Balkan meeting downgraded over Serbia-Kosovo wrangling May 7, 2010, 8:15 GMT
Belgrade - Serbia and Kosovo agreed to send foreign ministers to a regional meeting in Sarajevo next month, though under conditions and at a lower level than what was planned, the Belgrade daily Danas reported Friday. To secure the attendance of Serbian and Kosovo chief diplomats, Vuk Jeremic and Skender Hyseni, participants in the June 2 meeting will not be photographed together before the meeting and there will be no joint statement, it said quoting officials. Further, the nametags will only show names of attending officials, without their function and country. Both Serbian and Kosovo representatives told Danas that the conditions were accepted. 'We are happy because Serbia agreed to take part in Sarajevo,' the Kosovo government spokesman Mehmet Krasniqi told Danas. Kosovo is the mostly Albanian former Serbian province which declared independence in 2008, nine years after NATO ousted Belgrade's forces from there to end a brutal conflict. Though 67 countries, including the United States and most European Union states have recognized Kosovo, Serbia continues to fight its independence diplomatically. Backed by its superpower ally Russia, it has blocked Kosovo's accession to the United Nations. Saying Kosovo has no right to attend international meetings as a sovereign state, but only as a UN protectorate, Serbia in the past has boycotted several conferences, most recently a March regional summit in Slovenia. The meeting in Sarajevo was previously planned as a summit of Balkan nations and the EU, but was downgraded to a ministerial conference because of the diplomatic wrangling over Kosovo. 'We agreed to take part in Sarajevo because it is a meeting at a lower level than the one in Slovenia,' Oliver Ivanovic of Serbia's Kosovo ministry said. According to the Serbian Deputy Premier Bozidar Djelic, the topics in Sarajevo are infrastructure, ecology, social policies and energy. http://www.monstersandcritics.com/global/img/copyright_notice.gif http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/europe/news/article_1553898.php/Balkan-meeting-downgraded-over-Serbia-Kosovo-wrangling
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