Posted on 09/25/2006 12:57:27 PM PDT by kronos77
BELGRADE, Serbia, Sept. 25 (UPI) -- Serbia's prime minister tells a senior U.S. envoy that predominantly ethnic-Albanian Kosovo province will not be independent of Belgrade.
Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica Monday told Daniel Fried, U.S. assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, a unique stand of Serbia's all institutions is that Kosovo has always been and will be component part of Serbian territory, the RTS Serbian radio-television said.
Kostunica said Serbia favors a compromise solution and offers "essential autonomy" for Kosovo.
Fried said Belgrade students the Kosovo future status will be solved within the next six months. U.N.-led Serb-ethnic Albanian talks on Kosovo have been in Austria since February but have not produced any major breakthrough.
The Serbian government in Belgrade, representing 100,000 Kosovo Serbs, and leaders of ethnic-Albanians, who make up 90 percent of Kosovo's 1.8 million population, have stuck to their conflicting stands.
Ping
All of the above, plus some.
Tito refused to allow many Serbs to return to Kosovo post WWII. Instead, he gave Kosovo Alabanians an education the Albanian language and porous borders with Albania. (Tito was fueling the communists in the Greek civil war, and thought that if he could train these Kosovo Albanians to take Albania, then Tito could become the Stalin of the Balkans. But his plan didn't work) Plus, Kosovo Albanians had the highest birthrate in Europe, and as they became more numerous, they harassed many of the Serbs to leave. Nuns were raped, priests were beaten -- even Patriarch Pavle was beaten badly enough by Albanians to be hospitalized. By the 1980's, Kosovo was virtually lawless and the Albanians did anything they wanted to Serbs. The event that took Milosevic from a nobody communist bureacrat to a leader, happened when at a televised meeting in Kosovo, a little old Serb man came up to him and complained that the Albanians had beaten him and asked what Milosevic would do to stop the Albanians from hurting him. Milosevic replied "no one will dare beat you again", and became famous for that remark. The reat is history.
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