Kosovo 2018

Yearbook 2018

Kosovo. According to Countryaah.com, Pristina is the capital city of Kosovo, a country located in Eastern Europe. The country celebrated its 10th anniversary as an independent nation on February 17, after being liberated from Serbia in 2008. Serbia still does not recognize Kosovo (111 of the UN members have done so), and this means that neither Kosovo nor Serbia can seek EU membership – for normalization of relations is required.

In September, the presidents of both countries were supposed to meet in Brussels, but Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vučić refused to hold direct talks with Kosovo’s President Hashim Thaçi, so the “dialogue” was rather rejected. According to the Serbian government’s special Kosovo chief, Marko Djurić, it was “because of all the fraud, threats and lies of the Kosovo Albanians”. By the end of August, the two leaders had in any case discussed boundary changes and land changes as a way forward towards normalization. However, analysts fear that such border crossings also raise demands for changes in countries such as Bosnia and Macedonia. Therefore, the EU does not openly look at such possible agreements. In September, tensions further increased between Serbia and Kosovo since Hashim Thaçi visited a disputed part of northern Kosovo.

• According to Abbreviationfinder: RKS is an three letter acronym for Kosovo.

Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanović was shot dead in January outside the Mitrovica party headquarters. In 2016, he was sentenced to nine years in prison for war crimes. Ivanović had called on Serbian paramilitary forces to kill ethnic Albanians during the 1999 Kosovo war, according to the EULEX for Kosovo, EULEX. trial. In November, three Serbs in northern Kosovo were arrested on suspicion of murder.

In March, the party representing the Serbian minority in Kosovo left the government in protest against what they call “attacks on the people and representatives of Serbia”. The Serbian Party has four prime ministerial posts, including the Deputy Prime Minister’s post in Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj’s government. During the month, Kosovo also released six men who had links to the Gülen movement and the coup attempt in Turkey in 2016. Prime Minister Haradinaj did not know it would happen and therefore dismissed Interior Minister Flamur Sefaj and the country’s intelligence chief Driton Gashi. He believed that extradition is “unacceptable and goes against our values and the principles of our state”.

Parliament ratified in March a border agreement with Montenegro that allows the country’s residents to travel without visas to EU countries. In an attempt to stop the vote, opposition politicians had released tear gas in parliament. According to the Self-Determining Opposition Party (Vetëvendosje), the agreement, which dates from 2015, means that Kosovo will hand over approximately 8,000 hectares of land to Montenegro.

The air in the capital Pristina is very bad, according to measurements in January worse than in the Chinese cities Shanghai and Hangzhou. The main reason for this is the two coal-fired power plants outside the city and that many are heating their homes with lignite.

In February 1999, in France, the Contact Group (see Bosnia and Herzegovina, in this Appendix) and the USA met to seek other possible solutions to the conflict to be proposed to Milošević and the UKK, but there was no glimmer of hope. light. The failure of the Rambouillet conference – whose draft agreement included, among other things, a statute of autonomy for three years for Kosovo in exchange for the demilitarization of the UÇK and the military presence of NATO throughout the territory of the Yugoslav federation (Serbia and Montenegro) – triggered the start of the NATO attack on Yugoslavia. Military intervention,(without the consent of the UN Security Council due to the veto of Russia and China), it had a devastating impact: the material damage caused by the NATO bombing continued incessantly for 80 days with negative repercussions on the economic situation not only in Yugoslavia , but also of neighboring countries. Furthermore, the NATO intervention did not have a deterrent effect against the ethnic cleansing actions of the Serbian military and paramilitary forces; on the contrary, it encouraged a systematic repression and hundreds of thousands of residents of Kosovo were pushed into Albania and Macedonia, causing a destabilization in these countries as well. In early June, Belgrade accepted the peace plan proposed by the G 8, which was followed by the drafting of Resolution 1244 of the UN Security Council, which marked the end of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and established the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country, within which the autonomy of the Kosovo. On June 10, Yugoslavia began the withdrawal of its troops. The UN Security Council ratified the negotiated peace proposal and in the same days international troops, under NATO command, began to enter Kosovo. The clashes between Serbian and NATO soldiers, and between UÇK militants and Serbian forces, however, did not cease. Meanwhile, the international community continued its efforts to try to resolve the situation in the Balkans, and over 40 heads of state and government met in Sarajevo at the end of July to discuss the Balkan Stability Pact. On this occasion, approximately 2.2 billion dollars were allocated for reconstruction in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Kosovo, resources also destined for Bulgaria, Romania and Macedonia, to help them overcome the impact of the Kosovo crisis on their economy. Meanwhile, the UN administration in Kosovo was grappling with the demilitarization of the UÇK and its transformation – hindered by the members of the UÇK, who wanted the term army to appear in the definition – into a Kosovo Protection Corps : a civilian body of the Kosovo for humanitarian missions such as firefighting and rescue operations, to be created by September. Between the end of September and the beginning of October, the statements of some members of the US senior apparatuses seemed to presage a change in the US political line tending to support Kosovo’s independence. Such a solution, not contemplated in Resolution 1244, found the Europeans opposed, worried that the independence of Kosovo could unleash a domino effect, opening the doors to a Greater Albania, a separatist war in Macedonia, the fragmentation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the formation of Greater Croatia and Greater Serbia. The UN secretary general, Kosovo Annan, however, denied these rumors, reiterating that a high degree of autonomy was envisaged for the UN-administered region, but within the borders of Yugoslavia. All this showed how far we were still from a solution to the Kosovo question.