Kosovo Status Talks with Serbia Might Last Another 120 Days
12 July 2007
State's Fried calls on Belgrade to reconsider stance on breakaway region
Washington – A European and U.S. draft proposal would allow another 120 days of intensive negotiations between Serbia and Kosovo Albanians on the status of the province. However, a U.S. diplomat says resolving the Kosovo question requires Serbia’s leaders to choose a future with Europe.
“I think that most Serbs understand that Kosovo is gone,” the State Department’s Daniel Fried said in a July 6 interview with Agence France Presse in Dubrovnik, Croatia. “Most Serbs don't like that, but most Serbs also want to join Europe.” Fried is assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs.
The United States supports an independence plan developed by U.N. mediator Martti Ahtisaari, who has called for the period of “supervised independence” with Kosovo remaining under the control of a European Union administrator. Russia, which has veto power in the U.N. Security Council, prefers a solution that would be acceptable to both Serbia and Kosovo.
Serbia continues strongly to oppose independence for Kosovo, and Kosovo Prime Minister Agim Ceku on July 11 called on the European Union to bypass the United Nations if the U.N. is unable to resolve the status issue.
The breakaway region has been administered by the United Nations since the 1999 NATO humanitarian intervention. In the U.N. Security Council, the United States and Europe Union nations are trying to build support for a new resolution calling for a 120-day period of intensive negotiations between the Albanian majority and the ethnic Serb minority in Kosovo. (See related article.)
News reports July 12 said U.S. and EU diplomats have sought to gain Russian support by revising the draft resolution to remove a promise of independence following the four-month talks.
“We are working with our colleagues to come up with a resolution that can be brought to the council in the next few days,” Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told reporters July 9.
Khalilzad said a growing number of diplomats are concerned that failing to settle Kosovo’s international status could destabilize the Southeast Europe region. “It is our view that we need to make a decision on this relatively soon.”
UNITED STATES FAVORS MORE NEGOTIATIONS
Visiting Belgrade, Serbia, on July 10, Fried told reporters that the United States continues to support Ahtisaari’s plan for supervised independence. However, he said the United States also favors a final round of negotiations between the parties.
Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica has rejected the draft resolution, saying July 11 that Kosovo never will be independent.
Serbia has undergone a remarkable transformation since the rule of Slobodan Milosevic, who presided over the country through the violent breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Fried said in the July 6 interview. As they consider the future of Kosovo, Serbs are facing difficult choices but need to understand that Europe would welcome them into the fold, he said.
“Nobody is pleased that we have to do what we have to do. But, in 1999, Europe and America were forced to stop Milosevic’s armies, and what we are dealing with now is the consequence of [Milosevic’s policies],” Fried said. ”This is sort of the second act of that drama.”
By engaging in future status talks, Belgrade would not be losing Kosovo, Fried said, but gaining a new future where all ethnic Serbs eventually could reside peacefully in a single political community, the European Union.
“The irony is, to get what they want, they have to give up what they've already lost,” Fried said.
Serbia would benefit by breaking the cycle of nationalist politics that not only has held Serbs back, but has slowed the entire region’s progress toward joining its Central European neighbors as new members of the Euro-Atlantic community.
“Milosevic may have destroyed Yugoslavia, and Kosovo may be gone, but Europe is yours,” Fried said.
A transcript of Fried’s July 6 interview is available from the State Department Web site, as is a transcript of a July 7 roundtable discussion with Croatian journalists.
For more information, see Southeast Europe.
(USINFO is produced by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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