Curcic: Whoever is in power in Pristina, I do not believe they will initiate the formation of the CSM on their own

Petar Curcic, a researcher at the Institute for European Studies in Belgrade, does not expect Pristina to be able to independently initiate the procedure for forming the Community of Serb Municipalities, regardless of who is in power.

Curcic says that at this moment it is difficult to predict whether, if after the elections on 28 December a new government in Kosovo is formed by parties that are currently in opposition, that government would be more willing to form the Community of Serb Municipalities, especially given the very strong and pronounced Albanian nationalism, not only in Kosovo but also in the diaspora.

“Each side will want to be ‘more Albanian’ than the one in power. That solution will have to include all Albanian representatives, and what it will look like will primarily depend on the dynamics of relations with Western allies,” Curcic explains for Kosovo Online.

He notes that when it comes to the CSM, three perspectives should be kept in mind.

“One is the Serbian perspective, which assumes that the institutions in Pristina will form the CSM, an obligation they undertook more than ten years ago with the Brussels Agreement. Since then, there has been an obligation on Pristina, but this has not happened, bearing in mind that Self-Determination has been in power for almost half a decade, and that before that there was a complex coalition of Albanian parties in power. They simply did not want to form the CSM, and that is the second perspective – political will in Pristina. I do not expect Pristina to be able to initiate that procedure on its own, regardless of who is in power,” Curcic states.

The third perspective, he adds, relates to European institutions and broader international factors.

“Here I primarily mean the United States, which has in some way slightly toughened its rhetoric toward Pristina, and in addition we have the European Union. Through the process of negotiations and talks, we hope that the European side could influence Pristina to intensify the formation of the Community, which is important for Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija, but in the short and medium term I am not optimistic that this will happen,” Curcic concluded.