New Kosovo-North Macedonia Highway

[cheekibreeki]

[cheekibreeki]

A 60-km highway connecting the Kosovo capital of Pristina to the border of North Macedonia was officially opened on Wednesday. “If yesterday we dreamed of a Kosovo like this, today it is a reality,” President Hashim Thaci of Kosovo said at the ceremony held close to the border with North Macedonia.

Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj expressed admiration for the project and announced that work on another highway, connecting Prizren in southern Kosovo with Istog, will start soon.

“Twenty years ago this was a way of escaping the country, yet today we breathe freely,” Haradinaj said.

Kosovo Assembly Speaker Kadri Veseli, North Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, Assembly Speaker Talal Xhaferi, Montenegrin Prime Minister Dusko Markovic, US Ambassador Philip Kosnett, and Kosovo Infrastructure Minister Pal Lekaj were among the other top guests at the inauguration.

“Complex infrastructural projects provide opportunities to governments, companies and individual workers to develop their skills and planning management and construction. I am confident that, as Kosovo’s ministry has learned from experience, they will continue to develop clear budgeting and payment plans, and identify ways to take full advantage of projects to further develop capacity and abilities,” Kosnett said.

The highway, which Haradinaj has called one of the best infrastructural projects in the Balkans, has cost Kosovo a good deal.

However, a government meeting on Tuesday approved a decision to build two more access points on the highway, at Ferizaj/Urosevac and at Vitia/Vitina.

“The means will be provided by the Kosovo government and Ministry of Finance,” the Minister of Infrastructure, Pal Leka, told the government meeting on Tuesday.

At a press conference after the government meeting, Haradinaj said that covering the cost of this extra two access points was still not clear.

Ferizaj/Urosevac, the second largest municipality in Kosovo in terms of economic development, already had access to the highway, some 3 km from where the new access point is planned.

However, this access point was built closer in the direction of Skopje and not Pristina, and was criticized by businesses in the city who said it was inconvenient for them.

The motorway will have the longest bridge in the region, stretching 5,733 meters.

Construction of the highway started in 2014. It was supposed to finish early in 2018. But in September 2017, the government reached an agreement with construction firm Bechtel Enka to open the highway at the end of 2018 instead, as BIRN reported. BIRN reported in more detail on the construction problems of the highway in May.

To give the project patriotic weight, Thaci, now President and then Prime Minister, named the new highway after Arber Xhaferi, the ethnic Albanian Macedonian who signed the peace agreement in Macedonia between the government in Skopje and the country’s ethnic Albanian minority, ending an armed conflict there in 2001.

[KrashNick]

I was today in Skopje , really nice highway plus it has the longest bridge in Balkans .