The United Nations announced on Friday it would postpone a decision on the future status of Serbia's breakaway Kosovo province, hours after Serbia said it would hold an early general election in January.
The decision was taken in Vienna by the Contact Group of six major powers guiding Balkan diplomacy, shortly after Serbian president Boris Tadic announced the January 21 ballot in Belgrade.
"In light of the announcement by President Tadic ... and after consulting with the Contact Group today, I have decided to present my proposal for the settlement of Kosovo's status to the parties without delay after parliamentary elections in Serbia," said UN special envoy for Kosovo Martti Ahtisaari.
The Contact Group - the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia - had originally promised Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority a decision by year end. A European Union source said Brussels "did not see this as a long delay".
Diplomats say the major powers are sympathetic to Albanians' demand for independence but wants to avoid boosting support for the ultranationalist Radical Party, Serbia's strongest. Kosovo has been a UN protectorate since Nato bombed Serbia in 1999 to force late Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic to pull out his troops, accused of killing ethnic Albanian civilians while trying to crush a guerrilla insurgency.
Its 90-percent Albanian population is tired of waiting and blame the limbo for the lack of economic development that has mired the province in poverty and massive unemployment. Hashim Thaci, a former guerrilla commander turned politician, said Serbia's elections "might have an impact on the timing, but not on the substance" of the decision, which would be "independence and sovereignty". Sanda Raskovic Ivic, head of Serbia's office for Kosovo, said the delay showed Serbia's standing in the world had grown.
Serbia's election will pit the Radicals against the pro-West Democratic Party led by Tadic, now second in opinion polls. Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica's Democratic Party of Serbia - in power in an unlikely alliance with monarchists and technocrats - is third. Many voters say they are disappointed at what they see as a failure to deliver on its promises. The next government will first have to weather the likely loss of Kosovo and will also need to revive talks with the European Union and smooth out relations with its neighbours.
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