Zecevic: Without stronger pressure and threats from the EU, the CSM will not be formed

Director of the Institute for European Studies in Belgrade, Slobodan Zecevic, stated that without “more serious pressure and threats from the EU” or a change in the political atmosphere in Kosovo, the Community of Serb Municipalities will not be formed, but instead the process of “underground ethnic cleansing” of the Serbian community will continue.

“Without more serious pressure and threats from the European Union or a change in the political environment in Kosovo, they won’t succeed in doing that. Kurti clearly won’t,” Zecevic told Kosovo Online.

Commenting on the tenth anniversary of the signing of the second Brussels Agreement, which laid out a series of steps and spelled out the structure of the future CSM, Zecevic said that the Serbian side had fulfilled everything agreed upon both in 2013 and 2015. The problem, he stressed, is that the second part of the agreement was never implemented.

“Everything that was the compromise part of the agreement, which the Serbs implemented to their own detriment: integrating the police, the judiciary, in the hope that the second part of the agreement would be carried out, namely the Community of Serb Municipalities, has not been realized,” Zecevic specified.

He added that in the meantime, Serbs have begun to “lose faith,” eventually withdrawing from Kosovo’s institutions out of dissatisfaction with the entire situation.

“The process of implementation went forward only on our side, while from the Albanian side it was very weak,” he said.

Zecevic believes that the key reason why what was agreed has not been implemented, particularly regarding the establishment of the CSM, is the loss of credibility of the European Union.

“The EU has lost credibility, and it is struggling even to return to negotiations between Russia and Ukraine precisely because it also had such an agreement with the Russians – the Minsk Agreement – which it too failed to implement. They try to cover this up, but in essence, when you don’t implement what you agree to, your credibility declines. Among other things, that’s why the EU’s credibility in Serbian public opinion is lower and lower. That is not the only reason, but it is one of them,” Zecevic argued.

He is convinced that by its inaction, the EU is sending the message that it “tolerates ethnic cleansing” of Serbs in Kosovo.

“The message is that ethnic cleansing is tolerated, which is silent, underground. Albin Kurti acts in the style of an old ‘Stalinist-Marxist.’ Stalin used to say, ‘no man – no problem.’ Meaning, if there are no Serbs, there are no problems. That is Albin Kurti’s philosophy, that all problems will be solved once there are no more Serbs,” Zecevic emphasized.