Eleven years since the signing of the Brussels Agreement - we are still waiting for CSM

The text of the agreement, which was formally named "The First Agreement on Principles Governing the Normalization of Relations", was negotiated for six months before three signatures were placed on the document.

The document was signed on behalf of Belgrade by the Prime Minister at the time, and today's Head of Diplomacy, Ivica Dacic, and on behalf of Pristina by Hashim Thaci, who at that time was the Prime Minister of the Provisional Institutions.

The third signature, on behalf of Brussels, which participated as a mediator, was put by the then High Representative of the European Union for foreign policy and security, Catherine Ashton.

Brussels agreement was supposed to mark the beginning of the coexistence of the two peoples in Kosovo and Metohija and the normalization of relations between Belgrade and Pristina. However, the implementation of the key part of the agreement - the formation of the Community of Serbian Municipalities (CSM) - has been waiting for 11 years.

Brussels Agreement, signed on April 19, 2013, has a total of 15 points. The Community of Serbian Municipalities forms the backbone of this document, and the first six points of the agreement refer to it.

Based on the agreed document, it is envisaged that the CSM will be an association of municipalities where the Serbs make up the majority of the population in Kosovo, that it will have a statute, a president and vice president and an assembly, and membership would be open to any other municipality, provided that the members of the municipality agree on the participants.

All municipalities would have the right to cooperate in the collective implementation of powers through the CSM, and the Community would have full supervision over the areas of economic development, education, health, urban planning and rural development. Other points of the Brussels Agreement related, among other things, to the police, judiciary and local elections, and those whose implementation depended on Belgrade were implemented.

According to the Brussels Agreement, the existence of a regional police commander for four municipalities in the north of Kosovo where Serbs constitute the majority population (Northern Mitrovica, Zvečan, Zubin Potok and Leposavić) is foreseen, and the police commander for that region is a Serb who is appointed from a list submitted by four mayor on behalf of CSM.

It is also foreseen that the composition of the Kosovo police in the north reflects the ethnic composition of the population of these four municipalities. Just after the replacement of the commander of the Kosovo Police for the North region in November 2022, which Pristina has no right to do according to the Brussels Agreement, the Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija left the temporary institutions of Pristina.

The reasons for leaving, in addition, were non-compliance with the Brussels Agreement by Pristina, the incursions of special units of the so-called Kosovo police to the north and the construction of police bases and illegal arrests of Serbs.