EU envoy urges Kosovo and Serbia to resume efforts to normalize ties through talks

PRISTINA, Kosovo -- The European Union envoy for the Western Balkans on Friday urged Kosovo and Serbia to step up their efforts at normalization talks, saying these are decisive toward the two countries' membership in the bloc.

Miroslav Lajcak was in Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, for talks with Deputy Prime Minister Besnik Bislimi, in charge of the Kosovo side of the EU-facilitated talks. The local media said the envoy was not expected to go to Belgrade, Serbia's capital, as on previous trips.

The EU and the United States are pressing both sides to implement agreements that Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti reached in February and March last year.

“The agreement has also become part of Kosovo's EU path and Serbia's EU path,” Lajcak told reporters after meeting with Bislimi, adding that “there are statements here and there which are not helpful.”

Lajcak, whose mandate has been extended until January by the bloc's Council, is working on the next high-level meeting for the two countries' leaders.

The relationship between Kosovo and Serbia remains tense and the 13-year-long normalization talks facilitated by the European Union have failed to make progress, especially following a shootout last September between masked Serb gunmen and Kosovo police that left four people dead. NATO-led peacekeepers have also increased their numbers along the Kosovo-Serbia border.

Washington, Brussels and the peacekeeping force have urged Kosovo to refrain from unilateral actions fearing the revival of inter-ethnic conflict, after authorities last week closed five so-called parallel institutions in the north — where most of the ethnic Serb minority lives.

Kosovo’s Serbs said they would block roads to four out of five border crossings later Friday in protest against the closures. They also demand Kosovo police withdrawal from the north and want the peacekeepers to take control.

Lajcak urged the minority Serbs not to block the crossings as that would have “a negative impact on the freedom of movement.”

Meanwhile, Kosovo’s Foreign Minister Donika Gervalla-Schwarz said the threats to block the crossings” reflect “Serbia's hegemonistic goals” and are also "provocative and destabilizing acts.”

Kurti last month called for the full reopening of a bridge in the flashpoint city of Mitrovica, a move that the West is concerned would escalate tension with the minority Serbs. Mitrovica is divided into a Serb-dominated north and ethnic Albanian south, and the two sides rarely mix.

Kurti has also been at odds with Western powers over Kosovo’s unilateral closure of six branches of a Serbia-licensed bank in northern Kosovo earlier this year.

Kosovo, where 90% of the 1.6 million population is Albanian, is holding parliamentary elections next February, a vote that is expected to be a test for Kurti, whose governing party won in a landslide in the 2021.

Kosovo was a Serbian province until NATO's 78-day bombing campaign in 1999 ended a war between Serbian government forces and ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo, which left about 13,000 dead, mainly ethnic Albanians, and pushed Serbian forces out.

Serbia does not recognize Kosovo’s independence, proclaimed in 2008.

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Semini reported from Tirana, Albania. Follow Llazar Semini at https://x.com/lsemini