Clashes between Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti persist one day after their fruitless meeting.
European Union sources refute the Kosovo prime minister’s assertions that he was the only one to give a step-by-step plan for carrying out the agreement on normalizing relations during the conference.
The sources claim that the EU has given the parties a stepwise timetable for implementing the deal.
Though the EU’s special envoy for dialogue, Miroslav Lajcak, had presented a sequential plan back in June, and there had been seven rounds of separate meetings with the parties up to that point, according to EU sources, recalling that the High Representative, Josep Borrell, had declared that he had submitted the compromise proposal for parallel implementation.
EU sources state that Prime Minister Kurti’s assertion that his proposal was the only one on the table is therefore untrue.
Citing a July 19 memo, the sources recommend starting the “Negotiation Process for the Association of Municipalities with a Serb Majority.”
Concurrently, Serbia would relent from insisting on the use of the footnote and asterisk or UNMIK’s presence in regional fora.
The identification of official papers and symbols would thereafter be accomplished through a sequence of actions.
Following the meeting on Thursday, Joseph Borrell, the EU’s envoy for foreign policy, accused Kurti of being at fault for rejecting the EU’s suggestion to carry out the agreement’s responsibilities concurrently.
In the meantime, Kosovo’s prime minister blamed European diplomats, claiming that they had adopted Serbia’s demands as their position.”