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Kosovo

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, on securing this timely debate. I know very well the keen personal interest that he has in the Balkans and that, during his time as chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of another place, he led missions to Kosovo with great success. The noble Lord, Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon, has played a key role in the region, and I believe every noble Lord who has spoken has made an important contribution, based on a great deal of knowledge. It is in the United Kingdom’s strategic interest to work to ensure that this key part of Europe continues to leave the tragic events of the 1990s behind, and to move forward to a stable, prosperous, democratic European future. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, for his comments about Ambassador Rycroft and colleagues—a view which I strongly share. To set the context of what I have to say, I shall also lay down two markers for the debate, as I think that they help shape it. First, there are the fundamental questions mentioned by the noble Lords, Lord Ashdown and Lord Hannay, and the noble Baroness, Lady Rawlings, about delay. I completely agree, as do Her Majesty’s Government, that no further delay after the elections of 21 January is tolerable. We must not allow Belgrade to control the timeline, and we will strongly resist all calls from Belgrade—and possibly by some others in the EU—for any further delay. That is just to start. Secondly, I want to lay out the ground of this and respond to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, about greater Albania and partition, which might get dragged across all these discussions at this stage. The Contact Group and the EU have repeatedly said that there can be no partition of Kosovo, and no union of Kosovo with any other country or any part of any country. Talk of greater Albania does not, as we understand it, reflect Albanian opinion in Albania, Kosovo or Macedonia, and we must resist any of those confusions entering into the discussion.