Kosovo Serbs Want Belgrade to Run Education, Welfare, Health

Leaked documents that BIRN has seen reveal that Kosovo Serb stakeholders that the team tasked to draft the controversial statute in Kosovo on the Association of Serbian Municipalities consulted believe the statute should allow the education and health sectors to remain reliant on Serbia.

They also believe the Association should have managing rights over public enterprises in the Serb-majority north Kosovo, such as the Trepca mining complex and Gazivoda - which have been the subject of major disputes between Belgrade and Pristina.

BIRN obtained several reports of the May and June meetings of the Kosovo Serb team tasked by the Pristina authorities with drafting the statute for the long-awaited association -one of the key deals agreed between Belgrade and Pristina in EU-led talks.

The documents reveal that, during the May 21 meeting with the team, the heads of public enterprises in Kosovo that Serbia still controls said the Association must ensure the economic stability of the Kosovo Serb municipalities as a "condition of [their] economic survival and development".

Jovan Dimkic, head of the Trepca mines in Serb-run north Mitrovica, said that all public and social enterprises in the area should be managed by the Association, the ZSO.

"Interlocutors agreed that a future strong jurisdiction of the ZSO in the field of the economy is an important precondition for the stable functioning of these systems in the future," the report wrote.

Kosovo adopted a law on October 2016, which has not been implemented, that would transform the Trepca mining and industrial complex into a shareholding company in which the Kosovo government would control 80 per cent of the shares, while 20 per cent would remain the property of its workers.

This was...