Top officials to confer on platform for Kosovo

This is just one in a series of meeting where top Serbian officials are expected to come up with several models that Belgrade will offer as a solution for the southern province's final status.

The basic guidelines of the document should be finished by the end of the month.

Serbian Prime Minister Ivica Dacic said late on Tuesday that Serbia would lose Kosovo if its position in the negotiations with Pristina continued to deteriorate. He also noted that the platform needed to be flexible.

According to Dacic, Kosovo's status will not be the main topic of the talks.

Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) whip Branko Ruzic has announced that President Tomislav Nikolic, the PM and parliament are working on the draft platform for Kosovo.

"I believe that the issue is of state interest and that one should therefore not prejudge the content of the platform," he said.

"Once the platform is in parliament, then we will be able to comment on it in a quality way," Ruzic explained.

Serbian Parliamentary Committee on Kosovo Chairman Milovan Drecun has assessed that the platform for Kosovo will not be "sensationally new" and that it will not offer solutions that have not already been seen around the world.

"Its basic message will be that every agreement is acceptable if it respects internationally recognized borders," Drecun noted.

"It was evident after the first meeting between Dacic and (Kosovo PM Hashim) Thaci that the process will end with a solution for the Kosovo status despite the fact that Pristina claims all the time that the so-called independence is a done deal for them. Therefore, we have started a process that will finally solve a very long dispute between Serbs and Albanians regarding Kosovo . The important thing is that the platform will have elements that will be unchangeable," he stressed.

Former Belgrade team chief Borislav Stefanovic told the Radio that the platform should be concrete, clear and unambiguous.

"It should primarily contain our clear position when it comes to energy, telecommunications, the status of northern Kosovo, special guarantees for Serbs, the issue of protection of monasteries, property, issue of the missing persons but in a very concrete, clear and unambiguous way. The plan should contain our clear determination that we will never recognize the independence of Kosovo . Those are the things that the platform should cover and our position about Kosovo's membership in the international organizations, in which it would be possible and in which it would not," Stefanovic said.

He said he was concerned about the fact that the authorities had announced that the platform would not contain anything new.

"They are justifying it by saying that they should not reveal their moves in advance so the other side could not prepare. They are not ready for the problem, the authorities where the PM wants the partition of Kosovo and others the whole of Kosovo with an autonomy such in South Tyrol. And they said in the campaign that they knew how to solve the issue," Stefanovic concluded.