The Government of Kosovo has expressed its willingness to contribute to the de-escalation of the situation in the north of the country, which includes the current reduction of police presence by 25 percent in and around municipal buildings in four municipalities in the north of Kosovo where the majority Serb population lives, reports Anadolu.
The Government of Kosovo announced that this was agreed at yesterday’s meeting between the Deputy Prime Minister of Kosovo, Besnik Bislimi, and the Special Representative of the European Union for Dialogue, Miroslav Lajčak, in Bratislava.
In order to create preconditions for strengthening the focus on the full and unconditional implementation of the Basic Agreement of February 27 and the Ohrid Annex of March 18, the following steps were agreed:
• The Government of Kosovo publicly expresses its readiness to contribute to the de-escalation of the situation and by not taking actions that could escalate the situation in the north of the country. This includes an immediate 25% reduction in police presence in and around municipal buildings.
• The Kosovo Police, together with EULEX and KFOR, will assess the security situation as necessary, in particular to consider the possibility of further reducing the police presence in and around municipal buildings.
• Through a public announcement, the Government of Kosovo supports the holding of early elections in 4 municipalities in the north of the country after the summer season. Kosovo expresses its commitment to provide the necessary legal basis to enable the organization of these elections.
• The EU will invite the two main negotiators to Brussels in order to finalize the sequence plan of the Agreement on Normalization, after which the implementation of all articles of the agreement will begin.
The mentioned actions will be completed within two weeks.
Previously, the European Union, at the end of June, introduced temporary punitive measures to Kosovo because the Kosovo authorities did not fulfill the requirements regarding the de-escalation of the situation in the north of Kosovo. The EU asked the Government of Kosovo to withdraw the special forces of the Kosovo Police and the newly elected Albanian mayors from the municipal buildings in four municipalities in the north of Kosovo, and to call new elections in which the Serbian community, which boycotted the April local elections, would participate.
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