BRUSSELS, Nov. 20 – The last meeting between Kosova ethnic Albanian leaders and Serbia’s top officials in Brussels, Belgium, held under the auspices of the troika, resulted again in a failure
Albanians rejected a reworked offer of wide-ranging autonomy from Serbia insisting there were no alternatives to the province’s demands for outright independence.
Belgrade has before proposed granting Kosovo a high degree of autonomy with which to run its own affairs. Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians have rejected each such suggestion.
Following four hours of talks considered as “intense and difficult” there came out no results at all, with both sides blaming each other on the lack of compromise.
For its part, Pristina described its vision of Kosovo’s supervised independence in line with the recommendations of UN Special Envoy Martti Ahtisaari. Belgrade continued to elaborate to Pristina its vision of a highly-autonomous Kosovo inside the borders of Serbia, said a troika statement, adding that “both parties reaffirmed their commitment to refrain from making acts or statements that could undermine the security situation in Kosovo.”
Mediators from the European Union, Russia and the United States are failing to reach a compromise before a Dec. 10 deadline for reporting back to the U.N. secretary-general.
Kosova has threatened to declare independence unilaterally if no deal is reached by then, which makes them fear of a new wave of violence in the Balkans.
Serb and ethnic Albanian leaders will meet for a final round of talks over three days next week in Baden, Austria.
Serb President Boris Tadic said his country would not be held to the de facto Dec. 10 deadline. “We are not accepting artificial deadlines,” he said.
While Skender Hyseni of the ethnic Albanian negotiating team said the Serbs were seeking “to drag this process until hell freezes.”
All sides have suggested the negotiations are unlikely to provide a compromise by Dec. 10.
The three envoys, led by the EU’s representative at the talks, Wolfgang Ischinger, presented both sides with plans to develop practical partnerships in trade, policing and border issues without addressing independence.
Ischinger, along with the other two mediators _ U.S. representative Frank Wisner and Russian diplomat Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko _ sat down with the Kosovo and Serbian leaders to discuss possible resolutions.
Kosovo has been under U.N. control since 1999, when NATO intervened to stop a Serbian military crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists. NATO is currently in charge of Kosovo’s security and keeps a 16,000-strong peacekeeping force in the province.
Russia, a close ally of the Serbs, questioned the legitimacy of last weekend’s general elections in Kosovo because of a boycott of the voting by the province’s minority Serb community.
