Post by sookis on Jan 11, 2008 22:20:25 GMT -5
www.iht.com/articles/2008/01/10/europe/kosovo.php
U.S. and Germany to recognize Kosovo independence, diplomats say
By Dan Bilefsky Published: January 10, 2008
LJUBLJANA, Slovenia: The United States and Germany have agreed to recognize Kosovo and get the rest of Europe to follow suit after the province declares independence following the Serbian elections next month, according to senior European Union diplomats close to negotiations over the future of Kosovo.
In a recent conversation about the future of Kosovo, EU officials said President George W. Bush and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany had agreed that it was imperative to secure the stability of the western Balkans by coordinating the recognition of Kosovo after the second round of Serbian elections planned for Feb. 3.
They said Washington was aggressively pressing the EU to ensure that the recognition of Kosovo was not delayed by even a week.
"The cake has been baked because the Americans have promised Kosovo independence," a senior EU official said. "And if Washington recognizes Kosovo and European nations do not follow, it will be a disaster."
Pristina's determination to declare independence from Serbia is vehemently opposed by Belgrade and Moscow. Several EU countries - including Spain, Slovakia, Romania and Cyprus - are also reluctant to recognize an independent Kosovo, fearful that such a move would spur secessionist movements on their own territories. But EU diplomats said that a majority of European nations - including Germany, France, Britain and Italy - planned to recognize Kosovo, regardless of other dissenters.
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The German Foreign Ministry said Thursday that no decision had been reached on when the EU would recognize Kosovo. It ruled out any suggestion that Germany and the United States alone would recognize Kosovo. Merkel has been lobbying the other 26 EU member states in order that the bloc will have a united stance over this issue.
Slovenia, a nation of two million people that took over the EU presidency for six months on Jan. 1, is pressing EU members to make good on the bloc's pledge to send an 1,800-member police and civil force to Kosovo this month. EU officials said Slovenia was determined that the force be in place before Kosovo's independence declaration, and that the declaration and its recognition by EU nations could be put off until after the force was dispatched.
Slovenia, the first former communist country to assume the EU's rotating presidency, is determined to bring stability to the western Balkans nearly 17 years after it helped unleash the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia by declaring independence itself in 1991.
Dimitrij Rupel, the Slovenian foreign minister, said this week that the EU's best hope of finding a way out of a potentially explosive situation in Kosovo was to push Serbia to soften its recalcitrance by offering Belgrade closer ties and the prospect of joining the bloc. Rupel, who played a key role in shepherding Slovenia to independence and then EU membership, said he hoped Serbia and the EU would sign an agreement cementing political and economic ties by the end of this month.
"The financial situation of Serbia is terrible, and coming closer to the EU will help change that," he said.
Rupel noted that Serbia's per-capita gross domestic product of $3,000 had hardly improved since 1989, while Slovenia, which joined the EU in 2004, had seen its per-capita GDP jump from $5,000 in 1989 to $23,000 last year.
Kosovo legally remains part of Serbia, and two rounds of Serbian elections are due to be held, on Jan. 20 and Feb. 3. A declaration of independence in Kosovo before those dates would likely play into the hands of nationalist forces in Belgrade. Slovenian officials are pressing Washington and Pristina to put off independence until after the elections.
The EU has insisted that it will not fully embrace Serbia until Belgrade hands over those indicted on war crimes charges, including the former military commander Ratko Mladic.
But Rupel hinted that the EU could show more flexibility if Belgrade softened its intransigence over Kosovo. He warned that comments by Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica of Serbia last week, that the EU would have to choose between its relations with Belgrade and with Pristina, were unhelpful.
"Serbia belongs to the EU and can't join the United States or the Russian Federation," Rupel said. "It is absurd to think otherwise, and we should do our utmost to push Serbia toward the EU."
He stressed that Kosovo's ethnic Albanians, who had been brutally subjugated by the former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, had the same right to self-determination that an independent Slovenia had achieved.
As part of Slovenia's goal of bringing stability to the western Balkans, Rupel said it would also aim to accelerate the EU membership applications of the five other former Yugoslav countries: Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Slovenia, the only part of the former Yugoslavia currently in the EU, is uniquely qualified to act as a mediator between Serbia and the bloc, while reminding its European partners of the risks of equivocating over Kosovo's future. The country is determined to avoid the mistakes of the 1990s, when the EU was not unified in its foreign policy toward the Balkans and the United States intervened to halt Milosevic's oppression of Kosovo's ethnic Albanians.
Rupel said he was engaged daily in hours of telephone diplomacy to ensure that the EU's fragile emerging consensus over Kosovo did not unravel.
He acknowledged that some Serbs still held a historical grudge against Slovenia because it had been the country that spurred the unraveling of the former Yugoslavia.
"We were not popular in Serbia in the 1990s because we left Yugoslavia," he said. "They think we destroyed Yugoslavia by leaving it. They lost a lot."
Rupel said Slovenia - bordered by Austria to the north, Italy to the west, Hungary to the east and Croatia to the south - hoped that representing a bloc of almost 500 million people would give it a psychological boost.
Slovenia joined NATO in 2004 and was the first of the former Soviet bloc countries to adopt the euro. But such are the limits of its diplomatic heft that it will be represented during its EU presidency by more than 100 French embassies in Africa, Latin America and elsewhere where it does not have representation. Some Slovenian diplomats are concerned that the tiny country will be upstaged by France, which takes over the EU presidency in July.
Prime Minister Janez Jansa, a dissident in the former Yugoslavia, who was imprisoned for opposing the regime, said that Slovenia's small size could prove an advantage.
"The fact that our political work might be perceived as lesser than other EU member states could give us an advantage by giving us more room for maneuver," Jansa said. "It will help us to be an honest broker."
Mocked by some of its neighbors as a "poor-man's Austria," Slovenia has long prided itself on its Western-oriented work ethic and relative prosperity, though its Balkan neighbors have sometimes - perhaps jealously - regarded it as being smug and aloof. The country's recent success is partly rooted in the fact that it did not experience the protracted bloody wars of other Balkan nations.
Yet Slovenia, which had about 6 percent economic growth in 2007, still remains hampered by an inflexible labor market and a high level of protectionism. Jansa said the greatest economic challenge remained its inflation rate of 5.7 percent - far above the average 3.1 percent of other countries using the euro. He said inflation was bringing back bad memories of the end of the former Yugoslavia, when an inflation rate of nearly 1,000 percent helped create the disenchantment that led to Slovenia's movement toward independence.
Beyond bringing stability to the western Balkans, Slovenia also aims to use its presidency to push EU countries to quickly ratify the new Lisbon treaty, which is meant to streamline EU decision-making and replace the EU's failed constitution. It also hopes to improve Europe's ties with Russia and to make advances on the Middle East, Iran, climate change and energy liberalization.