New U.N.S.C. Session on Kosovo

United Nations Security Council (Photo:UN/Loey Felipe)

In the evening of Oct. 23, the United Nations Security Council will be discussing Secretary General Antonio Guterres’s new six-month report on the operation of the U.N.’s mission to Kosovo (UNMIK).

The meeting will be attended by Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic and Kosovo President Vjosa Osmani – who will, according to Pristina media, focus on the political and security situation in the wake of the Sept. 24 clash between armed Serbs and Kosovo police in the village of Banjska. The event was not featured in Guterres’s report, due to occurring outside of the document’s March 19 - Sept. 18, 2023 timeframe.

In the report, which will be presented by UNMIK head Caroline Ziadeh, Guterres condemned “in the strongest terms the attacks against international presences on the ground, and the use of violence in general” and urged “all parties to exercise restraint and refrain from taking unilateral actions that could lead to heightened tensions and further escalation.”

“The escalation of tensions and security incidents in May and June have adversely impacted the dialogue process. It is imperative that the actions of political leaders are driven by a commitment to address the concerns of all people of Kosovo. Dialogue remains the only pathway to resolving all open issues,” Guterres wrote.

The secretary general further expressed his concern over the fact that Kosovo and Serbia proper have not achieved significant progress in the application of the Agreement on the Path to Normalization and that they have yet to agree on the order in which the provisions of its Implementation Annex – which both sides conceded to in Ohrid on March 18 – will be put into practice.

In the past several years, Serbia’s representatives at the U.N.S.C.’s UNMIK-related meetings have been the country’s foreign ministers – Ivica Dacic and Nikola Selakovic – while Kosovo’s representatives were its foreign ministers Donika Gervalla-Schwarz, Meliza Haradinaj-Stublla and Glauk Konjufca, and, previously, then-ambassador to the U.S. Vlora Citaku.