UNITED NATIONS/ BELGRADE – Serbia's President Boris Tadic told the UN General Assembly on Saturday that talks with Kosovo will start soon but appealed for nations not to recognize the former province, AFP reported.

“Soon the two parties will be talking to each other for the first time in many years. We must be patient and seek out those issues which allow confidence to be built on each side,” Tadic said.
Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia in February 2008. It had been under UN supervision since a NATO campaign ended a military onslaught against ethnic Albanian separatists in 1998-99.
-- The Serbian government is preparing an expert team and a detailed platform for negotiations with Pristina, Vecernje novosti reported.
It is not known whether the “patron” of the talks will be the EU or the UN. Negotiations between Belgrade and Pristina will begin in late October.
The Serbian government will build an expert team next week, the role of which is to prepare a detailed platform for the upcoming talks, the daily Vecernje Novosti found out from top officials.
It cannot be said for certain whether the negotiations are going to be under the auspices of the EU, the UN, or steered by both of them.
Also, neither Russia nor the United States declared whether they would participate in the dialogue.
The meeting President Boris Tadic had with Catherine Ashton on Thursday in New York represented a kind of prelude for the future process, but the East River has seen neither place, date nor the exact agenda of the announced dialogue between Serbia and Kosovo Albanians being agreed upon.
The aim is to thoroughly prepare a new “historic meeting” in the course of the next month, using sustained diplomatic efforts between Brussels, Belgrade, Pristina and Washington.
The Head of EU Diplomacy Catherine Ashton, following a series of meetings with all major players in solving the Kosovo crisis at the brims of the UN General Assembly session, is to have a key meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton next week. This meeting should clarify a role Washington is to have in the dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina.
Also, in the coming days Catherine Ashton needs to agree a single approach to future dialogue with her European partners, to build a Brussels expert team and make a list of topics that will be acceptable to all sides.
Diplomatic sources announced “lighter topics” to begin with, which would not fuel the tensions too much, such as defrosting the CEFTA agreement, issues of transportion, energy, transport of goods across the administrative line, regional cooperation and finding missing persons.
Brussels expects to initiate a dialogue on the lower, expert level, and as time passes and climate improves, to have them finish at the “top level”. Europe desires to see, after the ground has been prepared, Serbian President Boris Tadic and Kosovo Albanian Prime Minister Hashim Thaci sitting at the same negotiating table.
Photo: Serbia's President Boris Tadic addresses the Millennium Development Goals Summit at the United Nations headquarters in New York on September 20. (AFP/File/Emmanuel Dunand