MOSCOW, June 8 (RIA Novosti) - The prime minister of Kosovo's provisional government called Friday on world powers to either adopt a United Nations resolution granting the territory independence from Serbia, or allow it to choose its own fate.
Prime Minister Agim Ceku held emergency talks with Western diplomats following reports that G8 leaders had agreed to postpone a UN vote on Kosovo, which were later refuted.
"We are calling on the international community to adopt the resolution as soon as possible or let us take our own path," Ceku told journalists after the emergency negotiations.
Leaders of the Group of Eight club of rich nations, who concluded their three-day summit in Germany Friday, reached a deadlock on the issue of independence for Serbia's predominantly Albanian province. Russia, a staunch ally of Belgrade, resisted calls from the U.S., France, Germany, the U.K., Italy and Canada for a vote on a draft resolution foreseeing Kosovo's independence.
Serbia's foreign minister said Thursday that independence for Kosovo would be unacceptable in any form to Belgrade. "The imposition of independence on Kosovo would constitute a serious violation of international law," Vuk Jeremic told a RIA Novosti news conference.
Later in the day, media cited a delegation source as saying the summit participants had agreed to postpone the UN vote on Kosovo's independence, but on Friday U.S. administration representatives refuted the reports.
The proposal to postpone a decision on Kosovo was put forward by French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Sarkozy had proposed holding off a UN vote for six months, to give time for an agreement to be reached with Russia, on the condition that Moscow recognize that Kosovo's independence was inevitable. However, Russia's delegation maintained it's full opposition to the region's independence, and refused to back down on its pledge to veto the draft resolution.
The settlement plan drafted by UN special envoy for Kosovo Martti Ahtisaari Kosovo calls for internationally-supervised sovereignty for the province, which has been controlled by the United Nations for eight years, and says the final decision on its status should satisfy both Pristina and Belgrade.
Last week, the U.S. and the EU put forward a draft resolution softening Ahtisaari's proposals.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the host of the G8 summit, told journalists Friday that "there is no sense" in replacing Martti Ahtisaari with any other UN representative.
"Ahtisaari's plan was presented in late January-early February. I can't name the date or week [when the decision will be made] but the decision needs to be made, we should work on it and formulate it," Merkel said.
The German leader said one week would not be sufficient to resolve the problem.
France's president confirmed the G8 leaders had failed to agree on the Kosovo issue. "There was no progress on Kosovo," Sarkozy told journalists after the summit.
Russia's position is that any solution should be based on a compromise between Kosovo and Belgrade and compliance with UN Security Council Resolution 1244.
Adopted in 1999, Resolution 1244 determined to resolve the grave humanitarian situation in Kosovo and to provide for the safe and free return of all refugees and displaced persons to their homes, a requirement still far from being fulfilled.
Russia's envoy to the UN Vitaly Churkin said the amendments proposed by Washington and the EU last week were "cosmetic" and that Russia will not back the new draft resolution.
Kosovo, which has a population of two million, has been a UN protectorate since NATO's 78-day bombing campaign against the former Yugoslavia ended a war between Serb forces and Muslim Albanian separatists in 1999.
While the Albanians have since demanded full independence, the sizeable Orthodox Serb minority has complained that their lives and religious sites would be at risk under the proposed setup.
Putin told journalists following the G8 summit that the same rules of conflict resolution should be applied to Kosovo as those applied to Abkhazia and South Ossetia, unrecognized republics on the territory of Russia's southern neighbor, Georgia.
"If we still come to the conclusion that in today's international situation, the principle of nations' right to self-determination is more important than the principle of the territorial integrity of states, then we will have to be guided by this principle in all regions of the world, and not only where some of our partners like it," the Russian leader said.
He said that in this case, Caucasus regions on the territory of the former Soviet Union should have the same right.
"We don't see any difference between the one and the other. Both are the result of communist empires disintegrating. Both have interethnic conflicts, and in both places the conflict has deep historical roots," he said.
