After Montenegro, Kosovo next stop?

"Before the end of the year, Kosovo, too, will join Montenegro as a new state and these new countries will be an important factor for stability of the whole region," Kosovo's Prime Minister Agim Ceku has said.

"Montenegrin independence could make things worse for Kosovo Serbs. The outcome of the referendum is a stab in the back for (Kosovo) Serbs," said Kosovo Serb leader Marko Jaksic.

"The concept of keeping Kosovo in Serbia is untenable. Montenegro's independence creates a precedent that is undeniable, and Kosovo's independence is now inevitable," Dukagjin Gorani, an ethnic Albanian analyst, was quoted by Serbianna  as saying.

The US envoy to the international talks on Kosovo, Frank Wisner,  has said that Washington is committed "to achieving final status for Kosovo [...] during this year, 2006."

Meanwhile, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has warned the international community against pressing for an end-of-the-year deadline for settling the status of Kosovo. 

According to the International Crisis Group document,  Kosovo: The Challenge of Transition (released before the status talks opened): “While agreement between Belgrade and Pristina remains desirable in theory it is extremely unlikely that any Serbian government will voluntarily acquiesce to the kind of independence, conditional or limited though it may be, which is necessary for stable long term solutions. The international community, and in particular the UN Special Envoy charged with resolving the status process, Martti Ahtisaari, must accordingly prepare for the possibility of imposing an independence package for Kosovo, however diplomatically painful that may be in the short term ...”

According to the Kosovo Albanian newspaper Kosova, "The EU has accepted the referendum in Montenegro, even though with some conditions, but regardless of its results, the thing that interests us in Kosova is that the Montenegrins are allowed to hold a referendum, but the Kosovars are not. The international community should not apply two different standards when it comes to countries of the same region."

In a commentary, the Berliner Zeitung argued that the referendum in Montenegro has also brought to the fore the "frozen conflicts" elsewhere on the continent - from Abkhazia to the Basque country. The EU "will have to address these frozen conflicts more urgently again," the paper said, adding that "it is better to allow nations, no matter how small they are, to go their own way."