Progess slow in Serbia's border talks

TIME IS running out for Serbia to achieve enough progress in strained negotiations with Kosovo to convince the European Union it should be granted official candidate status this year.

President Boris Tadic hopes to receive the nod from Brussels at a summit on December 9th, but EU members want to see a breakthrough before then in Belgrade’s talks with Kosovo’s ethnic-Albanian government. Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence is not recognised by Serbia.

Talks on the neighbours’ dispute resumed this week, but no progress was made on the key sticking point of how to manage the contested border between northern Kosovo and Serbia.

Violence has flared at the frontier several times in recent months, since Kosovo’s special police units tried to take control of a border that Belgrade and Kosovo Serbs refuse to recognise.

Local Serbs have built barricades on roads near the boundary to prevent North Atlantic Treaty Organisation-led peacekeepers and members of the EU police and justice mission in Kosovo taking ethnic-Albanian police and customs officers to the disputed border posts.

The only obvious progress this week was a deal for Kosovo and Serbia to recognise each other’s educational qualifications.

Kosovo’s foreign minister Enver Hoxhaj has insisted Pristina wanted “normal relations” with Belgrade, but complained “no other country in Europe tries to administer an area in another country using police and security forces like Serbia.”