Thaci for The Guardian: Agreement with Serbia could be reached within 2019

A possible agreement on normalisation of reports between Kosovo and Serbia following the historic agreement reached between Greece and Northern Macedonia may be possible during 2019, despite the returns we have made in recent months, Kosovo President Hashim Thaci has said in one.Interview for The Guadia, follows Periscope.

“We have to sit down with our old enemies, but without any preconditions and we have to try and listen to each other”, Thaci said in the interview given to the Guardian, before the conference to be held in Berlin on April 29th, the British biggest daily writes.

Serbia has refused to recognise Kosovo as an independent state since Kosovo declared independence in 2008 after a decade when the international community intervened to stop the 1998-99 bloody war.

10,000 Albanians were killed in this war before NATO began the bombing campaign against Serbia, which lasted 78 days and ended the conflict, writes Guadia, until he remembers hundreds of Serbs were also killed in this war.

Talks between the two countries have been halted since Kosovo imposed a 100% tariff on Serbian goods in November last year.

Thaci has told Guardian that he has invested all political capital in the last two decades to hold successful talks and their failure could cost the entire region”.

Under such circumstances, with tension, I don't even see why any foreign investors can come for investment in our region. Only a peaceful agreement would bring prosperity”, Thaci tells the Guardian.

In her Guardian writing, she brings back once again a chronology of pre-war Kosovo events, but also after that. Meanwhile, it also provides a mirror of the consequences of visa non-liberalisation and major unemployment in Kosovo.

“Thaci, former leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army who fought for independence, accuses several EU countries that have complicated the process (of talks v.j)”, writes Guardian, while also remembering the idea of border correction as an option”.

“Thaci has adopted this idea of changing territories, but such an idea has been rejected by Germany, which fears such an idea could trigger a domino effect that would lead to other requirements for border changes in the Balkans, including Serb-dominated parts in Bosnia. The United States, which Thaci is very close to, shows more open-minded about this plan”, writes Guardian, translates Periscopi.

Thaci tells British daily that border demarcation would be part of a mutual recognition agreement. But he underlines that there can be no limit to the ethnic substance”.

This is impossible. Both Serbia and Kosovo should remain multiethnic states”, he says.

Kosovo's “Serbs have withdrawn from political life in Kosovo, including the police and judiciary in Kosovo's north”, Thaci says. “No one can give an answer on how to move forward while the biggest victims of this situation are Kosovars and, in part, Kosovo Serbs”, he says. /Periscope.