Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama has praised the Kosovo-Serbia deal signed at the White House on Friday, and blasted critics of it and of the Mini-Schengen proposal, which he considered as an umbrella for the US-brokered deal.
In a Facebook post on Saturday, Rama considered the documents signed at the White House by leaders of Serbia and Kosovo “a new agreement” between the two countries.
He added that there is nothing new in this agreement compared to the Mini-Schengen project spearheaded by himself and Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vučić.
Rama lashed out at former prime ministers Ramush Haradinaj and Albin Kurti, whom he respectively blamed for “cooling off” relations with Germany and the US by refusing to lift the tariffs of Serbian goods and the Mini-Schengen. He blasted critics of the latter, whom he labeled “provincial turbo-folk nationalists” who have harmed Kosovo.
“I am just “tired” of the endless rejection, the loads of time wasted in vain, the harmful repressed behaviour of rational factors in Kosovo politics, who crouched inside the shell of absurdity created by fans of provincial turbofolk-nationalism, which put Kosovo on a dead end of international defactorization and cooling off with its biggest allies, especially the United States and Germany,” Rama stated.
He ridiculed the Haradinaj and Kurti governments’ “spectacular own goals” – i.e. refusal of the Thaci-Vučić proposal for land swaps and criticism of the Mini-Schengen, – as “dark comedy”.
Rama stressed that there was nothing new in the US-brokered deal apart from Kosovo’s recognition by Israel, which “is very important and with very meaningful potential consequences for those who know how to read this fact.” The prime minister did non elaborate on the consequences but added that the deal is just part of the Mini-Schengen project.
“I have the bitter feeling that there is nothing new in what was signed yesterday that is not part of the long-standing plan for the [Mini-]Schengen Area,” he wrote.
The only publicly available document of the Mini-Schengen is general 9-point joint statement signed by Rama, Vučić and Zaev in a meeting in North Macedonia, which explained that achieving freer flow of goods, people, services and capital, will be a step toward the EU integration of the region.
The Albanian prime minister specifically applauded one point in the documents signed at the White House, which allegedly deals with the construction of a railway connecting Serbia, through Kosovo, to Albania’s Port of Durres on the Adriatic Sea.
Rama concluded by praising Kosovo’s President Hashim Thaci and Prime Minister Avdullah Hoti, while blasting politicians in Albania and Kosovo who pose as patriots, but “incessantly poison the people with hate speech, monstrous accusations, and endless slander.”
