The FINANCIAL — According to EU business, EU foreign ministers perform a delicate diplomatic balancing act on January 28 when they seek to boost Serbia's pro-Europe presidential candidate Boris Tadic while readying to back a declaration of independence by Kosovo.
The ministerial meeting in Brussels falls ahead of the second round of Serbia's presidential election on January 27. Hardline nationalist Tomislav Nikolic topped incumbent Tadic by five percentage points in the first round.
Nikolic is close to Moscow, which like Belgrade strongly opposes the independence bid by the majority-Albanian Serbian province of Kosovo.
In order not to inflame nationalist passions Kosovo isn't formally on Monday's agenda. "We would like to help him (Tadic) as much as possible," one EU diplomat admitted.
The EU is keen to keep a lid on the independence declaration until after the run-off vote on February 3, fearful it would propel Nikolic into office.
The EU's Slovenian presidency has instead been pushing for the foreign ministers to sign a Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) with Serbia, the first formal step to European Union membership, to mollify Belgrade.
However the Netherlands is proving difficult to convince, insisting that Serbia must first cooperate fully with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
In particular the Dutch have insisted that before the SAA is signed the Serbs must help bring former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic — accused of genocide at the 1995 Srebrenica massacre — to the UN court, as demanded by its chief prosecutor.
Only Belgium has shown some of the same insistence, with the other EU member states prepared to be more flexible in a bid to sugar the pill over Serbia's impending loss of Kosovo.
The United Nations has run Kosovo since 1999, when a NATO bombing campaign drove out Belgrade's forces waging a crackdown on independence-seeking ethnic Albanians who make up 90 percent of the population.
A UN-backed effort to mediate a solution to the province's final status failed, with Serbia offering Kosovars autonomy instead of independence.
Ahead of the EU foreign ministers' meeting, the Slovenians and others have been seeking ways to overcome, or at least circumvent, the Dutch opposition to signing the SAA.
The only concrete move agreed upon in the draft statement for the foreign ministers' meeting, seen by AFP, is to begin a dialogue on visa liberalisation with Serbia.
Hardliner Nikolic's high showing in the first round vote "forced us to re-evaluate the situation; are we doing all we can to help Tadic get elected? If Nikolic wins it will be too late," one European diplomat said.
For weeks European diplomats have been working to facilitate a coordinated declaration of Kosovo independence, which is also backed by Washington.
A Nikolic victory would also like spur Kosovo into declaring independence quickly, instead of waiting until the end of February as European countries have hoped so they can deploy a 1,800-strong police team to help ease the transition to local rule.
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