Bislimi: Serbia refused to enter the meeting with the agreed agenda

The chief negotiator of Kosovo, Besnik Bislimi, has stated that it is a mystery how there was no trilateral meeting in Brussels, although according to him, the invitation of the EU envoy, Miroslav Lajçak, warned that there would be such a meeting.

He said on Tuesday that the Serbian side rejected the trilateral meeting, demanding "the introduction of its topics which are for political consumption".

"Even for us it is a bit of a mystery because the invitation was very clear from Mr. Lajçak that there will first be a bilateral meeting and the topics or the agenda of the bilateral meeting were proposed, then it was said that in the trilateral meeting the road will be discussed forward in the normalization agreement and other topics can be decided if there is an agreement between the two parties. We have agreed with this invitation, we have also confirmed the participation in the trilateral meeting, but it seems that Serbia then refused to enter with that agenda and requested the introduction of its topics which are for political consumption, which we did not agree to. , Bislimi stated.

According to him, the invitation stated that other topics can be discussed only with the agreement of the parties, and "therefore, the trilateral could not be conditioned by the acceptance or not of the proposals of the other party".

He added that the condition of the agenda "seems to have been that Serbia did not agree to enter the meeting".

"Today we asked Mr. Lajçak to deny the reports that both sides were not ready for a trilateral meeting because we have fully followed Lajçak's invitation. It was Serbia that refused to enter, as long as its proposals were not accepted with the topics that today are related to political consumption in Serbia", said Bislimi.

He announced that they discussed a range of issues, but the main one was the path to the implementation of the Basic Agreement and the Ohrid Annex. Bislimi announced that they also talked about the topic of telecommunications, as they had previously notified the official Brussels "about the violations that Serbia is making of the agreement by interfering with frequencies within the territory".

"Also for the agreed topic that in the future we will talk about postal services. He had invited commission experts who showed us the directives of the European Commission and these were extremely valuable for us. From these presentations, we saw clearly that in fact, according to their interpretation, Kosovo is fully in the field of postal services, in harmony with EU directives, while Serbia is only partially so. They also say that nowhere in the EU are tolerated illegal actions or operations of companies that provide postal services, and therefore it was very worthy of us to close the same", said Bislimi.

Commenting on the measures and demands proposed by the president of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, for Kosovo, Bislimi said that he found the international non-reaction more disturbing than the conference.

"What has been worrying for me, not its content, reporting or findings, but the fact that these findings have not met with concern or harsh reaction from the European Commission or the European Union, but what has been chosen is since a meeting of 40-50 minutes, choose two minutes that can be interpreted positively and all the reaction is taken with those two minutes and not with the very dangerous content of this address", he continued.

"For me, it is unfathomable that the European Union does not see it as worrying that all findings have as their starting point an artificial and untrue narrative about the developments in Kosovo. For your information, both the Agreement for MTS and the one for Elektrosever clearly stipulate that everything is developed based on the legal framework of Kosovo. With these agreements, Mr. Vucic has accepted that from here on Merdarja is an area where there is a different legal framework. Where there is zero interference of Serbia and then everything that happens within this area is done according to the legal framework of the Republic of Kosovo. And then he says let the policemen come back, let the judges come back, which is actually an invitation for the international community and Kosovo to correct its political failures. I think that this is the reason that the EU had to deal with and not with his invitation for the Serbs to participate in the elections. He made this invitation even before the April elections, but we know how it ended", said Bislimi.

He has added that he expects that by the end of Lajcak's mandate, by the end of January, there may be meetings of the chief negotiators, but not of the leaders.