Serbia Rejects German Model for Kosovo

30 10 2007 Belgrade _ Resolving the long-term status of Kosovo along the lines of an intra-German deal agreed in 1972 is unacceptable to Serbia, a minister said on Tuesday.

"If this information is true, I can only say that our side cannot accept any document of such or similar content," Slobodan Samardzic, the Minister for Kosovo and Metohija told reporters.

Samardzic’s remarks echoed a report by the state-run Tanjug news agency that said that Wolfgang Ischinger, the EU’s representative on the Troika of international mediators overseeing the Kosovo status talks, wants to ask governments in Belgrade and Pristina to settle the dispute over Kosovo’s future in accordance with the 1972 Berlin Agreement.

The Berlin agreement was tailored to improve relations between what were then West Germany and East Germany – two states that existed on German soil during the Cold War.

Samardzic said that the 1972 agreement saw the two countries recognizing the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the other.

"Kosovo is not such a case. It is a province within Serbia under international UN administration,” Samardzic said.

He added that the province’s long-term status will be settled at talks “conducted in line with UN resolution 1244" that after the Kosovo war of 1999 regulated the pull-out of Serbian security forces from Kosovo and the deployment there of NATO-led peacekeepers and a UN administration.

Samardzic also said that that resolution 1244 “does not allow for any agreements that resemble deals between states.”

"We were therefore surprised that anyone from the Troika, let alone the Troika as a whole, could put forward such a thing," he said,

Although Kosovo is still formally part of Serbia, the province’s ethnic Albanian-run government wants full independence, while the authorities in Belgrade are offering them only broad autonomy.

Kosovo Albanian leaders have warned they will not accept any delays to the independence of their UN-administered homeland after reports that a US draft document was considering a lengthy postponement.

The current phase of talks under the Troika’s aegis was launched in August after an earlier proposal for Kosovo’s internationally-supervised independence was blocked in the UN Security Council by Russia.

The consultations are due to end by December 10. (BIRN)