Envoy Presents U.N. Plan for Kosovo to Serbia

United Nations special envoy Martti Ahtisaari on Friday handed to Serb authorities his plan for the future of Kosovo.

United Nations special envoy Martti Ahtisaari on Friday handed to Serb authorities his plan for the future of Kosovo that will set the breakaway province on a path to independence.

Ahtisaari and Serb President Boris Tadic posed for photographers in silence sitting across from each other in a lounge of the presidency building, then retiring for a meeting expected to take less than an hour.

Ahtisaari will also present his plan in Kosovo's capital Pristina, where Albanian leaders know they are to be offered something short of independence at first, coupled with more years of international supervision by a European Union mission.

United Nations armoured personnel carriers moved around Pristina early in the morning, preparing to seal off the centre for the envoy's visit.

The former Finnish president, who mediated months of largely fruitless talks in 2006 in search of a compromise between Serbia and leaders of Kosovo's 90 percent Albanian majority, met Tadic but not Serb Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica.

Kostunica, who has condemned Ahtisaari for "anti-Serb bias" and taken the lead in rejecting his plan in advance, says he cannot receive the envoy because, following an inconclusive general election on Jan. 21, he is merely a caretaker leader.

"The question of the future status of Kosovo is the most important issue of state," Tadic's Democratic Party said.

"It is in the interests of our citizens... that it be approached with all the seriousness it deserves," it said, in an attack on Kostunica for making the issue a political football.

The mood in Belgrade was sombre ahead of the unveiling of a plan that some Serbs say will be an "imposed" settlement which could provoke violence in the divided province where 100,000 Serbs live in enclaves.

"D Day for Kosovo", wrote top-selling Kurir daily on its front page. "The plan that Ahtisaari will present to Tadic will mean only one thing -- an independent Kosovo".

NO SERB RULE

A summary of Ahtisaari's plan seen by Reuters confirms that Ahtisaari will avoid recommending independence by name, and will not refer to Serbian sovereignty.

It will, however, make clear that Kosovo will not return to Serbian rule and will obtain legal status that permits other countries to eventually recognise it as an independent state.

"Passage of a (U.N.) resolution would create a platform for Kosovo to declare independence and those countries minded to do so would recognise that," said a Western diplomat.

"The Serbs would have to accept the loss of Kosovo, the Kosovars would have to accept a continued international presence, significant limitations on their sovereignty and a very generous package of rights for the Kosovo Serbs..."

Kosovo has been run by the U.N. since 1999 when 11 weeks of bombing by NATO forced the late Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw his forces, accused of killing 10,000 Albanians during a counter-insurgency war.

The poor, landlocked province of two million, about the size of Cyprus or Jamaica, is cherished by Serbia for its cultural and religious heritage as the medieval homeland of the nation.

Pro-Western President Tadic has told Serbs Kosovo might already be lost. But Kostunica trusts to Russia to block Kosovo's independence by insisting on the law of sovereignty and says Belgrade should sever ties with any country that recognises the province as an independent state.

He also refuses to participate in talks Ahtisaari plans to hold with Serbs and Kosovo Albanians in Vienna in the coming weeks before the United Nations takes up his proposals formally.

 

Reuters