BUCHAREST - Serbia is ready to "go very far" to reach a compromise on Kosovo, the country's foreign minister said Tuesday in Romania.
"We are prepared to go very far, we are prepared to be very flexible in terms of defining the autonomous powers," Vuk Jeremic said during a press conference at an annual meeting for diplomats in the Romanian capital.
"Any compromise solution is better than any imposed solution," he said.
Serbia sees compromise as "the attempt to reconcile our legitimate demands for preservation of sovereignty and territorial integrity like every country in the world has the right to, with the legitimate demands of the Albanian ethnic community in Kosovo for the maximum degree of self governance," Jeremic said.
However, he added: "Serbia is strongly opposed to any partition of its territory, regardless of where its border would run."
Though technically still a Serbian province, Kosovo has been run by a UN mission since the end of its 1998-1999 war. A NATO bombing campaign in June 1999 ended a Serbian military crackdown on the Albanian majority.
A mediator who represents Russia at international talks on Kosovo said Tuesday that representatives of Serbia and Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority would hold direct talks on the province's future status immediately after an international meeting on Kosovo scheduled for September 27 in New York.
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09/04/2007 15:25 GMT