Kostunica: US blocks Kosovo compromise
Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica criticized the U.S. for encouraging the Kosovo Albanians not to accept a compromise on the status of Kosovo.
(KosovoCompromise Staff) Wednesday, October 17, 2007
"Daily statements by U.S. officials that their country will recognize the unilaterally declared independence of Kosovo in line with the Ahtisaari plan are intended to prevent the Kosovo Albanians from accepting a compromise," Kostunica said.
Serbian Prime Minister was responding to an October 15 statement in which State Department spokesman Tom Casey said that the U.S. believes that supervised independence in accordance with the Ahtisaari plan is the best option if no agreement was reached before the December 10 deadline for a Troika report to the UN.
Kostunica said Washington's policy of "force" was an extension of NATO's 1999 bombing of Serbia "to deploy military forces in the province and take away 15 percent of our territory."
He also contended that the U.S. policy is based on brute force and open advocacy of the partitioning of Serbia.
"Unfortunately, all of this indicates that the U.S. and NATO brutally and illegally bombed Serbia and brought their troops to the province so they could take away 15 percent of the territory of our country," he said, adding that the Annex 11 of the Ahtisaari plan "literally states that NATO is the highest authority in Kosovo."
The same day, State Department spokesman Tom Casey rejected the accusations.
"We are not impeding anything. In fact we are actively working as part of the troika through (U.S.) Ambassador (Frank) Wisner to bring both sides together," Casey told reporters.
He said there was a limit to how long the talks could take. "It has been clear to us and we have stated it publicly and privately, that barring an agreement among the parties, what we would believe appropriate and what we would tend to move forward with, would be a period of supervised autonomy for Kosovo."
