WASHINGTON: The United States has been the most powerful backer of Kosovo, which declared independence on Sunday, but must now limit the damage to relations with Serbia and its strong ally Russia, which reject Kosovo’s action.

Washington cautiously acknowledged Sunday’s declaration, saying it would review the move with European allies and meanwhile calling for “utmost restraint” in the region.

But in fact Washington has backed Kosovo’s breaking away from Serbia since 1999, when then-president Bill Clinton spearheaded the NATO bombing campaign that stopped Belgrade’s bloody crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists in the province.

US President George Bush has stuck to that position, even as tensions grew deeper with Belgrade and Moscow as Kosovo’s declaration grew closer.

“At some point in time, sooner rather than later, you got to say ‘enough’s enough, Kosovo’s independent’,” Mr Bush said last June on a visit to Albania, the first by a US head of state while in office.The stance earned Bush a rapturous welcome in Tirana, and two days later, the US State Department said Washington was ready to recognise a unilateral declaration of Kosovo’s independence.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has also encouraged the move. “We will get there one way or another,” she said in July, afterwards acknowledging the diplomatic complications the US stance entails.

“This is going to be an extraordinarily difficult period of time for the Serbian people,” Ms Rice told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday.

She held out the prospect of economic aid for Serbia in the wake of Kosovo’s breakaway.“What the US is going to do is offering a hand of friendship, saying that the status of Kosovo and its resolution will allow Serbia to look forward, and to move on then with what it needs to do,” Ms Rice said.

But Belgrade reiterated its rejection of independence for the province, which Serbs see as a historical heartland.

Some US observers have warned of violence towards the ethnic Serbs living in Kosovo, and said Serbia may turn away from Europe and forge closer ties with Russia, which supports its claim to the province.

“I fear that America’s current course of action risks renewing hostilities in the Balkans and stimulating Cold War-like tensions with Russia,” wrote Alan Kuperman of Texas University in the policy journal, The American Interest.

Russia and Serbia signed major gas and oil deals last month at a summit between President Vladimir Putin and his Serbian counterpart, Boris Tadic, who is regarded as pro-European, unlike his nationalist Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica.

But Rice insisted: “We want a Serbia that is looking to its future and that future is in Europe. Serbia will not accept Kosovo’s independence,” Frank Wisner, the US envoy to United Nations talks on the future of Kosovo, warned on Tuesday in an interview with the Council of Foreign Relations policy group.

“There is no political leader in Serbia today who is prepared to stand up and say ‘history is history, pages are turned, we’re getting on with our life’,” he said.

“They will maintain their claim that Kosovo is part of Serbia. And they will deploy considerable political efforts to make sure that Kosovo doesn’t take root in legitimacy.”

Kosovo’s status has been a sticking point in negotiations over the prospect of Serbia joining the European Union as its neighbours Croatia and Romania have done. The EU has also raised the prospect of EU membership for Kosovo.

“Kostunica has made it clear he doesn’t want Serbia to go towards the EU if in fact the Europeans are supporting Kosovo,” Wisner said.

“But there are (Serbian) students who are saying that this is hardly what they want – they’d like to be able to go to school in Europe.”—AFP