Kosovo Serbs boycott negotiations

Talks on future of divided province are disrupted as Serbian side rejects ‘minority status’

VIENNA (AFP) - Kosovo-Serb delegates, in Vienna to discuss the province’s future status, boycotted negotiations on the thorny issue of community rights yesterday, refusing to be branded as a minority and demanding to be treated as equals in the discussions.

The move was not expected to endanger the overall UN-sponsored dialogue on Kosovo but confirmed that talks over technical issues Monday had stalled.

“The Kosovo Serbs are absent for an obvious reason: They don’t accept being treated as a minority,” Dusan Batakovic, an adviser to Serbian President Boris Tadic, told journalists.

“They are a constituent nation of Kosovo... They feel they cannot be degraded as a minority.”

This is the first time in the Vienna negotiations that any party has boycotted a session, but talks between the Serbian and Albanian delegations went ahead yesterday, with Belgrade showing support for its Pristina counterparts.

“We cannot accept the results of the ethnic cleansing that happened after June 1999 when more than 60 percent of Kosovo Serbs were expelled” from the province, Batakovic said, adding that his delegation was representing the Kosovo Serbs in their absence.

According to Batakovic, the Kosovo-Serb delegation also refused to attend talks yesterday because it did not wish “to be in the presence of Mr Fatmir Limaj, who is still accused of war crimes.”

Limaj, who is part of the delegation from Pristina, was acquitted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) last December.

Before the meeting, chief Albanian negotiator Veton Surroi said he would submit new proposals.

“Every citizen is a constituent of the new Kosovo,” he said, adding that his delegation was seeking to strike normal “relations between those who are in an ethnic majority and those who are an ethnic minority.”

“The Serbs still insist on two ethnicities,” the head of the Albanian delegation, Lufti Haziri, replied, insisting Pristina supported autonomy for minorities.