Albania’s prime minister has refused to meet his Kosovo counterpart to coordinate efforts for fighting coronavirus.
On Tuesday, in an interview for Euronews Albania, Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti refused to comment on Albanian counterpart Edi Rama’s complete silence on the ousting of his government and other political developments in Kosovo.
“In the middle of March I wrote to Prime Minister Rama, telling him to hold a meeting between Rama, Meta, Ruçi, and me, Osmani and Thaçi [Albania and Kosovo’s Prime Ministers, Presidents and Speakers of Parliament], given that we couldn’t hold the [joint] governments meeting. We would discuss on the pandemic and other things but I never received a reply on this,” Kurti said.
The two governments hold regular joint meetings to improve collaboration between the two countries but the pandemic has made the successive meeting impossible.
Rama’s refusal to even reply to Kurti’s proposal follows the Albanian Prime Minister’s sudden decision keep complete silence regarding events in Kosovo.
He was previously very active in commenting on and supporting any agreement between Kosovo and Serbia’s Presidents, at a time when domestic and international analysts and experts warned that Thaçi and Vucic had planned to exchange territories.
A symbol of Rama’s active engagement in regional politics back then became his denigrating words against the then Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj, calling him an “ignorant” and “liar”, and suing him for suggesting that Rama was involved in the Thaçi-Vucic plan to exchange territories. Rama claimed that these allegations have created in the public opinion the belief that he worked against Kosovo’s interest.
However, shortly after he met Kurti in Tirana in his first visit as Prime Minister, where they disagreed on the Mini-Schengen initiative, and especially since the pressure on the Kurti Government to drop tariffs on Serbian goods grew, Rama has refused to answer questions related to Kosovo politics. He has justified this with the criticism received in both countries for interfering in Kosovo’s affairs.
