Slovenia's EU Plans for Kosovo

21 December 2007 Brussels _ Slovenia’s Foreign Minister, Dimitrij Rupel, has expressed the hope that the Kosovo status issue will be resolved in the first half of next year.

During a presentation of priorities for Slovenia’s forthcoming EU Presidency, Rupel said that Ljubljana wanted to contribute to the settlement of the Kosovo issue.

“I expect that the Kosovo process will be concluded by end of our Presidency”, Rupel said.

Slovenia takes over the rotating six-month Presidency for the first time on January 1.

Rupel said that the process of integrating the western Balkan countries into European institutions would be one of the main priorities of the Slovenian Presidency.

In the light of this, “Kosovo requires particular attention”, Rupel said, adding that “Slovenia believes that it is high time for the Yugoslav crisis to end”.

The Slovene foreign minister observed that within the EU there was a lack of understanding and information concerning Kosovo, and reminded everybody that the history of that entity did not start with the two-year UN negotiations on Kosovo's disputed status which ended in failure earlier this month.

On Wednesday the US and EU members of the UN Security Council concluded that the opprtunities for talks had been exhausted with Kosovo's Albanians insisting on independence, while Serbia was offering them only broad autonomy.

Rupel confirmed that at the next EU foreign ministers’ meeting at the end of January, further details of the EU’s planned police and justice mission in Kosovo would be discussed.

Asked about the legal basis of that mission, Rupel recalled that at its last high-level meeting, NATO decided to continue its presence in Kosovo, based on UN Security Council resolution 1244 which put an end to the Kosovo war in 1999.

“If 1244 is good enough for a military presence, it should be good for a civilian mission as well”, Rupel said.

NATO-led KFOR peacekeepers have been deployed in Kosovo for the past eight years to oversee security in the territory.

During that period Kosovo has been under UN administration, and it remains unclear what would happen to the UN administrative body there, UNMIK, once the planned EU mission has been deployed. (BIRN)