West calls on Kosovo leader to stay calm

PRISTINA, Serbia, Nov. 20 (UPI) -- The West warned Kosovo's new leader not to unilaterally proclaim independence for the Serbian province.

"We need a soft landing on this issue or we'll have a hard crash," Deutsche Welle Online quoted Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt as saying, following the election victory of former Kosovo Albanian guerrilla leader Hashim Thaci. After exit polls indicated his PDK party would emerge as the winner from this weekend's election, Thaci vowed to declare Kosovo's independence from Serbia.

However, in an interview with Monday's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, he said he would respect the agenda set by EU, U.S. and Russian mediators up to Dec. 10, a U.N. deadline on the status of the province.

Kosovo for years demanded independence from Belgrade. The Albanian-dominated province has been administered by the United Nations since 1999, when NATO bombing ended a bloody war between Serbian troops and Albanian rebels.

Belgrade is unwilling to grant independence to Kosovo and is backed by Russia.

Several EU and Group of Eight summits have failed to make any headway on Kosovo, and observers expect the conflict between Russia and the United States over the Serbian province's status to become nasty by the end of the year, as Washington is one of the strongest supporters of Serbian independence.

"At some point in time -- sooner rather than later -- you've got to say: 'Enough is enough. Kosovo is independent,' and that's the position we've taken," President Bush said in June during a visit to Albania.