WAR.WIRE
Potential Kosovo spoilers have no chance: NATO
 PRISTINA, Serbia-Montenegro, May 11 (AFP) May 11, 2006
 NATO warned Thursday it would not let extremists endanger talks between Belgrade and Pristina aimed at solving the future status of the UN-run Serbian province of Kosovo.

NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said NATO-led peacekeepers, deployed in the province since 1999, have been "here to facilitate that process in the framework of creating on the ground the situation of security and stability showing the potential spoilers that they will not have a chance."

Scheffer, who led the North Atlantic Council's one day visit to the province, said that NATO has been keeping "about a 17,000 strong force to see that this climate has been created."

"Anybody who would like to spoil the process or harm it, would be defeated by KFOR," he told reporters at the end of the visit.

The North Atlantic Council is the senior decision-making body of NATO, comprising the 26 NATO permanent representatives, chaired by the secretary general.

Scheffer said he hoped that "the status talks will result in a situation where there is not hope and expectations for one and frustration for another side."

"But everybody can have expectations and everybody can have hope," he said.

"Such a status process can only come and can only be successful with compromise of the majority and minority. Everybody has to compromise," Scheffer said.

After a series of meetings with senior international and local officials in the capital Pristina, the NATO delegation visited 14th-century Serb Orthodox monastery of Visoki Decani in western Kosovo, under UNESCO protection.

"Religious freedom and protection of patrimony sites, monasteries and churches is one of the basic values of any democratic and multi-ethnic society," Scheffer said.

Kosovo became a UN protectorate in 1999 after NATO bombing ended a brutal Serbian crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists who took up arms against the regime of then-Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic to demand independence.

UN-backed talks between Belgrade and the government of majority ethnic Albanian Kosovo started in February on issues such as decentralisation and guarantees for minority rights in the province, which Belgrade wants to remain part of Serbia, while the Albanian population seeks independence.