Serbia Will Not Attack Kosovo

The West and Russia have urged both sides to work hard to prevent any outbreaks of violence.

Serbia has no plans to intervene militarily if its United Nations-run breakaway Kosovo province declares independence, Defence Minister Dragan Sutanovac said on Thursday.

"Serbia does not see KFOR (the NATO force in Kosovo) as the enemy," Sutanovac told reporters. "Any military action now would look like the one in 1999."

NATO bombed Serbia in 1999 to expel Serb forces accused of killing thousands of civilians in Kosovo while battling ethnic Albanian separatists there.

The province's 90 percent Albanian majority is demanding independence after eight years as a UN protectorate, but Serbia has said it will only go as far as giving it maximum autonomy.

A final round of talks on Kosovo's future ended on Wednesday with no compromise, and Albanian leaders said the province would declare independence soon.

The West and Russia have urged both sides to work hard to prevent any outbreaks of violence.

Sutanovac said he was convinced the 16,000 NATO soldiers in Kosovo "would intervene and stop the destabilisation of Kosovo which could lead to the destabilisation of the entire Balkans."

He dismissed media reports quoting unnamed Serb officials as saying "Belgrade would do everything short of sending tanks" if Kosovo declared independence. Such talk by unauthorised people causes "unacceptable chaos," he said.

Sutanovac was speaking at a presentation detailing Serbia's progress in NATO's Partnership For Peace agreement, which Serbia signed a year ago.

He said it was still too early to say whether Serbia would join the alliance or remain at the preliminary level of cooperation. "Nobody (at NATO) has called us and we're not ready," Sutanovac said. "We need to focus on the 'PfP'.

The issue is controversial in Serbia, where most citizens remember the 1999 bombing bitterly, and Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica has repeatedly called for military neutrality.