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Kosovo Shelved by All Sides
// UN Security Council Rejects Ahtisaari Plan for Kosovo
The United Nations Security Council yesterday held its first discussion of the plan drawn up by special envoy to Kosovo Martti Ahtisaari. The plan has been widely criticized as offering the breakaway province de facto independence. Following a ten-hour discussion, Russian ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin broadly hinted that the solution to the problem will be delayed for months, if not years. RIA Novosti correspondent in New York Dmitry Gornostaev has the details from the closed session of the Security Council special for Kommersant.
From early in the morning the members of the Security Council found themselves bedeviled by a procedural question that turned out to be more serious even than any political question and that required almost three hours of consultations to be resolved. At issue was whether or not Kosovo President Fatmir Sejdiu, who had come to New York especially for the meeting, should be given the floor in the Security Council. British ambassador Emyr Jones Perry, who is chairing the Security Council in April, had intended to seat the Albanian leader at the same table with Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, which would have symbolically raised Kosovo to the same status as Serbia. Kosovo would have thus become an independent nation, if only for the duration of the Security Council meeting.
The Russian delegation immediately declared that this arrangement was unsatisfactory because it violated the procedural rules of the Security Council. According to these rules, only representatives of the member nations of the United Nations are permitted to take the floor for an official address, and Kosovo is obviously not a member of the UN. Theoretically the Security Council can invite anyone it likes to its sessions, but only in a personal capacity and, naturally, only if the invitation is approved by a majority in the Council. In the very first minutes of the discussion, it became clear that the majority was in fact not pleased with the idea at all.
Not content to let the matter go, the experienced English ambassador happened as if by chance to again bring up the question of a speech by Mr. Sejdiu, but this time in a more veiled manner. Incidentally, he did so at the precise moment when his Russian colleague Vitaly Churkin left the room to speak on his mobile phone. Mr. Perry's crafty plan was exposed, however, before the chairman could achieve a consensus on the exact nature of the Kosovar president's attendance. Mr. Churkin soon returned and objected that he was supported by several African ambassadors and the representative from Indonesia, which has been fighting a struggle similar to Serbia's over the rebellious Aceh province.
In the end, the British and their American allies failed to garner a majority of votes (the five permanent members do not wield veto power of procedural questions) and began to search instead for a compromise. From the very beginning, Russia maintained that it did not object to hearing a speech from the Kosovar leader, but only at an unofficial meeting of the Security Council's members outside the sessions chamber. The British, Americans, and French, however, insisted that Pristina's voice should be heard in the Security Council itself, and they suggested that President Sejdiu's speech be read by UN mission to Kosovo head Joachim Ruecker. On that, a compromise was finally reached.
This protracted argument was followed by a closed official session of the Security Council, at which UN special envoy to Kosovo Ahtisaari spoke after submitting his plan for the province's future and Serbian Prime Minister Kostunica presented a long list of Serbian grievances concerning violations of the rights of the Serb minority in Kosovo. The members of the Security Council then retired to another room in the opposite wing of the building to hear from the president of Kosovo in an informal setting. The Kosovar leader's address took all of ten minutes and was not attended by Vitaly Churkin, who sent a representative in his place.
Despite Mr. Churkin's misgivings, the Russian delegation did manage to squeeze some benefit out of the informal meeting with the president of Kosovo by using it as a pretext to bring up the topic of Abkhazia. Recently, the US refused to grant a visa to Abkhazian Foreign Minister Sergei Shamba, who had wanted to participate in the Security Council session on April 10 concerning the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict. "We emphasized during the Security Council session that the principle of necessary access to all information should extend to the review of other conflict situations on the agenda. In particular, we will continue to insist that Mr. Shamba be given the opportunity to come here and present his point of view," said Vitaly Churkin to Russian journalists. In the end it did appear that the situation involving the Kosovar president had worked in favor of the Abkhazian minister: Mr. Churkin reported that he had received a promise from the British ambassador that he will use his capacity as Security Council chairman to "speak with the US government about ceasing to make difficulties" for Mr. Shamba and granting him a visa.
After speaking with the diplomats, Mr. Sejdiu spoke briefly with journalists through an interpreter. "The people of Kosovo survived genocide during the Milosevic era. International intervention saved the people of Kosovo, and it is very important that this process be completed and that Kosovo receive international recognition," said the Kosovar president. He guaranteed that he would protect the rights of national minorities and promised that, if the Ahtisaari plan is adopted, he will turn Kosovo into a democratic nation with equal rights for all nationalities. To a question about his feelings about Moscow's objections, Mr. Sejdiu replied noncommittally that "Russia is a member of the contact group, we have been working with it for a long time."
Mr. Kostunica, who was late for his flight, had only a few words to say. The Serbian prime minister thanked Russia "for its principled position" and expressed satisfaction that the Security Council had not adopted the Ahtisaari plan.
The second official session of the Security Council lasted for almost five hours and was dedicated to a discussion of Mr. Ahtisaari's plan. The Council's members argued less fiercely over the plan than over the procedural question, since the positions of the participants were already well known. As Vitaly Churkin noted, "only three or four members of the Security Council immediately declared unconditional support" for the plan.
These "three or four" turned out to be the representatives of the US, Great Britain, France, and Belgium, which became clear later thanks to their comments to the media. The other ambassadors expressed various qualms about the accuracy of several points in the report, and several temporary members posed some tricky questions to Mr. Ahtisaari. For instance, the UN general secretary's special representative to Kosovo could not answer a question about how much time during the negotiations was devoted to a discussion of the most important question, the status of Kosovo, and what alternatives had been proposed. It became clear that no alternatives to independence had been discussed.
That fact, as well as Serbia's rejection of the plan, is the main reason that Moscow is against it. Beijing, another member that wields veto power on the Council, agrees, as do several temporary members. Vitaly Churkin made it clear, however, that Russia has no intention of "picking the Ahtisaari plan to pieces" and "respects the special representative as a former president of Finland who has done a great deal to develop Russian-Finnish ties."
The Russian ambassador's subsequent remarks were less optimistic about Mr. Ahtisaari's future as a mediator in Balkan affairs. Mr. Churkin noted that in 1993 two no less experienced diplomats, Cyrus Vance and David Owen, worked out a plan to resolve the situation in Bosnia. "But it was not accepted by the conflicting sides. In the end a new round of negotiations had to be opened, which led to the Dayton Accord, a plan that was very different from the Vance-Owen plan," said Mr. Churkin, who at that time was the special representative of the Russian president to the Balkans. Given that the Dayton Accord was not adopted until two years after the Vance-Owen plan was discarded, Mr. Churkin may have been hinting that finding a solution to the Kosovo question could take an equally long time.
French ambassador to the UN Jean-Marc de la Sabliere appeared to have also come to the same conclusion, and he accused Russia of dragging its feet on deciding Kosovo's status. However, he also said that he sees no deadline in the process, and he agreed with Russia's idea to send a mission from the Security Council to Belgrade and Pristina to give the Council's members an idea of the situation in the region. According to Mr. Sabliere, all of the members of the Security Council agreed to the idea of sending a delegation to the Balkans, and Mr. Churkin even said that he is ready to fly there "tomorrow, if you like."
Meanwhile, the Western proponents of the Ahtisaari plan, who now have to come to terms with a delay in the decision on Kosovo's status, are already thinking about who should be the author of a new resolution on Kosovo. Mr. Perry, the British ambassador, has already let slip that he thinks it would be logical for the task to fall to the EU or the US.
Dmitry Gornostaev
All the Article in Russian as of Apr. 05, 2007
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