Keepin touch

Whether you have a question, comment, suggestion or any problem in the purview of the government, send us your message and we will try to respond as soon as possible. If your problem is not in our purview, we will forward your message to the relevant institution.

The Government of the Republic of Serbia

In the service of citizens

More efforts must be made to resolve Kosovo issue

Belgrade, 22 May 2006

Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica talked today with UN Secretary General's Special Envoy for negotiations on the future status of Kosovo-Metohija Martti Ahtisaari, who presented his office's plan for the remaining portion of May and the following two months aiming to intensify and speed up the talks.

Kostunica voiced his displeasure with the talks so far, especially with the way they are conducted and directed by intermediaries.

He asked how any progress can be made concerning other much more difficult issues regarding the province's status, when the comparatively easier issue of decentralisation cannot be resolved.

Not only has no progress been made in Kosovo-Metohija regarding standards implementation, but the last few months and weeks were also brimming with concrete instances of human right's breaches and violence against the Serbs in the province, stressed Kostunica. In such a situation, to send private messages about some kind of conditional independence or limited sovereignty of the province seems utterly unproductive and is beyond the Special Envoy's mandate.

The Prime Minister added that the Serbian state team has a concrete proposal of double autonomy for Kosovo-Metohija – autonomy for the province within Serbia and autonomy for the Serbian and other non-ethnic Albanian communities within the province, in line with international law and European democratic principles.

Participants in the meeting, apart from Kostunica and Ahtisaari, were also coordinators of the Belgrade negotiating team Leon Kojen and Slobodan Samardzic and Deputy Special Envoy Albert Roan. They also agreed that additional efforts must be made to achieve a compromise solution to all the issues on the agenda.