Kosovo blackmail may mean Balkans violence -Tadic

SERBIANNA (USA) 09/23/05 11:21 ET

BELGRADE, Sept 23 (Reuters) - Serbian President Boris Tadic warned on Friday that Kosovo Albanians have imposed "the worst sort of tyranny of the majority" on Kosovo Serbs and must not be allowed to blackmail their way to independence from Serbia.

A compromise on Kosovo's future status was vital to stability in the Balkans, he wrote in the Wall Street Journal Europe, as the United Nations awaited a report from a special envoy on whether status talks should begin this year.

"Failure could plunge southeastern Europe back into the violence and instability of the recent past," Tadic warned, without saying what he would regard as failure.

Kosovo has been a United Nations protectorate since mid-1999, when Serbian autocrat Slobodan Milosevic finally bowed to three months of bombing by NATO and withdrew his forces from the southern province.

An estimated 10,000 Kosovo Albanians were killed by Serbian troops and police in 1998 and 1999 during a guerrilla insurgency by the Kosovo Liberation Army. When Serb forces pulled out, some 180,000 Serb civilians fled with them but 100,000 remain.

The bodies of murdered Albanians are still being returned from mass graves in Serbia, where they were hidden in a bid to cover up war crimes.

The 90 percent Albanian majority wants full independence. Serbia says it must retain sovereignty but would offer very wide autonomy to Kosovo, provided democratic standards are met and the rights of minorities fully guaranteed.

ACCEPTED TOOLS OF POLITICS

Talks mediated by the U.N. are expected to be launched before the end of the year, aiming at a decision in 2006.

Many Kosovo Serbs live in isolated enclaves under the protection of the 17,000-strong NATO led peacekeeping force KFOR and United Nations police. Most are unemployed.

It is a place, according to Tadic, where "organised church burnings and drive-by shootings are accepted tools of politics".

"Kosovo's Serbs, Roma, Turks and other non-Albanians live in conditions worse than those in which Kosovo's Albanians lived during the era of Slobodan Milosevic," he wrote. "In fact, they live in the most abysmal conditions of anyone in Europe."

The Albanians say they were treated like second-class citizens in Yugoslavia with the best jobs and most powerful positions reserved for Serbs.

There is no support among them for a return to rule from Serbia, and they have the sympathy of Western powers who believe Serbia forfeited its moral right to govern the province with its brutal handling of the 1998 revolt.

But since 1999, acts of violent revenge against Serbs and a strain of extremism apparently bent on driving them out of Kosovo have tarnished the Albanian cause.

Rushing to grant Kosovo independence, wrote Tadic, would be to "succumb to the blackmail of those who argue that violence will follow if their demands are not met".