SERBIA: Serbia will take part in talks next week in Vienna on the future status of Kosovo after all, Serbian president Boris Tadic said yesterday.
Mr Tadic told a news briefing after talks with Nato officials in Brussels that Serbia had had some "small technical problems" over the July 24th talks scheduled with leaders of Kosovo that it had raised with UN mediator Martti Ahtisaari.
"I heard that he solved these problems during my visit to Brussels and for that reason I am ready to go there," Mr Tadic said.
The Vienna talks will be the highest-level meeting between the two sides since Nato drove out Serb forces from the province in 1999 and the first to address Kosovo's final international status - independence or autonomy - since talks began in February.
But the meeting is not expected to yield concrete results given a seemingly unbridgeable chasm between the two sides.
Kosovo said on Monday it would demand independence from Serbia during the talks. Mr Tadic said on Tuesday independence would cause instability in the Balkans and beyond.
Ninety per cent of Kosovo's two million people are ethnic Albanians impatient for their own state. Serbia has offered wide autonomy for land it sees as the sacred cradle of the nation.
Western powers want a deal on Kosovo's final status within the year, concerned that a delay could spark fresh violence against the UN mission and Kosovo's 100,000 ghettoised Serbs, but Russia has cautioned against any "artificial timetable".
Nato said yesterday 600 German soldiers had begun arriving as a "temporary reinforcement" of the 17,000-strong Kosovo Force, reflecting fears of unrest as talks enter their crucial phase. A German military spokesman said the soldiers would stay for at least one month, deployed throughout Kosovo.
Kosovo daily Zeri yesterday cited international sources as saying German diplomat Joachim Ruecker, the UN privatisation chief in the province, will shortly be named as the new UN governor. Mr Ruecker (55) would take over from Danish diplomat Soren Jessen-Petersen, who quit early last month after almost two years in the job.