Macedonia, Kosovo Cooperation Urged
Skopje | 18 June 2009 |Skopje
“Kosovo and Macedonia can not allow the luxury of having bad relations,” Gjuner Ismail from Macedonia’s Council for Global Cooperation NGO said at a debate in Skopje.
The think tanks, Macedonia’s Forum Centre for Strategic Research and Kosovo’s Institute for Policy Research and Development, KIPRED, said that Macedonia should not delay establishing diplomatic ties with Kosovo. They urged Kosovo to respect the issue of Macedonia's disputed name and offer it support.
The think tanks, Macedonia’s Forum Centre for Strategic Research and Kosovo’s Institute for Policy Research and Development, KIPRED, said that Macedonia should not delay establishing diplomatic ties with Kosovo. They urged Kosovo to respect the issue of Macedonia's disputed name and offer it support.
Relations between both countries soured last month when Kosovo's President Fatmir Sejdiu canceled his visit to Macedonia after Skopje downgraded his visit from "official" to "working", citing that they had yet to establish full diplomatic relations with Pristina.
Ismail argues that their strong economic cooperation, the ethnic Albanians that makes up one quarter of the Macedonian population, and that both states have NATO and EU aspirations should bring both countries closer.
“This crisis in relations came at the moment when everyone expected exactly the opposite, establishing closer ties,” Yll Hoxha, the Executive Director of Kosovo’s Foreign Policy Council argued.
Hoxha says that the current stall poisons relations between two peoples and could even cause radicalization of the ethnic Albanian parties in Macedonia supportive of Kosovo’s independence.
Skopje recognized Pristina’s independence last year, but struggles to balance good relations with both Serbia, which is strongly opposed to Kosovo's independence, and Kosovo.
They say that the only open issue between Skopje and Pristina, the partially unmarked border line, is easily solvable should not jeopardize mutual relations.
“Macedonia must support the unity of Kosovo as the country could be put in a position to discuss its own unity,” Ismail notes. He warned of a possible domino effect among Macedonian Albanians should Kosovo be partitioned between the Albanians and the Serbs living there.
Thursday's debate was supported by the Swiss embassy in Skopje.
(Reporting by Sinisa-Jakov Marusic)
Friday, June 19, 2009