Resolutie over Kosovo ingediend bij de VN, ondanks Russische bezwaren (en)

EU and US diplomats late on Tuesday (17 July) formally introduced a compromise UN resolution on the future status of Kosovo, despite continued opposition from Russia.

The resolution could be either voted on or still withdrawn and modified. It calls for an extra 120 days of talks between Serbs and Kosovo Albanians, in line with Moscow's earlier suggestion that more negotiations between the disputed parts are needed.

But Russia said the text has "zero" chance of being passed, insisting it would create a back-door route to the independence of the province in southern Serbia, as proposed by the UN envoy on the issue, Martti Ahtisaari.

"It's kind of a hidden automaticity of the Ahtisaari plan," Russia's UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin commented on Monday (16 July), AFP reported. The same message came from Serbia with Moscow previously announcing it would reject any proposal opposed by Belgrade.

But western diplomats keep trying to convince Russia to behave in a more constructive way.

"What is interesting in this is the extent to which the Russians have outsourced their foreign policy to Belgrade," Britain's deputy UN ambassador Karen Pierce commented.

She added, "It is a source of some regret that they no longer seem to want to work through the Contact Group and bring this to a managed conclusion," according to press reports.

The Contact Group is a diplomatic initiative for the Balkans launched in the mid-1990s by the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia. Within the group, no country holds a veto.

Under the newest version of the draft resolution the six-country negotiating team would be in charge of mediating the extra 120-day talks between Belgrade and Pristina.

The EU's foreign policy chief Javier Solana on Tuesday even mooted the possibility of a shift of the Kosovo dossier from the UN to the contact group if the deadlock at the security council continues.

"I don't think we have a long time in order to try this type of resolution," he told journalists in Brussels on Tuesday, adding that the key nations would in that case have to "move on and open negotiations between the two sides, and shuttle between them, without having a resolution."

But Ms Pierce later played down his comments, suggesting "Solana does not speak for us on the Security Council or in terms of what the Security Council does. The co-sponsors will make their own decisions."

Kosovo - home to 1.8 million ethnic Albanians and over 100,000 ethnic Serbs - was taken over by the UN in 1999 after NATO intervened to stop a Serb crackdown on the Albanian side in a brutal civil war.

The EU and US are keen to grant an independent status to Kosovo, but the 1999 UN resolution 1244 on Serb territorial integrity stands in the way of legalising the western political drive.