As Kosovo drifts into another diplomatic row with its Western allies over an import ban on some Serbian goods, President Vjosa Osmani has told BIRN that a compromise solution is still possible “because common ground can be found”.

The ban, imposed in June last year, gives Kosovo authorities the right to inspect trucks entering Serbia given the danger, Pristina says, that they may be carrying weapons – a danger laid bare in September 2023 when a group of Serb gunmen killed a Kosovo Albanian police officer in the northern village of Banjska.

The ban, however, is unpopular with the major Western powers that backed Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence from Serbia.

Germany’s envoy for the Western Balkans, Manuel Sarrazin, visited Pristina twice in the space of a week – in late August and early September – amid warnings that Kosovo risks losing its place within the Central Europe Free Trade Agreement, CEFTA.

Kosovo is represented in CEFTA by the United Nations Mission in Kosovo, UNMIK, which took over at the end of the 1998-99 war. UNMIK was largely made obsolete by Kosovo’s 2008 secession, but it continues to exist due to Serbia’s refusal to recognise Kosovo as an independent state with the backing of UN Security Council veto-holder Russia.

Sarrazin has proposed that Kosovo be allowed to represent itself in CEFTA in exchange for lifting the ban on certain Serbian goods. Kosovo’s government, however, argues that the two issues are unrelated.

In a televised interview with BIRN Kosovo’s ‘Kallxo Pernime’ programme, Osmani said every effort should be made to find a solution before a mid-October summit of the Berlin Process, set up in 2014 as a platform to increase cooperation between the six Western Balkan states with ambitions to join the European Union.

“We have agreed for a while to change the status of Kosovo’s representation in CEFTA because UNMIK is still there and an opportunity has been found for UNMIK to leave when Kosovo lifts the ban on trucks with Serbia’s goods,” Osmani said.

However, Osmani said, Kosovo is still waiting for high-tech scanners offered by Germany to enable customs officers to screen trucks entering from Serbia, an offer designed to ease Kosovo’s security worries. Osmani cited “procurement procedures” as holding up delivery, but Kosovo won’t lift the ban until the scanners arrive.

EU holdouts need to be convinced to lift punishment

Tensions between Kosovo and Serbia have strained the former’s relations with its closest Western backers to a degree not seen in its 16 years as an independent state.

In June last year, the EU imposed a set of financial measures designed to punish Prime Minister Albin Kurti’s government for installing ethnic Albanian mayors in four Serb-majority municipalities, a move that triggered Serb riots in which dozens of NATO-led peacekeepers were hurt.

The original Serb mayors in the municipalities had resigned in a row over a Kosovo ban on Serbian-issued vehicle licence plates. A few months later, a heavily-armed group of Serbs led by a politically-connected Kosovo Serb businessman called Milan Radojcic killed a Kosovo Albanian police officer in Banjska. Radojcic fled to Serbia, where he remains at large.

A BIRN investigation found that bullets seized from the gunmen had been made in Serbia in 2022, while mortar rounds and grenade launchers in their arsenal had passed through Serbian state maintenance centres in 2018 and 2021.

It was not just a “terrorist” attack, said Osmani, but an act of Serbian state aggression.

“Those terrorists did not act on their own but on a political order,” Osmani told BIRN. “Serbia’s state supported them politically, from the top to the bottom,” she said. “They were financially paid by the Serbian state and militarily by handing them weapons that were under Serbian army ownership.”

Serbia, not Kosovo, deserves to be subject to punitive measures, the president told BIRN. She said that many EU member states want the measures lifted, but others are still reluctant.

“There is a lot of sentiment against [lifting the measures] within the European Union because, despite the fact that Kosovo is 100 per cent in line with the EU’s foreign and security policy, when it comes to sanctions or other decisions sometimes they seize on some small disagreement in order to block the decision-making,” Osmani said.

“Germany’s position is in favour of lifting the measures… but this should be a unanimous decision from the EU”.

Osmani declined to name the holdouts, saying: “We have to work to convince these countries, not attack them.”

Cautious over possible second term

In spite of the continued EU measures, Kosovo walked into another row with the West when it announced plans over the summer to reopen the main bridge in the ethnically-divided town of Mitrovica to vehicle traffic for the first time in 25 years.

Western powers want the issue of the bridge, a frequent flashpoint in the years after the war, to be resolved as part of EU-mediated talks in Brussels, not as a unilateral move by Kurti’s government. Kosovo Serbs oppose the reopening, saying it will leave them exposed to attack by Albanians on the other side of the Ibar river.

Kosovo, however, points to the fact that, under a deal in 2016, the bridge should have reopened to all traffic on January 20, 2017.

Osmani, who grew up in Mitrovica, said she favoured a coordinated reopening.

“There are assessments that we have to make preparations together with our allies, a joint coordination on the bridge issue in order to act together,” the president said. “The US has never demanded that the bridge be kept closed. They are demanding we sit down together and find a date based on joint security assessments.”

Asked about her own future and the possibility of a second term as president, Osmani was cautious.

The 42-year-old was elected president in April 2021 with the support of Kurti’s Vetevendosje party, but relations between the two have soured in recent months after Kosovo failed to clinch membership of the Council of Europe and a row erupted over a letter the government sent to the CoE without informing Osmani.

“I haven’t decided yet on this,” Osmani said on the possibility of running for re-election. “And frankly speaking there are many factors that need to be looked at. It is too early to say how political waters will flow before 2026.”

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