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Kosovo waits for report on future

The graffiti appears on apartment buildings, in parks, and outside businesses in Pristina, Kosovo`s dusty capital. In Albanian, it reads "no negotiations - self-determination." The message - six years after NATO bombers drove Serbian forces out and the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) came in - is clear. "We are here, suffocated with UNMIK over our heads, and Serbia over our necks," says Albin Kurti, who started the graffiti campaign. "UNMIK is now six years here without a deadline. We want a deadline. To become independent from a stronger place you need action, not process." But process is critical, say local decisionmakers. Diplomats and politicians have their own slogan - "standards before status" - which they say is the only way Kosovo can move out of the limbo it has languished in for the past six years.

In a few weeks, a UN envoy is due to release a report on how well Kosovo`s provisional government has met certain standards - democracy, a constitutional framework, minority rights - so that it can move to open negotiations about the province`s future with both the international community and Serbia, of which Kosovo is still technically a part. The talks will determine whether Kosovo becomes independent, as its majority Albanians want, or whether it will gain what Serbian President Boris Tadic calls "more than autonomy, less than independence."

So how will Kosovo measure up? "The report will present a very mixed picture, because Kosovo is a mixed picture," says UNMIK head Soren Jessen-Petersen. He notes that while the government has made strides in building its own institutions and police, those have fallen short in making Kosovo`s Serb minority feel safe outside the small enclaves in which they live. Even a bad grade, most residents say, is unlikely to spark Albanian riots similar to the one that engulfed Kosovo last March, leaving 19 people dead, and hundreds of Serb homes and dozens of Orthodox churches gutted. Kosovo`s Albanian politicians say they have their eye too firmly on independence to let that happen.

Opposition leader Hashim Thaci could be speaking for all of Kosovo",s Albanians - 90 percent of the population - when he says, "There is only one solution, and that is Kosovo as an independent and sovereign country."