MacShane dismisses calls for Kosovo independence

B92/AFP, Belgrade
April 22, 2004

BELGRADE -- Thursday -- Britain's minister for European Affairs, Denis MacShane, rebuffed Kosovo's claim to independence on Thursday, saying he had told leaders in the UN-administered province that European politics was based on interdependence.

Speaking after talks with Belgrade officials he also brushed aside calls for the United Nations to decide quickly on its political future. "There is just one final status and that is when we are all dead," he said.

MacShane, who met Kosovo's titular president, Ibrahim Rugova, and prime minister, Bajram Rexhepi, this week in the provincial capital Pristina, told reporters he had pointed out that "in Europe we don't use the word independence because in Europe we are all interdependent."

On March 24, Rugova, an ethnic Albanian and a Muslim, like the vast majority of Kosovars, said "the grand objective of our people and of all citizens is the formal and rapid recognition of Kosovo's independence" from Christian Serbia.

MacShane said he was "very pleased" with the readiness of the new foreign minister of Serbia-Montenegro, Vuk Draskovic, to meet Rugova and Rexhepi.

"Kosovo's problem will be solved when there is a full open dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina and all that the international community can do is to stop violence from becoming overwhelming," he said.

Kosovo has been under UN administration since July 1999, when a 78-day campaign of bombing by NATO warplanes forced Serbia, then under president Slobodan Milosevic, to pull out its troops and end the oppression of its Muslim majority.

But the UN Security Council, under threat of a veto by Serbia's main ally, Russia, refused to give Kosovo independence, consenting only to its "substantial autonomy and self-government".

Draskovic, for his part, said he hoped for "resolute intervention by the international community to create the conditions for Serbs who fled the province to return."

More than 200,000 Serbs, about one-tenth of the population of Kosovo, fled after the withdrawal of Serbian forces.

Last month, the province was rocked by several days of ethnic riots, when more than 600 houses were burned and 29 Serb Orthodox churches and monasteries were torched in the worst violence since the UN took ontrol of Kosovo.