Biden ends Balkan tour on high note in Kosovo despite Serb protests

THE US vice-president, Joe Biden, hailed Kosovo’s first year of independence yesterday and received a rapturous welcome in the mostly ethnic Albanian state, ending his Balkan tour on a high note following tense visits to Serbia and Bosnia.

Mr Biden was given Kosovo’s highest honour, the Golden Medal of Freedom, in recognition of his support for its independence from Belgrade, which it formally declared last year.

But his views have made him deeply unpopular among Serbs, who refuse to recognise Kosovo’s sovereignty and resent Washington’s backing for it and the leading role played by the US in the Nato bombing of Serbia, which drove Belgrade’s forces out of Kosovo in 1999.

While thousands of flag-waving Kosovars thronged the streets to greet Mr Biden, chanting “USA, USA!”, hundreds of police had lined Belgrade’s boulevards to protect him from possible attack and prevent protests.

In the Serb parliament, members of the nationalist Radical Party waved posters saying “Biden, you Nazi scum, go home” and rejected the US vice-president’s conciliatory tone.

“I came to Serbia on behalf of the Obama-Biden administration with a clear message: the United States wants to, likes to, deepen its relations with Serbia,” said Mr Biden, who was the most senior US politician to visit Belgrade since then president Jimmy Carter in 1980.

“The United States does not, and I emphasise, does not expect Serbia to recognise the independence of Kosovo. It is not a precondition for our relationship, or our support for Serbia becoming a part of the European Union,” he said.

Mr Biden called on Belgrade to play a more positive role in Kosovo, where most local Serb leaders refuse to recognise the authority of the ethnic-Albanian government.

In the capital, Pristina, Mr Biden told parliament that Kosovo’s independence was “irreversible” and the “only viable option for stability in the region”, and that its success as a sovereign state was “a priority for our administration”.

About 1,000 of the 100,000 or so Serbs who remain in Kosovo protested against his visit, as had Serbs in Bosnia on Tuesday.

In Sarajevo’s parliament, Mr Biden lambasted Bosnia’s politicians for failing to pass reforms that would help heal its ethnic divisions.

“The only real future is to join Europe. Right now you are off that path,” he said. “At worst, you’ll descend into the ethnic chaos that defined your country for the better part of a decade.”