Hero's welcome for Biden in Kosovo
Agence France-Presse | 05/21/2009 5:09 PM
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PRISTINA - Vice President Joe Biden travelled to Kosovo on Thursday, receiving a hero's welcome as the most senior US official to visit the Balkan territory since Washington backed its split from Serbia last year.
Biden's US Air Force Two plane landed at a NATO-controlled airstrip of Pristina airport, where Foreign Minister Skender Hyseni and students bearing US flags were ready to greet him.
He then travelled to NATO headquarters in a helicopter and arrived at parliament where huge crowds greeted him with banners, reading: "Welcome Mr Biden", "Kosovo loves the USA" and "Thank you USA".
The US vice president is considered one of Washington's strongest advocates of the independence of ethnic Albanian-majority Kosovo, which declared it was seceding from Serbia in February last year.
Coming after trips to Bosnia and Serbia, Biden's visit to Kosovo is his final stop on a tour to demonstrate fresh US engagement in Europe and the volatile Balkan region.
Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci said Biden can expect a "magnificent" welcome in Pristina.
Local media hailed the visit of the US vice president, one of the strongest supporters of Kosovo's independence when he served as a senator in the late 1990s.
"Mr. Biden is one of the few politicians in the world that has long believed in the independence of Kosovo. For his contribution to change our destiny, Biden is our man," the Express daily said Thursday in a commentary.
Biden will meet with Kosovo President Fatmir Sejdiu and Prime Minister Thaci before addressing the parliament that unilaterally proclaimed independence from Serbia on February 17, 2008.
The split is strongly opposed by Belgrade and Serbs, who number little more than 100,000 in the disputed territory of two million inhabitants.
Biden will also pay a visit to the Serbian Orthodox Church's Decani monastery, a 14th-century UNESCO-listed heritage site located in an enclave of southwestern Kosovo.
The Serb minority, who consider Kosovo the medieval heartland of Serbia, plan to stage an anti-US protest in their northern stronghold of the tense, ethnically divided town of Kosovska Mitrovica.
In Belgrade, Biden offered Serbia's pro-Western government a clean slate in relations tarnished by the Kosovo dispute, saying Washington does not expect Serbia to recognise its breakaway southern province.
"The United States does not, I emphasise, does not expect Serbia to recognise the independence of Kosovo," Biden told a joint media conference with Serbian President Boris Tadic.
In Bosnia a day earlier, however, he stressed Washington's decision to recognise Kosovo would not be reviewed by the four-month-old administration of US President Barack Obama.
"This independence, while young, is irreversible, and critically important to this region’s stability and progress," he said in a speech to Bosnian lawmakers.
US warplanes took part in NATO's 1999 bombing of Serbia to end a violent crackdown on separatist Kosovo Albanian rebels by forces loyal to late president Slobodan Milosevic.
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