Belgrade seeks restrain from neighbors
While diplomatic representatives of the EU countries are making intensive pressure on Serbian political leadership to give up its intention to file a resolution explaining that as ‘a move causing huge harm to Serbia', the complete diplomatic capacity of Serbian Foreign Ministry is engaged on keeping the UN members at stand-by, Belgrade based daily Blic writtes.
(KosovoCompromise Staff) Friday, July 16, 2010
As ‘Blic' learns from well informed sources in the Serbian Government, the Foreign Ministry has made a plan for ‘reminding and convincing' the UN members to vote for the Serbian resolution or at least to abstain from voting.
‘A special group of the countries are neighbors of Serbia - Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia - and they are expected for the sake of good neighboring relations, to abstain from voting', our source says.
At the moment the West is strongly rejecting idea of Kosovo partition, while diplomats in Belgrade say that changing of borderlines in the Balkans would be opening of Pandora's box claiming that such solution is not acceptable.
‘If Belgrade accepts what it is being offered and that is the high degree of autonomy for the north of Kosovo and the enclaves in what the EU is ready to help and practically makes possible the rule of Belgrade through the autonomy model, Belgrade shall save its own time. If it continues speaking about the resolution, negotiations over the status and partition of Kosovo it shall suffer losses only. Anyway, the UN resolutions have never settled anything, take Israel for example. Belgrade has to be practical because the time of rule over that territory is over', one foreign diplomat in Belgrade says unofficially on condition of anonymity.
Officials of countries that recognized Kosovo are permanently warning in their recent statements that violence can be expected in the north of Kosovo thus suggesting that the Serbs are the instability factor. The KFOR has announced heightened security measures in the north after the International Court of Justice announces its opinion over legality of proclamation of Kosovo independence.
The Belgium Prime Minister Yves Leterme said yesterday after meeting with Serbia President Boris Tadic in Brussels that reactions by Serbian authorities to the ICJ opinion over proclamation of Kosovo independence ‘shall be carefully watched'. That was his reply to question if that shall have influence on giving the candidate status to Serbia for admission to the EU.
President Tadic said that certain historical problems in the region ‘have to be solved' and that ‘Serbia shall not recognize Kosovo independence under any condition'.
‘Serbia is for a sustainable solution and such solution is not one in which one side gets everything and the other one loses everything'.
