U.S.-EU summit supports U.N. Kosovo plan

WASHINGTON, May 1 (UPI) -- The United States and the European Union have asked the U.N. Security Council to adopt a resolution on Serbia's Kosovo province without delay.

At the end of the summit in Washington the two sides said they support a U.N. plan giving internationally supervised independence to the mainly ethnic-Albanian province of Kosovo, the Serbian news agency Beta reported Tuesday.

Washington and Brussels are convinced the plan worked out by U.N. special envoy Martti Ahtisaari is a good basis for a new resolution of the Security Council.

Ahtisaari submitted his plan to the Security Council March 26, following nearly 18 months of talks between the Serbian government in Belgrade and Kosovo's leaders of ethnic-Albanians, who make up 90 percent of the province's population of 1.8 million.

The Belgrade government, representing 100,000 Serbs living in Kosovo, rejects independence from Serbia. The ethnic-Albanian leaders demand nothing less than independence.

Formally, Kosovo is Serbia's province, but it has been a U.N.-administered territory since 1999, when NATO troops stopped the Serbian police and military campaign against ethnic-Albanian armed separatists and civilians and drove the Serbian forces out of the province.