AUSTRIA AGREES: KOSOVO NOT A PRECEDENT

C O N F I D E N T I A L VIENNA 003286 SIPDIS SIPDIS STATE FOR EUR/AGS - SAINT-ANDRE E.O. 12958: DECL: 11/08/2016 TAGS: PBTS PREL UP AU SUBJECT: AUSTRIA AGREES: KOSOVO NOT A PRECEDENT REF: STATE 179829 Classified By: Charge d'Affaires a.i. Gregory E. Phillips. Reason: 1. 4 (b) and (d). ¶1. (SBU) Charge presented reftel demarche on November 7 to Hannes Porias, the Austrian MFA's A/S-equivalent Director for Eastern Europe, and Valerie Zirl, the MFA's South-East Europe desk officer. ¶2. (C) Porias agreed with our message, and undertook to support it. He said it was increasingy problematic that states whose territory was the scene of "frozen conflicts" -- Georgia, Moldova, and others -- were expressing concern that a Kosovo solution could prejudice their cases for territorial integrity. Porias added that the Chinese also seemed to fear that Kosovo would be a precedent for separatist movements. ¶3. (C) A Kosovo solution (i.e., an independent Kosovo, as we described in our points) would not ultimately be the subject of a negotiated settlement with Belgrade, much as we all would like that to happen, in Porias's view. The problem was that Russia and China wanted Belgrade to be part of an agreement. In the end, the UN Security Council had to be the body to make the decision on Kosovo, since UNSCR 1244 established the Security Council as the "master of Kosovo's future status," as Porias put it. ¶4. (C) Porias expressed concern that a delay in the Serbian elections would almost certainly mean holding a campaign after the Christmas season. This meant the elections would not be until after January 20, at the earliest. ¶5. (C) As a relatively minor point, Porias asked for clarification of our comment that frozen conflicts like Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria "predate the Kosovo situation." If we used this as a talking point, he said, we had to be wary of getting bogged down in a historical argument. He noted that this was true if one considered "the Kosovo situation" to mean the initiation of armed conflict in ¶1999. However, one could argue that today's Kosovo problem goes back as far as 1981. Phillips