ZAGREB: Kosovo Albanian activists want to have the UN-run province declared an independent state next week because they are so enraged at being formally included as part of Serbia in the new union of Serbia and Montenegro.

The calls for a declaration of Kosovan independence tabled by 42 members of the province’s parliament threaten to start a domino effect of further secessionist moves that may jeopardise the fragile peace across former Yugoslavia, where the nationalist fury that fuelled the wars of the 1990s is a far from spent force.

The United Nations and the European Union, stewards of the neo-colonial protectorates established in Kosovo and Bosnia, are firmly against “premature” independence for Kosovo and are determined to shelve for the time being all negotiations on the province’s “final status”.

But for conflicting reasons, Albanian nationalists and the Serbian prime minister, Zoran Dzindzic, are seeking to undermine the international strategy and are pushing strongly to end the limbo in which Kosovo has existed since the 1999 Nato war ended Serbian rule.

The final disappearance of Yugoslavia this week — it existed only in name and on paper — and its replacement by an EU-brokered union of Serbia and Montenegro provided the trigger for Kosovo’s brinkmanship.

On Thursday, Mr Dzindzic demanded an international conference in June over Kosovo’s status after warning that any Albanian declaration of independence would mean the unravelling of the Bosnian peace deal agreed in 1995.

The 42 Albanian representatives demanded an emergency session of the province’s fledgling parliament next Thursday, “with the purpose of adopting a declaration of Kosovo as an independent and sovereign state”.

But both the Serbian and Albanian moves have run into rigid international opposition.

Under the UN security council resolution of 1999 which established Kosovo as a UN protectorate, the province was formally recognized as part of Yugoslavia, a country which disappeared from the map this week.

But the mastermind of the new Serb-Montenegrin union, the EU foreign policy supremo, Javier Solana, had Kosovo formally defined as part of Serbia although Belgrade’s writ does not run there.

The banditry, ethnic persecution, and lack of democratic institutions all precluded independence for the time being.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.