsay blames EU for setbacks in Kosovo-Serbia dialogue (Telegrafi)

James Ker-Lindsay, professor at the London School of Economics, in an interview with Dukagjini TV on Thursday, blamed the European Union for setbacks in the dialogue between Kosovo and Serbia. “We are simply going around in circles without any fresh opinions from the parties or the European Union. I don’t see any future progress in the process. The European Union has done very little to encourage the parties. It has failed to send a message for the enlargement of the Western Balkans. To be honest, some of the more innovative ideas were blocked by Berlin. Ultimately it is up to the parties to work on a final settlement and this needs to be supported and not blocked by the EU and the partners,” Ker-Lindsay said.

Kosovar city's first Serb returnee reopens wartime wounds (RFE)

Dragica Gasic called it a "wish fulfilled."

Early last month, she became the first Serb returnee to the city of Gjakova, in western Kosovo, since the 1998-99 war that started the countdown to Kosovo's declared independence nearly a decade later.

But by June 30, following weeks of harassment by her ethnic-Albanian neighbors, Gasic had retreated to her sister's property near their childhood home about 30 kilometers away.

She fled after police prevented her from installing a security door on her apartment. And if it weren't for the police protection she got within days of her arrival, Gasic insisted, she might not have gotten out of the town alive.

Now, Gasic has returned to her old-new home in Gjakova and is bracing for the legal fallout as officials file suit to annul her lease and stoke petition drives to keep her -- and, seemingly, other ethnic Serbs like her -- out of their midst.

“I notified the police that I'm coming, the police came [and] the apartment was all alright, nobody touched anything," she told RFE/RL's Balkan Service after her latest relocation on July 8. "Police asked me if I had any problems, I said I didn’t. So, I just came. No problems for now."

Her stop-and-start case in Europe's newest independent state highlights thorny minority issues in a region ravaged by ethnically fueled wars in the 1990s that remain an obstacle to Balkan reconciliation.

It also amplifies international concerns that the successor states of the former Yugoslavia remain hostage to enmities that could reignite to threaten Europe's future.

Gasic told RFE/RL that the Office for Kosovo Affairs in neighboring Serbia will help her in a court battle to keep her lease in Gjakova.

Bigger Questions

Gasic originally came to Gjakova from a neighboring town when she was just 18 years old, and says she spent the best years of her life there.

Some of her detractors in Gjakova's overwhelmingly ethnic Albanian public cite Gasic's work for Serbia's national police force during the war.

She says she was merely a cleaning woman.

"I know I never did anything ugly to anyone," Gasic said of her two decades in Gjakova before she crossed a now-partly recognized international border into Serbia amid rising violence in the late 1990s. "I gave birth to two children here."

Her case quickly drew in the Serbian government, which still does not recognize Kosovo's independence and has extended public support to Gasic -- reportedly including their donation of the security door that Gjakova police confiscated rather than allowing it to be mounted in a municipal building.

The head of the Serbian government's office for Kosovo, Petar Petkovic, emerged from a highly publicized meeting with Gasic on June 28 vowing that Serbia and President Aleksandar Vucic would "do everything possible to enable a dignified, human life for Dragica Gasic." Petkovic later said that Gasic's case was raised at a meeting of the Brussels dialogue aimed at normalizing relations between Belgrade and Pristina, highlighting its potential to increase regional friction.

The Kosovar government has been mostly silent, aside from one member of the cabinet who holds a post traditionally set aside for ethnic Serbs in this landlocked country of around 1.9 million people.

Goran Rakic, Kosovo's minister for returns and communities, called the case "shameful and unacceptable."

"In the 21st century, this treatment of returnees and the return process is clearly an intention to completely stop the process and render it meaningless," Rakic said via Facebook.

Mostly Staying Away

Many ethnic Serbs left during or after the 1998-99 war, which famously included the NATO bombing of Yugoslav targets and ushered in a UN interim administration.

The UNHCR, the UN's refugee agency, says that nearly 29,000 voluntary minority refugees -- that is, non-ethnic Albanians -- have returned to Kosovo since 1999.

Those numbers surged in the years around Pristina's 2008 declaration of sovereignty from Serbia but have since ebbed to under 500 returnees a year since 2016.

It is unclear how many of them are ethnic Serbs, and the Kosovar government did not respond to RFE/RL queries about plans for the return of displaced Serbs to Kosovo.

But Gasic is, by all local accounts, the first Serb to come back to Gjakova.

She returned on June 6, after the Kosovo Property Agency had approved and implemented her longstanding request to evict the current occupants of her old apartment so that she could be allowed to live there herself.

She was met with local outrage and confrontation.

Gasic said she had been verbally abused and signs and pictures had been hung on her door, strangers had pounded on the door, and she even claimed to have been shot at.

"I really have no words," she told RFE/RL's Balkan Service last month, before she fled the nearly constant harassment.

"Why would I come back to my apartment if I didn't think I'd stay here?" Gasic said. "I speak Albanian, I know how to get around. So just don't harass me."

The city's mayor, Adrian Gjini, told local media that Gasic registered the apartment in question as hers in 1997. In an allusion to the ethno-nationalist violence that was brewing ahead of the war, Gjini called it a contentious period.

The mayor said that, while he understood the grief of the relatives of missing persons, he talked to police about ensuring peace and the dispute would have to make its way through legal channels.

There has been pushback also from groups like the Humanitarian Law Center (HLC) Kosovo, an independent Pristina-based group that promotes transitional justice to contribute to peace- and state-building.

Every displaced person deserves a right to return to their property and their previous home, if they so choose, according to HLC Kosovo's Bekim Blakaj.

"I fully understand the families of the victims in Gjakova, and I understand that in Gjakova there is an extremely large number of killed and missing and that their families have not yet seen justice," Blakaj told RFE/RL's Balkan Service. "However, the return of persons to their own properties, to their own apartments, should not be conditioned [on anything else]."

He said that appeared to be Gasic's case, and he urged Kosovo's security institutions, "first and foremost, to provide her with security and ensure that no one bothers her."

'Wounds Still Open'

Gjakova's mostly Muslim residents suffered heavily during the conflicts of the 20th century, from a grisly "gallows alley" during the First Balkan War to mass expulsions and killings cited at the war-crimes trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

Some 6,500 people were still missing after Kosovo's guerrilla war for independence from Serbia in 1998-99.

Numerous mass graves in Kosovo and in Serbia have been discovered to contain about 70 percent of those individuals' remains.

But around 1,600 more, most of them ethnic Albanians, are still unaccounted for.

The relatives of some of the area's ethnic Albanians who disappeared are bitter about Gasic's return.

In all, 11 NGOs in the municipality have pledged themselves to a petition drive to ensure that Gasic is forced to leave.

Some of them tried to organize a protest in front of her apartment late last month but abandoned those plans after talks with Mayor Gjini.

Gjini's office has declined on multiple occasions to respond to RFE/RL questions about the case, but Gjini reportedly told the would-be protesters that Gasic wasn't in the apartment.

Later, Gasic confirmed that she had temporarily left the apartment on June 30 out of concern for her safety. Instead, she was staying at her sister's house about 20 kilometers away.

Nysrete Kumnova, who represents a support group for women who lost husbands or children in the war called Mothers' Calls, insists that they won't allow a single Serb to resettle in Gjakova.

"She is not going to live here," Kumnova told RFE/RL's Balkan Service. "All [Serbs] committed crimes and the wounds are open."

Kumnova is still searching for her own son, who was abducted from his home along with five other ethnic Albanian men by Serb forces in 1999.

The remains of the other five have been identified from among those in a mass grave.

"And for her to come here to live? Right. And not only that, but we don't allow any Serbs" to return here, Kumnova said.

HLCK, YIHR support Serb returnee in Gjakova (Klan Kosova)

The news website reported on Thursday that the Humanitarian Law Center in Kosovo (HLCK) and the Youth Initiative for Human Rights in Kosovo (YIHR) have expressed support for Serbian returnee in Gjakova, Dragica Gasic, after legal actions was taken against her by the municipality of Gjakova. The two organisations said in a reaction that Gasic possesses the required documents proving she has the right to use the property and that this right was recognised by the Kosovo Agency for Property Comparison and Verification. The organisations also said that the legal actions taken by the municipality were in contradiction with the democratic and multiethnic spirit of the Republic of Kosovo. They also called on the municipality to withdraw the lawsuit against Gasic and to facilitate her return and stay in the municipality.

UN: 2022 budget for UNMIK approved (Deutsche Welle)

The UN General Assembly has approved the budget of the peacekeeping mission in Kosovo for the following year. Starting July 1, 2021 through June 30, 2022, UNMIK will cost over $41 million. Most of the budget is spent on financing staff costs. The total UNMIK staff consists of 348 people, of whom 312 are civilians and 9 civilian experts, as well as 18 in uniform, of which 10 are police officers and 8 are military observers.