BELGRADE - Serbia has decided to press ahead with plans to stage its own elections in newly independent Kosovo next month, despite UN opposition, reports said Thursday.
The Republican Electoral Commission adopted a resolution late Wednesday confirming its intention to organise the May 11 vote in the ethnic Albanian-majority territory, Serbian news agencies Beta and Tanjug said.
The local elections would be conducted in 23 Kosovo municipalities with a mainly Serb population who were given two weeks to enroll, according to the commission.
Kosovo's ethnic Albanian-dominated parliament unilaterally declared independence from Serbia on February 17. The tiny Balkan territory remains under its post-war UN administration.
The United Nations mission UNMIK said it was likely to block any Serbian local elections in Kosovo but would continue with a policy to "neither support nor hinder" concurrent Serbian legislative polls, Kosovo newspapers reported.
Serbia's minister for Kosovo, Slobodan Samardzic, had asked the UN to approve Belgrade's plans to hold the local elections in a letter to UNMIK chief Joachim Ruecker, said the reports.
"We are drafting a quick response ... to make it clear to him that if Serbia decides to organise local elections in Kosovo, this presents a breach of UN Security Council Resolution 1244, and that they will not have any legal validity," UNMIK spokesman Alexander Ivanko was quoted as saying.
A decision was set to be made by the end of the week.
Serbs, who are bitterly opposed to independence and make up around 120,000 of Kosovo's population of 1.8 million, boycotted legislative and local elections there in November 2007.
At the time, however, UNMIK chief Joachim Ruecker decided to keep Serbs in power at five municipalities where they formed a majority by appointing provisional Serb deputies and mayors.
The head of the UN mission is empowered to impose such rulings under UN Security Council Resolution 1244, which was adopted at the end of the disputed Serbian province's 1998-1999 war.
UNMIK has administered Kosovo since mid-1999, when a NATO bombing campaign drove out Serbian forces waging a brutal crackdown on separatist ethnic Albanians.
In some of the worst violence since Kosovo's declaration of independence, Serbs have set alight border posts on the Kosovo-Serbia border, and attempted to seize courthouses and a train line linking Kosovo with Belgrade.
Serb leaders in the flashpoint northern Kosovo town of Mitrovica, which is divided between Serbs in the north and Albanians in the south, said previously they would form their own parliament there after the May 11 elections.
Meanwhile, Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, who on Thursday held a cabinet session in southern Mitrovica, said he intended to reunite the town.
"Mitrovica is the Kosovo government's priority," Thaci told journalists.
"We will take all necessary measures to take care of the territorial integrity and full administrative integration of the north. There will be no south and north in Mitrovica.
"We will keep insisting on establishing the authority of Kosovo institutions on the entire territory," said Thaci.
In the 1998-1999 Kosovo conflict, several thousand people, mostly Albanians, were killed and an estimated 800,000 Albanians were forced to flee, according to the UN. Some 1,500 Albanians and 500 Serbs and other non-Albanians are still listed as missing.
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04/10/2008 13:23 GMT