Kosovo talks get underway in Austria

VIENNA: Diplomats from the European Union, Russia and the United States held talks with Kosovo Albanian representatives here on Thursday at the start of a new round of diplomacy to resolve the future of the breakaway Serbian province.

The so-called "troika" handling the delicate negotiations over the status of the UN-administered province was due to meet Serbian officials later in the day in a bid to break a diplomatic impasse over the tiny Balkan territory.

The discussions at the Austrian foreign ministry were called after Russia, a strong ally of Serbia, rejected a Western-backed UN Security Council resolution granting "supervised independence" for the mainly ethnic Albanian province.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon proposed on August 1 that another round of talks be held to break the deadlock, but keeping in mind months of failed talks in the past he set a December 10 deadline for a report from the troika.

Kosovo President Fatmir Sejdiu and Prime Minister Agim Ceku were leading the Kosovo Albanian delegation, while Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic and Kosovo Minister Slobodan Samardzic were heading the Serbian team.

Multiple rounds of talks between the two sides in recent years have failed to reach any compromise, with the Kosovo Albanians refusing to budge from their demand for independence and Serbia insisting on its territorial integrity.

Tensions sharpened recently when Kosovo's ethnic Albanian leadership threatened to unilaterally declare indpendence at the end of the current round of talks, a move Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica warned would be "very dangerous."

But EU envoy Wolfgang Ischinger expressed "optimism" as he entered Thursday's meeting.    The troika hoped to establish whether there was a "will for a political solution" to one of the last conundrums of the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, he said.

"We want to try to elaborate a negotiated solution so that we don't get another non-solution from the Security Council," he told German radio RBB-Inforadio earlier.

Kosovo has been run by the UN since 1999 when a NATO bombing campaign forced Serbian troops to withdraw and end a harsh crackdown on Kosovo Albanian separatist guerrillas. A NATO force of 16,000 remains in the province.

Kosovo Albanians insist on total independence from Serbia but Belgrade says the province is at the core of Serbian culture and history. Serbian leaders have offered maximum autonomy but these ideas have been rejected in Pristina.

Ceku said ahead of the talks that he envisaged the territory being granted independence without a UN resolution.

"There is nothing to negotiate concerning status. For us, this question is finished," he said, referring to the plan for supervised independence proposed by UN envoy Martti Ahtisaari. 

Ahtisaari's plan has been rejected by Serbia and Russia but welcomed by the United States and the European Union.

However at least one EU member state has expressed willingness to consider other solutions including partition along ethnic lines.

Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen said Tuesday a compromise to divide up Kosovo would be an acceptable solution as he met Serbian leaders in Belgrade ahead of the talks in Vienna.

"If both parties agree on it, and it is a workable solution, then division is acceptable for me, but only under the umbrella of the UN Security Council," Verhagen told Dutch public Radio 1 during his visit.

Verhagen is the first EU foreign minister who has said the division of Kosovo into Serb-dominated and ethnic Albanian-dominated parts is acceptable.

Ischinger said the troika would accept any solution agreed by both sides but he was adamant that no new proposals were on the table in Vienna and partition was not an option.

"In no way has the question (of partition) been put on the agenda by one of the two parties or by the troika. It's really a non-subject," he told German radio.