BELGIUM: UN must resolve Kosovo fate, Serb Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica says during EU visit

Serb Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica said on Wednesday (September 12) the fate of Kosovo could be resolved only at the United Nations and called on the West not to encourage the breakaway province to declare independence. Kostunica came to Brussels with a clear message for the European leaders: ''''These ideas of unilateral declaration of independence is something that Serbia is concerned about and we do think that the international community and the European Union should make clear warning that any...unilateral declaration of independence of Kosovo is something that is not only violating UN charter but is a threat to the peace and stability in the region and elsewhere in the world,'' Kostunica said after meeting with Hans-Geert Poettering, the head of the European Parliament. Kostunica said Belgrade was being constructive in negotiations to resolve Kosovo's future by December 10 but gave no hint of any progress in the talks. "And we do think that the United Nations and Security Council are the sole institutions within which the problem of the future status of Kosovo should be dealt with and should be solved with. Everything else is a sort of violation of international law," he said after talks in Brussels with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana. Efforts to win a Security Council resolution rubber-stamping a UN plan to put Kosovo on the road to independence broke down this year after Serb ally Russia threatened to veto any such resolution in the Council. Moscow insists any pact on the province, administered by the United Nations since a 1999 NATO bombing campaign to drive out Serb forces, must not be imposed on Belgrade. Leaders of Kosovo's majority ethnic Albanians say they will declare independence unilaterally if internationally mediated talks which began in Vienna last month do not yield anything and have called on the United States and EU to back them. Solana insisted the EU was doing everything it could to reach a deal in the negotiations and said the main parties accompanying the talks -- the EU, Russia and the United States -- had agreed to refrain from prognostications during them. Asked to comment on a new call from Belgrade that the Serb minority in Kosovo should boycott an election in the province tentatively planned for November 17, Solana said he had always urged them to participate. "It has been my position that it would be better for the Serbians who live in Kosovo to participate in the elections. The position of the the government of Serbia is different and we disagree on that point but I, I respect the decision that the government of Serbia will take. But for me I think it would be better to participate,'' Solana said. Serbs voted in Kosovo's first general election under U.N. rule but boycotted the second at the urging of Serbia. Kostunica also said recent comments by a junior Serb minister suggesting Belgrade could deploy forces to Kosovo in the event of a unilateral declaration of independence had been misinterpreted. But he said any such declaration would be "more than dangerous" and urged the West not to encourage Kosovo Albanians to take that route.

ITN Source | September 13, 2007

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