Kosovo: Crafting A Special Status For Northern Kosovo

A piece from 2010 that may be more relevant today as the parties -- especially the US, and the Europeans -- may be more ready to push the parties off dead stopped: https://www.rferl.org/a/Crafting_A_Special_Status_For_Northern_Kosovo/2148191.html

Fears of a Kosovo Partition (July 2006)

By mid-2006, Western concern over the unstable Kosovo situation had come to take the form of UNMIK Pristina worrying over a possible move by the northern Kosovo Serbs to implement a "hard" partition of the north to preempt an expected unilateral move by the Kosovo Albanians south of the Ibar to declare independence from Serbia.  (In the event, the northern K-Serbs never did seek partition -- though they hoped, and still hope, that Belgrade would thus save them -- while the K-Albanians did take the first move by declaring independence in February 2008.)  UNMIK's HQ stood in the middle of the K-Albanian capital of Kosovo -- Pristina -- and was under the direct influence of the Western countries (and especially the US and UK) which fully supported the K-Albanian position.  (At the US Office's July 4th celebration that year, the head of the office publicly called the northerners that UNMIK Mitrovica worked with "troublemakers.)  Under those influences -- channeled by the Office of Political Affairs (OPA) -- the UNMIK leadership grew quite paranoid about a northern partition.  OPA prepared a strategy paper outlining how UNMIK might work to prevent it.  OPA drafted a Code Cable in July to be sent to New York to cover the paper.  I don't remember UNMIK Mitrovica being given the chance to be involved in the preparation.  However, the PDSRSG was not unaware of the realities of the north so the OPA paper had to recognize that UNMIK had little to work with beyond continued diplomacy and peacekeeping.  In the event, in late July, he and I had the opportunity in Vienna to brief senior Western officials and Martti Ahtisaari (the UNSG's Special Envoy for Kosovo negotiations, UNOSEK) on the north.  It became clear that the Western dictum against partition was little more than words.  The draft code cable follows.  (I'm not sure it was sent.)  The full draft strategy paper is too long to provide here.

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The 2013 Brussels Agreement and the Implementation Plan

As noted in Wikipedia, the Brussels Agreement was made between the governments of Serbia and Kosovo on the normalization of their relations. It was negotiated and concluded, although not signed by either party, in Brussels under the auspices of the European Union. The negotiations were led by Serbian Prime Minister Ivica Dačić and Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaçi, and mediated by EU High Representative Catherine Ashton. The agreement was concluded on 19 April 2013.

Actually there does seem to have been an Implementation Plan initialed by the two leaders.  (I think it's them, but see for yourself below).  And relations have not be fully normalized until now and the plan never implemented.

A Map for a New North Mitovica municipality in 2006

I prepared this map in 2006 for Martti Ahtisaari, the UNSG Special Envoy for the negotiations over Kosovo status between Belgrade and Pristina.  I was serving as the UNMIK Regional Representative for Mitrovica (and northern Kosovo).  I had met Ahtisaari some 20 years previously while working on Angola.  We met in June in UNMIK HQ in Pristina and had other meetings during the summer.  One of his staff asked me to prepare the map which I delivered to Ahtisaari's team before the year's end.  It was supposed to balance the ethnic realities by giving the K-Albanian South Mitrovica a bit of the north while dividing the territory in a way acceptable to the majority K-Serbs in the north.  It was predicated on an eventual agreement in the UN Security Council on the status of Kosovo, some acceptable form of autonomy or "independence."  Despite Ahtisaari's best efforts, the US and Russia could not agree.  Pristina declared independence unilaterally in February 2008.  Ahtisaari later became President of Finland.

The light red line was the existing border of Mitrovica (which spanned the Ibar River).  The darker red line would have been the new border with the Serb majority North Mitrovica to the east and a mixture of Albanian and Serb villages as part of South Mitrovica to the west.  The area north of the Ibar were other Serb-majority municipalities