No moves towards Association, Serbian experts do not hand over draft status

In the Government of Kosovo, it is unclear how the task force consisting of four Serbian officials has not yet submitted the draft for association to Brussels.

“They have never submitted draft”, says Avni Arifi, chief of the Kosovo Technical Team in dialogue with Serbia.

“They have only handed over the processes of meetings that they have made with the interest parties. Initially, it was thought to have been delivered to Brussels and processed and drafted means that they should first send it to Brussels, but based on the information I have from Brussels, no draft has been submitted there”, Avni Arifi said.
August 4th has been the deadline when the management team formed on the issue has had to submit the first draft of the Association statute to Brussels.

The Kosovo government has said earlier that it expects the draft status for the establishment of the Association of Serb majority municipalities to be based on the Constitution of Kosovo.

Officials at the Ministry of Management of Local Power told Radio Free Europe, that since then they have not been handed over to the government and that there has been no other move on the Constitution of the Serb majority municipalities.

Even in Brussels, officials in the European Union who lead with technical dialogue between Pristina and Belgrade, though they had set August 4th as the deadline for handing over the draft, have never confirmed or denied that they accepted this proposal.

On the other hand, former Deputy Minister of Local Power Management Bajram Gecaj, from the Democratic League of Kosovo, told Radio Free Europe that he doubts the Kosovo Government is deliberately not asking the working group to push ahead the processes for Association.

I am sorry that the government has a bad approach to association, because it is possible that this issue will then come to us under a possible final agreement. So you've heard talk about the border correction option, and I'm telling the border touch or plus association. What we believe, what the LDK believes, is that it shouldn't be either [or] one [of them], Gecaj said.

He said that the status of association should be done under the Brussels Agreement, working with the charter drafting management group, in which, as Gecaj says, the Ministry of Management of Local Power, the OSCE and the EU should work.

Gecaj considers all these mechanisms should issue an initial draft to be discussed later in Brussels.

“The statue must be compiled on the basis of the 2013 International Agreement and the Constitutional Court's decision. These are the three main framework documents for drafting this statute. To do that, the Government has to take this job more seriously and it has to sit down and work with the management group. By the time we were in Government, we had a Serbian minister at the Ministry of Management of Local Power and Prime Minister Isa Mustafa had authorized me to work with the management group”, Gecaj said.

The management team for drafting the Association statute of Serb majority municipalities has already handed over to the Government of Kosovo only the processes.
Through these processes, this team has been tasked with informing Government of the statute drafting process.

Based on these processes, which include June and July, Serbian representatives in Kosovo have demanded that competencies in privatisation, in the economy, preserve the education system with Serbia, as well as other competencies be included in the Association statute.

In the processes translated into Albanian, the Association is described as the Serb Communist Community (BKS).

According to the transcript, the managing team consisting of four Serbian officials - Vinka Radosavljevic, Dejan Radojkovic, Igor Calamar and Svetislav Durlevic é at all meetings of Kosovo refers to Kosovo as Kosovo and Methohiaï.

The establishment of the Association or Community of Serb-run municipalities is the product of Brussels' agreements, reached within the dialogue between Pristina and Belgrade with the ease of the European Union.

The government in Pristina views this body as an association with non-executive competencies. As long as Belgrade and the representatives of Serbs in Kosovo claim that the Association, or as they call it, the Community of Serb municipalities, will also have executive competencies.