NATO's commander for southeastern Europe visits Kosovo's troubled north

Associated Press, Monday, August 14, 2006 4:45 AM

 

PRISTINA, Serbia-NATO's commander for southeastern Europe arrived in Kosovo Monday for a brief visit to the U.N.-run province that is in talks with Serbia to determine its future.

 

Adm. Harry Ulrich, commander of NATO's Joint Force Command based in Naples, Italy, is to meet Serb officials in Kosovo's northern town of Zvecan, said Col. Pio Sabbetta, a NATO spokesman in Kosovo.

 

He is also scheduled to meet U.N. officials in the ethnically tense town of Kosovska Mitrovica and will lunch with the top U.S. diplomat in Kosovo, Tina Kaidanow.

 

Ulrich is visiting the troubled north amid fears that tensions will rise between Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority and Serb minority as U.N.-mediated talks aimed at resolving the province's long-term status continue.

 

NATO-led peacekeepers are in the process of reopening a military base in the Serb-dominated north and increasing their presence alongside some 500 U.N. police officers recently deployed there.

 

The beefed-up security was triggered by calls from Serbian officials to boycott the province's ethnic Albanian-dominated institutions after a series of violent incidents that Serbian officials blamed on ethnic Albanians.

 

The talks are expected to conclude by year-end, but the two sides remain deeply divided.

 

Ethnic Albanians insist the province must become independent, while Serbia is offering broad autonomy, but not independence. Some Kosovo Serb leaders have warned of partition of the Serb-dominated north if independence is imposed upon them.

 

Meanwhile, Portugal's Defense Minister Nuno Severiano Teixeira is also visiting the province, where his country has about 300 soldiers as part of the 17,000-strong NATO-led peacekeeping force stationed in Kosovo.