Wasington Times
Jan 26 2007

U.N. mediator to issue opinion on break with Serbia
By David R. Sands
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
January 26, 2007

Russia and the United States may be heading for another clash of
wills as a United Nations mediator prepares to issue his
recommendation today in Brussels over whether the province of Kosovo
should break free from Serbia, a close ally of Moscow.
U.S. and NATO peacekeepers are on heightened alert in Kosovo as
U.N. Special Envoy Martti Ahtisaari gives a closed-door briefing on
Kosovo in Vienna, Austria, to the six-nation "Contact Group" trying
to broker a diplomatic deal.
Serbia has vowed to keep control of the province, whose
overwhelmingly ethnic Albanian majority is demanding independence.
Kosovo has been in political limbo since 1999, when a U.S.-led
bombing campaign drove out Serbian troops under President Slobodan
Milosevic.
Western diplomats fear Kosovo’s impatient Albanian leadership
could resort to violence if their statehood hopes are blocked. About
16,000 NATO-led peacekeepers remain in the province eight years after
the end of that war.
Mr. Ahtisaari, a former president of Finland, spent much of the
past year in a fruitless bid to find a formula for Kosovo acceptable
to both Belgrade and the Albanian leadership in Pristina.
The United States and the European Union support what are widely
expected to be the main outlines of Mr. Ahtisaari’s plan: a
"supervised independence" for Kosovo with strong protections for the
province’s Serbian minority, allowing Kosovo to set its own foreign
policy and join international institutions.
But Russia, a member of the Contact Group, has given virtual veto
power over the deal to Serbia, threatening to block any plan not
acceptable to Belgrade.
"Russia believes that it is unacceptable that a decision on the
status of Kosovo be imposed from the outside," President Vladimir
Putin said earlier this week in a press conference in Sochi, Russia,
with visiting German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Mr. Putin and other top Russian officials also warn that giving
Kosovo independence without Serbia’s consent would set a "precedent"
for other territorial disputes in states of the former Soviet Union,
including separatist movements friendly to Moscow in Georgia.
Vladimir Socor, an analyst with the Washington-based Jamestown
Foundation, said Russia could abstain on a U.N. Security Council vote
on Kosovo "in exchange for a Western quid pro quo in some other
theater."
U.S. officials have rejected the idea that Kosovo could be a
model for other territorial disputes, such as in Georgia, Moldova or
the Armenia-Azerbaijan clash over the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Mr. Ahtisaari will not make his recommendations public before
briefing Serbian and Kosovar officials Feb. 2. A spokeswoman for the
U.N. envoy said yesterday that he plans more negotiations after
releasing his plan in hopes of getting both sides to agree.
But Russia’s strong backing in recent days has only emboldened
Serbia’s leadership on the Kosovo issue. Prime Minister Vojislav
Kostunica said that Serbia’s leadership is unanimous in rejecting
independence for Kosovo and that it is "irrelevant" what formula Mr.
Ahtisaari proposes.
EU and U.S. diplomats had hoped that Serbia’s parliamentary
elections last weekend would produce a more moderate, pro-Western
government that could push through a compromise on Kosovo.
But the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party was the biggest
vote-getter, with 81 seats in the 250-seat parliament, according to
official results released in Belgrade yesterday.
Hard bargaining over a new ruling coalition is expected, and
could complicate Mr. Ahtisaari’s hopes to sell the new Kosovo
proposal.