Boycott May Doom Talks on Kosovo

Talks due to start tomorrow between political leaders from Serbia and Kosovo seemed doomed last night after the main Albanian delegation said it would boycott the discussions, the first since the end of the 1999 war.

The pledge by Bajram Rexhepi, the province's Albanian prime minister, came hours before Serbia's parliament speaker confirmed that the Belgrade government will face a no-confidence motion tomorrow, which may also jeopardise the negotiations in Vienna. It had been hoped that the vote - which could force Serbia's ruling democrats to resign - would be postponed to avoid denting the authority of Serb leaders participating in the long-awaited meeting.

The talks, announced at the Salonika summit that ended Greece's EU presidency last June, are the first encounter between the two sides since Nato's air bombardment of Kosovo four years ago. The 79-day military campaign led to the birth of the province as a UN protectorate after Slobodan Milosevic's army was forced to withdraw.

Western diplomats were hoping the discussions would break the distrust that has long kept Kosovo's bitterly divided ethnic communities apart. Although the agenda is limited to the less touchy topics of energy, transport, missing persons and the return of wartime refugees, the talks have been seen as a precursor to settling former Yugoslavia's last unresolved territorial question: Kosovo's final status.