Çollaku: Rama Did Well Not to Raise the Hague Four at the UN General Assembly

Former MP Kreshnik Çollaku, a guest on Friday’s Review program with Greta Topjana on Euronews Albania, spoke about Prime Minister Edi Rama’s address to the UN General Assembly. During his remarks, Çollaku said Rama showed diplomatic restraint by not speaking at the UN about the four former KLA leaders. He said unnecessary wounds would have been opened in an organization that recognizes Serbia’s sovereignty over Kosovo.

“This morning I heard a rumor circulating that he would speak at the UN about the issue of the four in The Hague. Honestly, it concerned me. I think he did well not to open that topic there, and apparently he must have been well advised this time.

I am very critical of him, but I think it was a mature diplomatic move. When you speak at the UN General Assembly, you are not speaking in Tirana, nor in Pristina, not even in Brussels, not even in Washington. You speak at the organization that still recognizes UN Resolution 1244, Serbia’s sovereignty over Kosovo.

So the UN does not recognize Kosovo as a state. UN Resolution 1244, under which KFOR, the NATO international forces, guarantee and maintain peace. There is an agreement with the state — I am speaking as it stands in the law of the UN General Assembly. There is the 20-year Kumanovo agreement that Serbia must stay away militarily from the territory of Kosovo, but officially at the UN, UN Resolution 1244 recognizes Serbia’s sovereignty over Kosovo, and the environment is dominated or at least paralleled — 50 percent — by Russians, Chinese, countries that do not recognize Kosovo, countries that refuse to recognize Kosovo. It would have opened an unnecessary wound.

First. Second, Kosovo is in an important process that may already have been blocked by these developments, but there are open issues of recognition. Only 121 countries recognize Kosovo. There are about 100 more UN members that it must convince to recognize it,” he said.