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bne February 2018 Southeast Europe I 45
launched membership talks with the EU so far. Albania and Macedonia hope to start the accession talks this year depending on the implementation of judicial reforms in Albania and if Mace- donia solves its long-standing name dispute with Greece.
Greece is blocking Macedonia’s acces- sion because it objects to the use of the name Macedonia as it has a province with the same name. However, Macedo- nian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev recently said that the name dispute could be solved by June this year.
Bosnia is hoping to gain EU candidate sta- tus, while Kosovo is thinking of officially asking to be granted candidate status.
However, the commission document warned that “local disputes” could make
it hard to meet the "ambitious" deadline.
"The EU cannot and will not import bilateral disputes. This is why all the Western Balkans partners concerned must resolve such disputes as a matter of urgency," the document said.
Aside from the Macedonian-Greek dispute, another thorny issue is
Serbia and Kosovo in the form of
a legally-binding agreement" was "crucial" for both their EU prospects.
Kosovo has also concluded a border demarcation agreement with Montenegro, but the authorities are now refusing to implement the deal, which is a precondition for further EU advancement.
“Only Serbia and Montenegro have launched membership talks with the EU so far”
Serbia's non-recognition of Kosovo's independence.
The document said that a "comprehen- sive normalisation of relations between
The document proposed that border issues should be solved by international arbitration, for example in The Hague, and that any rulings must be "binding, final" and "fully respected".
ing the law establishing the court was discriminatory. However, the parlia- ment failed to convene late on Decem- ber 22 due to the lack of quorum and the boycott by opposition MPs, and is now officially in winter recess until January 15.
All three members of the PAN coalition are headed by former KLA fighters, and their wish to stop the court becoming operational is understood to have been the main factor bringing the three par- ties together ahead of the 2017 election. The initiative to abolish the law on the special court was spearheaded by Nait Hasani, a MP from the ruling Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK), which was set up by Thaci and other ex-KLA leaders.
Panic grows among Kosovan politicians over special war crimes court
Valentina Dimitrievska in Skopje
Agrowing number of Kosovan politicians are mobilising in an attempt to have the Special Court for war crimes abolished before it makes its first indictments, as they fear political leaders in the country will face charges.
The court will prosecute alleged war crimes committed by members of the former Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) against ethnic Serbs during Kosovo's independence war in 1998-99. It was set up in 2015 in The Hague but will work under Kosovo's jurisdiction.
The KLA was a paramilitary organisation that sought the separation of Kosovo from Yugoslavia during the 1990s and the eventual creation of a Greater Alba-
nia. Among its former members are top politicians including President Hashim Thaci and Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj.
Former senior KLA members who
are now in politics are expected to
be indicted by the new court, and its president Ekaterina Trendafilova has stressed that there will be no immunity from prosecution.
43 of Kosovo’s 120 MPs, all from the governing PAN coalition, sent a request to the parliament in December asking for an extraordinary session to abolish the law that allows the Special Court to operate. This came after a group of KLA veterans signed a petition claim-
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