July 29 (Bloomberg) — The European Union named Wolfgang Ischinger, a German diplomat, as its representative in a new round of talks aimed at winning independence for the Serbian province of Kosovo.
Ischinger will join diplomats from the U.S. and Russia in overseeing negotiations between leaders of Serbia and Kosovo in an effort to settle the status of the province, an international protectorate since NATO’s 1999 air war.
Ischinger “will make every effort to achieve real and meaningful negotiations between the parties,” EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said in a statement in Brussels today.
Russia has blocked a United Nations resolution on independence for Kosovo, a province of 2 million people under UN control since the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ended Serbia’s crackdown on the ethnic Albanian majority in 1999.
Ischinger, 61, has served as German deputy foreign minister and ambassador to the U.S. and U.K., and played a role in the 1995 negotiations in Dayton, Ohio, that ended the war in Bosnia.
The U.S. will be represented by Frank Wisner, Agence France- Presse reported. Russia has yet to name an envoy to the new round of talks.
Serbian and Kosovo leaders failed to reach a status settlement in 13 months of UN-brokered talks that collapsed in March. The new effort at a settlement comes after Russia stood in the way of a UN Security Council accord.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who had pressed the EU to name a single representative, said in a statement in Berlin that “all parties have to use the opportunity of this negotiating process to strive as much as possible to come to an amicable settlement.”
Related posts:
No Comments yet »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Leave a comment
Copyright © 1996-2008 Serbian Unity Congress
Entries and comments feeds.
Valid XHTML and CSS. ^Top^