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The Government of the Republic of Serbia

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Security Council mission that will visit Kosovo must be of serious character

Belgrade, 6 April 2007

Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica said that a mission of the UN Security Council that should soon visit Kosovo-Metohija must be of a serious character instead of having a superficial and symbolic role.

Vojislav Kostunica

In an interview for tomorrow's double issue of daily Vecernje Novosti, Kostunica said that that mission must start from the beginning and establish all gloomy facts and everything that has not been done since Martti Ahtisaari took over the mandate.

Kostunica said that the consultations on the Russian initiative for the formation of a mission that should establish the real situation in Kosovo-Metohija will most probably begin after the Easter holidays, within the Security Council and the Contact Group.

The Prime Minister said that before his trip to New York for the session of the Security Council, the Serbian side had conducted intensive and numerous diplomatic consultations, with a clear and single goal - to prevent at any cost that the Council supports Ahtisaari's plan.

He said that consistent and principled support of Russia as a permanent member of the Security Council is of the major interest for Serbia.

Every citizen of Serbia and our entire nation knows and will know to respect this support. The Russian Federation advocates absolute respect for the UN Charter, especially its crucial part and that is that the sovereignty and territorial integrity of existing states must be respected, Kostunica underlined.

He said that since law and justice are on Serbia's side, advocates of independence do not have an easy task at all.

That is probably why they do not try to present counter arguments to Serbia's legal arguments. They have not even tried to do that. If they had tried to give a systematic explanation, that would perhaps seem more serious. But in this way they were completely unconvincing.

Since it was not possible to find a legal basis for an illegitimate and illegal proposal, Ahtisaari's resorted to history, to what happened during the 1990s.

My argument to that was very clear - history is not measured by years, but by centuries during which Serbs and Albanians have been developing their relations. And if he wants to calculate history as the last ten years or so, then he cannot take into account only the period before 1999, but after it as well, Kostunica said.

He said that if any state dared to recognise one-sidedly Kosovo's independence, that would be the harshest violation of the UN Charter. He said that Serbia clearly warns that Resolution 1244 is binding for all governments and that no member state of the UN may violate a resolution adopted by the Security Council.

Even more so, that would be a double violation because both the UN Charter and Resolution 1244 would be violated, which would mean trampling on the UN's authority, Kostunica reiterated.

Commenting on the open warnings of some world's officials that ethnic Albanians could lose patience and resort to violence, the Serbian Prime Minister said that "threat of violence cannot be the reason for giving in to the wishes of an ethnic minority and giving it no more, no less but a state".

If the violence is that minority's sole argument, then that speaks volumes about the very essence of the idea of independent Kosovo. The international community must give a clear answer, which is well known and that is that the violence must be prevented and terrorists punished, Kostunica pointed out.

He also added that it is possible that Albanian separatists will threaten violence because not one of the masterminds of the pogrom from March 17, 2004 and many other terrorist acts in Kosovo-Metohija have been punished.