Grote belemmeringen voor Kosovo om visavrij reizen EU (en)
BRUSSELS - The EU commission has started talks on visa-free travel with Kosovo. But huge problems - from regional politics to organised crime - stand in the way.
EU justice commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom went to Pristina on Thursday (19 January) to deliver the good news. She also visited a shelter for trafficked women and met with Kosovo leader Hashim Thaci.
"Whether and how soon citizens obtain the privilege of visa-free travel will ... depend entirely on the government of Kosovo's continuing efforts to implement reforms," she said in a communique. "Moving stories from victims of modern slavery. Shelter gives them strength to move on," she later tweeted on the trafficked women.
The 1.7 million ethnic Albanians who live in Kosovo feel hard done by on visas. All of their former Yugoslav neighbours already have visa-free travel. The cost of an EU permit is between €35 and €60 in a place where the average wage is €200 a month and 40 percent of people do not have jobs.
The Malmstrom announcement is a political breakthrough which means the five EU countries that do not recognise Kosovo - Cyprus, Greece, Romania, Slovakia and Spain - have put it on track for normal relations.
The EU in 2009 already put "the territory of Kosovo" on a list of entities that need visas. A future EU Council decision can move it onto a visa-free list.
But despite the goodwill, Kosovo's talks are likely to take much longer than the two and half years it took, say, Bosnia to switch lists.
With border security among EU visa conditions, a major issue is north Kosovo.
Smugglers' paradise
The enclave of 40,000-or-so ethnic Serbs is - according to Nato - run by organised crime groups who make big money from cigarette and people smuggling. It is a no-go zone for ethnic Albanian police. Crossing points into Serbia are run by Nato soldiers and EU policemen. But almost nothing goes through official checkpoints in practice.
The smugglers' paradise will be hard to shut down because it is highly political.
EU countries say Serbia supports local chiefs in order to block EU-Kosovo integration. And many observers believe it will only settle down if it gets some form of autonomy - a diplomatic feat that risks triggering similar claims by ethnic Albanians and Serbs in Bosnia, Macedonia and Serbia.
Kosovo's envoy to Brussels, Ilir Dugolli told EUobserver that autonomy is out of the question. He added the dodgy border should not halt visa talks: "Otherwise we would have the paradoxical situation that the same problem did not stop Serbia from getting visa liberalisation but for us it is a problem."
But a Serb diplomat saw things differently.
"Officially they have opened talks, but there will be a lot of discussions on these issues inside the EU," the contact said. He predicted that "talks about the political solution" for north Kosovo will begin shortly.
For their part, rank-and-file Kosovo customs and police officers have a good reputation.
But EU diplomats say its courts have far to go, with judges often letting smuggling suspects off the hook or "putting their case to the bottom of the pile" due to external influence. And allegations of organised crime have tainted the highest levels of government.
Bad apples
EU police is currently investigating Thaci himself after the Council of Europe said he ran an organ trafficking gang during the war and that potential witnesses still fear for their lives. Nato documents leaked in 2004 called him "a big fish" in the arms and people trafficking business.
Dugolli noted: "The attitude of the Kosovo authorities has always been full openness and readiness to collaborate with any investigation."
Meanwhile, international soldiers are at times part of the problem.
Anecdotal evidence in Pristina indicates that high-earning Nato and EU police are some of the best customers in local brothels and do not ask where the women come from. In 2010, Macedonian police caught 16 Romanian EU police officers smuggling large quantities of cigarettes and liquor.
Asked by this website if they were ever punished, a spokeswoman for the EU police mission said: "They were pulled back [home] by their authorities."
The culture of impunity is nothing new. When Romanian UN soldiers killed two ethnic Albanians with rubber bullets back in 2008, they were also pulled back home.