Europe

Home page

Europe

Serbia wants Kosovo partitioned

25 March 2008 12:39 (UTC +04:00)

The proposal, submitted to the United Nations, is the culmination of a campaign by Serbia to entrench its political and administrative control over the northern part of Kosovo, which has a Serbian majority. Analysts said it was a largely symbolic gesture as the ethnic Albanian leadership in Pristina has vowed never to accept partition, while European countries and the United States would reject it at the United Nations Security Council.
"This proposal is a provocation from Belgrade, and we reject it 100 percent," Kosovoâ€™s deputy prime minister, Hajredin Kuqi, said in a telephone interview from Pristina. "We want to help create cooperation between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo - not divisions."
Kosovo, which declared independence from Serbia on Feb. 17, has been under UN administration since 1999 after NATO intervened to halt the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevicâ€™s repression of the ethnic Albanians, who make up 95 percent of Kosovoâ€™s population.
Serbia regards Kosovo as its medieval heartland and rejects its independence, arguing that it is a breach of international law.
he proposal, which UN officials said they were reviewing, was submitted to coincide with the ninth anniversary of the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia. According to The Associated Press, the document acknowledges UN jurisdiction over Kosovo, but calls for the Serbian majority to take charge of the border customs, judiciary and police services in the north of Kosovo, which accounts for 15 percent of Kosovoâ€™s overall territory.
Belgradeâ€™s aim of asserting its control over the northern part of Kosovo has contributed to violent confrontations in recent weeks, including a clash on March 17 in which a UN police officer was killed and dozens of others were wounded when peacekeepers seized a courthouse in the northern city of Mitrovica that was being occupied by Serbian protesters.
Serbs have burned customs and border posts and taken over rail lines. Belgrade also has sought to strengthen parallel institutional structures governing education and health care in the north of Kosovo while dozens of Serbian officers have abandoned Kosovoâ€™s multiethnic police force and pledged allegiance to Serbia.
Many Western analysts and leaders believe that Serbia lost its moral and legal right to govern Kosovo after Milosevicâ€™s ethnic-cleansing campaign against the territoryâ€™s ethnic Albanians. But in Belgrade, Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica said the NATO bombing had been part of an attempt by the alliance to take control of Kosovo.
"Now it is more than clear that the merciless destruction of Serbia in the NATO bombing had only one goal, and that is to turn Kosovo into the first NATO state in the world," Kostunica said in a statement.
Kostunica, who helped lead the revolution that overthrew Milosevic in 2000, is determined not to go down in history as the Serbian leader who lost Kosovo. In recent weeks, he has adopted Milosevicâ€™s nationalist rhetoric.
He also has clashed with the Serbian president, Boris Tadic, a pro-Western moderate, who opposes Kosovoâ€™s independence but argues that Serbia should nevertheless strengthen ties with the European Union, even though a majority of its members have backed the new state (IHT).