EU Summit Gambles on Huge Kosovo Mission

European leaders yesterday agreed to send up to 1,800 police, judges, and administrators to Kosovo in its biggest foreign policy gamble, aimed at nurturing the breakaway Balkan province towards full statehood.

Despite persistent divisions within the EU over how to react to Kosovo's secession from Serbia, now expected in February, a summit of EU presidents and prime ministers decided to launch Europe's biggest nation-building operation, telling union foreign ministers to work out the details after the new year.

Gordon Brown, making his first visit to Brussels as prime minister, indicated the mission would be deployed - probably in February.

"The EU mission is very much part of the next stage," he said.

Senior European government officials said the EU was responding to strong pressure from Washington, which has signaled that it will wait until February before recognizing an independent Kosovo, but no longer.

Balkan experts at the US state department are drafting Kosovo's declaration of independence, to be proclaimed by the ethnic Albanian leaders of Kosovo in early February after Serbia elects a new president, the sources said.

"The Kosovans and the Serbs no longer want to live together," said Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president. "Our goal is that Europe does not explode."

A summit statement said the scope for any further negotiations between the Serbian and Kosovan leaderships was exhausted following two rounds of talks lasting almost two years. The statement called for a rapid resolution of Kosovo's status, and also sought to compensate Serbia by promising Belgrade a faster track to EU membership.

On two key issues, the Europeans are sorely divided - on recognizing an independent Kosovo and on softening the terms for Serbia's EU negotiations.

Many EU states want to entice Serbia into a deal by signing an agreement on preliminary EU membership talks with Belgrade on January 28. That would fall between two rounds of presidential elections in Serbia and would be designed to boost the chances of the pro-western president, Boris Tadic, defeating Tomislav Nikolic, an extreme nationalist.

"Kosovo independence is inevitable," said Sarkozy, telling the Serbs: "If you respect the independence of Kosovo, you have a future in the [European] family."

But the Dutch foreign minister, Maxim Verhagen, said the Netherlands would veto such a deal unless the genocide suspect Ratko Mladic was "put on a plane" to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

The EU is similarly riven over whether and when to recognize Kosovo statehood. Romania said yesterday it would not recognize any unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo.

Other EU states share that view, suggesting that the effort to build a consensus could be protracted.

"We're now talking about a process of months rather than days," said the foreign secretary, David Miliband.

With the EU facing tough decisions on Kosovo, Alexandr Vondra, the deputy prime minister of the Czech Republic, said: "We need a political approach.

"We need to keep Kosovo under our influence and away from the jihad influence. We also need to keep Serbia under European influence or we give it to Russia."

Although the EU mission is being kept separate from the dispute over the recognition of Kosovo statehood, European governments agree that the EU will be in Kosovo to implement the settlement devised by the UN envoy, Martti Ahtisaari, which foresees Kosovo independence.