By Matt Robinson
Reuters
Tuesday, February 27, 2007; 12:59 PM
BELGRADE (Reuters) - Some 15,000 Serbs protested outside
the U.S. embassy in Belgrade on Tuesday to denounce a
Western-backed plan to give independence to the Albanian
majority of Serbia's breakaway Kosovo province.
Some carried banners urging "Russia, Use Your Veto" to
block the proposal at the United Nations Security Council.
Cardboard cut-outs of Russian President Vladimir Putin and
Chinese leader Hu Jintao bobbed above the crowd.
Serb civil servants in Kosovo, who answer to Belgrade, were
given the day off and schools were closed so that all who
wanted to could travel to the capital for the protest. Dozens
of buses made the eight-hour round trip from Kosovo.
"Kosovo is the foundation and soul of Serbia," Kosovo Serb
political leader Milan Ivanovic said from a stage opposite the
embassy. "We appeal to the world not to carve up Serbia."
Serbs and Albanians are holding final talks in Vienna on
the plan by former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari. He wants
to send the blueprint to the U.N. Security Council in late
March.
But veto holder Russia repeated its skepticism on Tuesday.
"Frankly, we are worried at the absence of any desire to
meet the legitimate concerns of Belgrade," Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov said of the plan at a news conference in Moscow.
"The contents of the plan lead one to think that the
authors ... took as a starting point the inevitability of
Kosovo's independence regardless of Belgrade's views."
DEEP DIVISIONS
The Kosovo demonstration, backed by the ultranationalist
Radicals and the party of Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav
Kostunica, took place a day after the International Court of
Justice ruled in a landmark case that Serbia was not guilty of
genocide in the 1992-95 Bosnia war.
The verdict in The Hague threw a spotlight on the deep
divisions in Serbia over its role in the bloody break-up of
Yugoslavia in the 1990s, in which Serb forces under the late
President Slobodan Milosevic committed most of the atrocities.
Many Serbs deny this. The sense of vindication claimed by
nationalist parties who say Serb forces behaved no worse than
their wartime adversaries is likely to reinforce their
determination to oppose a U.N. plan to give Kosovo
independence.
The United Nations and NATO have run Serbia's cherished
province since 1999, when Western allies bombed Serbia to force
it to withdraw its troops and police who killed some 10,000
civilians in their crackdown on an Albanian guerrilla uprising.
The province's 90 percent Albanian majority say it will
never accept Serb rule again, and the West says there is no
viable alternative to granting them self-determination.
But Belgrade and the 100,000 Serbs still living in Kosovo
oppose the plan and there is no guarantee the province will not
be plunged once more into violence before its status is
settled. The plan should go to the U.N. Security Council in
March.
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