Serbia and Kosovo cut first deal

Jul 2, 2011, 19:30 GMT

Belgrade/Brussels - After a years-long effort, Serbia and Kosovo reached a compromise on a number of issues dealing with daily interactions between the neighbours, European Union Commission negotiators announced Saturday.

The citizens of the former Serbian province will now be able to travel to Serbia using their ID cards, Serbian negotiator Borislav Stefanovic announced on television in Belgrade. Previously, Serbia had declared all personal documents from Kosovo as null and void after the former province declared its independence three years ago.

Both sides also agreed to exchange information from their civil registries, the EU statement said. They had previously withheld all information about births, marriages and deaths in their territories from the other side. Serbia had confiscated older registries from Kosovo during the 1999 civil war, while Kosovo had kept the records of its Serbian minority from authorities in Belgrade.

The European Union has called on Serbia to compromise with Kosovo as a precondition for further dealings with Brussels, but Belgrade refuses to take any steps that could be seen as a recognition of Kosovo's independence.

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