Serbian President Talks Kosovo in UK

SERBIANNA (USA)

September 28, 2005. --Serbian President Boris Tadic is visiting Great Britain where he has met Britain's Foreign Secretary Jack Straw at the annual Labour Party conference in Brighton.

The talks are also to be held with the British Prime Minister Tony Blair who is also at the conference.

The discussions are to center around Serbia's European and Euro-Atlantic integration prospects, cooperation with the Hague tribunal and stability in southeast Europe especially the disputed Serbian province of Kosovo.

Kosovo is Muslim-dominated province where the Albanian majority demands independence. Ethnic Serb minority is under siege there and is routinely slain by the majority Albanians.

"The biggest stability problem in southeast Europe is the unresolved status of Kosovo" said Tadic. "I expressed the view that every solution for Kosovo must take into account the democratic, European, and Euro-Atlantic future of Serbia, and must at the same time be acceptable to all the parties who are fighting for their interests in Kosovo today."

During his visit to the United States, Serbian President Tadic characterized the Albanian-Muslim domination of that province as the "worst sort of tyranny of the majority" where Kosovo's minorities "and other non-Albanians live in conditions worse than those in which Kosovo's Albanians lived during the era of Slobodan Milosevic."

Referring to the UK talks, Tadic said that "We discussed the stability of the region. We discussed the necessity for special constitutional-legal solutions in Kosovo, such as those already present in Bosnia and Hercegovina, the state union of Serbia and Montenegro, and Macedonia, in other words everywhere in the region."

"As the President of Serbia, I am obliged to protect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of my country, and that I am doing so by respecting democratic and European values" underlined Tadic.

Talks on settling the future of the Kosovo province are set to begin sometimes at the end of 2005.

Kosovo has been under UN protection since the 1999 when the NATO led troops forced the troops of the Milosevic regime out of the province. Over 200,000 ethnic Serbs have been expelled out of the province since the arrival of the UN troops in the province.

September 28, 2005. 06:05 (10:05 GMT).