VIENNA (AFP) -- Members of a Kosovo Serb delegation attending UN-sponsored talks on the future status of Serbia's southern Kosovo region said Monday they would shun negotiations on the thorny issue of community rights.

Talks "can only be held meaningfully within the framework of comprehensive negotiations on the future status of Kosovo and the future political order of the province," the Serbs said in a statement.

"To accept talks on community rights outside this context would mean to accept that we have the status of a minority and it is well known that a people in its own country cannot be a minority," they continued.

Serbs and ethnic Albanians from Kosovo met in the Austrian capital on Monday to discuss technical issues for the first time since frosty high-level talks broke down last month.

The two sides had been due to debate community rights, in particular those of the Serbs, on Tuesday.

Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority, which makes up about 90 percent of the province, wants independence. Belgrade and the minority Serb community insist the region is the cradle of Serb nationhood and cannot be given away.

Belgrade is concerned about the fate of ethnic Serbs in the province following any independence agreement and the eventual withdrawal of the United Nations, which has been administering Kosovo a NATO air war drove Serbia's forces from the province in 1999.

Monday's talks broke down in mutual recrimination with both sides blaming the other.

"We have absolute differences on the principles. (..) The Serbs still insist on two ethnicities," Lufti Haziri, head of the Albanian delegation, said.

Leon Kojen, for the Serbs, accused the Albanians of intransigence.

"We cannot compromise on fundamental rights such as education, health care, security, freedom of movement for the Serb community and its traditions," he said.

United Nations representative, Bernhard Schlagheck, admitted the talks had hit a wall.

"There was strikingly some movement to close the gap on the policy issue (..) but on the major stumbling blocks there was no progress at all," he conceded at a press conference.

The main points of contention were issues on justice, education and the future municipalities, Schlagheck said.