Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic talks during the press conference in Belgrade, Serbia, 2018. Photo: EPA-EFE/ANDREJ CUKIC

In a letter sent on Tuesday, 37 non-governmental organizations from Kosovo and Serbia – including some from Kosovo’s majority-Serb north – called on Federica Mogherini to make a clear stand against Kosovo’s partition or an exchange of territories with Serbia along ethnic lines – a suggestion that has been widely debated in recent days.

“More frequent mentions of the possibility of redrawing the borders send a very dangerous message to the citizens of Serbia and Kosovo, as well as to the entire region, that there is a real possibility of legitimising the dangerous propaganda of ethnic ownership over territory – a principle that has pushed the region on several occasions into bloody conflicts,” the letter says.

Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, which Belgrade has refused to recognize, and EU-mediated talks on normalisation of relations were launched in Brussels in 2011. Since June this year, both sides have stated that the talks are entering the final stage.

As BIRN has previously reported, talk of an exchange of territories – swapping Albanian-majority areas in southern Serbia for Serb-majority ones in northern Kosovo – has grown more frequent among some Serbian and Kosovo politicians, although it has never been an official topic of discussion during the official Pristina-Belgrade dialogue in Brussels.

In Kosovo, the suggested partition has drawn criticism from both ruling and opposition parties, while in Serbia, one of the most vocal critics of partition of Kosovo and exchange of territories has been the highly influential Serbian Orthodox Church.

The NGOs that signed the letter, including Serbia’s Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, YUCOM, the Humanitarian Law Centre and the Youth Initiative for Human Rights’ Serbia and Kosovo offices, warned that solutions such as partition or exchange of territories could lead to a new exodus of civilians.

Vucic: compromise will be hard Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic told a press conference on Tuesday that he could not comment on the NGOs’ letter, but that he will ask EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini for much more than the NGOs did. Vucic said that “a lot of hard work awaits Serbia in September” when it comes to relations with Kosovo, and that he is committed to finding a solution to the dispute. But he said that “it will be difficult to find any compromise”, adding that citizens of Serbia will be fully informed about all the political, social and economic consequences of an agreement or the failure to reach one. Vucic also said that for Serbia one of the key topics will be property issues, and that Belgrade will work to ensure that Serbian Orthodox Church properties remain in the hands of the church, as well as to ensure the individual property rights of Serbs and companies that have or claim assets in Kosovo.

“Such developments would inevitably produce a chain reaction in other Balkan states and lead to numerous requests for changes in borders in the Balkans, which opens the door to new conflicts,” the letter says.

“This would also send a dangerous message to all Serbs and Albanians which are living on the ‘wrong side’ of ‘their’ ethnic states, which could lead to another exodus of the population in the Balkans,” it adds.

The NGOs urged the Kosovo and Serbia authorities and the international community to ensure the crimes of the past are not repeated, and to help establish proper democracies to prepare the ground for a peaceful future.

“Ethnically clean countries, an outdated 19th-century model, must not be the goals of any policy, nor should they be tolerated and supported by representatives of the international community,” the letter says.

“Any state that is based on discrimination and divides citizens on any ground is sentenced to failure in advance,” it adds.