Serbia and Kosovo Near Deal, Official Says

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/18/world/europe/18iht-kosovo18.html

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Serbia and Kosovo were edging toward a deal on Wednesday aimed at overcoming ethnic enmities in the former Serbian province, a senior Kosovo official said, in what would be a seminal moment in relations between former enemies that could help clear the way for each eventually to join the European Union.

Petrit Selimi, Kosovo’s deputy foreign minister, said in a telephone interview from Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, that the two countries had agreed in principle on a text under which Serbs in northern Kosovo would gain more powers in return for tacitly recognizing the authority of Kosovo’s government. He said the aim was to sign the agreement in Brussels on Friday, but cautioned strongly that the talks could still fall apart.

“There is no deal yet but the chances to get one are very high,” he said. “A deal would usher in a new period of stability in the entire Balkans and help both countries to put the past behind them.”

Serbian officials close to the talks declined to comment.

An agreement would mark a turning point in relations between Serbia and its former province. Kosovo declared independence from Serbia on Feb. 17, 2008, almost a decade after NATO intervened against Slobodan Milosevic, then the Serbian strongman, to halt an ethnic civil war with Kosovo’s majority ethnic Albanians.

Serbia, which has long considered Kosovo its medieval heartland, has steadfastly refused to recognize Kosovo, arguing that the declaration of independence was a reckless breach of international law. Kosovo’s independence has been recognized by the United States and a majority of the European Union’s countries. But countries including Russia and Spain have refused to recognize it, fearing separatist movements in their own territories.

Any accord will fall short of Belgrade’s recognizing Kosovo’s independence. But analysts said an agreement would nevertheless herald a new reconciliation after the Balkan wars of the 1990s which broke up the former Yugoslavia.

At a time when the European Union is mired by crisis in the euro zone, it would also mark a vindication of the bloc’s soft power, its ability to use the incentive of membership in the world’s biggest trading bloc to press countries that want to join to make difficult compromises.

Trying one last push to talks that had collapsed earlier this month, the Union’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, invited Serbia and Kosovo back to the negotiating table on Wednesday, delaying a report on Serbia’s readiness to start accession talks that had been scheduled for Tuesday.

At stake is how much autonomy Pristina is willing to cede to Kosovo’s Serbian minority. Belgrade has retained de facto control over a small Serb majority area in northern Kosovo, where until now the Serbs have lived in isolated enclaves that do not recognize Pristina’s authority and have been administered and financed by Belgrade.

Under a potential agreement, municipal structures in Serb-majority northern Kosovo would attain greater autonomy — over everything from health care to education — in return for Belgrade’s recognition of Pristina’s authority there. But the talks collapsed earlier this month as Pristina insisted it would not countenance any Serbian legislative body within Kosovo and Belgrade insisted that it wanted an association with real executive power, including control over the judiciary and the police.

It is a sign of progress by each side that the leaders of Kosovo and Serbia, both former arch nationalists, even sat at the same table. Kosovo’s prime minister, Hashim Thaci, is reviled by many Serbs as a guerrilla commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which fought the war in the 1990s. His Serbian counterpart, Prime Minister Ivica Dacic, was the wartime spokesman of Mr. Milosevic, who was overthrown in 2000 and died in jail in 2006 while being tried for crimes against humanity.

An agreement would pave the way for Serbia to get a date to begin E.U. membership talks. It would help it to rejuvenate its struggling economy and cement its links to the West, an important psychological and geopolitical landmark.

It would also enhance regional harmony by further integrating the western Balkans into Europe. Slovenia, a former Yugoslav republic, joined the European Union in 2004. Croatia is set to join the bloc in July. A deeply divided Bosnia remains the regional laggard, though analysts predicted that a Kosovo deal could help focus minds there.

For Kosovo, a desperately poor, predominantly Muslim landlocked country of two million, warmer ties with Serbia would help buttress its standing and lift a beleaguered economy. Unemployment in Kosovo is about 40 percent; lawlessness and corruption are rife.

Kosovo’s security is guaranteed by about 5,000 NATO troops, and the international community hopes that the potential calming of ethnic tensions engendered by any agreement would tip the scale decisively toward peace.

But vocal critics on both sides have expressed visceral anger and skepticism, underlining the challenges to enforcing any deal. The Kosovo opposition movement Vetevendosje — self-determination in Albanian — said it planned mass protests if any deal emerged.

Shpend Ahmeti, the vice president of Vetevendosje, insisted by phone from Pristina that a deal would reinforce rather than overcome ethnic divisions. Giving further autonomy to Kosovo’s Serbs, he said, would effectively make Kosovo “another Bosnia,” where a decentralized institutional structure, and ethnic rifts, make it difficult to govern.