Four thousand days without the Community of Serbian Municipalities

As it was specified, also agreed in Brussels, in the general principles for the formation of the CSM from 2015, the Community should have broad powers, its president, to decide on health, education, urban and rural planning, economic development, to have the right to own movable and immovable property and that it can be financed from Serbia.

Two months after these principles were approved in the presence of the then High Representative of the EU, Federica Mogherini, in October 2015, the president of the so-called Kosova Atifete Jahjaga asked the Constitutional Court to assess the constitutionality of the agreement on the formation of the Community of Serbian Municipalities. Until the court's decision, she requested that the agreement from Brussels on the CSM be suspended.

Constitutional Court issued a verdict concerning this issue on December 23, 2015, in which it is said that the principles related to the CSM, which were agreed in Brussels, "are not fully aligned with the spirit of the Constitution", with the explanation that it pertains to the provisions concerning equality before the law, as well as the rights of communities and their members.

The verdict, however, also states "that the Community of Municipalities with a Serbian majority will be established as provided for in the First Agreement, ratified by the Assembly of the Republic of Kosovo and proclaimed by the President of the Republic of Kosovo".

This decision of the Constitutional Court is also binding for the current government on the so-called Kosovo, yet the CSM was not formed during the past three years, when Albin Kurti was at the head of the government.

Although the Agreement on the normalization between the so-called Kosovo-Serbia Agreement of February 27 of last year is not mentioned by that name, but it talks about "ensuring an appropriate level of self-governance for the Serbian community in Kosovo", and Kurti has an excuse for not implementing that document: it needs to be signed.

Another "argument" he makes is that the Community "is not the main priority of normalization and cannot be taken out of the package as an individual issue".

The management team, composed of representatives of Serbs from Kosovo and Metohija, presented the draft of the CSM statute in Brussels on May 2, 2023, but Kurti immediately rejected that document, explaining that it was "incompatible with the Kosovo Constitution" and that it was associated with Republika Srpska.

The day after the draft was presented, the Minister of Local Self-Government Elbert Krasniqi dismissed the Serbian team, and Kurti announced his "vision" of the draft based, as he said, on the Croatian model for national minorities. Soon (at the beginning of June), the Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama "joined" the proponents of the draft statute of the CSM, who sent his proposal to French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, so that in October the "big five" would present the draft statute of the Community at the meetings in Pristina and in Belgrade, which was characterized in Brussels as a "modern European proposal".

Apart from the fact that Kurti said about this proposal at the time that it represented a "framework" for the continuation of further talks, no further progress was made.

Prishtina's new promise to form the CSM was found in the protocol letter sent to the rapporteur for the so-called Kosovo in the Council of Europe Dora Bakoyanni. In it, the president and the prime minister and the president of the Assembly of the so-called Kosovo obliged to respect all the articles of the agreement from Brussels and Ohrid, including the formation of the Community of Serbian Municipalities.

They did not specify whether it would take another 4,000 days.