Russia to launch probe if Ahtisaari Kosovo plan accepted – FM-1

16:17|27/ 03/ 2007

MOSCOW, March 27 (RIA Novosti) – Russia will demand inquiries into the
implementation of all previous UN resolutions on Kosovo if the UN
Security Council approves a UN special envoy’s plan on the status of
Kosovo, the Russian foreign minister said Tuesday.

Marti Ahtisaari, a special UN envoy for talks on Kosovo, has proposed
that the province be granted internationally supervised sovereignty,
but Serbian authorities have strongly opposed the plan as threatening
Serbia’s national sovereignty and territorial integrity.

"We will be checking how existing UN Security Council resolutions on
Kosovo, particularly Resolution 1244, are being implemented," Sergei
Lavrov said. "We want to objectively, without imposing any one-sided
evaluations, determine who was implementing UN Security Council
resolutions and how, and who was not."

On Monday Ahtisaari returned his proposals on the future status of the
breakaway Serbian province to the UN Security Council following
fruitless top-level talks in Vienna between Pristina, Belgrade and the
European Union, which said later in a statement that it fully backed
Ahtisaari’s plan.

As a veto-wielding member in the 15-nation UN Security Council and a
traditional ally of Serbia, Russia has insisted that a decision on
Kosovo should satisfy both Kosovar and Serbian authorities, and that
it must be reached through negotiations.

Serbia’s predominantly ethnic Albanian Kosovo province, which has a
population of two million, has been a UN protectorate since NATO’s
78-day bombing campaign against the former Yugoslavia ended a war
between Serb forces and Albanian separatists in 1999.

The Serbian parliament unanimously approved a resolution February 14
rejecting some provisions of the plan.

Unlike Russia, NATO has made it clear that it favors independence for
Kosovo, but a final decision will be up to the UN Security Council.

In its foreign policy review, published Tuesday, the Russian Foreign
Ministry said that the lack of an alternative to the proposed
independence for Kosovo could strain the international community’s
efforts to resolve the issue as a whole.

"The formation of an independent state of Kosovo could result in
serious complications for stability in Europe," the ministry said. "It
is doubtful that an independent Kosovo that does not enjoy the consent
of all the countries involved will resolve the fundamental tasks at
hand, such as the formation of a multi-ethnical society and the
implementation of other standards for Kosovo."

Russia has been opposed to the internationally backed plan to grant
sovereignty to Kosovo, also arguing that it would set a precedent for
the breakaway regions in the former Soviet Union it is believed to
support – Georgia’s Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and Moldova’s
Transdnestr.