No swap is a good swap
Here is the long interview I did this week with Jeta Xharra, Director of the Balkans Investigative Reporting Network in Kosovo:
The transcript is available as well.
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2 thoughts on “No swap is a good swap”
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Serbs want to make another mess.
No tiny little part of Kosova can be swap…
This country is not a private property of Vućić and Thaçi.
As of Saturday, it looks like Merkel has firmly quashed the idea of any border changes: Vučić was on a tour of the North (starting from Gazivode) where he was telling people “I can’t tell you what you want to hear.” (And after they’d hung all those flags and plastered his picture everywhere, in anticipation.)
Serbs would have to increase their numbers in Kosovo and improve their economy in order to someday, perhaps, be in a better position to get what they wanted, he told them. Serbian governments since the first revolts against the Turks have been trying to persuade, if not force, Serbs to stay or move to Kosovo to get the numbers up, but was the percentage ever this low before? By now they claim to account for 5-6 percent of the population, meaning any idea of “taking a rifle from the store window and heading to Prishtina” must be firmly ruled out, he said. He was promising more money to all and sundry (they’ve tried that in the past and seen most of it lost to corruption) and fighting for Gazivode, but all the excitement seems to be over for the moment.
With Bolton telling Dačić (and presumably the Kosovars) that the U.S. is done with negotiating in tandem with the EU and UN etc but intends to act bilaterally from now on, that might not last. Thaci will eventually come up with a new dramatic move to break the logjam, you have to assume. Just not something involving a Trump-Putin combination, let’s hope.