SERBIA: Kosovo Unity Team leave for the summit in Vienna for the last rounds of talks for the future Kosovo status

The Kosovo Unity Team left Serbia on Friday (March 9) to take part in the weekend summit in Vienna, the last rounds of talks for the future Kosovo status. The summit is a last chance for compromise, but Kosovo is not about to be given back to Serbia or entrusted wholly to its Albanian majority. The West's task, now increasingly seen as unplanned "nation-building", will not end for some time. United Nations envoy Martti Ahtisaari mediated fruitless talks in 2006 and 2007, and has said he expects no last-minute moves away from Serb insistence on sovereignty or Albanian insistence on independence for Kosovo's two million people. But by displaying deadlock one more time, at the highest level, the two sides will clear the way for him to present his own plan for Kosovo to the U.N. later this month. Speaking at Pristina Airport, Kosovo Unity team member Veton Surroi said: "We can't apply any form of rearrangement of governance if Kosovo at the end doesn't have a clear recommendation from President Ahtisaari for an independent country, which in the future should be a member of the United Nations." Kosovo Prime Minister Agim Ceku said he was feeling confident. He said: "The Security Council with its new resolution will back up Ahtisaari's proposal, and we are convinced that Ahtisaari in UN Security Council will propose independence for Kosovo." The deal Ahtisaari proposes gives neither side all it wants. But it would set Kosovo on course for independence and allow a shift of Western responsibility from NATO and the U.N. to the European Union. NATO could be moving out six months after it is signed. The NATO allies bombed Serbia for 78 days in 1999 to stop Serb forces' violence against the 90 percent Albanian majority in Kosovo. Intervention restored alliance credibility wrecked by the daily televised slaughter in Bosnia, where Serb forces rampaged from 1992 to 1995 making NATO look irrelevant. Yet its full implications were not immediately acknowledged, and it won U.N. blessing only after the fact in Resolution 1244, which upheld the sovereignty of Yugoslavia, now a defunct state.

ITN Source | March 10, 2007

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