The commander of U.S. forces in Kosovo denied on Thursday that NATO and the United Sattes planned to turn Kosovo into a NATO state, news from Belgrade reported.
"NATO doesn't intend to create a state out of Kosovo as it is there on a peacekeeping mission," Douglas Earhart told a press conference in the east Kosovo town of Gnjilane.
He said that the UN, the European Union and the United States are involved in the process of deciding the future status of Kosovo.
Serbia's Interior Minister Dragan Jocic echoed on Thursday a number of the country's government officials, accusing NATO and the United States of trying to set up a barrack-style satellite state in Kosovo.
Jocic called the United States to give up the idea of creating a NATO state in Kosovo if it wants normal relations with Serbia, Tanjug, Serbia's official news agency, reported.
Kosovo, Serbia's southern breakaway province, is currently run by the United Nations and patrolled by 16,000 peacekeeping forces led NATO, of whom 1,500 are from the United States.
Serbia claims that Kosovo is an inalienable part of its territory while ethnic Albanians, who make up 90 percent of the province's 2 million population, are demanding independence.
Last week, envoys from the EU, the United States and Russia, the so-called Kosovo-troika, made a 120-day effort to break the impasse over Kosovo. They planned to launch a new negotiation over the issue in Vienna at the end of this August.
Source: Xinhua
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