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NATO to keep force in Kosovo

Members of the ceremonial guard of the Kosovo Protection Corps, created from the ranks of a disbanded guerrilla army, perform exercises in Pristina, Kosovo, on Thursday. PHOTO: EPA

NATO ministers were to pledge yesterday to keep their peace force in Kosovo at current strength as it heads toward independence and to make more troops available as necessary to deal with any violence.

Ethnic Albanian leaders of the breakaway Serbian province are expected to declare independence in the next couple of months after the failure of international mediation, potentially sparking new unrest in the Balkans.

A senior US official said NATO ministers would announce at a meeting in Brussels yesterday that NATO's 16,000-strong KFOR peace force would remain at current levels "with full flexibility for the commanders."

Belgian Foreign Minister Karel De Gucht said after a dinner of NATO and EU foreign ministers on Thursday that all agreed that KFOR strength should be maintained.

He said NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer had confirmed additional troops would be made available if needed.

"Everybody agreed to that and nobody was putting into question their contribution to KFOR," he told a news briefing.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said it was crucial that European nations, whose internal divisions failed to stop the outbreak of the Balkan wars of the 1990s, showed unity in the months ahead.

"This is in Europe's backyard and European nations need to show real leadership ... We know from the mid-1990s the cost of Europe wringing its hands and failing to provide leadership," he said.

NATO foreign ministers will be asked to confirm they will not limit how the KFOR can deal with violence as they did when riots in 2004 caught NATO off-guard.

International mediators will report to the UN on Monday that efforts to reach a compromise between Pristina and Belgrade failed. Russia wants further mediation, but the West says the time to settle Kosovo's status has come.

Washington and the vast majority of EU states are likely to recognize a declaration of independence by Kosovo, expected around late next month.

The West has been irked by aggressive rhetoric from Belgrade, and on Thursday the EU's mediator on Kosovo demanded that Serbia disown a comment made by an adviser to Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica that "war is a legal tool."

"I do hope this statement was not authorized. I expect it to be retracted," Wolfgang Ischinger told reporters in London.

Kosovo has been administered by the UN since a 1999 NATO bombing campaign to halt ethnic cleansing by Serb forces of the 90 percent ethnic Albanian province, which Belgrade insists must remain under its sovereignty.

Serbian Foreign Affairs Minister Vuk Jeremic on Thursday asked for UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's support in keeping Serbia's integrity in the face of a possible declaration of independence.

"I told the secretary-general we are faced with an imminent threat to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of a UN member State, one of the proud co-founders of this institution," Jeremic said.

"So I said, `Mr Secretary-General, I'm asking for your personal support as well as the support of this institution in defense of the UN Charter, in defense of the sovereignty of my country, in defense of the inviolability of our internationally recognized borders.'"
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