Kosovo on EU summit agenda

14/12/2007

While confirming the EU's readiness to take a leading role in implementing a settlement to the Kosovo status issue, the heads of state and government of the 27-nation bloc are expected to offer Serbia a fast track towards candidacy status Friday.

"We have a duty to deliver as far as Kosovo is concerned and we cannot be blocked by a kind of Russian veto,'' Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker told reporters before Friday's (December 14th) EU summit in Brussels. [Getty Images]

EU leaders met for a summit in Brussels on Friday (December 14th) to discuss a few pressing issues, including steps to ward off possible instability in the Balkans following the failure of internationally mediated talks on Kosovo's future status.

With the province's 90% ethnic Albanian majority widely expected to announce its intention to declare independence from Serbia next month, reaching a common stand on how to respond to such a move is seen as key to avoiding a new crisis in the bloc's backyard.

"We have seen what happened in the former Yugoslavia when the [EU] did not take things in hand," Reuters quoted Belgian Foreign Minister Karel de Gucht as saying ahead of the summit, referring to the Balkan conflicts in the 1990s.

Representatives of the 27-nation bloc held their year-end meeting five days before a discussion at the UN Security Council of the EU-US-Russian mediators' report on the negotiations' results.

The majority of the member states, including the EU's big four -- Britain, France, Germany and Italy -- have signalled their readiness to recognise an independent Kosovo. Fearing that endorsing the province's secession without the UN's approval could encourage separatists elsewhere, a handful of countries -- Greece, Romania, Slovakia, Spain and, most vigorously, Cyprus -- have expressed reservations.

News agencies cited a draft statement the EU leaders were expected to discuss Friday as saying that the negotiation process has been exhausted.

"The European Council agreed with the UN secretary-general that the status quo in Kosovo is unsustainable and thus stressed the need to move forward towards a Kosovo settlement, which is essential for regional stability," Reuters quoted the document drafted by EU foreign ministers earlier this week as saying.

Insisting that Kosovo is an unalienable part of its territory, Serbia has voiced opposition to any plan that would put the province on the path to statehood, stressing that all it can agree to is broad autonomy.

While technically still part of Serbia, Kosovo has been a de facto UN protectorate since the end of the 1998-1999 conflict. The draft summit statement stresses it is a unique case and does not establish a precedent.

Former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, who led the talks between Belgrade and Pristina on behalf of the UN for 14 months, proposed a plan in March that would grant Kosovo EU-supervised independence.

Preparations for the deployment of an 1,800-strong EU nation-building mission to implement Ahtisaari's plan are said to be well-advanced.

Regarding Serbia, the draft EU statement encourages Belgrade "to meet the necessary conditions to allow its Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) to be signed rapidly", also expressing "confidence that progress on the road towards the EU, including candidate status, can be accelerated".

Some member nations have suggested the EU drop full co-operation with the UN war crimes tribunal as a condition for finalising Serbia's SAA, but the Dutch have voiced opposition to making any concessions to Belgrade until it arrests all war crimes indictees still sought by prosecutors at The Hague.

Some EU leaders have suggested that it might be best for the bloc to wait until after the Serbian presidential elections before moving towards recognising an independent Kosovo. The first round of voting is scheduled for January 20th, with a possible runoff on February 3rd.