Nobel peace honoree pushes case for Kosovo independence
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OSLO: Martti Ahtisaari, the former president of Finland who is scheduled to receive the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize here Wednesday in recognition of a long career mediating conflicts around the globe, on Tuesday tried to shore up support for Kosovo's claim to independence in the face of opposition from Russia and Serbia.
"Kosovo is independent and it will remain independent," he said, and added: "The progress there is irreversible."
Even as Ahtisaari spoke, United Nations officials in Kosovo were handing over civilian law enforcement responsibilities to the European Union and local authorities in Pristina, the capital.
"As of this morning, the United Nations mission in Kosovo will no longer perform police or justice functions," a UN spokesman, Alexander Ivanko, said by telephone from Pristina.
"We will remain here in a much downsized version, doing political monitoring and reporting," the spokesman added.
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For the United States and most countries in Europe, the handover of police, justice and customs oversight to the EU is considered a milestone on the road to universal recognition of Kosovo as a state, and potentially to its membership in the EU.
But while more than 40 nations have recognized Kosovo's independence from Serbia, Moscow and Belgrade insist it is still a Serbian province.
They have sought through the United Nations to limit the EU's role to avoid the appearance of expanding independence.
Asked about the new EU law and order mission, and the declining role of the UN mission after nine years of administering Kosovo, Ahtisaari said, "I think it's very welcome."
He said UN recognition, which would require Russia approval, remains a distant prospect.
But he added, "I think the Kosovo situation is moving forward. More countries will be recognizing it."
Ahtisaari is a former primary-school teacher who became president of his country and a prominent UN envoy.
He has played a large role in Kosovo's journey from an oppressed Serbian province under President Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s to today's fledgling state.
In the spring of 1999, as NATO bombed Serbian military positions in the alliance's first sustained combat operation, Ahtisaari joined Viktor Chernomyrdin, a Russian envoy and former prime minister, in persuading Serbia to capitulate and withdraw its forces from Kosovo.
U.S. officials nicknamed Ahtisaari "the hammer" during that successful, high-stakes assignment, said Strobe Talbott, who was deputy U.S. secretary of state at the time.
In late 2005, Kofi Annan, then the UN secretary general, appointed the Finn to lead Kosovo's "final status" negotiations between Serbia and the ethnic-Albanian leadership in Pristina.
Contentious negotiations ended without a deal in 2007, but Ahtisaari presented the UN Security Council with a draft plan for internationally supervised independence.
The Ahtisaari plan was blocked in the Security Council by Russia, but it encouraged the elective Kosovo Assembly to declare independence unilaterally on Feb. 17, 2008.
Despite widespread support in Europe for Ahtisaari's plan, a few analysts in Europe have accused Ahtisaari of pushing impartially for independence at the expense of Kosovo's Serb minority.
Jan Oberg, director of Sweden's Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, said before Ahtisaari's news conference Tuesday that a permanent partition allowing Serbian-dominated northern Kosovo to go it alone or join Serbia proper would have been more just.
"His task was not to find the best solution, but to pressure the Serbs to accept an independent Kosovo," Oberg said.
"It was a commissioned work on behalf of the U.S., NATO and the EU, and that's not worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize."
Talbott, the former U.S. State Department official, vigorously defended Ahtisaari in a telephone interview while traveling to the Nobel ceremony in Oslo.
"If you had subdivided Kosovo with a partition, where would that ever end?" he said.
"You would then have a metastasis of mini-states around the Balkans. Every medium-sized minority would want its own state and that would be a formula for instability."
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