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Yugoslav President Rejects Majority Rule in Kosovo
Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica Tuesday called for a form of veto power for Serbs in a future Kosovo parliament, saying that majority rule would not protect their minority rights.
Kostunica made the appeal after speaking to U.N. Secretary- General Kofi Annan here. He told reporters that Serbs should be empowered to block a majority vote because of Kosovo's overwhelming ethnic Albanian population.
A parliamentary system with majority rule "would not function in the case of Kosovo, where there is an overwhelming Albanian majority and small non-Albanian minorities," he said.
Elections in Kosovo -- a province of Serbia, one of the two republics in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia -- are expected later this year in preparation for a transition from the current U. N. interim administration to self-government.
Kostunica, on a visit to New York and Washington, also held talks with Hans Haekkerup, who heads the U.N. administration in Kosovo, a Serbian province. Haekkerup has been working on a blueprint of Kosovo's governmental institutions in anticipation of the elections.
Belgrade and politicians representing Kosovo's ethnic Serbs are troubled that his plans will give de facto independence to Kosovo, which has been run by the United Nations and the international peacekeeping force since June 1999.
Kostunica did not precisely say how Serbs' voice in parliament should be protected, but he said safeguarding the rights of Kosovo 's minorities did not mean trying the system in knots.
The head of the U.N. administration mission in Kosovo could make decisions if there was no other way of breaking a deadlock, he said.
"We are proposing actually some sort of consensual democracy model instead of a parliamentary majority order, which would not function in the case of Kosovo," he said.
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