Gogic: Brussels has no serious plan for Belgrade-Pristina dialogue

Political scientist Ognjen Gogic assessed that the message from EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas following her separate meetings with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti in New York indicated that Brussels had no serious plan for the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue, Blic reports.

Following the meetings in New York, Kallas said that “progress in the normalization of relations and progress on the path toward the EU must go hand in hand,” that the agreements reached were binding and that “it is time to move forward.”

“These are statements made merely for the sake of form because it is obvious that Brussels has no serious plan for the dialogue. This is also indicated by an earlier statement by Peter Sorensen, the EU Special Representative for the Belgrade-Pristina Dialogue, who said that ‘the dialogue has no deadline.’ That means the dialogue is, for all practical purposes, historically dead, outdated and irrelevant,” Gogic told Blic.

He said it was inappropriate for European officials to continue discussing the issue in such terms.

“It is an insult to one’s intelligence. What does ‘it is time to move forward’ mean? Was it not time to do so a year ago? The Belgrade-Pristina dialogue is a frozen conflict, much like the cases of Cyprus and Northern Cyprus or Israel and Palestine. Those are dialogues that have been deadlocked for decades,” Gogic said.

He added that he did not know what could move the dialogue out of its current impasse.

“Even if Brussels were now to tell Belgrade and Pristina, ‘Reach an agreement and you will join the EU,’ I still do not think there would be any progress in the negotiations,” Gogic assessed.

He also observed that Brussels “no longer even seems to care about terminology.”

“For the first time, a European official has said that the EU will be an ‘impartial arbiter’ in the dialogue. Arbitration is not the same as mediation. An arbiter is someone who makes the final decision, while a mediator assists and facilitates negotiations so that the parties can reach a final agreement. It is possible that Brussels has become so uninterested that it no longer even cares about the terminology it uses,” Gogic concluded.