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Mediated Serbia-Kosovo summit opens in Austria

With a deadline looming next month, Serbian and ethnic Albanian negotiators were to meet yesterday in Vienna for the latest round of internationally mediated talks on the future status of the breakaway province of Kosovo.

Although Kosovo formally remains a part of Serbia, it has been under UN administration since 1999, when NATO airstrikes ended former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic's crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists.

Ethnic Albanians, who make up 90 percent of Kosovo's 2 million people, insist on independence. Belgrade strongly opposes that idea.

Yesterday's talks, the latest in a series aimed at producing a settlement, will be mediated by the so-called troika: the US, Russia and the EU. The group is to report back to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon by Dec. 10.

A meeting between the two delegations in the Austrian capital two weeks ago ended with angry statements from both sides, raising the likelihood that Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority would follow through with a threat to declare independence if the negotiations fail to produce a result. Serbia has said it would never recognize Kosovo's independence.

During the Oct. 22 talks, Russian diplomat Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko, EU envoy Wolfgang Ischinger and US representative Frank Wisner and presented the sides with a 14-point document aimed at reaching common ground.

While it did not explicitly mention independence, it assured Kosovo's ethnic Albanians that Serbia will "not re-establish a physical presence in Kosovo."
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