Petkovic: CoE must not fall for Kurti's trick

BELGRADE - The head of the Serbian government Office for Kosovo-Metohija Petar Petkovic said on Thursday Albin Kurti and his mentors were trying to deceive the Council of Europe (CoE) ahead of a meeting of the organisation's Committee of Ministers.

In a last-minute letter to the CoE, they said they would allegedly meet a commitment to submit a statute of a Community of Serb Municipalities to Pristina's constitutional court, Petkovic said in a statement released by the Office.

The CoE must not fall for that trick as all Kurti is doing now has nothing to do with dialogue but with his violent unilateral moves aimed against Serbs in Kosovo-Metohija, Petkovic said.

The letter says the statute was being drawn up by Kurti in coordination with local Serbs who are loyal to him, based on a document prepared by Germany's Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the statement said.

Petkovic said the letter was made up of purely false claims aimed at helping Kurti to avoid his commitments from the dialogue with Belgrade.

"Under agreements reached in Brussels, a final Statute is to be agreed and adopted in high-level dialogue, so the possibility of it being a unilateral act by Pristina is out of the question," he said, noting that drafting a statute was a competence of a steering team that had presented its statute in Brussels on May 2.

"The Steering Team is comprised of Kosovo-Metohija Serbs and officially represents the interests of Serbs in Kosovo-Metohija on this matter," Petkovic said.

A "big five" of Western powers and the EU special envoy for the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue Miroslav Lajcak presented in Belgrade on October 23 last year a draft statute prepared by the EU, Petkovic noted, adding that this was another proof claims in the letter were false.

"Belgrade expressed readiness to work on that (EU) document as a good starting point for drawing up a final statute. Our positive attitude towards that document was expressed clearly in the section relating to respect of 2013 and 2015 agreements, without going into status-related issues," Petkovic said, adding that Kurti had publicly rejected the EU's draft statute, declining to discuss it.

"It is impossible for NGOs to write a statute of a Community of Serb Municipalities, let alone for such a document to be purported as some kind of an official proposal," Petkovic added.

"A small company of people who have gathered around illegitimate ethnic Albanian mayors cannot be a legitimate representative of the Serbs with which Kurti could discuss a statute, especially in view of the fact those individuals have won 3.5 per cent of ethnic Albanian votes in the north (of Kosovo-Metohija) while the Serbs boycotted those elections," Petkovic also said.